When it comes to film and television, the representative professor of the college experience tends to reside in the English department. More often than not, this esteemed scholar – stereotypically haughty, brilliant, tortured and seductive – plays the unenviable role of the serpent in the garden. One of the College’s English faculty members weighs in on the subject and answers: Why us?

by Tim Carens

Over the past 25 years – first as an undergraduate, then a graduate student and finally as a member of the profession – I’ve met my share of English professors. My colleagues in the English department are a fine representative sample, a cordial group of women and men with a broad range of interests and perspectives. I don’t claim to speak for them all, but it seems to me we have a pretty good job. True, we have to grade stacks of essays on the weekends, but we also get to discuss favorite works of literature with smart students, help them become more adept critics and writers and pursue our own intellectual interests in books and articles.

I don’t imagine that this sketch of our relatively tame pleasures will come as a huge surprise. But it does offer a striking contrast to Hollywood’s depiction of the typical English professor. In the 1980s and ’90s, as I became increasingly interested in becoming an English professor, I also became increasingly amused and perplexed by a growing series of movies about college life in which an English professor plays the role of a villainous libertine who seduces students and consumes heroic quantities of booze and marijuana. Think of Professor Jennings, the character played by Donald Sutherland in Animal House, who lures students to his bohemian apartment and grins devilishly, his face illuminated by the flicker of candlelight, as he teaches them to smoke pot. His sexual affair with one of them further displays his evil and seductive charm.

This sort of depiction of the English professor has gained wide popularity: The seductive English professor plays a central or peripheral role in movies such as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, A Change of Seasons, Terms of Endearment, D.O.A., Mr. Wonderful, One True Thing, Loser, Miss Congeniality, Wonder Boys, The Rules of Attraction, The Squid and the Whale and Elegy and crops up as well in television series such as Dawson’s Creek and Dead Like Me.

These movies and programs develop a melodramatic plot featuring a charismatic but villainous English professor. Female students play the role of heroines who are smart, assertive and sexually adventurous but also, in a recurring paradox, wide eyed and innocent. In D.O.A., Sydney Fuller (played by Meg Ryan) is careful to note that she, a latter-day Dorothy, hails from Kansas. In The Rules of Attraction, an admirer describes Lauren as “sweet … pure … innocent … a virgin.” Dora (played by Mina Suvari), the student in Loser, sports artfully torn fishnet stockings, but her platform Mary Janes and plaid skirts suggest a school-girl vulnerability masquerading as urban chic. The 2002 season of Dawson’s Creek follows Joey (played by Katie Holmes) to college in Boston, where she realizes, “I’m totally and completely on my own for the first time in my life.” After her professor (played by Ken Marino) kisses her, he worries, “I’ve robbed you of your innocence, haven’t I?”

English professor characters even fall into comparison with the great robber of innocence, the arch-fiend himself. As Professor Jennings begins a lecture on Paradise Lost, he bites into an apple while standing beside the only word on the blackboard: “SATAN.” His apple symbolically links the classroom, in which it represents a mark of student esteem and affection, and the Christian narrative of lost innocence, in which it represents perilous temptation. Animal House is not the only movie or program to station an English professor at this intersection. In Dawson’s Creek, a friend encourages the heroine to become romantically involved with the “gorgeous” and significantly named Professor Wilder, describing him as “forbidden fruit.” The suggestive examples go on and on.

What is going on here? Why this recurring association of the English professor with mythic themes of seductive exploitation and loss of innocence? In an essay recently published in College English, I argue that this media trend reflects an intellectual rather than a sexual conflict – that it has more to do with what goes on in the classroom than what goes on in the bedroom.

This conflict arises from the fact that, more visibly than any other discipline on campus, English requires forms of thought assumed to be free of objective standards. On the first day of ENGL 299: Introduction to English Studies, I asked my students why they chose the major. A number of them told me what I have heard on many other occasions, that they are drawn to English because of the interpretive freedom it offers. Such students have a strong point, of course, because the process of interpreting a novel or poem does not generally boil down to right or wrong answers.

But there is also a dark side to interpretive freedom, which emerges with special intensity in relation to the figure who presumes to hold authority in the literature classroom. It is only natural that college students, even those who respond favorably to interpretive freedom, distrust the authority figure who first invites them to interpret and then judges the effectiveness of their ideas. In light of this dynamic, it’s no wonder that the experience of studying literature in college generates stories of seduction and betrayal.

The experience of college, after all, conjures images of newfound freedom and the heady authority of self-determination. Consider the theme song of the uninspired sitcom Saved by the Bell: The College Years, delivered from the perspective of the entering college student:

I’ve never seen such a view before:
A new world before my eyes!
So much for me to explore;
It’s where my future lies!

The movies and television programs noted here register the painful shock of discovering that the “new world” of college is already inhabited by a suspicious figure who flatters and beguiles, who tells students that they are mature enough to taste the forbidden fruit of interpretive freedom.

And then the devil gives them a grade.

– Tim Carens is an associate professor of English. When asked who would play him in film or on television, he astutely replied, “Unfortunately (and this is sort of the point of my argument), my life is way too boring to make it to the big screen.”
Illustration by Britt Spencer