I was first introduced to David Lodge’s endlessly great novels when a college girlfriend gave me her copy of Nice Work. The book was assigned to her in a senior-year English literature class at left-leaning University of Texas at Austin, and the fact that it was assigned existed as at least an anecdotal corrective of the popular notion in the 1990s – and now – that college campuses were hopelessly lost to the left-leaning professors instructing the students. Perhaps not at UT, or maybe the professors there were willing to let opposite points of view enter the minds of the students.
That is so because the novel covered the relationship between feminist University of Rummidge (England’s University of Birmingham where Lodge taught) professor Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox, managing director of a manufacturing company in the area. Penrose was charged with shadowing Wilcox as a way of enhancing relations between academia and industry.
Of much greater importance, Wilcox and the industry that he venerated were routinely defended by the academic in Lodge. While all of Lodge’s books were funny and generally unputdownable, there was a message in them. Lodge wrote the pro-business character of Wilcox to instruct the anti-business Penrose that economics is life, and that there are tradeoffs for all the feel-good things she and her fellow academics desire.
Wilcox reminds her that “someone always has to pick up the bill,” that as a tradeoff for her belief that her colleagues have a “right to a job for life” (tenure), Penrose was ensuring that mediocrities would get paid no matter their skills, all at the expense of those not tenured, including Penrose. And when Penrose lamented the cuts to university budgets without which she might have a “permanent” job, the always wise Wilcox asks her if she thinks “universities should expand indefinitely?”
On the matter of universities more broadly, Wilcox asks Penrose as they walk the majestic grounds of Rummidge why someone of her “left-wing principles” would “defend this elitist set-up” that exists to employ the well-educated and relatively well paid who are paid to teach well-heeled and well-automobiled students. “Why should my workers pay taxes to keep these middle-class youths in the style of which they’re accustomed?”
As the novel comes to a close, Wilcox writes Penrose a letter in which he makes a case that the days of the “smart state” are over with, that “The people who work in state institutions are depressed, demoralized, fatalistic.” No doubt Wilcox learned a great deal from Penrose, and loosened up, but Penrose learned so much more about the simplistic nature of progressive thought on the typical college campus. Keep in mind that Nice Work was published in 1988.
Notable about Nice Work is that it was part of a trilogy that included Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984). The latter was a parody of left-wing academics traveling the world on someone else’s dime, all in pursuit of a $100,000 per year job that required no work, and that was titled the “UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism.” As for the former in Changing Places, it’s about two university professors who literally change places: Rummidge’s Philip Swallow fills in for State University of Euphoria’s (Cal-Berkeley) Morris Zapp, while Zapp fills in for Swallow. Lodge’s description of Berkeley and the left lean of its students on the fringe would be a worthy stand-in for the Berkeley of today. Which is the point.
More than a few right-of-center commentators are earning good money today while lamenting the relentlessly left-wing atmosphere on college campuses. The source of their rising incomes is an expressed belief that “this time is different,” that the “long march” of the left to control universities is complete. Which is nonsense. And Lodge’s novels remind us why it’s nonsense. Lodge was making fun of the ridiculous lean among academics long before today’s up-in-arms critics were even born. Which speaks to a bigger point.
Not only are today’s alarmists about campus life ignoring that campuses were always the way they are now (William F. Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale in the 1950s…), they forget that it’s arguably bullish. It’s a sign that the right-leaning are doing something other than instruct college kids who are most likely not listening as is, which is the other bullish response to the right’s lament about the “long march” at universities: left-leaning academics have been teaching young people for decades, yet every time a Republican runs on a reasonably Republican platform for president, a Republican wins. As this write-up is being read, Republicans are on the verge of controlling the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and a majority of governors’ mansions. It’s an important point about how the right is overreacting to what’s happening on college campuses, but it’s also a digression.
In his obituary for Lodge, Washington Post columnist Harrison Smith cites Post columnist Michael Dirda’s review of Lodge’s excellent 1992 novel Paradise News, and his observation that Lodge ”is one of those writers that you could read all day, finding something amusing or stylish or ingenious on every page.” Absolutely.
Starting with Nice Work, I ultimately read just about every novel ever published by Lodge. He was a blast to read, and read again. Better yet, the late great David Lodge’s novels are the antidote for all the handwringing of today about how awful things are because of “what they’re teaching kids today.” In a joyous, humorous way Lodge’s novels reminded us and will hopefully remind many more that our worries aren’t new, and better yet, they shouldn’t be worries. Read Lodge to relax, then relax some more.
