Just a quick reminder before we move into the one thought of the day: we’ve officially launched HESA’s Transnational Education (TNE) Strategy Project and are now looking to finalize our founding cohort of member institutions. If your institution is exploring (or re-examining) transnational education as part of its future strategy, we’re inviting expressions of interest by February 23. You can learn more about the project here.
One of the great guilty pleasures of Wednesday nights in North America in the early/mid-1990s was watching Beverly Hills 90210 and making up new drinking games while watching (“drink when they have a life crisis with which you can’t possibly identify” was always a go-to favourite). When the show recently re-appeared on Crave, with a number of previously-excised episodes restored (there was a whole rights issue involving episodes with live music), I thought it would be worth a re-watch to see how all those episodes about the college search process, transitions to post-secondary, student politics, and overall campus culture in the mid-90s stand up.
Short answer: it’s mostly a mess, but not because it aged poorly. The aging thing is actually what makes it worth watching.
35 years after its debut, the main thing that stands out is its political topsy-turviness. The story begins when a certain Walsh family from Minneapolis moves to Beverley Hills and the family’s twin teens, Brenda (Shannen Doherty) and Brendan (North Vancouver’s Jason Priestley) have to adapt to this exotic new environment. The main character is effectively Brandon, and a very high proportion of episodes revolve around the theme of Brandon – a virtuous, hard-working boy-wonder who at one point is tipped to be the new Bill Clinton before that comparison had quite such icky connotations – bringing good old-fashioned Minnesota liberal common-sense to a given set of problems. It is incredibly jarring, in 2026, to see Minnesota coded as being to the left of California, but the show debuted only six years after it was the only state not to back Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election, so it’s actually quite historically accurate (I had forgotten that Brandon named his car “Mondale”, just as fellow Minnesotan Tom Wambsgans named his dog in Succession – coincidence or homage?).
Anyways, the first three seasons are largely free of education politics because they occur while the pair and their friends – the aggressively blond Kelly and Donna, the deeply nerdy and self-righteous Ahhhndrea (who – heads up GenXers – became a senior citizen this year), David the unlikely music prodigy, the darkly-attractive and poetry-obsessed Dylan (like Lord Byron, he is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”) and, of course Steve, literally the worst human being in the entire world – negotiate their time at West Beverley high school and various LA phenomenon like the 1992 riots. Let’s just say that dealing with race is not really 90210’s strong point, although there was a fun episode about high school districting and how West Beverley would bend rules for talented Black athletes but not for lower middle-class types like Ahhhndrea.
The one good bit of season 3 was episode 9 (“Highwire”), which is basically entirely about the college search process. Steve the Worst Human pines for a future at USC (which is so spot-on it’s actually painful) while Ahhhndrea worries if she is good enough for Yale. The Walshes, however, have a dilemma: though Mr. Walsh is an elite accountant, it’s still a one-income family (it’s never clear what Mrs. Walsh does, but paid labour seems not to be essential), and so while they are ineligible for student aid, the family can’t afford to have both the twins going to private universities. SOLOMONIC DILEMMA! HOW WILL THEY CHOOSE? Brenda decides she will make the “sacrifice” by going to live with grandparents and claim in-state tuition at UMN (the same trick Ahhhdrea used at West Beverley) but Brandon saves the day by suddenly realizing that the local public university – that is, “California University” – is actually pretty good and his chances of getting in are solid. SOLOMONIC DILEMMA SOLVED! And with no need for student aid, either.
The fun tails off until the gang gets to university in season 4, when Occidental College in Los Angeles – actually about halfway between Glendale and Pasadena and alma mater to none other than Barack Obama – becomes the stand in for “California University” (I guess UCLA wanted no part of 90210, though a few years later it did elect to be the setting for National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, so the decision presumably wasn’t based on grounds of taste). I think my favourite scene in this season occurs in episode 3, where you get to see what course registration looked like before the internet, only this being California, all the tables are outside instead of in a gymnasium. Utterly bananas, loads of memories.
Anyways, the big thing in s4 is that Brandon, after first getting elected to student council on the strength of his reputation as a rabble-rouser (he convinced his high school to go on strike after Donna is denied leave to graduate because she showed up drunk to prom night in contravention of policies that might have made sense to Orange County Republicans but AFAIK would never have occurred to anyone in Beverley Hills), is selected to sit on THE TASKFORCE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION.
It’s never really clear who is organizing this taskforce or for what purpose. In the early going, it seems like something CU is doing on its own, and I guess it kind of makes sense that a charming 1st year student might make their way on to something like that, particularly if they make a good impression on the Chancellor/President, as Brandon inevitably does. Somehow, though, over the course of the season, this taskforce mutates into a national body, charged by Bill Clinton himself to improve American Higher Education. Really, it’s best not to think too hard about this. Anyways, at the end of the season, Brandon gets to present the taskforce’s findings, personally, to The Man Himself (they use an angle which shows Brandon shaking hands with the President from behind the President’s back, with both obviated the need for special effects and created a parallel with the famous shot of Clinton and Kennedy shaking hands in 1963). Woof.
How do you follow that up? By making Brandon student body president! The story of how he became president is too absurd and convoluted to explain here; suffice to say the plot development allows our Brandon to hobnob with the Chancellor every episode, handling a series of campus crises that were very du jour in 1994 (homophobic fraternities, Black student caucus inviting an antisemitic speaker to the university, serial rapists on the prowl, welcoming southeast Asian dictators with dodgy human rights on campus) all the while fending off the attentions of the Chancellor’s daughter. As one does.
This rote cycling though various campus issues of the mid-1990s is wonderfully nostalgic. I mean, the episodes aren’t exactly what one would call well-written, any more than their lifestyle and housing choices are realistic. But it’s hard to fault the series for the breadth it chose to give to issues of campus politics: certainly, it is hard to think of another show which has gone deeper into them from the student point of view. The only really jarring thing from a 2020s perspective is truly epic amount of students sleeping with their teaching assistants or residence fellows, graduate students sleeping with teachers and the like. Stuff that would be pretty much grounds for termination now but treated as completely normal back then. It’s kind of wild. But then, not all nostalgia is pretty.
Brandon’s political career sadly ends at the end of season five when the Chancellor blindsides him with a tuition increase on the eve of his re-election vote. But that just allows him to return to his first love, student journalism while allowing One Thought readers to exit stage left, because the last five seasons are kind of a garbage dump (even the ones with two-time Academy Award winner Hillary Swank, yes, really) and possess none of the intrinsic interest and fun of seasons 3-5.
That’s all for today. The blog is off next week, but will return on March 2nd. Check your spam filters if you don’t see me then.
