Gods and Monsters in the Ruined University: Filmic Teachers and Their Moral Pedagogies from The Faculty to Higher Learning

Gods and Monsters in the Ruined University: Filmic Teachers and Their Moral Pedagogies from The Faculty to Higher Learning

This chapter explores the classed and gendered narratives and ideologies, and their political and moral pedagogies, of selected film case studies centred on filmic teachers and university professors from the 1970s to the 2010s. The chapter also critically examines how particular popular myths about teaching and education are reproduced in these film narratives, because, as Harmes, Huijser and Danaher (2015, 1) suggest, popular stereotypes and (mis)conceptions about teaching and education can be both powerful and disempowering as, “something mythic also crosses into areas of faith and belief.” Indeed, several filmic scenes under analysis here construct the university professor as a kind of idealized, charismatic, embodied God-like figure, representing a stark contrast to the common realities of most teaching academics in the contemporary, digital, neoliberal university. As we shall see, popular images of the honoured, eccentric but privileged professor enjoying his [sic] “cushy” tenure in an elitist “ivory tower,” sheltered in beautiful historic buildings draped in ivy, are far removed from the precarious, lived experiences of the typically female academics who deliver most of the teaching online, in democratised, rationalised and restructured universities (see also Butler, 2004; Gill & Donaghue 2016, 92; Connell 2019, 48). Hence, these film scenes and narratives not only reveal classed and gendered moral judgements of “good” and “bad” teachers, but also trace the shifting socio-cultural climate of commercialism and corporatisation around universities in the 1990s and into the 2000s, which has fundamentally altered perceptions of the “good” university (see also Connell, 2019). Moreover, while popular entertainment frequently focuses on the sexual and social relationships of fantasy professors inhabiting symbolic architectures of tradition and elitism, in reality the digital, neoliberal university is increasingly a “toxic” and “de-socialised environment” (Gill & Donaghue, 2016, 97) of digital surveillance, isolation and competition rather than collegiality. As Dervin (2015, xiii) rightly points out, myths of learning and teaching are not “innocent” but rather “naturalize certain norms” and reveal unequal power relationships between people and social groups within the academy. Thus, deconstructing the myths of the academy, whether they be political or politically correct beliefs and assumptions, is vitally important to moving beyond oppressive stereotypes and power hierarchies (Dervin, 2015, xiii) toward rethinking the very idea of the university and its purpose.

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