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Fifteen years ago this week I turned in my last set of college grades, and I’ve never looked back. Teaching wasn’t for me—I still cringe when I think of myself at a podium, hemming and hawing—but I have plenty of friends who’ve made it their life’s work. I doubt many of them would consider their profession well-represented in the movies. Not that there aren’t plenty of lecture halls: there’s never been a better place for a lazy screenwriter to unload a bunch of exposition. And hundreds of movies deal with the student experience, relegating the professor to the role of ice-cold taskmaster (think John Houseman in The Paper Chase). But when I try to think of movies that actually delve into the world of college faculty—as, for instance, Mary McCarthy did in her wicked satire The Groves of Academe—I mostly draw a blank.
I think I know this guy. Though I operated at the bottom of the academic food chain and did my damnedest to steer clear of department politics, I spent enough years teaching to see people whose professional status and personal esteem was tied to their ideas and who would fight to the death defending them regardless of their relative merit. There’s something pathetic about it, because an academic begins his career trying to advance the search for knowledge and sometimes ends his career trying to halt it. If you’re lucky, you might get tenure. But your ideas never will.
