There have been several farcical fictional treatments of university life in the United States over the past couple of decades. The 2021 Netflix series The Chair, revolving around Jay Duplass’s disillusioned English professor who finds himself canceled after performing an illustrative Nazi salute during a lecture, was at its most interesting when it abandoned the usual platitudes about affirmative action in a Harvard-esque English department and dared to offer distinctly un-woke moments. When Duplass defiantly sings a snatch of “Springtime for Hitler” in front of a disciplinary board, the scene felt dangerous and edgy, as it must have done when the song was first heard in 1967’s The Producers. When the character later says “Universities are supposed to encourage dissent,” the line seems almost risible in its idealism.
The Chair’s satire takes its place among the campus novels of Philip Roth, most notably 2000’s The Human Stain — in which a light-skinned African American professor “passing” as white causes outrage by referring to “spooks” — and 2008’s Indignation, following the travails of a Jewish college student at the fictitious Winesburg College in Ohio. The same genre must also include the goings-on at Devon University in Scott Johnston’s 2019 Campusland, and the even broader antics at Faber College in the great 1978 comedy Animal House, where one of the few academics on screen, Donald Sutherland’s louche Professor Jennings, is, naturally, having a sexual relationship with one of his students, back when such activities were regarded as a perk of the job rather than a criminal breach of trust.
All of these are effective enough jabs at the American university system, although The Chair pulls its punches to allow for an upbeat and optimistic ending. Such a conclusion can also be found across the Atlantic in Kingsley Amis’s classic campus novel Lucky Jim, first published 70 years ago this month. Generations of readers have found its ending, in which the hapless medieval history lecturer Jim Dixon is granted both the girl and job of his dreams, an unconvincing exercise in wish fulfillment. But the joys of the funniest book ever written about academic life lie elsewhere, in its pitch-perfect skewering of pretension and intellectual vanity.
The campus novel as we know it either began with C.P. Snow’s 1951 The Masters or Mary McCarthy’s 1952 The Groves of Academe, but Amis’s book is distinct from those, and subsequent offerings such as John Williams’s 1965 Stoner or Michael Chabon’s 1995 Wonder Boys, in that it’s hilarious not just in a fashion that requires you to have an innate knowledge of English customs and humor to find funny.
The 31-year-old Amis managed, in his first novel, to tread a fine line between virtuoso scenes of comic invention and subtler, more pointed mockery. In the first category are Lucky Jim’s great set pieces, usually involving either the consumption of alcohol or the result of its effects, which include Dixon waking up after a drunken binge: “A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.” There’s also the climactic “Merrie England” scene, in which Dixon, realizing he will lose his job through a mixture of incompetence and riling his superior’s son, drunkenly ridicules his subject and the faculty alike in the guise of delivering a lecture about a historic version of utopian Britain.
Amis’s target is the insipidity of contemporary university education, with the unnamed English provincial campus (probably based on Leicester, where Amis’s friend and Lucky Jim’s informal editor Philip Larkin once served as librarian) standing in for postwar Britain in all its shabby, frustrating unfairness. Amis was at this time nominally a left-winger, although he soon moved over to the Right, and his bracing cynicism about the likes of Dixon’s superior, Professor Neddy Welch (“No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor”) reflects his career-long distrust of, and distaste for, institutions and, especially, the pretenders who set up shop within them, never to be dislodged. At the time Amis wrote the novel, he was working as an academic at the University of Swansea in Wales, and it carries the tang of authority, written by a man who knew.
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Lucky Jim remains a masterpiece of comic literature, as funny now as it was seven decades ago, but there is also something subtly depressing about it. Part of it is the postwar milieu it depicts, of plate-glass universities, food and goods rationing, and of pliant and suicidal women and arrogant men asserting their right to them in the spirit of droit de seigneur. But the other issue is its depiction of how university culture is not one of intellectual exploration and free speech, but petty and pointless one-upmanship, where anyone who dares to step out of line will find themselves out of a job, if not worse.
As the Claudine Gay saga should remind us, it is easy to laugh at the vainglorious and arrogant exploits of out-of-touch academics. Yet just because it’s easy to laugh doesn’t mean it isn’t also worthwhile. Gay’s many detractors may have rejoiced at her downfall (although it seems unlikely that she has vanished from public life altogether), but as Amis so eloquently and hilariously showed us, mediocrity seldom rises to the top faster than it does in a university. As readers should have learned 70 years ago, the realities of university culture are enough to drive even the most committed and idealistic academic to drink.
Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at the Spectator World.