Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on Academe’s ‘Factional Disputes and Ideological Scandals’)

“These continuous factional disputes and ideological scandals were a form of spiritual luxury that satisfied the higher cravings for polemic, gossip, and backbiting without taking the baser shape, so noticeable in the larger universities, of personal competition and envy. Here, living was cheap and the salary range was not great. The headships of departments were nominal, falling, by common consent, to the member with the greatest taste for paperwork. Such competition as there was centered around vying for the better students.”—American novelist, essayist, and memoirist Mary McCarthy (1913-1989), The Groves of Academe (1952)

It's been more than 70 years since Mary McCarthy’s satire on higher education appeared, and the issues embroiling these schools—divestment in Israel, DEI, to name a few—would have been utterly foreign to the novelist who viewed with such a jaundiced eye life among students (her bestseller The Group) and faculty members (The Groves of Academe).

But academic politics remains as powerful a force as ever—perhaps even more so than it was in her time, consumed by the 24/7 news cycle in a way it never had been when she wrote.

In retrospect, the Fifties looks like a golden age of fictional treatment of college and university life. Over in England, just after publication of The Groves of Academe, Kingsley Amis reaped comic material from a hapless lecturer in medieval literature in Lucky Jim.

But it’s a novel that came out at the start of the decade, C.P. Snow’s The Masters, that may have the most resonance in the current American academic environment, with a plot that centers on the scheming and plotting in selecting a new head of an imaginary college (clearly inspired by Snow’s time at Cambridge).

Especially after last year, it might be said that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” for anyone hoping to fill a similar role at any American college or university.