Down With... Academics

In 2018, a teacher in a Manhattan private school was explaining how to calculate angles during his Calculus class. While doing so, he raised and lowered his arm to visualise the angles he was describing. At one point, he looked down at his arm and realised he had inadvertently performed a Nazi salute.

"Heil, Hitler," he quipped.

Word of the incident spread quickly on social media, and a number of concerned parents threatened to withdraw their children from the school unless appropriate action was taken against this Anti-Semitic teacher. About two weeks later, the teacher (whose father was Jewish, and who had two great-grandparents who were killed in Auschwitz) was fired.

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In 2021, a music professor at the University of Michigan launched a course about the process of turning a stage play into an opera, focussing on Shakespeare's Othello. He began by screening the 1965 film version of Othello, starring Laurence Olivier in blackface.

Students accused the professor (who had escaped his native China during the Cultural Revolution) of racism, and the professor was eventually obliged to step down from his teaching position.

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In 2020, a Business Communications professor at the University of Southern California was teaching a class about conversational Mandarin in which he described the colloquial phrase ne ga - which a few of his students decided was acoustically similar to an unpleasant racial epithet in English. They launched a formal complaint to the college, and the professor was suspended.

In a written statement, the Dean of the college wrote, “It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. [The professor] repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry.”

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These are all modern examples (admittedly cherry-picked, but by no means unique) of academic figures finding themselves taken to task (or worse) because their words or actions were deemed unacceptable to the current generation of students.

In many areas of popular discourse, it is incidents like these that have come to define "Cancel Culture". For some, they are examples of "political correctness run amok". For others, they were simply the younger generation taking a stand against the excesses of those in positions of power.

For anyone making a living in the field of higher education, these are perilous times - when the wrong turn of phrase or the wrong quotation can have terminal consequences. Many academics are finding it increasingly difficult to discuss controversial topics in college environments that are (literally) atwitter with buzzwords like microaggressions and safe spaces.

Last year, when the film Tár was released, columnist Michelle Goldberg described it (glowingly) as "...a film about cancel culture, making it the rare piece of art that looks squarely at this social phenomenon that has roiled so many of America’s meaning-making institutions."

She goes on to say,

"There have been a couple of comedies that have taken on the idea of cancellation, but they’ve stacked the deck by making the person who gets cancelled either totally innocent, as in the 2021 TV series The Chair, or absurdly guilty, as in the satire Not Okay. […] But a dramatic work that asks you to empathize — if not sympathize — with a tragic figure who has done a lot of harm is more difficult to pull off."

Full disclosure: I did not share Michelle Goldberg's enthusiasm for Tár - I found it to be a deeply flawed film - but she is partially correct in her assertion that modern film-makers are extremely nervous about tackling Cancel Culture (in all of its messy complexity) head on.

Ironically, one of the most incisive and unflinching films about Cancel Culture in the academic world was made thirty years ago; long before the term Cancel Culture even existed.

Oleanna is David Mamet's film (adapted from his own stage play) about a meeting between a teacher and his student, who is initially concerned about her failing grade in his class.

Many, many things about Oleanna are shocking and disturbing, but prominent amongst those things is how much more topical it is when viewed today.

David Mamet can be an uneven writer (to put it charitably). His writing is always totally distinctive (and often excruciating) but he is also a man with an enormous amount of latent hatred and anger, which can sometimes overwhelm his works. His signature (Pulitzer Prize winning) play, Glengarry Glen Ross - about a group of desperate, unethical real estate agents operating at the edges of human decency - is so angry, brutal and expletive-laden that actors generally refer to it as Death of a Fucking Salesman.

In Oleanna, that anger (and razor-sharp dialogue) is brilliantly channelled into the scenario in question. Teacher and student both have agendas (and a great deal of baggage) and we, the audience, are forced to sit helplessly as events descend into their inevitable conclusion.

William H. Macy (who created the role in the original stage production) stars opposite Debra Eisenstadt as his frustrated student.

At the 1992 stage premiere there were shouted arguments among audience members during the interval and even (apparently) fist fights after the final curtain. I sincerely hope nothing like that happens this Thursday when I screen the film, but it does reinforce the idea that Oleanna successfully presents a situation that is genuinely ambiguous; where neither party is explicitly right or wrong.

We will be screening Oleanna at 7.30 on Thursday, the 18th of May at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.