‘Survivor: Academe’

Man, these survivor shows are popping up everywhere. Did you read about the one in Malaysia with the wannabe imams? And now there’s one about us academics.  Called Survivor: Academe, it’s on The Learning Channel (2:00 a.m. Tuesdays). If you missed the first episode, I can tell you all about it. It’s a lot like Bravo’s Work of Art and Project Runway, only instead of artists or fashion designers, it has five assistant professors from the Cultural Studies Department at Westbrook College, a small, select liberal-arts college in New Jersey. (I know, I know, it’s a crazy place what with so many assistant professors in one small department.) They’re vying for the double grand prize of tenure and an office with a window.  

On the first episode, the five contestants were nervous wrecks. One guy fussed obsessively with his goatee, and one of the women kept reaching up to twiddle her Peruvian earrings. They ranged from a guy with a Ph.D. from Harvard (I didn’t catch his last name, but it came with the Roman numeral “III” suffix), to a single mother who’d worked her way through Wayne State University waitressing in a bowling alley bar at night. They’re all pretty telegenic, to my eye, and one candidate even has an adorable tiny tattoo on her arm (a portrait of Julia Kristeva as an angel). I’m not sure yet who my fave is, but I think I’m leaning toward the guy with the blonde cornrows whose research is the semiotics of Little Princess beauty pageants. (I know I’m not supposed to notice these things, but let me tell you, he’s one hot hunk.)

The six judges are a dean (the doofus kept looking at his watch), a provost wearing an American flag lapel pin and a tie clip in the shape of a yellow goldfinch, which he told everyone is the New Jersey state bird, two semi-retired octogenarian faculty members (one showing off a bracelet saying, “Yes I Can”), a buildings-and-grounds worker, and a Vice President for the North Parking Lot.

Each week the candidates are presented with a different challenge. In the first episode (the only one aired so far), the challenge was to get a five-page article accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. It was oh-so-tense watching everyone frantically type away for a full day on their laptops. Afterwards, we got to listen to the contestants whispering on their cell phones to their dissertation advisers, asking them to put in a good word with their inside contacts at various journals. I was surprised at how most of those advisers seemed so stand-offish toward their former students, but a couple of them said no problem, the article was as good as published. The guy who lost the first round was chewed out big-time by the judges for being so naive as to think that anybody would print an article arguing that the textual evidence proves Ayn Rand and I.F. Stone were lovers.

The nine remaining episodes will present the contestants with some even tougher challenges:

1. Standing up at a departmental faculty meeting and disagreeing with a tenured full professor who’s known as the departmental bully.

2. Applying for four weeks off to tend to a child whom the middle school counselor says has “thumb-sucking issues.”

3. Handling a grade protest from a sobbing female student who got a B- and wants an A so she can get into law school. (Her father is the college’s chief counsel.)

4. Finding a way to get off the Outcomes Assessment Committee.

5. Learning Blackboard 14, including the nine-step clicking and dragging procedure that permits students to combine their Facebook and Twitter pages and convert them into term papers.

6. Getting an invitation to present a paper at the MLA convention, with the caveat that if more than six people fall asleep during the presentation of the paper, the contestant will be automatically eliminated. (If the total attendance at the presentation is fewer than six, the contestant is eliminated if one person falls asleep.)

7. Serving as faculty adviser to one of the following student clubs: The Subatomic-Particle Physics Club, The We’re Off to Antarctica Club, or the Fancy Worms Cooking Club.

8. Purchasing online, and immediately wearing on campus (no exchanges permitted), a complete new faculty outfit. The women will be permitted to order only pastel pantsuits from Talbot’s and the men permitted to order only tweed jackets with suede elbow patches and light khakis from L.L. Bean.

9. Leading a group of 7th-grade students and their parents on a tour of the campus, followed by conducting a question and answer session on the importance of Cultural Studies to the off-campus community.

The last episode is going to be a real nail-biter. The final two contestants will have 72 hours to write and get published a book (no re-worked dissertations allowed), and have it garner a positive review from The Journal of  Post-Post-Cultural Studies. The Web site says that if Survivor: Academe gets the ratings TLC is hoping for in the crucial 35-72 sedentary-in-an-isolated-college-town age bracket, the network will green-light a second season. We’ll get to see five more faculty members compete, this time to see who can get favorable student evaluations while actually handing out a C.