Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents is not merely about the decline and fall of English departments — where creative writers congregate — or even of universities. Eminent literary critic Elaine Showalter treats the academy as a cultural microcosm, discussing its representation in fiction as both symptom and symbol of society’s ills at large.

Viewed through the satirist’s lens, the college-on-the-hill is neither moral beacon nor life-of-the-mind sanctuary today (if it ever was). In his academic novel Home (2001), Hazard Adams describes an English department where professors who had “pretty much forgotten its long colorful history of dispute with the administration, the legislature, and maybe the world or the real now fought among themselves for power.” (p. 122) Showalter’s book — insightful, analytical, personal and frequently laugh-out-loud funny — is all about power in the tower.

Showalter discusses institutional dynamics, individual characters and plots that often hinge on sexual politics. She is particularly adept at reading the psychological subtexts of departmental life, especially Oedipal projections on to the chair — the alpha male, who must be served by women and emulated by men. Showalter identifies a homosocial “erotics of rivalry,” which bonds men vying for academic power, and an “erotics of teaching,” which links professors and students — and lies on the slippery slope of sexual harassment. Like some colleagues, some novelists deplore the waning of “phallic entitlement” and the waxing of “political correctness.”

Professors play many parts: men’s roles include tweedy intellectual, randy tomcat, academic hotshot and new, feminist-friendly metrosexual. Women’s roles include bookworm spinster, harpy faculty wife (almost extinct), seductive student (hunting season officially closed), elegant sleuth, feisty feminist, “just-one-of-the-boys” careerist and murder victim (reserved for tenured professors and chairs). Almost all these academic women fit sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’ description of “the outsider within.”

Faculty Towers ambitiously maps the development of 50 years of American and British novels about campus life, starting with C.P. Snow’s The Masters (1951), “reverent, idyllic, utopian,” and wholly centred on men, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is identified as the funniest academic satire of the 20th century, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) introduces the first female professors, while Alison Lurie’s novels (e.g., The War between the Tates, 1974) offer the perspective of the educated and frustrated faculty wife.

The genre gains popularity with Carolyn Heilbrun’s mystery novels, with their spunky, detective-professor heroine on faculty at a prestigious university in New York City. Heilbrun, a professor at Columbia who writes as Amanda Cross, was persuaded that a woman can never become “a full-fledged member of the brotherhood of professors.” (p. 73) Heilbrun’s Death in a Tenured Position (1981) features both sleuth Kate Fansler and Janet Mandelbaum, the (fictitious) first tenured woman in the Harvard English department, who feels that “women, at least around here, live in a never-never land, not certain where they belong.” (p. 72)

Current events and glass-ceiling statistics support Heilbrun’s theory. But in Showalter’s judgement, Kate Fansler is no feminist. “Overall, feminism took a long time to seep into the academic novel,” she claims. (p. 4) Faculty Towers does not examine Canadian literature, where Marian Engel’s No Clouds of Glory (1968) opened, by contrast, a feminist floodgate with antiheroine Sarah Bastard, a “lady PhD” and up-the-establishment iconoclast.

One of the pleasures and dangers of reading campus fiction is to see each novel as a roman à clef, with real-life models. In John Aldridge’s 1960 novel, The Party at Cranton, for example, the main character is the editor of a prestigious literary journal who acts like the “godhead, or at the very least, head god.” (p. 36) The insufferable Arthur Buchanan bears some resemblance to a real person. Much campus fiction contrasts “the rationality these men aspire to by vocation and the all-too-human passions and pettinesses they lapse into.” (p. 23)

The reflection in the looking glass of campus fiction is not flattering. Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1998) traces changes through two generations of English professors — father and son. The latter presides over a petty, divided department. He asks the chair of foreign languages how his department is doing and gets the reply, “Silly, small, mean-spirited, lame ... Same as English.” (p. 97)

Languages and literatures were once the core of Plato’s academy, but now are repeatedly depicted as having lost their sense of purpose and their relevance. This, despite — or because of — the massive social, political and economic changes occasioned by the human rights movements for groups including Jews, Blacks, women, Aboriginals, people with disabilities, gays and lesbians. More nuanced analysis is needed here — a surprising criticism for a study written by a woman who changed the course of English studies with her early feminist book A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977). But one has to ask: Whose stories? Whose tower? Who’s power rising? Whose “paradise” lost?

The death of the humanities happened not only because of the “commercialization” agenda that favours lucratively patentable science and technology research. Late 20th century humanities scholarship, obsessed with literary theory, became an end in itself and not a means to an end. The sacred grove in general today, claims Showalter, suffers from an infestation of scholarly obscurantism and celebrity cultism, which campus fiction and its criticism expose.

Examples abound. Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Angst” in The Hungry Ghosts (1974) shows, in the author’s words, “how ambition, lust for fame and prestige, and egotism, can ruin the lives of presumably intelligent people.” (p. 55) Changing Places (1975) by David Lodge, campus novelist par excellence, introduces the high-voltage Morris Zapp from the State University of Euphoria, “an academic who approaches the university as if it were a corporation, aims for financial and sexual success, loves power and is not despised or punished for being crass, sexist, competitive, hedonistic and horny.” (p. 63)

Lev Raphael’s The Death of a Constant Lover (1999) depicts a whole university that is similarly distorted by corporatism: “it currently housed close to 50,000 students, or ‘customers,’ as our idiotic new president liked to say and I suppose we were lucky he hadn’t instituted drive-through classes yet.” (p. 97)

Showalter sums up: “Vocation has become employment; critics have become superstars; scholars have become technicians.” (p. 98) Academic hotshots may get rich, but the underclass remains poor. In The Lecturer’s Tale (2001), James Hyne offers a haunting image of vulnerable, contract academic staff, “the steerage of the English Department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak.” (p. 109) Recent campus fiction shifts from satire, through muted elegy, to tragedy.

Too few of us, including humanists and social scientists, have a good understanding of university history or an analysis of academic culture. Showalter’s Faculty Towers has lighted the way for further, more comprehensive, more interdisciplinary studies. She may be right that “achieved nothing” is every scholar’s most feared epitaph. If so, Showalter is surely free from anxiety, for she has already achieved a place of distinction, several times over, in the pantheon of great and original literary critics.

Wendy Robbins, chair of CAUT’s Women’s Committee, is a professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. With an interdisciplinary research team, she is writing a book, thrice rejected for SSHRC funding, about women professors in Canadian literature and society.