As you might imagine, I am pretty fond of campus novels. A frequent weakness, however, is that the idealize the idea of a campus, or at least the of a particular type of campus, or at least of a particular types of program (English professors are hugely over-represented in campus novels and indeed among campus novel-ists). What you don’t often see is a campus novel that actually exhibits genuine skepticism about the enterprise itself.
That’s not the case with Randy Boyagoda’s new novel: The Lords of Serendipity, just out from Haper Collins in Canada and Mariner Books in the United States. It’s different from the regular campus novel in a couple of ways: shifting scenes between multiple universities at different levels of the prestige ladder in different countries, and above all, centering the voices of international students. But above all it’s different because it characterizes higher education as a whole as an endeavour which requires moral compromise. It’s bracing, I can tell you.
Joining me today is the novel’s author, Randy Boyagoda. In addition to being a novelist, Randy is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, a former Principal of St. Michael’s College at St. Michael’s College and a Vice-Dean at the U of T’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences — which may make him the first administrator to write a campus novel. His perch at U of T, and institutions which is paradoxically both massive and elite, and which has one of the largest international student populations of any university in the world must have been an excellent one for gathering material for the book,
I was super-excited about this interview not only because I enjoyed Lords of Serendipity, but also because while a lot of our episodes are about books, this is the first time we’ve looked at a work of fiction. I was a bit nervous but let me tell you – Randy knocks this one out of the park. And so without further ado – here’s Randy.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 5.4 | Lords of Serendipity
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Randy, you’ve written books about academics before; the first two volumes of the trilogy, Original Prin and Dante’s Indiana. What’s different about this novel?
Randy Boyagoda (RB): Alex, I think those first two novels are probably much more in keeping with what we all think of when we think of a campus novel – a novel that usually features an English professor. It’s usually a stand-in for the author. It’s almost always focused on one campus, on one situation, and then it’s about the dramas, the melodramas, the foibles of professors with each other and with their students.
Now, I, of course, will naturally make the case that I’m doing more than that with those Prin novels, but I’m doing a lot more than just focusing on one college, one professor, one situation with my new novel, Lords of Serendipity.
AU: So, I think you nailed one thing about the campus novel, which is that it is almost always an English teacher, right?
RB: Yes, that’s right.
AU: On Netflix right now, there’s at least three different shows involving English teachers. But what for you is interesting about the campus novel genre?
And I gotta ask, what’s your favorite campus novel?
RB: Well, okay. I’ll go with the first part of your question first. The campus novel speaks to me as an English professor, as a reader, because it creates the opportunity for us to feel like we’re inside something that is very special, very transformative, but also high stakes. Which is to say the inner lives of students and professors at crucial points in their lives.
It is also the case that, generally speaking, one of the goods of the campus novel is it promises you a kind of self-enclosed world. So even if you can’t go away to university, at least through your imagination, you can feel like you’re transported to this one place where all of this stuff is happening, both in terms of learning and research, but also all the human drama.
And the key, I think Alex, is that it’s self-contained. There’s something very assuring about that, I think. I mean, I’m gonna argue a little bit that campus fiction is really a fantasy. And that’s one of the fantasies that I’m taking on with my new novel, Lords of Serendipity. But as for my own favorite, I think it would be Stoner by John Williams from the early nine… I think 1962, if I’m not mistaken, which is a beautiful and melancholic account.
AU: Wow, I wouldn’t have picked that. But okay, I understand the… logic there. So, I mean, you mentioned early on that this novel is not just about one institution, right? I mean, campus novels, more often than not – not always, but more often than not, are giving a take on fairly elite institutions.
And you have one of those in there, the one you call Haven. And sometimes they take on mass institutions and the drudgery or the comic attempts to become elite. You lampoon both of them at the same time. Why?
RB: Because they’re connected to each other. I think one of the really interesting things for me about higher education these days is – and I’m speaking to Alex Usher, I’m sure you’ll have a sense of this Alex. How many people apply to Harvard in a given year do you think, for freshman year, if you had to predict?
AU: Oh uh, … I don’t know the exact number, but it would be about 40 times the number that actually get in.
RB: Yeah, yeah. It’s something like 48,000 the last time I looked, and as you say, maybe, you know, a couple of thousand, 3,000 get in. Generally speaking, the people listening to this podcast, the people who read Usher, who read Campus Fiction we care about people in the 2 to 3,000 range, if you know what I mean.
People who got in, people who almost got in. But what about the person who applies to Harvard and is ranked 47,800? Why is that person applying to Harvard? They have no chance whatsoever, and yet they apply. And of course, selective schools like Harvard love to point out their high standards, their admission rate, their selectivity.
My new novel is about a Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of going to Harvard and then does whatever it takes to get in. And her effort to get in puts her in touch with hustlers, dreamers, gatekeepers all over the world at various universities. And I think what I’m really interested in with Lords of Serendipity is exploring what strikes me as the global interconnectedness.
We think about Harvard as a stand-in for elite universities, but really of course, this represents, you know, probably much less than 1% of people who go to university, people who work at universities. And yet we all have this shared image, this shared vision of higher education that basically maps onto Oxbridge or historic New England Ivys and selective colleges.
Why do we have that? How are they connected together? So rather than, as you said, just focusing on one place or another, my novel, it’s really what we would call a systems novel. It’s about the system of higher education and the relationship between a Sri Lankan village girl and Harvard University and everyone and everything in between.
AU: Well, you talk about a system – and I know that The Wall Street Journal …their review of your book suggests it was a commentary specifically on the American system of higher education. But you’re Canadian, you teach at University of Toronto, so is this book really about American higher education or are you saying something more broadly about Western higher education?
RB: Yeah, I would go more with Western higher education, more perhaps with global higher education. It is absolutely a book also about American higher education. Two of the three major universities in the novel are based in the United States. And, you know, part of that… You know, there’s two reasons for that, I think.
One would be my own personal interest. I’m an American literature professor. I write a lot about the United States in terms of my public writing, my fiction, my scholarship. Second, as we needn’t be surprised, when you think about, you know, kind of where the action is in terms of the high stakes industrial grade nature of the higher education game – while Australia, the UK, Canada, the Anglosphere generally represents an important part of this, still proportionally speaking, it’s the United States, in terms of both elite schools and then large, and medium-sized schools that are lower ranked.
There was just – there’s just more going on there. And then the last thing I wanna say on that point, it comes from being married to an American. You know, I was really struck, Alex, when our oldest of our four daughters was in grade 10, my wife started asking me, “When are we going on a college tour? You know, shouldn’t she be thinking about this for her applications?”
And, and I looked at her very confused, and I said, “What do you mean? She’s gonna go to U of T, maybe McGill, maybe UBC.” You know, best six courses, shrug. And my wife couldn’t understand this because in the United States, people are thinking about university more or less from the time of conception when it comes to their children.
They’re saving for it, they’re planning for it, they’re strategizing for it, and all of that in terms of the storytelling opportunities for a campus novelist was way too rich to pass up, never mind these days given the federal government’s relationship to higher education and all the news that comes out of that on a daily basis.
AU: Right. Well, people do need money to go to university, right? And, in your case you talk about the difficulty of a professor being able to afford higher education for his daughter. It shows a lot of people in and around higher education, I think this was a word you used too ‘hustlers’, right?
There’s a lot of hustle and sometimes it’s a hustle to get by and sometimes it’s a hustle to be seen as a superstar. Is that the way you see higher education? Like, is it a hustle?
RB: I think it is a hustle. It’s not only a hustle – it’s not exclusively a hustle. But as a novelist, I think I am drawn to hustlers, and I really like… No one’s kind of pointed this out before the way you just did. I really like that reading that, yes, there are some straightforward hustlers in this book. The Sri Lankan village girl, for all the way you wanna think about her as a poor victim, is in fact herself a kind of hustler.
She comes into contact with a tutor via WhatsApp who presents himself as an Oxbridge-type Anglo-Indian student, when in reality he’s a basement-dwelling troll attending a mediocre Mid-Atlantic university. He’s a hustler. The TA who he pays off with money that he takes from young people in the Global South while providing them with fake tuition is also a hustler.
And then at the top of that little pyramid, as you say, is a sad sack, mediocre stats professor whose whole life is based on his daughter getting into Haven College – where everyone has a personal trainer and climate anxiety – this perfect New England liberal arts school. And this professor at Arcadia Tech, that’s the mediocre Mid-Atlantic university, he’s teaching overload, a giant stats course that the university depends on to attract international enrollments.
And there’s a lot of hustle and cheating going on in it. But the point here is that everyone is trying to game the system for sincere purposes, not just out of greed, but because they realize the possibilities if you succeed in higher education for yourself and for your family, and so they’re willing to hustle to make that happen.
You know I should say Alex, on this point, one of the inspirations for this book – which I’ve been working on for 10 years while publishing other books – was hearing an urban legend during the pandemic about a TA in a stats course at the University of Toronto who was selling grades to students. Now, as the university administrator, as a Vice Dean at the time, there was nothing for me to look into because it was just an urban legend.
But as a novelist – I started wondering, who would sell a grade in a stats course? Who would buy a grade in a stats course? Why would you buy a grade? What does that tell us about your situation? It started expanding from there, and suddenly this is much more interesting than yet another comedy about an English professor, his colleagues, and his students.
AU: So Randy, one of the things I think really distinguishes this campus novel from pretty much every other one I’ve read is that you center the voices of international students. I mean, actually, you know, some are professor books and some are student books and some are both… but international students don’t often get a look in campus fiction.
And you include three of them, right? All from Sri Lanka, but, you know, from very different backgrounds. But they’re all strivers, right? They’re all people who see Western education as something that can help them get ahead, you know, some of them from further behind than others.
Are they right? Should international students be more skeptical about Western education? Is that part of what you’re trying to say here, or no?
RB: No, I don’t think so. You know, there’s… as you say, there’s three international students in this that figure significantly in the novel. The first is this Sri Lankan village girl. The second is her tutor, who’s Indian actually, and is himself kind of – as I say – kind of passing himself off as one thing online for his clients, and then actually in reality is something else very different. The third is another Sri Lankan a migrant who ends up being raised by an ambassador, and she has a much more kind of dramatic entry into the meritocracy.
Let me step back for a minute, leaving aside the novel for a moment. I was in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago doing research for Lords of Serendipity. And while I was there, I just happened, Alex, to find an international university fair in the hotel where I was staying in Colombo. Okay? Now this stuck with me because all down the highway from the airport to Colombo are billboards promoting international student opportunities at all these different universities. I’ll say this, it used to be skin whitening creams. Now it’s international study abroad opportunities. I see a parallel there as a novelist. Anyway, I go to this fair and it’s packed, okay? It’s packed with universities from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, a few from Canada and a few from the United States.
Now I don’t have the 360-degree view of higher ed that Alex Usher has, but I’ve been in university since I was 19 – as a student, grad student, professor, university administrator – and Alex, I hadn’t heard of any of these places, okay? None of them. And yet they all had imagery that suggested Oxbridge, and they had names, you know, like Strathcliffe upon Heathcliff Side University, things that sounded rather grand – but I hadn’t heard of any of them.
So now there’s two ways to think about this, okay? Version one, this is exploitative and these people are being sold a false bill of goods, because you’re seeing this image of young people in an ivy-covered stone wall in a quadrangle, but really this is just a strip mall somewhere, whether in the UK or Canada.
So, there’s that version. But, do we really think these families are that innocent? That they have no idea about what they’re getting themselves into? That they’re really that invested in IT studies? Or do they see this as the transformative opportunity it could be for generations if one of them can get in, you know, and then what that means for their family?
I’ll just say one last thing. I’ve said this elsewhere, my father immigrated from Sri Lanka to Canada in 1967, and he calls that the second most important event of his life. The first was going to university because that was what created the conditions for movement, for dramatic movement.
So, I hear you about exploitation, it’s there, but there’s also agency.
AU: Yeah. Okay, that’s interesting. One thing that struck me, in the novel was that… okay, so universities have, in a sense, become gatekeepers to the West for people from, for instance, Sri Lanka. Get in here, and it’s… I think it’s one thing for an institution to take on that role, but I think what your book highlights is that if an institution does that, there’s moral complicity from a lot of people inside the institution. They’re drawn into it because they become gatekeepers as well. They have to give good grades… and so you get TAs and profs and administrators, all become co-opted into being gatekeepers at the individual level in ways that they might not even have thought of when they started working here.
RB: I very much think about this, and I think about it really by way of the great novelist Graham Greene, Alex.
And, you know, one of the… I think one of the most resonant features of Graham Greene’s fiction is it features people who find themselves in a fallen world, morally compromised and still trying to do the good.
And any which way they turn, the most they tend to be able to do is less bad than someone else might do in their position.
And I think to myself that often when we’re confronted with the question of gatekeeping or gate opening, right? Like let’s think about it that way as well, and the mutual dependencies that we’re talking about here – about ensuring access, but also ensuring that courses work out in terms of, specifically in this case, international students, being able to access them, being able to succeed in them.
And that matters for the individual students in no way different than for a domestic student. There’s no daylight there. But in aggregate, given the nature of funding and structure when it comes to international tuition it is impossible for someone like me, let’s say, who is a professor and also a university administrator, to not be mindful of this interplay, right?
Most professors probably aren’t thinking about the university’s bottom line relative to their grading practices. But the higher up you go, the more these things come in, and then that’s where the Graham Greene moment comes in, right? Yes, I wanna help this individual student. Yes, I want the university to be fiscally sound. And I think as a novelist, there is a very rich terrain to explore there.
AU: I’m gonna be thinking about universities as Graham Greene novels for quite a while now.
So that’s an interesting point, right? Because the way you tell the story, the problem with universities is basically it’s Mammon. Like, money is what makes it all go round. If it’s not the root of all evil, it’s the root of a lot of dilemmas, right? It’s the start of the path towards moral compromise. I mean, is that a fair assessment of your views? Would universities be morally better if they didn’t need so much cash?
RB: I don’t think so, ’cause they would still be full of human beings who are themselves fallible. I think the push for money – and this is true when it comes to let’s say, the question of international tuition in places like Canada, the UK, and Australia, and New Zealand, and then when it comes to tuition itself, of course, in the United States.
You know, you do see the deforming effects. I was just reading a couple weeks ago about an NCAA football player who made the decision to not go into the NFL because he’ll make more money in his final year at wherever he’s playing because of Name, Image, Likeness – NIL. You know? I was really struck by that.
But then, you know, the analysis suggested this is someone who likely – if you just look at sort of the for lack of a better analogy, the actuarial tables for NFL careers – this is someone who might spend three or four years, five years at most and that’s probably what success looks like.
But right now, they are literally the big man on campus and making a million dollars or something like this. That is absolutely an example of the deforming effect of money in higher education. I see that. But then, you know, the other version of it in the novel is just the interconnectedness of all of this, right?
You have a Sri Lankan toilet cleaner in Colombo cleaning toilets at a five-star hotel so that his daughter, the village girl with Harvard dreams, has money to give to her tutor because he needs that money to pay off his TA to get the guaranteed grade he needs to stay in that course, keep his study permit. The TA has made $2.5 million off international students using this scheme. The university’s not paying attention because it doesn’t really want to because it needs this course and these international enrollments. And of course, the professor doesn’t care because he’s teaching it on overload ’cause he needs that money to pay for his daughter to go to Haven College.
And so, in the little run I just gave you, absolutely you see the deforming effects of being driven by money. But it’s not money in and of itself. No one in my novel is greedy for the sake of money. Right? There’s no Smaug, to think in Tolkien terms, in this book. You know what I mean?
It’s all money in service of something else; and whatever that something else is, is absolutely connected to succeeding at university and succeeding at life, and these two things are put together very closely.
AU: Okay, so let me ask you about one of your characters, the one who you said was based on an urban legend at U of T … maybe an urban legend, hopefully an urban legend.
RB: Let’s hope it was an urban legend, yes.
AU: Right, so that’s Allard Hamburger, the TA who was taking money. I take your point that he was getting the money for a particular purpose, but I gotta say, it seemed like a fairly spiteful purpose.
So, he seemed like the most dislikable character in the novel. Have you met people like that? I mean, are there people like that in the university?
RB: Well, I think you know as well as I do that there are people in the university who can carry grudges for whole careers. Now in Allard’s case, and we’ll let our listeners figure this out by reading it, he has a personal family connection to a very famous professor who won’t acknowledge his existence. And so there’s a… frankly, a father-son thing going on there that’s motivating him. But certainly… this is often the stuff of campus fiction, the comedy of campus fiction, is just… And there’s versions of this famous quote, you know, just the stakes are so…What is it? What is it?
AU: It’s … “university politics are so vicious ’cause the stakes are so low.”
RB: Yes, right, or David Foster Wallace – I always loved his version of it. David Foster Wallace, the great American novelist, described faculty politics as great white sharks fighting in a bathtub. And, that’s a lovely image if you think about it, you know? Yeah, great white sharks fighting in a bathtub.
And so yes, he is someone… I like the way you put it. He is someone who’s acting out of spite. I mean, there’s probably a lot of hurt and frustration there, but acting out of spite and that’s why it doesn’t really work out very well for him in the book. But at the same time, what’s fascinating to me is that he can get away with it, that like, it’s not a particularly sophisticated cheating scheme. He just realizes that the university is not paying attention because of the industrial-sized nature of the enrollments in this one course. And frankly, again, as I said earlier, doesn’t want to. And so, he is absolutely motivated in the wrong ways to seek, I think, some sort of recognition or justice for a wrong that was done to him when he was very young.
AU: Last question, and it’s partly about your book and partly about campus novels generally.
Your character Helen is pretty awful. Like, I mean, in the sense of just like sort of full… potentially promising but, you know, full on betrayal. Why are there no sympathetic administrators in campus novels? Is it just because professors are always the heroes and therefore administrators have to be the villains?
RB: Well that… I think that’s one way to think about it. Now Helen – for our listeners – Helen is some kind of a Vice Dean with a giant title. She was a true believer in the university, a proper scholar, a humanist whose department was consolidated into some ridiculous euphemism like cultural expression or something like this.
She used to be in a history department that was shut down. And, you know, I think she made a decision to go into administration rather than just be an embittered rank and file faculty member. And she has a connection to the statistics professor, whose name is Jack.
Those two have a history, and they kind of come together over the whole cheating scheme and some of the other dramas involved in Jack’s teaching at Arcadia Tech. I didn’t mean for her to be that awful, I will say. I wanted her to be a little sympathetic, but she is someone who finds herself caught in a system that, her profession’s on the outside.
And this for me is maybe the only genuinely autobiographical moment, Alex, in this whole novel. It’s when… ‘Cause I – I’m a longtime university administrator myself, but it’s that sense from faculty who don’t go into administration, you know, kind of like, “How could you do this? How could you be part of something like that? How do you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning? How can you live with yourself as a part of what is the evil administration?” You know? And so, my hope is that while Helen herself may not inspire you to see otherwise when it comes to administrators, I hope the overall novel shows that everybody in higher education finds themselves in a compromised position. Everyone in higher education is still trying to do the good.
AU: Randy Boyagoda, thanks so much for being with us.
RB: My pleasure, Alex.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Noah Arney and Sam Pufek, and of course, you, our listeners and readers, for joining us today. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode or suggestions for future ones, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week when our guest will be a German blogger, Jan-Martin Wiarda. He runs the Wiarda Blog, which is the… equivalent of Higher Education Strategy Associates’: One Thought to Start Your Day, only in Germany. He’s coming to join us to talk about the political effects of the AfD’s wins in Mecklenburg and Saxony-Anhalt. Bye for now.
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