And Seek for Truth in the Garden of Academus

Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum ~And Seek for Truth in the Garden of Academus


The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy is a a novel set in a progessive, small college in the 1950's during the height of Communist fears. It begins when professor Mulcahy of the Literature Department receives his letter of dismissal from President Maynard Hoar. From this point on, Mulcahy schemes to keep his place. In the process, the reader is treated to many a stimulating dialogue between the learned members of the faculty. The message is one of tolerance and a resigned acceptance of the often contradictory nature of experience. When the book was written, during the era of Eugene McCarthy's ascendancy, this was exactly the message the public needed to hear.

The novel focuses on the political side of academia between faculty, students, and administrators and a tight-rope between condemnation and forgivess is walked. There is also the question of judgement. It is said by one of the characters in the novel that "Everybody has the right to be judged and to judge in his turn." However, is it beneath the dignity of man to punish the accused?

While I, myself, have not worked in academia, I can imagine that political struggles, although perhaps not to the extent that are written about in this novel, ring true today in America's universities and colleges. Politics, unfortunately, are a reality of the institutions. While I could not relate directly to the novel myself because I have not worked in an academic setting, I do feel that there was some accuracy in the novel's political portrayl, although I do believe that it was blown out of proportion somewhat in the creation of the novel as a satire. Literary satire's are meant to magnify certain human vices or follies through wit or irony and this means that they may be blown out of proportion in certain aspects.

The part of the novel that surprised me the most was simply how dislikeable and scheming the main character was. He was concerened only with himself and believed himself to be far superior than any of his colleages. "The anomalies of the situation afforded him a gleam of pleasure--to a man of superior intellect, the idea that he has been weak or a fool in comparison with an inferior adversary is fraught wtih moral comedy and sardonic philosophic applications" (pg 5).He was willing to lie, deceive, and use any other means necessary to keep his job and even causes his colleages to lie on his behalf. He is cunning and deceitful and perhaps even a bit mad.

The faculty in this novel, with the exception of Mulcahy, were treated as the stereotypical academic staff such as Ivy Legendre of the Theatre Department with "her deep, bellicose, lesbian voice" and "Mrs. Masterson of the Psychology Department, a spinsterish, anxious little widow with a high, thin voice"(pgs. 73-74). Furthermore, "[m]ost of the instructors were young and unmarried and did not grudge the few settled men their professional stipend, which went into bringing up children and did not into conspicuous entertaining. Among the older married teachers, there were a number of those husband-and-wife 'teams' that progressive colleges like to hire and others, for some reason, do not--for them the double income made a low salary practicable. And even such an instructor as Henry Mulchay, tortured by debt, doctor bills, coal bills, small personal loans never paid back, four children outgrowing their clothes, patches, darns, tears, the threatening letters of a collection-agency, knew himself well off here in comparison to many an instructor at state university or endowed private colleges, where a stipend of twenty-five hundred would not be considered too low" (pgs. 83-84).

The students, on the other hand, are viewed in a much different light. "Seeing them come year after year, the stiff-spined, angry only children with inhibitions about the opposite sex, being entrained here remedially by their parents, as they had been routed to the dentist for braces, the wild-haired progressive-school rejects, offspring of broken homes, the sexually adventerous youths looking to meet their opposite numbers in the women's dormitories, without the social complications of fraternities and sororitites or the restraints of grades, examinations, compulsory athletics, R.O.T.C., the single well-dressed Adonis from Sewickley with a private plane and a neurosis, the fourteen-year-old mathematical Russian Jewish boys on scholarships, with their violin cases and timorous, old-country parents, hovering humbly outside the Registrar's door as at a consular office, the cold peroxided beauties who had once done modeling for Powers and were here while waiting for a screen-test, the girls from Honolulu or Taos who could 'sit on' their hair and wore it down their backs, Godiva-style, and were named Rina or Blanca or Snow-White, the conventional Allysons and Pattys whose favorite book was Whinnie-the-Pooh--seeing them, the old timers shook their heads and marveled at how the college could continue but in the same style they marveled at the survival of the race itself" (pg 65).

The administration is viewed mostly in a negative light in this book. Henry views Maynard Hoar, the college's president, as being ignorant and stupid and easily deceived and manipulated and in fact he, and the rest of the main faculty of the novel, are decieved and manipulated by Henry right through to the end when Henry forces Hoar to resign. "It was the usual mistake of a complex intelligence in assessing a simple intelligence, of an imagination that is capable of seeing and feeling on many levels at once, as opposed to an administrative mentality that feels operationally, through acts" (pg. 5).

I must admit that this is the first academic satire that I have read and I did enjoy it, although I feel that I would have enjoyed it more and understood it more clearly had I been directly involved in academia. I would like to read another academic satire at some point in time, perhaps after engaging in the setting a bit more so that the humor, and perhaps even the sadness, of the situation will resonate more readily.