Some weeks ago, an article alerted me to a new academic novel, Lords of Serendipity, by an English prof named Randy Boyagoda. He works now in Canada but originally came from Sri Lanka, where a good deal of the novel takes place. Spoilers ahead! The main characters are:
Jack Bayern, a middle-aged widower who teaches Introduction of Statistics for Non-Majors at the mythical Arcadia Tech University, which might be MIT, but I can't tell. Jack has a daughter Katrina who is a freshman at Haven, one of the most elite schools in the Northeast. which her late mother also attended. Jack is teaching extra sections to pay Katrina's tuition. Katrina has a roommate from Sri Lanka called Cham, a young woman with quite a back story of her own.
Young Allard Hamburger, a statistics grad student, is the senior Teaching Assistant in Jack's course. His mother Patricia Hamburger conceived him out of wedlock with a professor named Martin, an astronomer, who refused to drive her to the abortion clinic where she planned to end the pregnancy. Instead she had Allard, gave up her doctoral studies, and eventually went to work at "student research services" at Haven, which is located deep in a forest. After years of helping students, Patricia is about to be replaced by a chatbot. Allard knows that his father, whom he has never met, is a professor at a leading university, and he is building a multi-million dollar nest egg by charging foreign students--and only foreign students--for altering their grade to a minimally acceptable 76.
Near the beginning of the book, Allard gets a visit from another Sri Lankan, Adi Bhopal, who paid him for a 76 several years earlier. He now wants to go to grad school and needs a better grade, and asks Allard to sign on to a complicated scheme to give him one. Allard refuses. Bhopal has a side hustle of his own: tutoring would-be foreign students at American colleges from Sri Lanka and elsewhere who dream of getting into a western university and transforming their lives. One of his tutees is a young Sri Lankan girl named Devi from a poor family there. She knows him as Johannes. Bhopal/Johannes commits suicide after Allard refuses to help him. Devi perseveres on her own, but without success.
Both Jack and his daughter fall afoul of the PC police. In the opening meeting of his course, Jack uses an incident involving a bird of prey and a squirrel to make a point about different disciplines, and makes a veiled reference to the work of J. K. Rowling, who, in case you didn't know, is persona non grata among the woke because of her transphobia. That leads to a threatening visit from a Dean, but he survives. Katrina and her roommate Chan take part in a Christmas Gaudy, a play, which activist students try to turn into a pro-Palestinian demonstration. When they try to continue the play as planned, they are invited to leave their dormitories. The real theme of the book, however, is fraud. Jack Bayern is the kind of old-school academic who cares about doing things right--the reason his career has never gone anywhere--and he is unlucky enough to uncover two cases of it.
First, the suicide of Adi Bhopal leads Jack to examine the grading history in the introductory statistics course, and he discovers the extraordinary number of foreign students who received a 76 from Allard Hamburger--something which, he knows as a good statistician, cannot be a coincidence. The administration refuses to look into the matter any further or take any action. Then, by a series of coincidences worthy of David Lodge, Jack and Professor Martin, the distinguished astronomer, find themselves working at, or with, a newly renovated university in Sri Lanka, which is being transformed by lavish funding from China. Martin claims that his team has found a way to predict where black holes will occur, and Jack and a couple of enthusiastic grad students get the task of checking his statistical methods. Jack finds that Martin must have been falsifying his data, that there is no other way that he could have gotten the results that he did. Once again he wants to blow the whistle, but he eventually loses his nerve, partly because he needs his new salary to keep his daughter at Haven.
I could not dismiss this last climax as over the top, because of another book I had read recently and reviewed here: How to Rule the World, by recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker. Working for the Stanford newspaper, Baker uncovered an equally serious fraud that had helped make the career of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whom he eventually forced to resign (with a handsome severance package) from Stanford when he revealed it. That fraud related to false data claiming to point towards a newly identified cause of Alzheimer's disease, which, if accurate, would have been worth perhaps billions of dollars. There are professors, as the history of academia shows, who become almost too big to fail.
The vast expansion of US higher education in the 1960s, I believe, outran the supply of really outstanding intellects. A critical mass of mediocrity turns dedicated and original academics into outsiders, and makes way for careerists who learn by the time they are 40 that they really don't enjoy academic work that much. Many of them become administrators, the class that now runs every major university along strict business and public relations principles. The Ivy League and its competitors depend now on a steady stream of money from Wall Street and the tech sector, and their main function within our society is to provide the young talent that keeps those sectors going. To attract the maximum number of students and convince their parents to pay enormous annual sums, they must keep them happy during their college years, which is why A- has become the default bad grade at most of them, and assignments have been cut back so much. Since everyone gets the same grades, they have become irrelevant, and bright young students spend more time networking. We need another realistic novel focusing on the top administrators and trustees of an elite school. It could also make a great movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment