Something Rotten in the Groves of Academe
David Martin Jones reviews The Dark Side of Sunshine by Bruce Oliver Newsome
The fictional University of Sunshine, Bayside, on America’s West coast, is the best public university in the world, ‘because it is the most enlightened university in the world’ declares its President.
British exchange lecturer, Dr Simon Ranald, soon finds himself out of his depth. Despite teaching international politics at London’s politically correct Riverside University, Simon finds the Bayside campus an altogether more challenging proposition. On the most progressive campus in America, the World and International Studies Programme (WISP) teaches peace not war. The History department, which still teaches war, ‘is so last century’. Meanwhile the Director of Asian Studies prefers Asia to the west because it has ‘no white racism’.
Identity is everything on the Bayside campus and micro aggressions are detectable everywhere. As one sympathetic student tells ‘pale, male and stale’, Simon, he will have to pretend to be ‘melatonin and estrogen challenged’. His British accent too is a worry at a university where glorifying imperialism is a sackable offence. This, however, is only the beginning of Simon’s woes. His head of department reprimands him for assigning too much course reading. Bayside students ‘expect their lecturers to tell them what not to read’ and prefer learning in ‘less prescriptive ways’, finding their inner voices by constructing ‘narratives’ . A cynical programme director explains the system:
“We validate the instructors, so that they can validate the students. Then the students validate us. So that the institution appears valid to their recruiters.”
It all sounds so familiar.
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