How Dark Is Academia—and Why Is It So Fascinating?

Fall was a time for new beginnings when I was a professor. Once the sunscreen and beach towels were tucked away, the small town where I lived and worked took on a different energy as thousands of students descended on campus and overnight, parking spots and restaurant reservations vanished while Walmart check-out lines expanded. Then the first home football game would officially launch the semester, providing happy alums with a reason to return to an even more crowded campus.

Murder at University Park, my debut novel, is not about that side of college life, which is probably a good thing—imagine how shocking it is to discover that academe is more adult Hunger Games than Legally Blonde. That’s what happens to my protagonist, Lacey Redd, a newly minted PhD and one of the few female faculty hired thanks to affirmative action initiatives. The book is set in 1998, a surprisingly grim time. Sure, it was the year when Titanic broke movie records and Google was launched, but it was also an era when Monica Lewinsky was globally disgraced and fears of Y2K approached panic level.

Lacey has other troubles, too. Her mostly male colleagues seem willing to subtly plot against her, creating a toxic workplace where she’s teetering on the edge of tenure. Then she accidentally discovers a possible research fraud on the part of her boss, a misogynist with the power to ruin her career.

In 1998, it was surprising when professors tampered with the results of their studies in an effort to gain fame and fortune, but a recent article in Science Direct suggests research fraud is now rampant, a claim Wikipedia supports. They cite the example of Dr. Ching-Shih Chen, a former Chair of Cancer Research and professor of medicinal chemistry at Ohio State University (OSU). He was an award-winning researcher until an anonymous email detailing his fraudulent behavior led to an investigation and then his resignation. What does it say about faculty who are that willing to risk their livelihoods by cheating the research system? Lacey will find out.

She also discovers her colleagues won’t hesitate to undermine her in subtle ways, creating the ultimate toxic workplace. There’s no friendly camaraderie in the faculty lounge and even when a coworker isn’t overbearing, the competition inherent to promotion and tenure (P&T) traps everyone in an academic pressure cooker. The expectations are daunting: publishing scientific articles that make it through the snarky review process of respected journals, being among the 5% who receive funding from NIH after an arduous application process, participating in a continuum of service activities and good but preferably great student and peer evaluations. Lacey, like most insiders, knows that everything but external funding is window-dressing because her misogynistic boss and his cronies are quick to point out she has yet to achieve that.

The classroom presents a different mental obstacle course. Like most professors, Lacey has student challenges to deal with, especially from the son of a rich university donor who has been her nemesis for four years. Fortunately, the RateMyProfessor site hadn’t been launched in 1989, sparing her another type of abuse in the form of vicious anonymous comments that prompt students to pass on courses taught by teachers who turn out to be boring, outdated, or just unpopular.

Parents get involved, too, and they have the clout of paying tuition. After the first week of classes, it’s not uncommon for an irate mother or father to go straight to the university president with complaints about required courses like ECON 101, which sounds so easy but is definitely, disappointingly not. Fortunately, Lacey’s degree is in Nutrition so she’s spared the ECON nightmare, but how far will students go to undermine faculty who must strive for stellar evaluations without inflating grades?

Students are also caught up in their own kind of Hunger Games, without the assurance of a job after graduation or the professional prestige a college diploma used to offer. In my many years of interviewing medical school applicants, mostly from college seniors, I came to believe there was an invisible checklist that must have been shared by candidates. Few deviated from transcripts top heavy with AP courses and flawless GPAs, self-funded non-profits for all manner of worthy causes, collections of honors and awards plus elite status as an athlete, none of which guaranteed admission. Who knows how far students would go to achieve that near-perfection goal? (Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu offers a darkly comic answer to that question.)

In addition to criminal colleagues and sinister students, faculty like Lacey and her contemporaries must deal with an incredible minutia of meetings and outreach for that lesser category of “Service” on P&T dossiers. The most extreme of these is committee memberships. Consider this fictional example from History Lessons by Zoe Wallenbrook:

Daphne was only a first-year professor at Harrison University—a Bambi in the eyes of her colleagues—but even she’d lost all hope that the meeting could be salvaged once her colleague began to explain in precise detail the long history of translocal mail runners on the Silk Road. Ten minutes into the diatribe, a giggling panic had bubbled up in her chest at the realization that she’d locked herself into this career for the next thirty years.

As if the oppressive emotional atmosphere Lacey faces isn’t enough, the physical layout of many universities like hers offers plenty of hidden spaces and scary places where bad things can happen. Like most scenic campuses (and the cover of my book!) there is an abundance of attractive architecture that can also hint at danger. Weathered grey stone buildings, a bell tower ringing out the hours and ivy-covered walls can be charming by day; at night when those buildings blend into the darkness and a breeze through those glossy green leaves sounds just like footsteps scurrying behind you, it’s a different story. Consider this description of a place to be avoided from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History:

The campus was small and very old, the buildings grey gothic... The library was the most beautiful building on campus, an enormous pile of dark slate and mossy granite with narrow, leaded windows and a high, steeply pitched roof where owls nested in the gargoyles.

Even worse can be those paranormal influences detailed in “The 13 Most Haunted Schools in the US” at https://the-line-up.com/haunted-schools. The university where I spent most of my career is on that list, probably because of the real murder of a young student in the massive college library, detailed in the book Murder in the Stacks by my colleague David DeKok.

It’s a gritty read, but after all, nothing is quite so dark as the things that can go wrong in the day-to-day life of a college professor…

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