Hollywood has had a long love affair with representing school and higher education on the big and little screens. We were drawn to watch Netflix’s six-part series The Chair (Peet, Benioff, Weiss, Oh, & Longino, 2021) not only because it was relevant to the work we do with academic department leaders each day but also for the challenges that it represents within higher education. Some critics like Drezner (2021) argue that popular representations of higher education lack realism. However, others like Esposito (2023a) argue that there are no bad representations in media and popular culture because even bad representations allow us to interpret and make meaning. Analyzing popular culture allows us to study the cultural practices and educational forces at work in society (Giroux cited in Esposito, 2023b). Love (2021) argues that The Chair makes conversations on racism, sexism, ageism, and consumerism within academia accessible. In the essay that follows we discuss how the series addresses obstacles to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and underrepresented populations, campus climate in the digital information age, and the lack of professional development for chairpersons. These challenges have only intensified since the series first streamed in 2021, as we have seen the delegitimization, defunding, and dismantling of DEI programs and initiatives that, by some accounts, includes changes at over 200 colleges in over 30 states from January 2023 to present day (Gretzinger, Hicks, Dutton, & Smith, 2024).
DEI and Underrepresentation
The Chair addresses DEI in higher education throughout the series in ways that are problematic. Professor Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) is voted chair of the English department at the fictional Pembroke University because she is the face of diversity on campus. Notably, she was the face of the faculty on the college brochure. The writers depict the family dynamic of Ji-Yoon, a single mother of an adopted Hispanic daughter, her personal relations with a colleague and workplace conflicts. Parallel to Ji-Yoon is Professor Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah), a junior faculty member who Woods (2024) argues, as is true of many Black women in academia, is underutilized and uncertain about her tenure despite being an active and productive scholar. Ji-Yoon’s advocacy for Yazmin to continue at Pembroke is based in the same reasoning that made Ji-Yoon a token diverse faculty on campus. Love (2021) notes, “The Chair is interested in the psychology of marginalized people who choose to press forward in an academic culture that was built on their exploitation.” Ji-Yoon tries to make the department diverse by retaining faculty of color rather than changing the system of inequality in the department and college that perpetuates an unwelcoming climate for underrepresented faculty. Esposito (2023b) argues that Ji-Yoon represents performative allyship by expressing solidarity with Yazmin but not tackling the structures of power and privilege. The Chair complements Netflix’s catalog of programs because the streaming service depicts marginalized people and DEI issues much more often than the mainstream media (Yoon, 2023).
The series also draws our attention to myths in higher education including some subjects that are overlooked entirely. For instance, Colombo (2022) argues that we perceive department chairs as white male omnipotent leaders, but they do not have any real power as we eventually come to see in the case of Ji-Yoon who cannot even award the distinguished lectureship to Yazmin, the most popular professor in the department. Additionally, the series fails to explore the pervasive nature of sexism and ageism and LGBTQIA+ subjectivities are not developed at all (Woods, 2024). The series creators touch on the fact that Professor Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor) receives sexist student evaluations, but they don’t really delve into how racist and culturally biased student evaluations can be (Pratt, 2021). Additionally, no adjunct faculty are present on The Chair’s fictional campus; however, adjuncts, including one of the co-authors of this piece, constitute over two-thirds of U.S. faculty positions although they also lack job security and benefits (Wong, 2021). Seeing the full-time faculty in English department at the beginning of the series, we might assume that they were hired at one time based on their merits, but the series fails to underscore the fact that those merits are privileges that have not been made equally available to all (Joy, 2023).
Campus Climate and Communication
In The Chair Professor Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) recklessly and irresponsibly makes a Nazi salute to mock the absurdist and fascist topic that he is discussing. A student records him and the segment with the salute is cut from the longer video and it travels through the class and across campus and is turned into a meme. Bill’s teaching assistant Lila (Mallory Low) is approached by the student newspaper for comment, but Lila reports that department chair Ji-Yoon asked her not to speak about the incident which creates the impression of a campus coverup. Bill also tries to address the conflict by meeting with the students and explaining the context of his actions, leaving the students with the impression they are being talked at but not talked with or listened to. The campus protest storyline is meant to dramatize how easily the meaning of a word or action, taken out of context, can spiral out of control in the digital information age. While a fictional and comic depiction of academe, the series captures the great potential for mishandling and misperceiving protest events or movements on campus. The spring 2024 campus protests, and the unrest, mistrust, and division that they released, speaks to the relevance of the campus protest storyline in The Chair.
Critics have viewed the protest storyline as indicative of the threat that cancel culture poses to faculty and alternately as an illustration of students in the process of learning to exercise their free speech rights. Ramos (2023) argues that the youth depicted in the series are representative of a generation that is more environmentally and socially conscious than their predecessors, with communication technologies integrated into their everyday lives. We see in the series that as the clip of Bill’s salute is taken out of context, different media users add animation and repetition to make the act appear more insidious. Bill’s outdated and analogue style of response of explaining the context, intention, and his motives of his larger lecture to an assembled protest group on campus is unsurprisingly a failure. He views it as a chance for him to talk and not listen, because he perceives it as a simplistic fix. He ignores the impact of social media on campus messaging and how it increases the closeness that students feel to the event and the emotional impact it has on them.
Bill’s explanation frustrates the students in part because it gives them no recourse to engage their social consciousness on this issue. In the TV series Hacks (Riley, Aniello, Statsky, & Downs, 2024; series 3, episode 8) comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) faces a campus backlash when she is put forward for an honorary degree from students who felt the sting of her earlier comedy, which was racist, sexist, and culturally insensitive. Rather than leave, Deborah stays and receives the students’ thoughts and feelings in a listening session. Bill and faculty like him may be ill prepared to face the type of multimodal dialogues that today’s students expect not just during protest assemblies but during the learning process. Faculty professional development at many colleges is now grappling with training faculty to adapt to teaching in the AI context. Arguably many faculty also struggle to maximize the potential of social media inside and outside of the classroom. Bill is still communicating as though he is the main channel of information when he is one of many sources of information vying for his undergraduates’ attention. Even though he sees his own action in the classroom as innocuous, he does not realize how his students have been exposed to hateful racism and antisemitism from other sources on campus. Ramos (2023) also argues that we need to channel students’ social consciousness into real-life experiential learning and internships that prepare them not only for careers but also for life.
The vulnerability that faculty feel in this new digital campus is perhaps exemplified by quotes used in reviews of the series that reference faculty who are “desperately frightened” of misspeaking amid a “campus-culture war” (DeGroot, 2021; Logan, 2021) that has also been defined as a “pressure-cooker” fueled in part by “intergenerational tension” (Sperling, 2021). In fairness, campuses have always and will always be a discursive space for ideological discord and the digital age is just the latest manifestation of that tradition. Esposito (2023a) argues that colleges need to do a better job of delineating hurt speech and hate speech from speech that challenges your views. The fictional Pembroke College depicted in The Chair fails to make such distinctions and instead makes its decision to fire Bill based on the levels of campus and public outrage. By contrast, this is a line that students disregard when their dislike for Joan’s classes leads a male student’s online feedback to cross the line into misogynistic comments about her appearance. Sexist and racist biases, as Pratt (2021) and others have noted, keeps professors from wanting to look at their course feedback.
Professional Development for Chairs
With respect to DEI, we are critical of attempts to diversify campus that relied upon simple fixes (i.e., adding a diverse individual as opposed to attempting real cultural change). That said, critics like Colombo (2022) and others have questioned the potential for Ji-Yoon to influence change given the limited power available to her. The Chair teaches an important lesson that solving problems requires overhauling broken and inequitable systems, but this work goes beyond the efforts of a single individual. For example, Woods & Lane (2024) argue that academic freedom does not exempt faculty from the need to be responsible to the community in what they say and do. Moreso, we need to model and provide guidelines for how faculty can engage responsibly with the campus and surrounding communities. Said models and guidelines should embody DEI principles. Further, Woods & Lane (2024) call upon faculty and administrators to prepare proactively for dissent on campus by creating forums for students to express their views in ways that also advance campus equity.
Ludvik & Hagedorn (2022) argue that there is a paradox in the mismatch between the qualifications required to be a chair, the assigned duties, and the lack of training provided. This nexus of factors would seem to set the chair up for failure, burnout or both, which is what we see in The Chair. Ji-Yoon is voted out as chair in favor of Joan, but despite this demotion, Ji-Yoon is happier as a result. Wong (2021) argues that the series demonstrates the frustrating powerlessness of middle management where power can be limited or even invisible. Success as chair requires skills and training (such as grant writing, mentoring faculty, mediating grievances, orienting new faculty/staff) but Ji-Yoon receives none and which is unfortunately more common than one might think. Ludvik & Hagedorn’s (2022) meta-study of chair training found in some cases that two-thirds or more received no training when appointed while those who have received direction, receive only one to four hours of education. While Ji-Yoon returns happily to her research and teaching after being voted out as chairs, Ludvik & Hagedorn (2022) argue that the process of returning to a full-time faculty role also requires time and support.
Final Thoughts
The image of academia provided by The Chair is by no means perfect and yet therein lies its value. In its missteps it holds up a mirror, albeit a funhouse mirror, to those of us who work in administration. It allows us to explore the systematic outcomes of poor planning, hasty decision making and problem solving, and superficial engagement with constructs including academic freedom, campus climate, and DEI the latter of which Matthew (2021, p. 4) sums up as “the gap between diversity and inclusion rhetoric and reality.” The issues raised in this 2021 series have not only endured but heightened, as seen in the accelerated erosion of the pillars supporting DEI and civil discourse and in academia’s continued technological lag as we struggle to understand, embrace, and effectively channel the potential of AI for education. Deans who mentor, supervise, and/or train chairs could benefit from considering what this series has to say about problematic college governance and leadership practices that are perpetuated throughout higher education even as they, like Ji-Yoon’s broken office chair, strain under the weight of the institutions they must uphold. The first scene where Ji-Yoon sits in her new office chair and it breaks foreshadows the series to come and that reminds us of the quote by Benjamin Franklin, “The discontented [person] finds no easy chair.”
References
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