Why I Didn't Watch Netflix's The Chair
When universities went remote
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way towards The Chair. As a long-time faculty member of a postcolonial English Department in a neoliberal university, I can’t bear to watch it.
I lasted till the end of the first episode. Yup, it’s definitely like that, I would catch myself saying. I could tell early on how insightful the show was going to be, except that I found it to be too close to actual experience. Too close for comfort. Too real, it’s triggering.
My husband, a chef, likes to watch culinary films that are chock-full of kitchen drama. He likes to be able to say, Yup, it’s definitely like that. So he didn’t quite get it why he was more excited than I was to watch The Chair, with popcorn on-hand.
A colleague from another English Department nailed it when he posted a similar reaction to Facebook. Watching The Chair for him felt like hanging out at the department again and getting dragged back into the thick of issues that he was so relieved to get away from with the suspension of onsite classes.
The comments and laughing emojis that flooded his post confirmed the sentiment to be widely shared. We’ve had a pandemic online academic year. Why would anyone want to relive what we’ve all been fortunate to escape from while still retaining our jobs?
As for me, however, I’d just taken the extra step of distancing myself that the last thing I wanted to watch on Netflix is a depiction of academic work culture. I’m currently on leave because last year’s remote teaching burnt me out to a crisp. I suspect that deep within me, though I refuse to openly admit it (as I will bravely do now), one of the many reasons I quit is my dread of the day when I might have no choice but to be an administrator. Like a chair.
Not just a course coordinator, or a quality assurance officer, which were small-time administrative roles that time and again I had to fulfill as required of my employment. I dreaded the day when, perhaps many years from now if I stay the course (a big IF), looking around the department for chair candidates, my name will come up — due to sheer seniority, or lack of better options, or by some malicious scheme to make sure I’m the chair when the department inevitably blows up (exactly as how the luminous Sandra Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim had put it).
Chair nomination, campaign, and election season is particularly soul-crushing and divisive that some departments opt to change chairs by going through an alphabetical roster (Prof. A for this term, Prof. B for next term), or by playing Russian roulette, or by whatever means to depoliticize the process.
What corporate types don’t always understand about academia is that generally speaking, nobody wants to be promoted to higher positions like the chair. Why would any idealistic educator want to worry about enrollment rates, marketing degree programs, or getting in the crossfire between upper-admin and disgruntled faculty? Who would want to make hard, even absurd decisions involving hiring and firing, budget allocation, or the revision, retention, or retiring of certain “obsolete” courses?
Most of us joined academia to be teachers, not managers. Our happy place is in the classroom surrounded by starry-eyed students, or the research lab with mentors and mentees. The most “management” we can do is classroom management; the most senior among us don’t even bother with this, consigning the work of grading and attendance record keeping to TAs. Beyond that, had we wanted to become managers and administrators in the first place, we would’ve gone corporate instead where the pay is bigger. (Those who rake in a lot of money as school administrators is, of course, another story. And I may only be speaking for myself, because there exists a very rare breed of gifted managerial educators with the heart and capacity to direct academic reform—it’s just not me.)
But what’s with the English Department in particular that makes it controversial enough as a subject for a binge-worthy, comedy-drama series? In three bullet points, as this is no place to historicize the ways that literary education had been complicit with power and oppression:
the alleged uselessness of a humanities education in a technocratic world;
no-holds-barred discussions of anti-conservative theories like feminism, critical race theory, etc.;
literature departments tend to be directly opposed to business schools’ triumphalist market-centric narratives, and usually have to defend their relevance in the face of downsizing and the corporatization of universities.
What I ended up watching instead of The Chair
Another colleague on Facebook noted an ending scene in The Chair showing Ji-Yoon reveling in a teaching moment, in a classroom. The scene, said this colleague, is a reminder of our bottom line, of what makes us stay in academia despite everything. It’s the reading and teaching of literary works.
My daughter wanted to watch The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a dark reimagining of the Archie comics, along with Riverdale. My daughter is 9 years old, and Sabrina is rated 18+, so I watched it with her (I forbade her to watch Riverdale). As a literature junkie, I had fun watching Sabrina for all the literary references I could spot.
The high school literature teacher was possessed by Lilith, first wife to Adam and consort to Lucifer. The “Dark Lord” Lucifer Morningstar didn’t disappoint as a character — he was the drama queen that he was in Milton’s Paradise Lost, utterly misogynistic and predictably, even comically, flawed with his ego and pride. The third season had Sabrina and pals visit Dante’s nine circles of hell through a painting portal in — guess what — Dorian Gray’s warlock-only pub. Outside the realm of the Inferno, pagan deities like Pan, Circe, and Medusa threatened to take over the earth as the witches of Christian lore switched loyalties from Satan to Hecate (because, really, why would a coven of mostly women witches worship a d*ck?). In the fourth season, the realms of earth, heaven, and hell were reduced to marbles at the mercy of Lovecraftian cosmic terrors.
As all these historic-cosmic upheavals were taking place, down in Sabrina’s regular high school universe, a girl named Suzie was transitioning to boyhood as Theo while clutching a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He found love in Robin, a hobgoblin straight out of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What is high school without the tired trope of Romeo and Juliet, which Sabrina’s classmates staged at Baxter High, as she developed complicated friendships with the Weird Sisters trio at the Academy of Unseen Arts? The allusion to the witches of Macbeth is clear.
There are many more: the academy director and dark church high priest was named Faustus (of Goethe’s Faust), and the other teachers were big names in horror (like Shirley Jackson). In a Kafkaesque episode where Sabrina was thrust to a parallel world, she relived an endless, postmodern TV shooting of the ‘90s Sabrina with its original cast and an animatronic Salem. It included a script with her in a cockroach costume, Gregor Samsa-style.
I’ll stop here, though I can still go on. My only complaint about the show is its ending. The makers of Sabrina didn’t seem to have learned anything from the reception of 13 Reasons Why.
The fun is not just in the hunt for Easter Eggs. It’s in interpreting how literary references deepen and expand the show’s themes and plot. As well as how the show “talks back” to the literary classics it cites.
Needless to say, Sabrina is by no means straightforwardly comparable to The Chair. It just happens to be the one I’m watching now to fill the same need that I thought watching The Chair could fill.
Going back to The Chair…
In the only episode of The Chair that I’ve seen, what mesmerized me were pre-pandemic classroom scenes filled with students without masks. I missed the exchange of energies in a classroom like that, though it’s very hard now to imagine going back to the old days like the pandemic didn’t happen.
The pandemic exacerbated the brokenness of academic systems, not just English Departments. But in the end, I agree with that colleague who noted The Chair’s poignant ending scene. A teacher being just that, a teacher, to a roomful of students. That’s our bottom line, what will make my return to academia and all its troubles worth my while.
That is, if I will ever return. And perhaps, watch the entirety of The Chair, with open eyes and a combat-ready heart. And popcorn.
Here’s the link to the original version, Aug. 30, 2021.