Book review: The Shakespeare Requirement

Having enjoyed Dear Committee Members (see “Exploring the twisted personality that can result from tenure”), it was time to sample The Shakespeare Requirement, also by Julie Schumacher.

This is a more conventional novel about life on campus in the English department, which is being pushed into the margins by more successful departments such as Economics. Some samples…

[from an orientation for new TAs brochure] Remind them not to sleep with the undergraduates, even when undergrads are older/hotter/more desirable than the norm. No drugs or drinking with the undergrads, especially hard drugs while inside the building.

[English Department Chair] Fitger shrugged. He had no sympathy for [fellow professor] Tyne, who had been slapped with a six-week sentence for making a remark about a fellow faculty member’s vacation in “Sodomy Springs,” but he didn’t blame him for trying to avoid the training. The university’s sensitivity sessions resembled Maoist reeducation camps: one was expected to recant, to weep, to offer up several bones to be broken, and to emerge gleaming with a proselyte’s commitment to reform. There were other correctives for Tyne that Fitger would have prioritized and recommended, starting with a psychiatrist and a skilled barber.

[Economics professor] Roland strode past. He didn’t generally work with the undergraduates, whom he found to be undisciplined and unprepared for education. They could be ferocious on the one hand, ready to burn their higher-ups in effigy for the slightest misstep; and on the other hand they claimed to be terribly sensitive, ever dreaming up new ways in which they believed themselves to have been harmed. It was the era, Roland thought, of the student-as-victim: one’s social status increased according to the extent to which one imagined oneself damaged and wronged. Here was a group of the oppressed right now, playing foosball and eating junk food in a corner. They wanted trigger warnings and petting and coddling—when what they needed, Roland thought, was a kick in the ass.

[during a literature class] Fitger had snapped in response to a student’s question: Why would any writer bother to make stuff up? Because, Fitger answered, reality was bleak and often unbearable, their puny lives a meaningless trudge toward the blank vault of death.

For the past dozen years, via some obscure and unwritten agreement, Stang had taught only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while most of the other professors taught three, if not five, days per week. “What about the schedule?” “My Women in Literature class isn’t over this semester until four-fifteen,” she said. “As you probably know, I’m a single parent. I don’t want to teach after three-thirty.” It was only reasonable, Stang said, that the department adopt a family-friendly attitude and give scheduling precedence to professors with children. Fitger had started making a note on his pad of paper, but paused to look up. “Isn’t your son at least in high school?” He remembered running into Helena Stang at the grocery store over the summer, and seeing her arguing with a sullen, heavily tattooed young man among the frozen foods. “Rudy is sixteen,” she said. But a child was a child, and as a mother she had particular duties and responsibilities that made it difficult for her to be on campus, whether for class or for a meeting, after 3:00 p.m.

A big part of the story concerns a student who becomes pregnant after a one-night encounter with a member of her Bible study group. She and her fellow Christian are planning to get married. The secular university staff encourage the girl to choose the single-mom-with-child-support-cash lifestyle instead. After the faculty have persuaded the bride to leave her groom at the altar:

[Administrator] Fran nodded. She had thought about trying to talk Angela out of the wedding but decided against it. Marriages weren’t forever these days; and maybe it was preferable, legally or for insurance reasons, for Thurley to own up to what he had done.

Fran asked if she needed a lawyer—Ms. Matthias would definitely find one for her—or if she wanted help extracting money or maybe some pints of blood or a testicle from Trevor L. Thurley. … Fran limited herself to a subtle murmur of response, quelling what otherwise would have been a thorough condemnation of the sanctimonious son of a bitch who had knocked Angela up, then tried to bully her into a misogynistic excuse for a wedding. … Fran indulged in a brief agnostic prayer that Trevor would be denied access to any and all modes of transportation—cars, vans, buses, bicycles, camels, scooters—and that any contact between his family and Angela’s would consist only of generous, regular installments of cash.

[Note that Schumacher teaches at the University of Minnesota and that her own state caps child support revenue at approximately $405,000 (over 18 years; neighboring Wisconsin offers unlimited child support profits). It is unclear exactly where “Payne University” is located.]

The core action of the book concerns a guy who refuses to abandon his belief that English majors need to study Shakespeare for a full semester. Schumacher gives us a portrait of the traditional literature scholar:

For forty-two years, Dennis Cassovan had carefully sidestepped all things controversial at Payne. He had arrived on campus in 1968, an introverted, anxious assistant professor who had evaded the draft due to a spindly right leg—polio, contracted at the age of four. The senior faculty had warned him, soon after his hire, against becoming embroiled in “student-centered unrest”; overwhelmed with teaching and nearly sleepless following the birth of his son—a squalling, furious, elfin creature, all mouth and fists—Cassovan had kept his head down, spent every spare second on his research, and been awarded tenure and a contract for his first book by the end of the war. Over the years, austere neutrality had become a character trait and a default. Aloof but unfailingly civil, Cassovan had accepted as inevitable the cultural shifts in the discipline in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. He had tried to be open-minded when dealing with the department’s theorists (though he wished they could write); the creative writers (though he wished they had standards); and those who would fill their syllabi with sociological studies, television shows, discussions of sexual mores, food, politics, animals, fashion, and popular culture. Cassovan assumed that students benefitted from a breadth of electives and from scholarly perspectives beyond his own—as long as these whimsical alternatives didn’t threaten the core.

Cassovan closed his eyes for a moment, feeling ill. The very marrow of the discipline would be expunged.

And what might Payne’s young literary scholars study instead? Bracing himself, Cassovan returned to the course catalog. Upcoming classes included Aliens and Outlaws, Marxism 2.5, The American Soap and the Telenovela, and The Literature of Deviation. How was a student to make any sense of it? Shakespeare was the cornerstone, the fountainhead.

If Fitger’s intention was to sweep beneath the carpet of oblivion the heart of the discipline in which Cassovan had long labored…No: Cassovan had taught at Payne for more than four decades, and he was not at a loss for strategies and resources. The arms are fair, he thought, when the intent of bearing them is just.

More: Read The Shakespeare Requirement