Some – most? – of you probably watched The Chair on Netflix last term (for the uninitiated, it’s Sandra Oh playing Ji-Yoon Kim as she runs an English Department at what appears to be a bottom-of-the-top-tier liberal Arts College in the US Northeast).  Reaction to the show was justifiably mixed: it got a few important things right about academia, but it did so in an irritatingly unrepresentative setting – my kingdom for a campus drama not set at a private school in the Northeast! – and with a central plot line that wavered between irritating and implausible. 

The good stuff was admittedly very good: it was certainly an accurate portrayal of how department chairs get trained for their jobs (i.e.. not at all).  When faced with an obvious financial catastrophe in the form of old tenured professors teaching tiny classrooms, Kim’s immediate go-to is “but we can increase enrolment!”.  The inability of institutions to make themselves more racially inclusive (and indeed tenure’s role in exacerbating this problem) is made brutally clear when Kim realizes she might be about to lose her young star African-American professor Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah) to Yale.  Kim: “You are going to be the first tenured black woman in the department.” McKay: “That’s why I’m leaving”).  Also, no spoilers, but David Duchovny’s cameo is freakin’ hilarious.  

A trickier subject is the aging professoriate.  Bob Balaban plays an aging professor who Kim tries to protect from the financial axe by merging his class on “Survey of American Letters Through 1918” (enrolment: 4) with McKay’s “Sex and the Novel” (enrolment 80 or so).  He puts in his usual great performance, and the pain on his face as he watches McKay elicit enthusiastic and adoring class participation using methods he finds both unfathomable and unscholarly is quite marvellous.  Holland Taylor – maybe the real star of this show – puts in a deft performance of a character of mixed qualities: a sympathetic, put-upon, elderly professor (Joan Hambling) who has put up with an enormous amount of crap from male colleagues over the decades  and now feels discarded by the academy (“One of the reasons I went into this was that you don’t age out!”), but also quite unsympathetic in that she basically hates students (setting fire to course evaluations). 

But these performances aside, the only reason they are allowed space in the story is that judging by the staff meetings, the average age of the English Department faculty is well north of 70 (and in case all the wrinkles aren’t a subtle-enough tip-off, we’ve got one character whose main dramatic function seems to be popping various pills and asking about other professors about their colonoscopies.)  With the exception of Kim and the widowed, alcoholic love interest Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), no one appears to have been hired into a tenure track position since about 1980, which seems unnecessarily exaggerated. 

As interesting as these things might be, the show is let down by its central plot device when Dobson makes a brief Hitler salute to accompany his description of absurdism as a reaction to fascism.  This then blows up into accusations of racism, anti-Semitism, etc., and a series of events where a self-destructive Dobson digs himself ever-deeper into the mire and eventually gets himself dismissed.  The problem is that to swallow this little sequence, you have to believe that students are a lot more censorious and unable to read context than they actually are.  And despite all the waffle out their about a “snowflake” generation, frankly that just isn’t true (interestingly, in the real-life incident on which the show’s writer based the whole sequence, many students ended up backing the instructor against the administration). 

Overall, The Chair is probably a B – watch it to keep up with the zeitgeist (sort of), but don’t expect and significant insights.  For those, allow me to direct you to another Netflix show entitled Kota Factory. 

Kota is a city in Rajasthan which some years ago began to develop an economic cluster in a very unusual area: test preparation.  Although most people in the west tend to associate the phenomenon of non-stop high-stakes test preparation with Confucian cultures such as Japan, Korea and China, India is equally all-in on the phenomenon.  Of particular value is the JEE test – that is, the Joint Entrance Examination, which is the basis of admission to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) System as well as many other prestige institutions.  Dozens of competing test preparation schools established themselves here and hundreds of thousands of students migrated to study at them (China has an equivalent – Maotanchang, but it is maybe one-twentieth the size.)

Kota Factory follows a group of young men and women who have their sights set on becoming IITians and are putting their entire lives into studying math physics and chemistry to make this possible.  This is not your average North American teen show, and if you are minded to use the series as a sign of the changing world order – hardworking Indians vs decadent stupid North Americans – that’s certainly a plausible read, even if the kind of learning they are doing is not exactly of the integrated, both-halves-of-the-brain-type we tend to celebrate.

(Filmed in Hindi and dubbed in English, I recommend both listening to the English soundtrack and having subtitles on at the same time.  Partly because it is occasionally an independent source of amusement when the two translations don’t align – “idiot” and “dumbf**k” get substituted for one another a couple of times – but also partly because two independent takes on the meaning of the original can be helpful, for instance when trying to understand the occasional extended cricket metaphor.) 

On the one hand, the plots of many of these episodes are just geeky boy-meets-girl stuff, which is not in the least bit deep, but they play well as comedy because the young cast of actors are mostly good.  Other episodes are more about the process of test-taking: these schools run tests constantly, mainly to see which students will become “toppers”, and have access to the best teachers, or even move into a more prestigious cramming school, which our protagonist does in season 2.  Sometimes, the stories revolve around the study subjects themselves (s1 e3 contains an epic rant about inorganic chemistry starting at around 25mins that you should watch even if you don’t watch the rest of the show), and sometimes around the process of learning to study intensively.  Somewhat jarringly for a North American audience, the show mostly takes a pro-testing point of view, seeing them as a set of challenges that young people overcome and in so doing become mature adults.  The celebration/dance scene after the all-India test results are released in s2 e5, in which all the students feel they have accomplished something major, is pretty amazing to watch.

The portrayal of the business aspect of these cram schools, and the prestige economy they all inhabit, is the most amazing bit.  The students’ guru at one academy, Jeetu Bhaiya (Bhaiya meaning elder brother), played by Jitendra Kumar (both in the script and in real life is a charismatic young IITan) is not just an excellent physics teacher but a mentor and life coach and well.  In the second season he starts his own academy, but competing with the big establishments is difficult.   With more money, they can advertise more, offer bigger scholarships to the top students (and even give them free BMWs if they rank number one All-India after their exams), which in turn attracts more top students…and so the circle continues.  If this sounds like the prestige economy at the top tier of the US higher education system, that’s because it is.  And watching this show should make you question whether this kind of competition is necessarily “Western capitalist/neoliberal” or if there is something else, more cultural at work, too.

In any case: The Chair is fine as far as it goes but in many ways, it represents a paean to a bloated, elitist form of American higher education that is ever-less representative or influential globally.  Kota Factory on the other hand, is about the gateway to the Indian higher education system, which is now much larger than the US system and may represent the future of higher education globally (and, in truth, of our local higher education system too given how many international students we have).  From a global higher education perspective, The Chair is the past and Kota Factory is the future.   If you only watch one, make it Kota Factory.