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.

Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on a Man With a ‘Gift for Being His Own Sympathizer’)

“Hen has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It’s a rare asset; it could be useful to him in politics or religion….He's capable of commanding great loyalty, because he's unswervingly loyal to himself. I'm not being sarcastic. Very few of us have that. It’s a species of self-alienation. He’s loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause.” —American novelist, critic, and political activist Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), The Groves of Academe (1952)

Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on Postwar College Students)

“These youths, for the most part, were still squirming in the straitjacket of puberty; their hands trembled when they lit a cigarette; their wrists protruded from their very coat-sleeves; they lived in an existential extremity; every instant of communication was anguish. Besides the beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers' and racketeers' sons, movie-agents' sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort—the male part of the college included an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as some spastics and paraplegics, cripples of various sorts, boys with tics, polio victims. There were a deaf boy, a dumb boy, boys with several kinds of speech-defects; there were two boys who had fits, boys with unusual skin diseases with ordinary acne, with glasses, with poor teeth, a boy with a religious complex, boys who had grown too fast, with long, chickeny necks and quivering Adam's apples. The girls, by comparison, were blooming, healthy, often pretty specimens, with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore, girls from the surrounding region, narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosey, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals or fashion-drawing, liverish girls, older than the rest, on scholarship." —Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952)