Professors aren’t what they used to be—at least in film, if not in life.
The professor has long been a staple in film, usually fitting a few types. One is the professor as snob, mocked in the Marx Brothers’ 1932 Horse Feathers and recurring in characters such as the priggish business professor in Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 Back to School. Another is the bumbling but good-natured geek, made an archetype in the 1961 Disney classic, The Absent-Minded Professor. A third, appearing since the 1950s, is the expert, who is a voice of reason about science, medicine, or history, like the Ronald Reagan character in his 1951 Bedtime for Bonzo, who informs us about nurture versus nature. More in a comic role, an additional type is the rascal or reprobate, for instance the Donald Sutherland character in Animal House (1978), who introduces his young charges to marijuana.
Of late, there is a new type: It seems as if professors have become depressed and downtrodden. For example, two well-regarded 2008 films, The Visitor and Smart People, center on aging, later-career professors who are disengaged from their work and exhibit obvious signs of depression. The Visitor depicts an economics professor, played by Richard Jenkins, who is going through the motions, teaching syllabi from years before and avoiding research. Around 60, he’s too young to retire but entirely detached from academic life. He’s also a widower, which sets the tone of his life—he’s alone, dejected, and hopeless.
The plot turns on his accidentally meeting a young man and woman who are illegal immigrants. He becomes caught up in their struggle to stay in the United States. In a climactic moment—the scene of recognition in an otherwise subdued film—the professor confesses, while having dinner with the mother of the young man: “I’m not busy, not at all. The truth is I haven’t done any real work in a very long time. ... It doesn’t mean anything to me. None of it does.”
It’s hard not to wince at his words—especially if you’re a professor—not only because of the pathos they express and their raw honesty, but also because they lend credence to the image a lot of people have of professors, particularly tenured ones, that we’re privileged slackers. My cohort, who joined the professoriate around 1990, had to scramble to get jobs, and, if anything, we are overachievers who can only wistfully imagine the days of the relaxed, leisurely, pipe-smoking professor.
As a type, the professor in The Visitor is remarkably similar to the professor in Smart People, played by Dennis Quaid. They are the opposite of Mr. Chips: Both are uninspired in class, plodding through old notes, and each stonewalls an earnest student who stops by his office. The Quaid character is a widower as well, and has closed himself off. He seems to shuffle through life (according to the commentary on the DVD, Quaid worked on the walk), disconnected from his profession as well as his family.
Though images of professors are not always positive, these represent a new turn. In The Absent-Minded Professor, the Fred MacMurray character, while bumbling, is a vital young man on the rise, both professionally and in his personal life. The film, closing with his marriage, a classic plot motif, exemplifies the springtime of life. Both The Visitor and Smart People tend toward the opposite pole, depicting the winter of a career and life.
The earlier professor—good-natured, absorbed in his work, respected if sometimes mocked, and up and coming—is a fitting figure for postwar higher education, flooded with new students, new faculty members, and new money. Around mid-20th century, the American university system saw, along with its steep climb in students, a parallel rise in the number of faculty members, from about 82,000 professors in 1930 to 247,000 in 1950. The expanding professoriate was a byproduct of the postwar welfare state and its support for research as well as mass higher education. In Bedtime for Bonzo, the Reagan character is a quintessential postwar figure: a veteran, serious, hard-working, and ambitious. He is also the son of a convicted felon, which is a nub in the plot but eventually proves his thesis about nurture over nature; he himself shows the rightness of the meritocratic principle of postwar higher education.
If earlier films depict the rise of professors, recent films portray a fall. One reason is simple. Though the university has continued to expand—student enrollments have gone up regularly through the past century—professorial jobs have receded, largely because a majority of positions have been reconfigured as casual or part-time rather than full-time, permanent slots. In my field, English, a recent Modern Language Association survey reported that 32 percent of jobs are tenure track, meaning that, for the first time since World War II, two-thirds of those teaching have impermanent positions. Professorial jobs are no longer secure but precarious.
That obviously has the harshest effects on those without decent jobs, but it has a side effect on those remaining who have tenure-track positions. With fewer new professors, in simple demographic terms, the permanent faculty is graying. We are no longer up and coming, but stagnating and shrinking. According to Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein in The American Faculty, a majority of the professoriate (52 percent) is now 50 or older, whereas in 1969 more than three-fourths of faculty members were younger than 50. And there is very little new blood: Now only one in 12 faculty members is 35 or younger, whereas in 1969, a third of faculty members were 35 or younger. (Schuster and Finkelstein’s data draw on a 1998 survey, so the ratios are probably even more steep now.) Visualize your department: If you have a department of 30, 10 of your colleagues would have been 35 or younger 40 years ago. How much gray is showing at your faculty meetings now?
The situation is not much better for younger faculty members depicted in other well-regarded recent films, among them The Savages (2007) and We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004). In The Savages, one of the lead characters, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, has a life as depressing as those of his senior filmic colleagues—he can’t seem to finish his academic book on Brecht, he’s schlubby and unshaven, his house is a mess (his sister remarks, “It looks like the Unabomber lives here”), and he lives in a perpetually dreary Buffalo, where it’s always cloudy or snowing, compared with scenes in sunny Arizona.
He’s also a widower-manqué, grieving a girlfriend’s moving out. Part of the problem is that he won’t commit, but, as he explains to his sister, his hesitance is rational rather than just typical male phobia: “Do you have any idea how many comp-lit critical-theory Ph.D.'s there are running around this country looking for work?” And he adds, “even if Kasha and I did get married, she could end up teaching at some university that’s farther away from here than Poland.”
The film depicts yet another side effect of the current job situation: It affects not only one’s income but where one lives and one’s relationships. I’ve often thought that current professorial jobs are like being in the Army: One might be stationed nearly anywhere, according to the orders that come down from some arbitrary academic genie.
We Don’t Live Here Anymore taps into a different plot line, presenting an updated Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with a pair of couples pulling each other apart. One of the male leads, played by Mark Ruffalo, teaches at a small community college. He is the opposite of glamorous: We see him sitting at a side table in the living room slogging through a pile of student papers, and in one classroom scene he has trouble reaching a bored class about Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych. Like the Hoffman character in The Savages, he is unkempt, mumbles and stumbles around, and lives in a dark, sloppy house. The realm of expectations has shrunken: Professors are no longer privileged professionals but part of the downsized world of contemporary America.
One other type of professor has gotten some screen time in the past few years: the celebrity professor. For instance, Elegy (2008) and 88 Minutes (2007) feature professors who might appear on CNN or Charlie Rose. In Elegy, the protagonist, played by Ben Kingsley, is an English professor and also has a television show, on which he comments on books and accrues fame as well as ready young women. 88 Minutes’ protagonist, played by Al Pacino, is a forensic psychiatrist who testifies at high-profile trials and also appears on TV. Both characters have enviable lives—they are successful, famous, and rich, each with large, luxurious apartments that the camera lingers over. And, instead of beat-up Volvos, they drive new Porsches.
The celebrity professor might seem to counter the image of the downtrodden professor, but he is merely the flip side of the coin. He represents the “winner take all” model that governs businesses and, progressively more so, professions. Like the CEO who receives 300 times what the person on the shop floor is paid, these professors reap the spoils—disproportionately high salaries, large speaking fees and ready travel, little teaching—while adjuncts do the clean-up work of teaching all the service courses on the cheap. (Actually, it would be administrators who take the lion’s share and are the CEO’s; perhaps celebrity professors are more like spokespeople advertising the university.) The celebrity professor exemplifies the steep new tiers of academic life, in a pyramid rather than a horizontal community of scholars.
Films, of course, are inexact historical evidence, but I think that this wave of them—all generally well-made and critically praised—reflects how changes in academic employment have affected professors. These movies put some flesh on the statistics and get at not only the facts but the feeling of what it’s like to be a professor now. A professor is no longer an upbeat functionary of the post-World War II boom. Now we are entrepreneurs of the mind, and it wears us down.