David Lodge, Comic Prophet of the Globe-Trotting Professoriate

Did I say that I wasn’t going to use this space to respond to reviews of my new book? Maybe I did, as an idealistic first-time blogger back in late June. But toughened by six weeks’ experience in the cyber-school of hard knocks, I can’t resist revisiting the passing claim by one reviewer of The Great Brain Race that my popular account of academic globalization and its benefits missed the enormous potential for humor to be found in today’s jet-setting “sabbatical man.” My excuse for returning to the topic is not so much to defend my own honor as to draw readers’ attention to an exceptionally hilarious chronicler of the peripatetic professoriate, one whose work seems especially à propos in this season of summer travels and a rapidly approaching new academic year in which, as usual, international exchanges and conferences will figure prominently.

I speak, of course, of David Lodge, whose masterful satires of the globetrotting scholarly life inevitably come to mind when, as a journalist turned author on university globalization, I receive friendly inquiries from friends and professional colleagues of a kind that were few and far between during my many years as a member of the working press. Would I like to come to a conference on international higher education in Taiwan? Write a paper for a gathering of international relations scholars in Azerbaijan? Will I see you at the global-rankings meeting in Berlin? How about the OECD meeting in Paris this September? Toronto in January? Etcetera, etcetera.

All this has been the subject of much thoughtful commentary, including Nigel’s recent post observing that “the wheels of international higher education are oiled by international travel to conferences, workshops, and seminars.” The phenomenon was also affectionately lampooned just over 25 years ago by Lodge in his 1984 novel Small World, the second in a comic trilogy that began with Changing Places in 1975 and concluded with Nice Work in 1988. “Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory,” declares Morris Zapp, the fame-seeking American academic whom Lodge, a longtime professor of English literature at the University of Birmingham, modeled on his friend and colleague, the indefatigable literary critic Stanley Fish.

Lodge’s work is both witty and prescient. Long before the Internet became ubiquitous he understood how modern technology was revolutionizing academic life. Through the character of Zapp, Lodge zeroed in on the transformative impact of such relatively recent developments as mass jet travel, direct-dial telephones, and the Xerox machine (which, I would add, could be viewed as analogues to the new roads of medieval Europe, which permitted wandering scholars to travel to and from the first Western universities in places like Paris, Bologna, and Oxford).

Technology, Zapp tells his innocent young Irish colleague, Persse McGarrigle, has rendered obsolete the monolithic brick-and-concrete campus. “[I]nformation is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people,” declares Zapp:

Ergo, it’s no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus…. Scholars don’t have to work in the same institution to interact, nowadays: they call each other up, or they meet at international conferences. And they don’t have to grub about in library stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have Xeroxed and read it at home. Or on the plane going to the next conference…..

…. As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only universities that really matters – the global campus. A young man in a hurry can see the world by conference-hopping.

Plus ça change … . Lodge has enormous fun with a literary-allusion-filled series of improbable coincidences and romantic adventures, all experienced by a cast of characters that never seems to stop conference-hopping around the world. I liked Lodge’s observations on university globalization so much that I inserted a couple into my book manuscript as chapter epigraphs, until my editor and I reluctantly concluded that their tone didn’t quite match my own

Against this backdrop, then, I was a bit hurt when I was chastised by a less-than-fully-enthusiastic reviewer for the Economist for taking an overly sober approach to academic globalization. (You know you’re in trouble when the Economist – the Economist!– says you are too earnest.) Why had I not mined the comic riches to be found in this topic? I am, to be sure, guilty as charged; I attempted a serious work of nonfiction. But why bother doing otherwise, when Lodge brilliantly cornered the market on parodies of the global academic tribe a quarter-century ago?