I haven’t been in the habit of pulling all-nighters since college, aside from a couple of late-night vacation drives when no motel could be found. But since I returned to school after two decades off, I’ve gone far into the wee hours at least half a dozen times. Now I can go without sleep practically on demand, and sometimes without intending to. In a fit of insomnia a couple of weeks ago, I used Netflix’s instant viewing feature to screen “The Paper Chase,” the slightly self-important dramedy about “one Ls” (first-year law students) at Harvard.
Fiction about the Academy has always been a fringe genre best suited to the novel. Occasionally it becomes the theme of an author’s career (David Lodge), more often an indulgence that “serious writers” enjoy once or twice, their chance to imagine a cloister in which writing is the summum bonum (Saul Bellow and many others). I was going to suggest that this urge is a byway on the prep-school lad’s essentially masculine journey into donhood, but Iris Murdoch has written novels on academic themes (The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Book and the Brotherhood), and I’m sure she’s not alone.
There are a handful of academia-themed movies: Besides “Chase,” I can think of “A Beautiful Mind,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Dead Poets Society,” “Little Man Tate,” and “Finding Forrester.” I don’t think “Breaking Away” and “Animal House” count, though we should probably include “True Genius.” I love watching films set on university campuses. Father Karras’s jog around the track (was it at Georgetown?) in “The Exorcist” struck a warm chord of comfort and normalcy for me, just before the projectile vomit hit the fan. (Not to get too far off topic, but college campuses make superb hunting grounds in teensploitation horror flicks. Now there’s an education you can’t get at any price.)
I saw “Chase” when it first came out. I was 13, and it made me want to become a lawyer. That was before I learned that being a lawyer is what unscrupulous philosophers do to make money. After I learned that, I learned that philosophers who stay philosophers don’t make money, so maybe lawyers have chosen the lesser of two evils. At any rate, the intellectual skill-sets are similar, at least if you’re comparing the law to analytic philosophy. The curricula and tone of presentation appear to differ greatly, however. First-year law courses aren’t seminars, from what I can make out. They’re attended by hordes of students in amphitheater classrooms otherwise used for undergraduate chemistry and psychology. The one Ls sit at tiny desk-chairs or benches, waiting to be called on by the professor. The atmosphere of competition is electric. The very best jobs will be waiting for the students who run this gauntlet with the greatest aplomb.
In philosophy, on the other hand, you would think the competition would be even keener, since getting any job at all will be a coup, but in a way it takes the pressure off. Philosophers tend not to be all that convinced that they must be philosophy instructors, although some do feel called to teach. Graduate philosophy courses generally are seminars, or they end up being more like seminars than lecture classes. At CUNY, courses tend to carry about a dozen enrolled students and three or four audits and sit-ins. Not as intimate a kaffeeklatsch as one might wish for, but hardly impersonal.
In “Chase,” apart from the rather wooden central character, the prime mover is Professor Kingsfield, the impassive blowhard who employs the “Socratic method” in his contracts course. There is indeed question and answer in his classroom, but in spirit nothing could be further from the elenchus of Socrates. The aim of Kingsfield’s technique is not engagement of sundry interlocutors in an endlessly rewarding discourse fit for any citizen of Athens—and even for a slave—but rather the motivation of legal thinking through fear. In fairness to the fictionalized Harvard Law (never mind the real thing), I should add that “Chase” portrays Kingsfield as a bigger SOB than anyone else on the faculty. I still got the feeling that the instructors of torts and Constitutional law, etc. would not be far behind him in their unwillingness to suffer fools gladly.
Philosophy programs do have characters like these around, but, like autocratic orchestra conductors, their day in the sun has probably passed. No doubt the same is true in law schools, which are no more immune to student grievances than any other department of corporate academia. I’ve taken philosophy courses with professors who confront students “Socratically.” At my school, the one who makes the biggest show of this turns out to be the opposite of Kingsfield: intently concerned with students as individuals, humorous beneath the gruff mask, willing to befriend.
I for one am glad to live now, in the age of student consumerism and political correctness, if it means avoiding the old-school pedagogy of pressure and shame. It’s hard enough being a One P, without the extra agita.
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