Before There Was Woke, There Was ‘PCU’

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In This Episode

In 1994, a movie called PCU opened in theaters to little fanfare. But three decades on, the cult classic feels like an on-the-nose satire of the kinds of identity politics, liberal extremism, and right-wing intolerance that fuel many of today’s hottest disputes in higher education. In a conversation with The Chronicle’s Jack Stripling, Zak Penn, a co-writer of PCU, talks about how the film looks in 2024. Later, Chronicle staff share their impressions of the movie.

Related Reading:

• A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone: What the congressional antisemitism hearing really means.
• What Does ‘Woke’ Mean Anyway?
• The Oral History of ‘PCU,’ the Culture Wars Cult Classic

Guest: Zak Penn, a co-writer of PCU

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Zak Penn I’m not trying to say like either I told you so or wow, look at all the foresight I had. But I do remember thinking the problem with the way this argument is being framed is going to get worse.

Jack Stripling 30 years ago, a little movie about a politically correct college landed in theaters. Not many people saw it at the time. But in its second life on cable television and home video, PCU became a cult classic. Set on the fictional campus of Port Chester University, the movie is a relentless send up of what today we’d call ‘woke’ politics on college campuses. On the rolling green lawns of Port Chester, you’ll find a broad array of student activists. Among them, the “Womynists,” a group of militant feminists who are suspicious of all men. The “cause heads” who find world threatening issues and stick with them for about a week. And the Black activists whose leader sees a white devils conspiracy around every corner. All of this is played for laughs. Three decades on, PCU feels in some ways like a relic of 1994. But it can also be seen as a prescient satire, skewering the extremes of campus activism, language policing, and identity politics. Today on the show, we’ll talk with Zak Penn, who co-wrote PCU, along with Adam Leff, who was his classmate at Wesleyan University. Zack is a screenwriter and producer whose more recent credits include Free Guy and X-Men: The Last Stand. And, hey, just a head’s up, there’s some mild cursing in this episode. We’re excited to have him join us today on College Matters from The Chronicle. Jack, welcome to the show. Zak, welcome to the show. Sorry.

Zak Penn That’s that’s okay. Zak. I make that mistake myself, Jack.

Jack Stripling Yeah. No, no, no problem. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. So I want to dig into this movie. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I want to dig into what it means in 2024. But before we do that, tell me what inspired you and Adam to write it in the first place.

Zak Penn What inspired us was our experience at Wesleyan, period, which I probably can’t say for almost any other — maybe one other movie I’ve done has been that personal, but it was literally based on my prefrosh weekend at Wesleyan, just hanging out in this crazy house and being exposed. I mean, I was from New York City, so it wasn’t like liberal politics or something that were far from my doorstep. But even so, I think all of us, no matter where you were coming from, it was kind of this bizarre, almost like funhouse tour through a totally different world where like, language was different and social mores were different. It made this huge impact on us, and it was hilarious, too. I mean, that’s the main thing. Like you look for something that you think is funny. And most of my experiences were not terrifying. They were funny.

Jack Stripling The plot isn’t really the point of PCU, it’s mostly known for its social commentary. But for people who haven’t seen the movie, I should probably quickly say what it’s about. The story follows Tom Lawrence, a high school senior, who visits the fictional Port Chester University, for a prefrosh weekend. And Tom learns the ropes of the campus from Droz, a sort of jaded punk played by Jeremy Piven, who lives in a defunct frat house known as “The Pit.” As you might expect from a college comedy, “The Pit” is under threat — and the only way to prevent the house from being repossessed is for Droz and his friends to raise some quick cash. To do that, they plan to throw a wild party. But in the world of PCU, political correctness is so out of control and the students are so fragile that they even protest the party. Let’s hear a little bit of the trailer.

PCU TRAILER It’s a whole new ballgame on campus these days, and they call it “PC.” Politically correct. What don’t we eat? Red Meat! What happened to the ozone layer? It was last week. Now it’s meat. Let’s do lunch. Pride of the Port Chester Sports program, Tom, hippy Olympics. Swirly! But hey, it’s the 90’s, we’ll take what we can get. Gays in the military now. Free Nelson Mandela. They freed him already. Oh.

Jack Stripling So, I’m curious Zak: How closely does the fictional PCU resemble the Wesleyan of the late 1980s, when you were a student there?

Zak Penn Obviously it’s very exaggerated and it became more exaggerated as, you know, the production of the film went on in some ways. But a lot of it is just based on real stuff. I mean, a lot of it is of course, some of the chants, some of the groups, some of the things that people say are things that people actually said to us. The hierarchy of grievance was something that came up all the time. You know, it’s turned into, it’s metastasized into a different discussion these days, one which is somewhat repellent. But like the kind of who’s had it the worst quality was something that was just everywhere you went.

Jack Stripling Based on identity sometimes?

Zak Penn Oh always. You know, always based on identity, politics, social constructs, I mean, anything. And the funny thing was it was kind of like this overlay on life because we were still all college students, so we still behaved like college students. But like, every once in a while, you know, you’d wander to a party and there’d be a protest and it would be about something really obscure. I would say in some ways it’s a more like violent and, you know, in the way that the people chase him around campus, stuff like that, obviously, none of that happened, But I mean, there was like a firebombing in the president’s office our senior year.

Jack Stripling Oh, that that happened while you were at …

Zak Penn While we were at Wesleyan. But in any event, yeah. So like, crazy stuff was happening while we were there. It just wasn’t – we had to make some allowances.

Jack Stripling But the movie is deeply skeptical of activism from students, right?

Zak Penn Oh, it is. Although it’s also equally skeptical at the people who are so bent out of shape about activism. And I mean, that’s something I feel today. You know, if we want to jump right into the politics of it, when I look at things today, one of the things that we are trying to say in PCU is, look, all of you people who are getting like so bent out of shape about trying to be fair to women or not being racist, these are not difficult bars to jump over to act as though this is preventing you from having fun or having a sense of humor. The protests of the protests were kind of harsher than the protests themselves at times. And conversely, I always felt like so many of these groups and so much the activism had gotten so consumed by language, that language had become the issue. And that really feels like, you know, I remember thinking, “this is bad”. Like some of these ideas are totally valid and should be listened to and they’re not going to be listened to because the language around them is so dense, off putting, designed to piss people off. I’m rambling, but.

Jack Stripling No, but when you say language, you’re talking about — there are scenes early in the film where the Jeremy Piven character is saying, don’t call this college student a girl, call her a woman. Is that the type of thing you’re referring to, that there was sort of policing around language?

Zak Penn Yeah, although that is a fairly benign one. It’s more when you need to learn the inside language in order to not offend. So, you know, your first couple of classes at Wesleyan, you know, you’d raise your — I remember I was in a class about Freud with a thesis of which seemed to be Freud was like the worst person ever, and also totally irrelevant, which prompted my question then why are we learning about him? You know, and I got a pretty, pretty severe answer, which was it was to excise him from culture. But what I would say is, even asking a question like that, I didn’t realize, oh yeah, you can’t say something supportive of Freud. Like that’s going to be interpreted as every bad thing that Freud said or did is something you believe. And that kind of surprised me because I just felt like, well, no, we’re just, we’re studying Freud. We’re reading his work. Like, I’m not going to sit here and give a disclaimer for each thing that I say. But I started to realize that, like, if you didn’t use the language that was expected of you, you were going to come off in a way that made it very difficult to communicate with people.

Jack Stripling And you could be ostracized on the campus, it sounds like.

Zak Penn Yeah. And by the way, it was usually like ostracism that anyone ought to be able to take. Like, I never felt like, oh no, they’re ruining my college career. It’s more that — one of the things that really inspired PCU was in that class, I had gotten into a discussion with somebody about, you know, and its a touchy subject, but like, the question was whether all men are responsible for rape culture in a personal way, which I thought was just was a strange argument. I didn’t understand it, to be honest, I didn’t understand. So you’re saying I’m personally responsible for all rape that men have committed. And I’m, by the way, this was an argument with a fellow student, not the professor. So I’m not saying that their argument was a good distillation of what they had learned, but it was their opinion was, yes, you are responsible. And I remember saying to the person, but you’re German and I’m Jewish. So what does that mean? Like, are you responsible for killing six million of my relatives? Which I would not say today. I’m probably going to regret saying that on this podcast for some reason. But, I felt at the time like that’s not that controversial an analogy to make. But people were kind of horrified that I brought that up, maybe for other reasons, too. And also, just like the, everybody needing to know, well, we don’t call people that here, we call them this. There was never any like, hey, like the various groups didn’t give you a quick tour like we did. That’s kind of what we were trying to do, also, by the way, to say, hey, if you’re going to college, this is some shit you should know, you know? Which I think is valid. And I think, you know, I couldn’t get my kids to watch it before they went to college, although they finally did when my daughter went to Wesleyan, my son, one of my sons, is there now.

Jack Stripling Oh wow. So. So your experience was not unfavorable to the point you didn’t want your own kids going there, it doesn’t sound like?

Zak Penn No, I loved Wesleyan. I loved it. And in fact, I think the point of PCU, I mean, I don’t know if this comes through and it’s been a long time since I watched it, since you it’s very hard to watch.

Jack Stripling This is because it’s not as accessible, not because you just can’t stomach it, right?

Zak Penn Right. No, no. It’s because it doesn’t stream. I loved Wesleyan. My wife went to Wesleyan. We’ve stayed closely involved with them.

Jack Stripling Let’s talk about student activists and how they’re portrayed in the film. There’s a memorable scene early in the movie. I did rewatch it this past week. I managed to get my hands on a library copy. And you know, I definitely remembered this from 1994, a scene where there’s a vegan protest, you know, we shouldn’t eat meat on campus. And these rabble rousers end up disrupting this protest by throwing a bunch of raw meat at the protesters. That’s one of the early sort of iconic scenes of the film. And I would say that, you know, no one with a socially conscious position in this movie is portrayed as having much legitimacy. And I wonder if you can tell me what this movie is saying about student activism, at least as you saw it then. And maybe your views have changed.

Zak Penn Well, first of all, that’s probably the thing that’s aged the worst, because when I watch it again, it just seems like they’re just being mean, you know. Which I think most of the other things in the movie, they’re not being mean; they’re just frustrated. You know, first of all, it was a different time in Hollywood. And we did want to shock a little bit. You know, you have to remember, like South Park hadn’t really come along yet. And, you know, The Simpsons took aim at some of this stuff. But, you know, it’s a, you know, a prime time sitcom, basically. So I think the meat tossing — which, by the way, I don’t know if it was based on something real — but I think that was probably something where we didn’t think about it too much. We just thought it would be fun to film. But when you look at it in retrospect, they’re probably the only people who are actually protesting about the thing that they care about. That said, by the way, I’ve never seen vegans say, get all the meat out of our buildings. You know, like I, I haven’t actually … I guess you could argue that that’s one where we purposely exaggerated it to make it seem a little crazy. Because would vegans really protest to say other people shouldn’t be allowed to eat meat in this building? I mean, they might protest about it, but I doubt that they would block off the building. You know, that just seems like not a vegan attitude, but made for some good visuals. So we did it.

Jack Stripling Yeah. And you kind of alluded to this in terms of what was happening in comedy around that time. I find it interesting that Bill Maher’s show, Politically Incorrect, I think premiered, you know, within the same year, maybe as PCU — within about 12 months of it. So this was in the water. But what is your memory of what the conversation was around political correctness in the country at that time?

Zak Penn Well, there wasn’t a lot of conversation around it. That’s kind of why we wanted to write the movie. Like, I mean, I would have my parents lecture me about some politically correct thing, and I’d say, Do you think I don’t know that? I’m, you know, like it’s something they read in some obscure magazine. And I’d be like, yeah, I go to college, so I know what the left position is on, you know, Freud, for example, you know where he stands in the can — I know what the position on the canon is for that matter. So, I think only in rarefied circles was anyone talking about this. It was really confined to academia. And I’m not trying to say like, either I told you so or wow, look at all the foresight I had. But I do remember thinking the problem with the way this argument is being framed is going to get worse.

Jack Stripling And I just want to clarify the problem we’re talking about here. When people complain about political correctness, they’re usually talking about policing around what people can say and what they can’t say. Are you saying that that sort of thing stifles conversation?

Zak Penn Well, it stifles conversation. It also allows people — I would say if you look at what’s happening now, right, where people will be complaining about something or protesting about something that’s something that’s totally legitimate. So complaint is probably not the right word, saying like, look, you shouldn’t be racist. You know, which is not something that you should disagree with, like that should be canon. You shouldn’t be racist. And yet what’s happening is the debate is being shifted over into something that allows people to answer in a way that is vaguely racist. But because you’ve made the entire discussion about race, there’s no real way to argue about it without it turning into... So, yeah, it stifles conversation. There’s no question about that. But it also gets away from: But what about the people who are the victims of racism, right? Like which seems like that’s what you should be talking about is, not did this person say something vaguely racist in response to a thing that happened that was vaguely racist? How about, this person was the victim of something vaguely racist. Let’s stop that. You know?

Jack Stripling Well, you do have a character who I think is portrayed as racist. This is the character David Spade plays that you alluded to. He’s a preppy guy, wears a jacket and tie, an early version of David Spade as the smarmy sort of character that he came to play a lot. And he’s a member of a sort of, I assume this is a riff on Skull and Bones, that’s called a group called Balls and Shaft in the movie. Nice turn of phrase there, Zak.

Zak Penn Thanks. You know, I was just aiming for the highbrow audience.

Jack Stripling And he’s one of the clear villains of the movie. And I actually jotted this down because if he has a moment where he sort of gives a thesis, it is him lamenting what’s happened to the college. And he says, “this school used to be a bastion of rich white elitism. And now? Now they let homosexuals on the football team. Whining minorities run the student government, and you can’t even coerce a woman into having sex without being brought up on charges.” It’s pretty clear the audience isn’t supposed to like this guy, but there’s a tension in the movie. I mean, on one hand, PCU seems to be saying that college students should go back to having some mindless fun like they used to. But you are also saying the good old days weren’t so good for everyone. So what… talk about how those two things might be in tension at all.

Zak Penn When you look at the history of college campuses. That is totally a valid criticism. You know, that is what it was like. And I grew up around a lot of people like that, and that is the way they were. And I think …

Jack Stripling But is there a harkening in the movie still for an era when people didn’t take themselves so seriously?

Zak Penn Well, yeah, although I think those people took themselves deadly seriously. I mean, the preppies that I grew up around, they didn’t think I was funny either, you know, like and also they were easily offended, too. I mean, that’s the thing that people forget is the opposite side, the right, let’s call it, although I find these terms really hard. This is one of the problems. It’s become hard to discuss these things without picking out exactly the right term.

Jack Stripling It sounds like you think language is really important in this conversation, Zak.

Zak Penn I know. I know. How many times am I going to hit that thesis?

Jack Stripling No, you’re leaning on your training here.

Zak Penn No, but I think that those people, you know, growing up around them, they were offended if you said, you know, if you curse, they were offended if you said something that was seemed un-Christian, you know, which as a Jew, I didn’t really give a shit about.

Jack Stripling So you’re saying they yuppies had their own sort of language codes?

Zak Penn Well, the preppies, I would say the preppies. Yuppies were just like a social fad. But preppies, the WASPS, all those people absolutely had a social code that was just as oppressive towards them and everybody else. So it’s a bit disingenuous to act like, oh no, it’s so much worse now that I can’t call that woman a girl. It’s just not that big a deal. Just don’t call her a girl if she’s not a little girl, you know? I think what we were trying to say was the false nostalgia for a time where everybody, where it was worse for everybody else is bullshit, too. But here’s the thing. We were having fun at Wesleyan while all this was happening. It wasn’t like it was a grim experience. In fact, The Pit is based on Eclectic, which was a house that had parties constantly when I was at Wesleyan, and they were super fun and they had like kind of a punk vibe to them. So there was, you know, it was a place where you felt like you didn’t have to be on your toes as much. And that was true for everyone who went there, right? So to make a movie, you’ve got to find a way to exaggerate what’s true of the campus. And I’d say that what we were feeling was, Hey, we can all have a good time here. We can still debate and we could still get angry at each other. But we can have a good time too. And in the movie, it feels, you know, we exaggerate things so it feels like people are struggling to have a good time. So when a good time was available to them, it wasn’t like the campus was actually at war, as you said. I am deeply skeptical of student activism. It’s often the most embarrassing activism, which is appropriate when the most embarrassing writing you do is when you’re a student. The most embarrassing everything you do is when you’re young. But yeah, I think we were just trying to get at what we saw as reality, which was, times were more fun right now. There was no need to turn them back. That might be a better way to describe what our attitude was. To be fair, I think it’s often true, people would be like, well, that might be what you wanted, but that’s not what the movie is really saying. And I don’t think that’s my place to invalidate that. I mean, if somebody – I’m the last person whose opinion about PCU that people should be listening to because I wrote it. So I have no objectivity at all.

Jack Stripling Well, I mean, it may be saying more than one thing, and that’s okay. But I think one of the prevailing messages is we’re not going to protest. You know, we should stop this activity and we should have a good time and everybody should come to this party. And, you know, as they put on the flier, “everybody gets laid.” I mean, it does seem to be a call to be stupid drunk college students as opposed to being people who are getting riled up about causes that perhaps they haven’t interrogated fully. Is that unfair?

Zak Penn No, that’s not unfair. That’s not unfair at all. And I think it’s an important part of college: freedom that you’re given. And I see that with my own kids. You know, I have three kids. One’s a sophomore, one’s a junior, and one is now a graduate student. She graduated from Wesleyan a year and a half ago. But, kids still know how to have fun. I mean, like, the thing is that endures. When you go back to Wesleyan, it’s not Eclectic anymore. I think it’s fair to say it might be ADP — Alpha Delta — that fills that role, which both my daughter and son were members. You know, my son is a member there. And they throw parties. I’ve been at one. You know, it’s pretty raucous and people are still having a good time. And you know what? They are a lot better about not saying shit that’s really offensive. And guess what? No one’s having a worse time because of it. Like nobody sitting there saying, well, if only we could say racial epithets, we would be having more fun at this party, that’s just not the way college works. So, you know, I’m heartened.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

[BREAK]

Jack Stripling It’s weird to say I’m wrestling with PCU 30 years later. I mean, I’m sure I caught bits and pieces of it, you know, on cable over the years. I don’t know until this week may have been the first time that I sat down and watched every scene all in a row. I think I’d seen every piece of it. And it is at its heart a comedy, but it is about something. And I’ve been trying to understand why it feels so much lighter than a debate that feels the same today that feels a lot darker. And what I mean by that is if we’re talking about “woke” campus culture, there’s just a different darkness to the conversation, to my mind, than there is about political correctness. And I wonder whether you think that’s true and why you think that might be.

Zak Penn Not only do I think what you’re saying is correct. I would argue that’s been my thesis when people talk to me about PCU, is that when you see how much uglier and darker the discussion around some of these issues has become, it’s disconcerting, because as opposed to the dialog around political correctness, which at the time we were dealing with, it was you could laugh it off because it was like a college professor saying something inflammatory or someone would have a party with an offensive flier or whatever it might be, or somebody’s appearance on campus was canceled because they were deemed too controversial. Now the dialogue seems like a metastasized version of all that, where just the terms being thrown around, the claims and counterclaims, the conspiratorial thinking, you know what I mean? All this stuff is way darker.

Jack Stripling You mean both on the left and right?

Zak Penn Yes, I do.

Jack Stripling Can you break those down for me a little bit?

Zak Penn Wow. All right. Well, I’ll get in trouble, I’m sure. I’m trying to think of who I want to get in trouble with: my kids, the public, my wife. I don’t know.

Jack Stripling I don’t feel like you have to choose, Zak. We can include all of them.

Zak Penn Okay, good. As long as they are all equally offended. No, I think that clearly let’s start with the right, that the kind of anti-woke, whatever you all, everyone, anyone who says anti-woke immediately loses some of my respect, because I do think there’s a slightly racist intentionality behind it because the term woke — I mean, I remember when people talked about woke and it was from, you know, it was from Black culture. It’s not, you know, this was about being aware of legitimate social injustice that I think people would have a really hard time denying. You know, like unless you believe slavery didn’t happen or it was voluntary or something like that, like most of the things that led into, at least in my understanding. But now when you hear people on the right talk about “woke” they’re basically using, I would say, like a racially charged term to invoke a conspiracy, like a dangerous conspiracy to take over America, which I think is utter bullshit. I mean, I think it’s, the left is in no danger of taking over America. That is a crazy notion to me.

Jack Stripling And the left in your movie, I think,they’re spoilsports. They’re lame. Their greatest sin …

Zak Penn They’re flailing. They’re flailing.

Jack Stripling Yeah. But as you say, they’re not part of a vast conspiracy to remake the culture of the country or its politics. I mean, it doesn’t seem to me. I don’t want to speak for what you thought.

Zak Penn No, they’re not doing a good job of making it about their point, right? And I would argue that that is 100 percent true today.

Jack Stripling Before we leave the right, I am curious, though, have you found yourself sort of unwittingly or not kind of identified as somebody who was, ‘Oh this is this is the guy who foresaw it all. Like he’s, you know, “Captain Woke.” You know, I mean, have you have you been like championed by right wing ideologues who think that your movie is like an harbinger of things to come?

Zak Penn You know, less than than you might want. I mean, just for the pure attention and silliness of it. But yeah, but look, sometimes, I mean, I definitely read stuff about PCU, which feels like it was written by somebody who just didn’t get it at all. Here’s the thing: There’s all these people on the right who think that what’s happening in PCU is literally the status quo, and that America is run by like extreme left socialists. You know what I mean, like if you asked even The Pit, like, what are the worst? Let’s say you took the characters in the movie and say, Who’s the worst on campus? Their description would be, Well, the ones who most get in our face are the “Womynists.” But it’s really like 11 of them. And it’s mostly about, like very specific language things, right? If you talk to people on the right now about the “woke agenda” and about, you know, what we’re talking about in PCU, they’ve categorized it as, it’s like the 1950s and the Soviet Union is trying to invade America. You know what I mean? That like, they’re imagining this like globalist conspiracy, which, by the way, always sounds vaguely antisemitic to me as well. You know, even when it’s coming from fellow Jews, it’s just like, stop saying, like when you say globalist agenda and throw George Soros into it, I just feel like, what are you really trying to say to me?

Jack Stripling So if the anti-woke crowd is darker and more sinister than the oppositional forces portrayed in PCU, what about the modern day left, particularly on college campuses?

Zak Penn Well, here’s the thing. I don’t think the left has traveled as far as the right has, because I think that there are certain issues that reliably I find the left’s point of view to be a bit you know, I feel like they’re missing the point or they’re arguing about... By the way, what I see about the left, honestly, is its ineffectiveness. You know, like often talking to people with harder left opinions and it’s like, yeah, great job, you just got Donald Trump elected. But I would say that certainly when you see college students protesting something and then being interviewed on the news and admitting they don’t even know where the countries they’re protesting about are, you know, that feels to me like, well, somebody on the left has fed them some talking points and maybe it’s coming from YouTube or TikTok, but like there’s nothing behind this. And yet, man, is this a fervent protest.

Jack Stripling Well, the allegation often coming from the right is that the person feeding the talking points is a professor on a college campus. And I wanted to ask you about this, because in watching PCU recently, I was struck by the fact that there’s — I don’t think there’s a single scene in a classroom. I don’t know if there’s a professor in the movie. Was that not on your radar as an issue at the time? Is there a reason? Or is this a budget thing? I don’t know.

Zak Penn No. You know what, not only, it was totally on my radar because the my whole experience started with that professor in that college class who was such a character. I mean, I could tell you stories about him, just how crazy some things got in that class. So professors were hugely important. My wife was in graduate school, you know, working towards her Ph.D. in comparative literature. So I was like steeped in the world of academia at that time. That, I think is just pure accident.

Jack Stripling The president of the university ends up kind of being the stand-in for the “woke” administration or the PC administration,it seems like.

Zak Penn We did have some subplots. We had a film department that was incredibly pretentious and there was some other department that was depicted where we might have gotten into the professor teaching it. I will say this, I don’t think it’s a crazy accusation for someone to make that college students are getting some of their extreme ideas from their college professors. I would say you could go back to Aristotle and Socrates and Plato. You know what I mean? Like, of course they are. And of course the people on the left are getting their talking points from their professors. The question is, what are they actually doing? They’re throwing a over the top, semi-violent protest on a college campus that lasts for a few days, or maybe for a few weeks. I’m not trying to minimize… I know plenty of kids who’ve been the victims of like antisemitism, for example, during, you know, this past season. But let’s be honest, it’s not people storming the Capitol. You know, that’s the difference. It’s a bunch of college students doing college student things and saying extreme stuff to get attention. There are real protests that go on over really, truly life or death situations that become life or death, you know.

Jack Stripling If you were making PCU 2, though, would the pro-Palestinian protesters be a ripe target for ridicule? Or do you see them in a different way?

Zak Penn Put it this way: It would be hard not to target the woman I saw on TV who said, I’m not exactly sure where Israel is or where Palestine is, but it seems like it’s bad, you know, or whatever. Like that’s, that kind of like, I don’t even know what I’m protesting about would have been… I mean, that would have been in PCU.

Jack Stripling Yeah. There’s a line about Nelson Mandela, and he’s already been freed.

Zak Penn Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re asking me, have the recent protests about everything shown a bunch of people who are saying stuff that seems pretty stupid and pretty, pretty ill-informed for something that they’re screaming about? I would say yes, that would still be the target.

Jack Stripling So, part of why I wanted to have this conversation was because I wanted to wrestle with how this movie might feel different in 2024, in the political moment we’re in now. And I have to say, it did affect my viewing experience that it stars Jeremy Piven, who has since been accused by several women of sexual harassment and sexual assault. That is reporting from Buzzfeed that Jeremy Piven strongly denies. But I’m curious whether it affects how the movie holds up, or is it interesting to you that this actor who is the hero of PCU has been accused of something like this.

Zak Penn It’s only vaguely interesting. I mean, here’s the thing. One, it’s confusing because I have a personal relationship with them, not just directly, but indirectly through his family. So, and I’m not going to speak to, nor can I speak to any of the things that people have said about him. There’s no question, I mean, look, you’re watching the movie… I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s been completely canceled. But there’s no question that, you know, because of those accusations, rightly or wrongly, it’s affected his career, right? And it affects your viewing of it. But that’s not for me to say whether that’s justified or not. Like, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those questions.

Jack Stripling You mentioned at one point that this movie is not available on streaming. It’s certainly not on any major service that I could tell. You can buy a DVD. I’m serious, you can buy a VHS tape right now of it on Amazon. And I found it at a library. What happened? Is there a story here?

Zak Penn I don’t know the story. I assume it has something to do with music rights or royalties that Disney now owns Fox, or the people who made it. So usually with stuff like this, what’s happened is they’ve decided that they either don’t want to pay the royalties. They don’t, like, part of it is how Hollywood is broken right now in terms of the way streaming works, where they don’t make any money off of streaming their library because they’re not selling advertising based on it. And they still have to pay royalties. So they just don’t air it because they want to save a few, you know, literally they want to save, you know, a thousand bucks or something by not airing it. One could argue that the big media companies, particularly those that own networks, should have some responsibility to stream their libraries because they’re getting certain favorable terms from the government in terms of, you know, if you own a network, how it’s aired. It’s a complicated subject.

Jack Stripling But you don’t have any indication that this movie has become like politically toxic or something and it needs to be buried?

Zak Penn No. No. No.

Jack Stripling It’s more we don’t want to have to pay Elvis Costello for using Pump it Up or George Clinton?

Zak Penn Or Yeah, probably or pay me and Adam Leff, you know, residuals.

Jack Stripling Do you think future generations need to see PCU?

Zak Penn Well, yeah. Here’s the thing. Even if it was to talk about why PCU is the stupidest movie you ever saw, I’d say, well, then it should be available because people should be able to see the stupidest movie that you ever saw. Right? I mean, there’s movies I’ve worked on that I would not lament, hh my God, I can’t believe you can’t see that on streaming anywhere. It has this cool action sequence. In general, I lament as all people in this business do, when you work really hard on something, you’re kind of counting on people’s having some ability to see it. But I also started in a time where it wasn’t like it was a God given right that everyone got to stream everything all the time. So it doesn’t feel like what’s owed to me. But on the other hand, if people still want to talk about it — and they clearly want to talk about PCU that, I will attest to, I get comments about it all the time and it is the 30th anniversary. And people have asked me like, why isn’t it… why aren’t you know, why aren’t you guys doing a special screening? And the answer is, I don’t know. But as a writer, it’s hard to organize. Hey, everyone, look at this great movie that I just happened to write. You know, it’s just it or whatever, this important movie. But look, I think that of many movies I’ve written, it’s particularly frustrating to me that PCU is not available. Particularly frustrating, because I think it does have something to say to the debate today. I mean I mean, I guess I have one final question, which is, did it make you laugh when you watched it this time?

Jack Stripling There were definitely moments. There were a couple of moments when I cringed. But, you know, there are things that I found a lot more offensive, frankly, in Weird Science, watching that with my kid recently, than PCU, I will say that.

Zak Penn Yeah. Because, by the way, I cringe about things in PCU that are not as funny as they should be, which is like, that’s really hard to watch, but I’m glad it made you laugh. It is always heartening to have people like at least be interested in the thing that you created is very satisfying. You know, that is why you do this.

Jack Stripling When we started knocking ideas around for podcast episodes, PCU was one of the first things that we started talking about. It has an enduring quality, and I’m actually very excited to have some of our younger staff watch it and tell me what they think too. So thanks for doing this, Zak.

Zak Penn No problem. And I’m always, as I said, I’m always available to talk about PCU.

Jack Stripling So, before we go, I did ask several of my colleagues at The Chronicle to watch PCU and share some of their thoughts about it. I wanted to hear from a broad range of folks, who went to very different colleges at very different times. Here to start off is Jasper Smith, a reporting fellow and 2024 Howard University graduate:

Jasper: I just finished PCU and honestly, I think the movie is pretty funny. As someone who was born in 2002, I definitely don’t have the greatest idea of what college was like in 1994. But I thought it was really funny that this exaggerated perception of politically correct college was kind of similar to experiences that I had in college. So I thought that was funny. The movie honestly felt a lot like scrolling down Twitter in 2020, so some of those jokes honestly repeated themselves. But I thought it was cool. It was pretty funny.

Jack Stripling Now to Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, a producer on our show, and a 2015 graduate of Louisiana State University

Fernanda: I went to a flagship public university in my home state. I went to LSU. Go Tigers. And in my mind, I thought that private liberal arts education was like this. I thought that this was what liberal arts schools were like. So, that’s what I used to always picture for a liberal arts campus is the PCU campus. I’ll add that I used to think that small, private liberal arts schools, colleges were like the institution depicted in PCU because now that I’ve been at the Chronicle for eight years, I’ve been a reporter myself, and I’ve read a lot of my colleagues’ really smart work on various institutions, I’ve dispelled myself of that notion. But it’s important to say that plenty of people, myself included, think that private liberal arts schools look kind of like the PCU experience.

Jack Stripling Emma Pettit, a senior reporter and 2016 graduate of Villanova University

Emma: Another part of the movie I really liked was when the president changes the mascot from a Native American character that was offensive to a whooping crane and says something like, you know, we’re going to keep the crane in a cage and away from its natural habitat because of the dangers of that habitat. And I think that’s just a really good metaphor for sometimes what colleges try to do with their students or sometimes what students ask them to do, which is to police student life and their social lives in ways that are perhaps an attempt to mitigate danger or mitigate harm, but really lead to this kind of secluded, sequestered existence, or at least the impulse to have a secluded and more sequestered existence. I understand in the metaphor of the whooping crane, the impulse to keep a beautiful bird in a cage. But the only thing you’re hurting is the bird in the long run.

Jack Stripling Len Gutkin, senior editor of The Chronicle Review and 2007 graduate of Bard College

Len: I think the most prescient thing about PCU is that it’s a movie about campus life that contains no college professors. So maybe unwittingly, PCU foreshadows the world described by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg over a decade ago, in a really interesting book called The Fall of the Faculty. That’s a book about, as the title suggests, the — in 2011, I think the year that he wrote the book — the increasing decline of faculty power in things like setting the curriculum, establishing policy, all of the things that come under the heading of faculty governance. In Ginsberg’s telling, student demands on the one hand and administrative expansion or bloat on the other have systematically crowded out the faculty. And this sort of banquet of cultural and recreational therapeutic offerings on campus has come to supplant the classroom in the lives of students. In that sense, we’re moving ever closer to realizing the world of PCU. College has never been less about professors, their scholarship, their teaching, their wisdom, than it is now.

Jack Stripling Brian Charles, a senior reporter and 2005 graduate of Purchase College at the State University of New York.

Brian: So this is an Animal House set in the 1990s, but almost like a parody spoof of Animal House. Right? You take this young student navigating college and running into these kind of trope characters that you would imagine in college in the 60s and 70s, but definitely were there in the 80s and 90s. I think what’s very interesting is like the idea that, you know, one, first of all, people could smoke on campus everywhere. No one could do that today. And just the kind of the irreverence for creating a politically correct culture. The sophomoric jokes do land in some sense that they are poking fun at this overreach in attempting to satisfy people’s need to be seen, identity wise. And it does ring of some of the things that we see, in the battles we see on campus now, between different groups based on identity and politics.

Jack Stripling And finally, Andy Thomason, assistant managing editor, and a 2013 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Andy: Another resonant moment for me in the movie was when, at the end, the main like cool character is making this speech to the assembled crowd at the bicentennial. And he’s like, you know it used to be us versus them, and now it’s us versus us. And like, I’m sure everybody who watched this movie from The Chronicle remembered that one of the main messages that college administrators were telling us during the protests in the spring and going back further this year, was that the thing that really worried them about the protests over Gaza is that it was student against student, not student against administrator. And so the fact that that rhetoric was so trenchant that it was the culmination of a movie made in 1994 about campus politics is pretty striking.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.