“After the Hunt,” the new psychodrama from Luca Guadagnino is unlikely to endear you to elite higher education, to excuse whatever pretensions and egos, no matter how sympathetic you might have been feeling toward the nation’s Columbias and Harvards amid their recent turmoil.
Nominally a movie about a dubious allegation of sexual assault, the film, which opens widely this week, is an exploration of generational warfare; the toxic delusions of professional self-regard; the false virtues of the intellectually pedigreed; their easy, compromised capitulation to the very rich. These themes might have been unpacked in any number of contexts, but the film situates them in the philosophy department at Yale.
The timing can seem paradoxical — the star power of Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield deployed to examine a world stripped of so much glamour and currency. The past several years have witnessed a steady churn of journalistic lament over the fate of the humanities on American campuses. The prognosis, at least if Ian McEwan is taking measure, shows no sign of turnaround. His new futuristic novel, “What We Can Know,” is lodged in a 22nd century in which there seem to be just two remaining historians on earth. According to federal statistics, the percentage of college students majoring in English or foreign languages and literature plummeted by a third during the 10-year period ending in 2022.
Yet at the same time, literary and pop cultural immersion in this world has not gone so deep into the well in quite a while — perhaps not since the 1980s or ’90s, during the era of peak academic celebrity. Whether it is because writers, directors and the executives who commission their work so often come up through the liberal arts or because there is a natural inclination to rubberneck in the face of any empire in free fall, the volume of cultural product focused on the internal workings of humanities departments has risen in inverse proportion to their apparently faded relevance.
What has poured through has hardly condensed into a public relations effort. The image rendered is largely disparaging, nearly always trivializing, the material almost seeming to complement the assault now confronting universities. “A lot of this is responding to the zeitgeist of five years ago,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “The coddling of students as snowflakes, the way that petty disputes get reframed as moral judgments. That was part of the critique of academia from moderate liberals.”
“After the Hunt,” which gives us Alma Imhoff, an ethicist and teacher of Foucault, is only the latest example of a film, novel or series that has concerned itself with the perceived narcissism, insularity and distemper of the professorial class. The film was underway before the Trump administration’s attacks and the complaints, many coming from faculty, that institutions caved too readily to the government’s demands. But the film would have you question whether caving is not endemic to every facet of the academic ecosystem. Alma herself embodies the subjugation of principle to self-interest. The student she fawns over is a mediocre doctoral candidate, whom she pretends is “brilliant,” but in truth is just the daughter of billionaire donors.
The film fertilizes the already rich ground of what we might call Unhinged-Professor Art. To what extent could all that preceded the White House onslaught be said to have glided the path for such antipathies? A new Vanderbilt University poll of Americans across party affiliations, for example, tells us that two-thirds believe that ideological or political bias at colleges and universities is a serious problem.
Well before the conservative activist Christopher Rufo set an agenda for upending academic life, there was enough content available via Netflix or Kindle to embolden the view that universities were ripe for disruption. The call, in some respects, seemed to come from inside the house.
Like the Guadagnino film, “Vladimir,” Julia May Jonas’s best-selling 2022 novel about a literature professor in late middle age at a college in upstate New York, casts the academy in dark shadow. Depleted by what she sees as her vanished utility both as a scholar and sexual creature, the unnamed narrator, eventually moved to kidnap and drug a male colleague, recounts her employer’s subservience to puritanical rhetoric forged in the name of progress.
In an open marriage to her department chair, she was never particularly bothered by her husband’s dalliances with students; they happened long ago and ended when the rules changed. But now, with a movement afoot to fire him, her colleagues are angling for her suspension as a matter of association.
She is indignant while also at war with her work. She has been forced to keep teaching a class called “Women in American Literature,” which she hates “more and more each year.” Like Alma, she is exhausted by her students’ inability (or refusal) to interpret text beyond the narrow political framework fed to them by those all too susceptible to pedagogical fashion.
The novel is currently being made into an eight-part Netflix series starring Rachel Weisz. When it arrives it will stand as at least the third series in just a few years to delve into the squabbles, animosities and infidelities of English professors. “The Chair” made its debut in 2021, a comedy about the head of an English department at the fictional Pembroke College. “Lucky Hank,” starring Bob Odenkirk, based on the 1997 novel “The Straight Man,” by Richard Russo, came not long after in a similar vein of disdain, one in which characters say things like: “My book of sonnets on Jonathan Swift has become the benchmark in early feminist 18th century response poetry.”
The setting in “Lucky Hank” is a small liberal arts school in central Pennsylvania, where meaningless slights and arguments fly around campus as if pinned to Frisbees. Two professors appear to have a longstanding feud about Pinocchio. One of them maintains that the story “is racist” and “filled with allusions to child slavery and demented Christian ideology,” a position the other challenges with the flaccid counterclaim: “Yeah. Except it’s not.”
In May, Mr. Russo published a collection of essays, “Life and Art,” which includes a piece examining the trajectory of the campus novel and the transition his own book made to television. In earlier iterations of the form, he points out, the plot typically hung on the climb toward tenure, the quest for something enviable. Later, the subject turned to inertia and malaise.
What struck Mr. Russo about the adaptation of his novel years later was the emphasis on representation. In terms of the faculty characters, “every identity box had to be checked,” he said. The novel, like so much of his work, focused on class. But the creators of the show satirized new norms while still surrendering to them.
Both “Lucky Hank” and “The Chair” take measure of absurdist disciplinary proceedings that follow infractions that would have most likely been considered minor in the past, if they would have registered at all. In the form of a scruffy Jay Duplass, “The Chair” offers a beloved professor, recently widowed, who becomes a target of campus protest when he makes a joke about the “Heil Hitler” salute. Stating the obvious, that he is “not a Nazi,” accomplishes very little.
I asked Mr. Roth, who in addition to running Wesleyan writes frequently about higher education, what the end result of all this might be — the ambient cultural absorption of a damning political appraisal at a moment when academic freedom is under such hostile scrutiny. “It couldn’t come at a worse time,” he told me. “The only way this would be beneficial is if it reminded people of what these places should be like. Even as you watch a professor do some stupid thing you’re at least reminded that people are reading Shakespeare and Toni Morrison somewhere.”
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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