Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsVery entertaining and realistic description of an unusual fictional college and contemporary college culture
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 2, 2017
I'm a retired academic (i.e. professor dinosaur) and based on reviews I enthusiastically dove into this book expecting a satire of the current politically-correct culture creating mayhem on many college campuses. I was very entertained by the description of the sequestered environment of a small college in a bucolic setting and by the academic politics and sociology that are pretty typical of many higher ed campuses both small and large. A host of other contemporary issues creep into the story, such as the focus on diversity versus merit and preference given to "legacy" or donor children in admissions or faculty hires and promotion.
However, Webster College is rather unique in at least one regard, namely its official policy of encouraging student protest as part of the educational process and has its students form special interest living groups based on their own perceived social affinities. This allows the author to create a fascinating conflict between various student special interest groups (e.g. lesbian or students of color) and the college administration, which is led by the novel's heroine Naomi Roth. She is a radical departure from the college president that she replaces in that she herself was a socially active and committed student and faculty member before her promotion to College President. Thus she constantly struggles between her conservative responsibilities to Webster in the face of the usual extreme student demands and her long activist involvement with contemporary social issues and her commitment to student mentoring and development. This leads to a number of very intense conflicts between Naomi and the various Webster "stake holders".
However, the story itself failed to entertain me nearly as much as the unusual setting for Webster, for the simple reason that in my own academic experience its resolution was also too realistic and thus unsurprising. Thus my colleagues and myself experience all too frequent examples of misrepresentation and malfeasance on the part of both students and faculty, so the specifics of those transgressions in the resolution of the Webster conflicts seemed rather mundane.
I am fond of the author's writing style, which was reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's descriptions of American subcultures and also evocative of Graham Greene's "Lucky Jim", a somewhat similar description of a provincial British University just after WWII. However, the author's novel seems nonjudgmental in its treatment of the sociology and politics of such a politically-correct setting. It would make for an interesting book club discussion of whether the author has any particular views about such things as evidenced in her narrative.
Overall, I would think that the novel would appeal mainly to academics but would probably puzzle college level students and the general reading public.
