What <em>The Chair </em>Gets Unexpectedly Right About the Ivory Tower

This story contains spoilers for Season 1 of Netflix’s The Chair.

The sheer number of column inches devoted to Netflix’s The Chair in the almost two weeks since its debut is impressive. This is no doubt in part because a central premise of the show is correct: Academics are a rather self-absorbed bunch, and even a series that gently mocks us perversely feeds our egos. As Saint Oscar Wilde put it, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” For American academics, The Chair is our moment.

Tuning into the premiere feels at first like watching an adaptation of a campus novel. An early scene is straight out of Richard Russo’s : The dean at the show’s fictional Pembroke University hands a list of names to the new English-department chair, Ji-Yoon Kim (played by Sandra Oh). “These folks have the highest salaries and lowest enrollments in your department,” he says. “Before I bring out the stick, maybe you could