We are perhaps too well informed about the appalling state of America's universities. Over the years, innumerable books have taught us about tenured radicals, illiberal education, multiculturalism run amok, and affirmative action's murder of merit. In their recent Who Killed Homer?, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath argue that the entire discipline of classics has collapsed. In last year's The Shadow University, Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate demonstrate that free expression is in danger on campuses across the nation.
Such books are necessary -- but they're not sufficient. The facts are not enough to show America how low its higher education has fallen. We need to personalize the unbelievable stories of scholastic decay. We need the kind of mockery that will make the denizens of the academy hang their heads in shame. We need, in other words, what only art can give us. We need more books like Blaire French's The Ticking Tenure Clock, a novel about what false professionalization, the tenure system, and talking-heads television have done to America's college professors.
French knows that world very well indeed. Besides having written a scholarly history of presidential press conferences, she has a graduate degree from the government department at the University of Virginia, and she's married to a prominent member of that department. The reader of her novel can only marvel at the goings-on at her fictional Patrick Henry University in Albemarle, Virginia. "When I see what it takes to get tenure in the world of her novel, I'm just glad I don't teach at Patrick Henry University," observed Paul Cantor, an English professor at the University of Virginia -- though his university bears a suspiciously close resemblance to French's Patrick Henry U.
The main character in The Ticking Tenure Clock is Lydia Martin. She is a tenure-track professor of government who had thought that she was a sure thing for a permanent job, with a published book, several academic papers, memberships in all the right professional organizations, suitably self-assured relations with the senior faculty, popularity with the untenured junior faculty, and positive teaching evaluations. But as the novel opens, her department has without warning raised the tenure standard to require two books, and poor Lydia is left with a tenure vote less than nine months away and no ideas for that now mandatory second book.
Through Lydia's story, French exposes the disproportionate weight placed on publications in tenure decisions. Major research universities pay lip service to teaching, but in reality they view only research (which often means publishing for its own sake rather than worthwhile scholarship) as essential. Research and publication -- not students -- are what bring power, fame, and fortune to the academy these days.
If Hegel was ever right, he was right about the hierarchical world of modern universities. At French's Patrick Henry University, there's a master-slave dialectic between the senior and junior faculty. The assistant professors are minnows, while the tenured professors are whales. Minnowy Lydia is determined not to be swallowed before she can become a whale in her own right, and so she abides by what she calls the "Roll-Over Rule": Never disagree with a whale, even if it means abandoning other minnows or sacrificing the littlest minnows of all, the graduate students.
Lydia is not an entirely likable character as the novel opens, nor is she entirely admirable even at the novel's end. She is a post-modern woman in all her inoffensive yet selfish glory. She knows how not to get involved, how not to volunteer unless it furthers her career. French deftly sketches a woman who does not know that she is alienated until she finally sees herself through the eyes of others -- particularly the young man whose love interest she wants to attract and keep. Lydia has imbibed the lesson that giving inhibits individual fulfillment. So her family, which wants to see her at holiday time, becomes merely an impediment, as does her friendly but professionally useless neighbor.
After undergoing a test of character in her department that becomes inter-twined with a private disappointment, Lydia sees her shallowness and confesses to it in her second book. The ending comes a little abruptly in The Ticking Tenure Clock, but French manages to show how Lydia not only joins the academic system but also learns, at least a little, where and how to oppose it. The heroine may become a whale in the end, but there's a part of her that remains a minnow -- and that's the part which has grown something like a conscience.
What French has done for tenure, she should do next for the interview process and hiring practices at universities in an era of declining standards, budget cut-backs, and a glut of candidates for positions. It's only with novels like Blaire French's -- only with the kind of thing that novels can do -- that we can perhaps shame the academy into reform.
Elizabeth Edwards Spalding teaches government and politics at George Mason University.