"The Chair": A Woman of Color Chairs a Department Full of Doddering, Older-than-Dirt White People

 

In The Chair, Ji-Yoon (Sandra Oh) has just been appointed Chair of the English Department at absurdly elegant, Ivy League on steroids Pembroke University.  Her colleagues consist of:

1. Four doddering, older-than-dirt white people (three men and a woman) who haven't looked at a student evaluation since 1966 and don't see any reason to (they have tenure, after all).  They lecture on "the stylistics of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales"  to empty classrooms (all university classes on tv, even advanced seminars, are taught in giant lecture halls).

Uh-oh, the Dean is upset about their low enrollments and has issued Ji-Yoon an ultimatum: get them on the ball, or fire them. Or else he will close the English Department. (Wait -- every student takes a first-year writing class taught by English professors or grad students.  The English Department can't go away.)

2. A young black woman with revolutionary ideas, like "Tweet your favorite line from Moby Dick."  (Um..."Call me Ishmael"?).  She's  going up for tenure.  Uh-oh, everybody knows that you follow the party line to the letter, and save the revolutionary ideas until after you get tenure.  That's why, when you look at the publication list of gay scholars, you find no "queering the text" articles for the first five or six years.  I published on gay topics from the moment I got my Ph.D., which is why it took 13 years to find a tenure-track position.

Plus doddering, older-than-dirt, decidedly not woke white people judging a person of color?  This won't end well.

3. Middle-aged professor Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass, top photo.  Don't get excited -- that's his brother).  Bill's stereotyped dead wife causes him to act out in destructive behavior, like trying to make out with Ji-Yoon n her office, fraternizing with a female student, accidentally showing a porno instead of a powerpoint slideshow, and giving the class a Nazi salute.

That last thing has the students up in arms, demanding that he be fired, resulting in a brawl with the university police.  But hey, he has tenure.

4. There's a job opening.  (Wait -- I thought the department was facing retrenchment.)  Ji-Yoon wants to hire a rising-star person of color who is being courted by Harvard and Yale, but the doddering oldsters of course want someone whose doctoral dissertation cites only works from before 1956.

Beefcake:  None.  Not even any silver foxes among the doddering oldsters.  The students are drawn mostly from drama majors at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh; one has to look far down the cast list to find one with beefcake shots available. (Shown: Alex D. Jennings, "Muscular Guy" in one episode.)

Other Sights: Establishing shots of the ultra-elegant Pembroke University, pieced together from Washington & Jefferson College and Chatham University.  And the offices are beyond elegant.

Gay Characters: None.  No one at this college is aware that LGBT people exist.  Not even the students.  Not even in a class on Moby Dick. My college, much, much less prestigious, celebrates Pride Month.

Heterosexual romance: Ji-Yoon and Bill were dating before they married other people and had kids.  Now they're both single, so no doubt they will embark on a "will they or won't they?" Sam and Diane thing.

 My grade:  B.  In spite of the utter lack of beefcake and strangely retro erasure of LGBT people from existence, The Chair resonates so strongly with my experiences in academe that it's a lot of fun to watch