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    Pensacola Christian College Cancels Concert Over Gay Singer, Drawing Backlash

    Pensacola Christian College called off an appearance by the King’s Singers, citing the “lifestyle” of a member.The King’s Singers, a renowned British a cappella ensemble, looked forward to its appearance last week at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, the final stop on the group’s four-city tour of the United States.Instead, the college informed the ensemble two hours before the concert was to begin on Saturday that it was being canceled because of concerns about what it called the lifestyle of a singer, who is gay. Students, parents and staff members had complained to the administration, saying that hosting the group would run counter to the college’s Baptist values.The school’s decision has drawn backlash, with artists, gay rights activists and the ensemble’s fans denouncing the college for homophobia and discrimination. The King’s Singers issued a statement on Monday expressing hope that “any conversations that follow might encourage a greater sense of love, acceptance and inclusion.”In an interview on Tuesday, Jonathan Howard, a member of the six-person group, called the cancellation “really shocking” and “hurtful.” The singers led a workshop for Pensacola students on Saturday and had started rehearsing for the concert — a crowd of more than 5,000 was expected — when they were pulled aside by college officials and informed of the cancellation, he said.Howard said it was the first time in the group’s 55-year history that an engagement had been canceled for reasons other than bad weather, war or the coronavirus pandemic. He also said the group had performed at Pensacola before.“Our mission is always the same: Can we bring people together, connect them and heal them through music?” he said. “Usually that’s received with open arms, even if our politics and personal beliefs are different.”Two members of the ensemble are gay, Howard said, though a statement by Pensacola Christian College made reference to only one. The statement provided by the school said it had canceled the concert after learning that one of the singers “openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture.” It said it had treated the artists with “dignity and respect,” and that they were paid for the performance.A section in the school’s articles of faith that refers to several verses in the New Testament says the community believes that “Scripture forbids any form of sexual immorality including adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography.”The cancellation comes amid growing concern about discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people in parts of the United States, including Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed legislation last year prohibiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that opponents have called “Don’t Say Gay.”After news of the cancellation spread on social media, several performing artists posted messages in support of the King’s Singers.“Such a misguided, closed, short-sighted decision, which you met with dignity, love, comprehension, grace, and class,” the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato wrote on Twitter. “Let the music PLAY. Love is love, and true compassion is what endures. Thank you for showing the way!”The King’s Singers will continue their tour in Canada this week, appearing in Montreal; Toronto; Ottawa; and London, Ontario. More

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    At Rennie Harris’s Hip-Hop University, Teaching the Teachers

    On a Friday morning in December the hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris was in Boulder, Colo., teaching a master class. Rather than taking a post at the front of the studio and staying there, Harris moved among the students, weaving his way through the room and dancing along with them. He offered a few critiques, but more often he paused to share stories and historical tidbits, illuminating the lineage and theory behind the movements he was teaching.But this was more than just a master class. It was one of the final sessions in a yearlong program to train and certify hip-hop and street dance teachers. A few days later, most of these students became members of the first graduating class at the newly minted Rennie Harris University.Over the course of his decades-long career, Harris, who turns 59 this week, has been a guiding force, ushering hip-hop and street dance into new spaces and championing their history and legacy. He is perhaps most widely known for bringing these styles to the concert stage with his Philadelphia-based company Rennie Harris Puremovement. (The company will present its signature work, “Rome & Jewels,” a retelling of “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Joyce Theater in New York in February.) Rennie Harris University builds on the principles that have shaped its founder’s career, bringing them into the classroom.“No one’s teaching how to teach hip-hop, everyone’s just teaching people how to do it,” said Harris, here in Boulder for his program’s winter cypher session.Stephen Speranza“What’s special, I think, about the curriculum is the pedagogy piece,” Harris said in an interview. “Because no one’s teaching how to teach hip-hop, everyone’s just teaching people how to do it. It’s the assumption that because you can do it, then you can teach it, but everybody doesn’t know how to teach it.”Hip-hop teaching, he said, often focuses largely on learning choreography. Rennie Harris University aims to broaden the scope by giving educators a working knowledge not only of hip-hop technique, but also of its origins and culture. And because hip-hop and other street styles have historically been overlooked in academic settings that teach dance, a program like this one could help place qualified instructors in institutions where these styles have not been offered or prioritized.Farrah McAdam, a member of the first graduating class, said there were additional benefits: “I think this program helps quote, legitimize hip-hop, even though it’s legit as is, right? But we know in education or academic spaces, ballet and modern are seen as a higher priority or a higher foundation of dance than hip-hop or other cultural forms.”In dance programs across the United States, classical ballet and modern are typically part of the core curriculum, while genres like tap, hip-hop and other street styles are often offered as electives — if at all. And while faculty members, dancers and choreographers have grown more vocal about the need for change — especially after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, which brought renewed attention to racial bias in the arts — it has been slow in coming.Farrah McAdam and Tyreis Hunte in B-boy KO’s Popping Combo class in Boulder.Stephen SperanzaFor D. Sabela Grimes, a multidisciplinary artist and associate professor of practice at the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance at the University of Southern California, this phenomenon is part of what he calls the “ballet industrial complex.” Ballet, “at least in the American context, has created pathways for people to have careers as performers,” he said, “and then go into higher education.” But, he added, that has not been the case for hip-hop and street dance teachers.Grimes, an original “Rome & Jewels” cast member, said he was hopeful about the change he is seeing on an institutional level — and that programs like Harris’s would help with the momentum.“I think the program will be a resource,” he said, but “what I have learned working in higher education is that we’re going to need more. Times are changing, which is beautiful, but these institutions don’t move at the same pace that hip-hop culture in a really general sense moves and popular culture also moves.”Harris’s program may be the first of its kind at this level, but similar ones are in the works. Last fall, the British dance company ZooNation rolled out a slate of courses to train hip-hop teachers. And Moncell Durden, a dance scholar, hip-hop figure and a former member of Rennie Harris Puremovement, is developing a teacher certification program in Black American dance as part of his organization, Intangible Roots. It’s slated to begin in the fall, online and with in-person sessions in Los Angeles.The seeds for Rennie Harris University were planted more than 20 years ago, when Harris started Illadelph Legends, a dance festival that gathered hip-hop and street dance pioneers to teach classes and discuss the culture and the history of the forms. Harris said that Durden, who was also involved with the festival, had proposed a partnership with Unesco to create a certification program that would explore hip-hop as a form of traditional folklore. The idea didn’t come to fruition, Harris said, but he couldn’t get it out of his head.Harris presiding at the dance battle at the cypher session in Boulder.Stephen SperanzaHe got to work mining his connections across the dance world, he said, and “called some in favors.” Rennie Harris University welcomed its first pool of applicants in early 2021.The program is structured to allow students to take technique classes locally, with a list of qualified instructors near their homes provided by the school; students also meet virtually to take a rotating slate of courses online. Sessions cover hip-hop and street dance-specific injury prevention, pedagogy, theory and history; Harris’s contribution, a series called The Day Before Hip-Hop, traces the roots of the form back to the period of American slavery. The courses are taught by renowned dance scholars including Ayo Walker, Thomas DeFrantz, Charmaine Warren and Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, and hip-hop and street dance practitioners like Buddha Stretch, Pop Master Fabel and B-boy YNOT.“Most people think that dance is just dance,” said Stephanie Sanchez, a graduate of Rennie Harris University. “And it’s not, it’s so much more than that — it’s research, development, where this move comes from. And that’s exactly what Rennie is doing with this program.”On top of their course load, students attend multiday intensives called cypher sessions, with in-person dance classes and lectures. On the roster for the winter session, held in Boulder in December, were classes like Wake & Break, Tops & Rocks, Popping Combo and Can U Freestyle. (The spring session is in Miami; tuition covers the classes but students pay separate fees for travel, room and board.) The cypher sessions, named for an important hip-hop practice in which dancers (or rappers) gather to perform and cheer one another on — usually in a circle, taking turns in the center — bring students together in a community, a vital part of the Rennie Harris University experience and of hip-hop culture more broadly.To earn their certificates, students are required to pass an extensive slate of assessments. These include teaching a mock class, taking a written test and participating in the cypher-end dance battle, which welcomes dancers from the area and offers a $3,000 grand prize.Warming up before the dance battle.Stephen SperanzaPreparing to pull out their most impressive stunts, the students at the cypher session in December may have been feeling the pressure on the evening of the battle. But a strong sense of unity was the prevailing note. As the judges paused the competition to deliberate after the first round, the competitors fell into a cypher, dancing for — and with — one another as if they’d been dancing together for years.Many Rennie Harris University graduates have taken on Harris’s sense of mission. Tyreis Hunte, a senior at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., said they hoped to bring hip-hop and street dance into the academy in a deeper way, “to educate communities about the history and the integrity of street dance and street culture.”Some are already teaching dance, like McAdam, who works at Sonoma State University in California. She said her experience at Rennie Harris University had deepened her relationship to hip-hop. That it is not only about her teaching, she said, “but also just showing up to jams and battles and spaces, or opening doors for other people to come into the teaching space that might not usually have the access.”For Harris, too, the program is about opening doors. It’s an opportunity to share his knowledge, and also to widen hip-hop and street dance’s circle of influence and help reshape priorities.At Rennie Harris University, where the second cohort has already started classes, “we’re flipping the script,” he said. “Hip-hop dance is first. House dance is first. Street dance is first — that’s the focus, right? Anything else is secondary.” More

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    National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $31.5 Million in Grants

    The third round of funding for the year will support 226 projects across the country.A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to secure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century, and research for a book on the history of red hair are among 226 beneficiaries of new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.The grants, which total $31.5 million and are the third round awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Canada, England and the Netherlands.Such projects include a documentary, to be co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about the Colfax Massacre — named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists. Funding will also go toward research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his own time and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, said in a statement that the projects, which include educational programming for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources and experiences.”In New York, 31 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $4.6 million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a new permanent exhibition exploring 400 years of Brooklyn history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and the Hospital of the Innocents, a 600-year-old children’s care institution in Florence, Italy.Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, a U.S. government initiative that provided jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression, by the Washington-based Stone Soup Productions. Another grant will benefit a history of the Cherokee Nation being co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson College in North Carolina.The grants will also benefit the Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on a 1980s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over its Cold War-era MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control. More

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    Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

    Author, critic, teacher and public intellectual, he was an unabashed flamethrower who challenged conventional thinking about classical music.Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, said.An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”Mr. Taruskin was the author of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University PressHis words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”In a contentious 2001 Times essay, Mr. Taruskin defended the Boston Symphony’s cancellation of a performance of excerpts from John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” after Sept. 11 that year, arguing that the opera romanticized terrorism and included antisemitic caricatures. Even in advocating for what some criticized as censorship, he underscored a central component of his worldview: that music was not neutral, and that the concert hall could not be separated from society.“Art is not blameless,” he wrote. “Art can inflict harm.” (His writings, too, could inflict harm; Adams retorted that the column was “an ugly personal attack, and an appeal to the worst kind of neoconservatism.”)Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”Mr. Taruskin had a no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat, once comparing a fellow scholar’s advocacy for a Renaissance philosopher to Henry Kissinger’s defense of repression at Tiananmen Square. He faced accusations of constructing simplistic straw men, and lacking empathy for his historical subjects. Following a 1991 broadside by Mr. Taruskin contending that Sergei Prokofiev had composed Stalinist propaganda, one biographer complained of his “sneering antipathy.” Mr. Taruskin’s response? “I am sorry I did not flatter Prokofiev enough to please his admirers on his birthday, but he is dead. My concern is with the living.”But his feuds were often productive: They changed the conversation in the academy and the concert hall alike. Such hefty arguments, Mr. Taruskin believed, might help rescue classical music from its increasingly marginal status in American society.“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”Richard Filler Taruskin was born on April 2, 1945, in New York City, in Queens, to Benjamin and Beatrice (Filler) Taruskin. The household of his youth was liberal, Jewish, feistily intellectual and musical: His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother was a former piano teacher. He took up the cello at age 11 and, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), voraciously consumed books on music history at the New York Public Library.At Columbia University, Mr. Taruskin studied music along with Russian, partly to reconnect with a branch of relatives in Moscow. He stayed for his Ph.D., with the music historian Paul Henry Lang as his mentor, as he researched early music and 19th-century Russian opera. He also began playing the viola da gamba in the New York freelance scene and, while subsequently teaching at Columbia, led the choral group Cappella Nova, which gave acclaimed performances of Renaissance repertoire. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1986.Mr. Taruskin conducting the choral group Cappella Nova in 1983. The group, which he led, was acclaimed for its performances of Renaissance repertoire.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIn the 1970s, musicology was still largely focused on reviving obscure motets and analyzing Central European masterworks. Mr. Taruskin participated in the “New Musicology” movement, a generation of scholars that shook up the discipline by drawing on postmodern approaches, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies.“Richard had a very keen sense of the political stakes of music history,” said the scholar Susan McClary, a pioneer of New Musicology, in an interview. “He also was an extraordinary musician. And so he was not going to sacrifice the music itself for context; these always went together for him.”While researching Russian composers for his doctorate — at a time when scholars largely dismissed them as peripheral figures — Mr. Taruskin realized how 19th-century politics had insidiously shaped the classical canon. It was no coincidence, he forcefully argued, that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were so well-regarded: Their popularity and acclaim represented the aftereffects of a long-unacknowledged, and deeply rooted, German nationalist ideology. His monographs on Russian opera and Musorgsky redefined the study of music in Eastern Europe, chipping away at longstanding myths.In 1984, Mr. Taruskin began writing for the short-lived Opus Magazine at the invitation of its editor, James R. Oestreich. After Mr. Oestreich moved to The New York Times, Mr. Taruskin contributed long-form essays to the paper’s Arts & Leisure section that poked at composers who were often treated as demigods; the section’s mailbag soon filled with irate readers. (He had no qualms about sending letters of his own, mailing curt postcards to prominent music critics to lambast their errors or logical fallacies.) His writings for The Times and The New Republic were later collected in the books “On Russian Music” and “The Danger of Music.”Mr. Taruskin attending an international conference in his honor at Princeton University in 2012. He was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, and his presentations were blockbuster events. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesTeaching a Stravinsky seminar at Columbia inspired the two-volume “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” a seminal 1996 study that upended the cosmopolitan image that the composer and his acolytes had long cultivated. Mr. Taruskin drew attention to traditional Slavic melodies that Stravinsky had embedded within “The Rite of Spring,” and how the composer himself had deliberately obscured the folk roots of his revolutionary ballet.The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces. In more than 4,000 pages, he wove intricate analyses alongside rich contextualization, revealing musical history as a fraught terrain of argumentation, politics, and power.Critiques of the “Ox” abounded — that it betrayed its author’s personal grudges, that it unfairly treated modernists like Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. But it remains a central, seemingly unsurpassable text. “This is the last time anyone’s going to tell this story,” Dr. McClary said. “And it was told in a way that was just as good as it ever possibly could have been.” (Her own criticism of the Ox is perhaps the most enduring: Mr. Taruskin’s survey almost entirely ignores Black musical traditions.)Garbed in a purple blazer, Mr. Taruskin was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, where his presentations were blockbuster events. In recent years he refrained from giving papers in favor of attending talks by his many former pupils.He married Cathy Roebuck, a computer programmer at Berkeley, in 1984 and lived in El Cerrito, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Paul Roebuck Taruskin; his daughter, Tessa Roebuck Taruskin; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Among Mr. Taruskin’s numerous awards was Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, which he received in 2017. His most recent book was the 2020 compilation “Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices.” When he died, he was working to complete a book of essays that would serve as an intellectual biography.Despite his highhanded persona, Mr. Taruskin had a soft side known to colleagues and students. For years he sparred with the music theorist Pieter van den Toorn over the meaning of Stravinsky’s music — Mr. Taruskin arguing that it could not be separated from the politics of the 20th century, Mr. van den Toorn seeing such concerns as extrinsic to the scores.Nevertheless, Mr. Taruskin dedicated one of his books to Mr. van den Toorn. The inscription: “Public adversary, private pal.” More

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    ‘Accepted’ Review: Reaching for the Stars, Seeing Them Dissolve

    After a scandal unravels at their private school in western Louisiana, four seniors pick up the pieces.In “Accepted” the director Dan Chen takes us inside the world of T.M. Landry, a Louisiana private school whose videos of African American students collecting Ivy League college acceptances once went viral. But nine months after the filmmakers’ first visit to the school, The New York Times published reports of physical abuse, falsified transcripts and “cultish” behavior on the part of its founders, Mike and Tracey Landry. Viewers of “Accepted” get a front-row seat to the life-altering impact of the school’s unraveling through the stories of four promising high school seniors: Adia, Alicia, Cathy and Issac.As we witness both the documentary’s subjects — and its director — navigate a shocking development in real time, a quietly probing film emerges that pierces the myth of American meritocracy.Chen makes the choice to plod along at the same measured pace throughout — even after the T.M Landry scandal comes to light — and forgo the cryptic scoring we’re used to hearing when the jig is up. Similarly, the cinematography by Chen and Daphne Qin Wu moves seamlessly between intimate hand-held shots and aerial views of western Louisiana landscapes that reflect the eventual loss of access to the Landrys and the school.In the end, it is the resilience of the film’s teenage subjects that lifts “Accepted” to new heights. As they sit for close-ups in front of a swirly blue backdrop, gone are the Georgetown and Stanford sweatshirts, and the hopes they once represented. But in their place sits a clear understanding of the misguided pressures placed upon individual minority students to succeed in a society that systemically disadvantages them and a surprisingly powerful tale about making peace with imperfection.AcceptedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    N.Y.U. Names New Performance Space After Nation’s First Black Theater

    The university is commemorating the African Grove Theater, part of a new building opening in 2023.A new performance space at New York University will be named “The African Grove Theater” in honor of the African Theater, a historic New York production company and venue widely considered to be the first Black theater in the United States, the university announced on Wednesday.Supported by a $1 million donation, the theater is on the fourth floor of a new multipurpose educational building at 181 Mercer Street that will open in spring 2023. It also will house the graduate acting and design programs for stage and film of the university’s Tisch School of the Arts.Where there was once merely a plaque with a brief history of the theater, there will be space to host theatrical performances, lobby displays, educational seminars and an annual symposium on the history of Black theater and culture.“This theater wasn’t ‘somewhere downtown’; it was on our campus,” said Laurence Maslon, an arts professor at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts who is also a theater historian and co-chair of a university Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “It has been part of our DNA for over 200 years.”“Felicitous is the word I keep coming back to,” he added.The original African Theater was started in 1816 by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward who started hosting music, poetry and short plays for Black New Yorkers in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. The entertainment “tea garden” became known as the African Grove, one of the few spaces where Black patrons could enjoy leisure arts.In 1821, the theater moved to Bleecker and Mercer Streets — where the new performance space will stand next spring — expanding to a 300-seat venue known for staging operas, ballets and Shakespearean classics alongside original work, initially performed by Black performers for Black audiences and, later, integrated audiences. The original venture was not entirely peaceful. The theater faced harassment from white rivals and police raids. A yellow fever epidemic further ravaged the theater, which closed two years later. The last known playbill for an African Theater production was dated June 1823.The new theater will be a “space where we celebrate another tradition in the culture of New York City that has often been disregarded and overlooked and not understood,” said Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “This was a theater that in its early time, was really creating a model for what the American theater could be. And that’s what we want the modern African Grove Theater to be.”Dinwiddie said he was excited “to see what happens culturally” for students who learn about the theater and understand that they are performing in a place that is “historic and sacred and new, at the same time.” More

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    A New Class of Campus Satire

    IN THE SMALL hours of the morning, as my viscera turned to water, I binge-watched the entire season of “The Chair,” Netflix’s 2021 campus comedy. It was the night before my first colonoscopy, a middle-age rite of passage, and I was a captive, contemplative audience of one. I must have been a sight: swigging Suprep, laughing in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of my iPhone as Sandra Oh played out scenes from my professorial life. When two of her character’s aged, tweedy white colleagues began discussing colonoscopy results (“Clean as a whistle! You could serve shrimp off my colon”), an existential dread welled up within me: “Perhaps I’m them now — not the hero but an easy satirical mark.”I am a tenured English professor, 47 years old, Black as well as white, more likely to wear a hoodie than houndstooth, Nikes rather than tasseled loafers. I led my first college class when I was 23, which means I’ve been a teacher over half my life. By a conservative estimate, I’ve spent some 3,000 hours lecturing. I’ve taught at small liberal arts colleges, Ivy League and large public universities, on the East and the West Coasts, in the South and in the Mountain West. Of all the places I know, I know the college campus best.That’s why “The Chair” startled me. Unlike most accounts of campus life, it depicts an experience that I recognized as my own. The six-episode series follows Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim, a newly minted English department chair, as she confronts plummeting enrollments, an aging faculty — and her attempts to reconcile her own progressive values with the realpolitik of administrative leadership, all while attending to life as a single mother of a young adopted child.I’ve grown accustomed to campus fictions that center students, a sensible creative choice. After all, most of us were students once. And students’ lives are intrinsically interesting. College-age 18-to-20-somethings are navigating their identities, tacking to extremes in pursuit of a centered self. College has long figured as a second womb, a space of quasi-independence in which young people, finally free of their childhood homes, can come of age in mind and body with the more measured paternal intervention of the campus: professors to cultivate the mind; staff to provide hot meals; administrators to offer a baseline of safety, a buffer from law and consequence. Onscreen, most college-based films and television series favor students nearly to the exclusion of faculty, staff and administration, like 2021’s “The Sex Lives of College Girls” on HBO Max and “Dear White People” (both the 2014 Justin Simien-directed film and the 2017-21 Netflix series). If you tour fictional colleges — Faber from “Animal House” (1978), Hillman from “A Different World” (1987-93), Port Chester University from “PCU” (1994), Cal U from “Grown-ish” (2018-present) — you’ll discover that faculty are either overlooked or introduced as comic foils trying to catch a contact high off their students’ youth and cool. Pembroke, the Ivy-inspired setting of “The Chair,” is the first place I saw professors both satirized and humanized, presented as fully conceived members of an imagined community. That matters because the real campus is far more complicated — and compelling — than most projections ever show.Clockwise from top left: Marisa Tomei, Dawnn Lewis, Ted Ross, Vernee Watson-Johnson, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney and Lisa Bonet in Season One of “A Different World” (1987-88).© Carsey-Werner Co. Courtesy of Everett Collection“The Chair” is part of a renaissance of college comedy, dramedy and satire — onscreen and on the page — offering new understandings of a swiftly changing campus. In the last three years alone, I’ve read a syllabus’s worth of recent campus novels, which variously employ elements of satire in telling their stories: a voice-driven coming-of-age tale in Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot” (2017); a transgender academic detective novel in Jordy Rosenberg’s “Confessions of the Fox” (2018); a high-literary surrealist dreamscape in Mona Awad’s “Bunny” (2019); a fictionalized multigenerational history of an Israeli prime minister in Joshua Cohen’s “The Netanyahus” (2021). These works are both rooted in conventions of campus satire stretching back nearly a century and responsive to life on campus today.With more people spending more time in college and graduate school, seeking refuge from economic uncertainty; with the proliferation of M.F.A. programs stocked with fiction writers fulfilling the age-old maxim to write what they know; with contentious campus debates over racial justice, gender and reproductive rights, mental health, disability rights, police abolition, academic freedom and so many other issues, it’s no wonder that fictions about college provide such fertile imaginative territory. Satire is uniquely suited to respond to challenging times because it provides a comedic safety valve that admits the existence of tragedy while also holding on to hope that the world can change for the better. One senses all of this in “The Chair.” Pressing in on its expression of the inherited tropes of campus life on film — the strains of Vivaldi opening the first episode, the stately buildings seen from on high, the students cutting paths across the quad — is an insurgent awareness of a modern university in crisis.Another of Winant’s collages, this one made using stills from films and television shows, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls” (2021), “Legally Blonde” (2001), “Old School” (2003) and “The Nutty Professor” (1963), spliced together with vintage images from historically Black colleges and universities.Carmen Winant, courtesy of the artist. Source photos (clockwise from top left): courtesy of HBO Max (2), Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, MPTV, Paul Thompson/FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images, Richard Foreman, Jr./Dreamworks Distribution/Photofest, Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images, courtesy of HBO Max, Buyenlarge/Getty Images, courtesy of HBO Max (2), Paramount/Photofest, courtesy of HBO Max, the Abbott Sengstacke Family Papers/Robert A. Sengstacke/Getty Images, courtesy of HBO Max (2)THE ROOTS OF satire stretch back to antiquity. Narrowly defined, satire is a genre of literature (traditionally a comic poem written in hexameter) that employs techniques such as irony, parody and burlesque to illuminate human folly and vice. However, ask an English professor and they’ll tell you — I’ll tell you — that satire most often functions less as a narrow genre than as a rhetorical mode, a disposition toward life. At a minimum, satire is purpose-driven. One doesn’t accidentally write a satirical takedown of the English occupation of Ireland by suggesting that the impoverished Irish might sell their children to the English as food, as Jonathan Swift did in “A Modest Proposal” (1729).The campus satire emerged in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century with Max Beerbohm’s “Zuleika Dobson” (1911), a whimsical tale that follows a governess who moonlights as a prestidigitator to Oxford University, where she turns class and convention topsy-turvy. (One could even trace the satirical gaze on academic life back to Swift’s portrayal of the grand academy of Lagado in “Gulliver’s Travels” [1726].) It then made its way across the Atlantic during the interwar period: One early example is the Marx Brothers’ film “Horse Feathers” (1932), which introduces Groucho as the college president Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff. In a memorable scene, he barges into a lecture on anatomy and exposes the professor’s teachings as claptrap. The campus, however, is little more than a convenience, as good a place as the circus or the opera for the brothers to clown.Groucho Marx (center) and Zeppo Marx in “Horse Feathers” (1932).Everett CollectionMost modern conventions of campus satire found form in post-World War II literature, with Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe” (1952), Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” (1954) and Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures From an Institution” (1954). McCarthy is particularly ruthless when it comes to describing academics, among whom she counts “a certain number of seasoned nonconformists and dissenters, sexual deviants, feather-bedders, alcoholics, impostors.” (Jarrell’s novel, by contrast, filters through a nameless protagonist who offers equal-opportunity comic upbraiding, taking specific aim at a churlish novelist named Gertrude Johnson, allegedly based on McCarthy.)Recent Issues on America’s College CampusesSlavery Ties: Harvard released a 134-page report on the universty’s four centuries of ties to slavery, in an effort to begin redressing the wrongs of the past.Admissions: The Supreme Court will decide whether two race-conscious admissions programs are lawful, raising serious doubts about the future of affirmative action.Hiring: Outrage ensued after U.C.L.A. posted an adjunct position that offered no pay. Turns out, the school is not unique.Tuition: After a plan for free community college failed to gain traction in Congress, New Mexico is taking the lead in the tuition-free movement.The rise of the campus novel coincided with major demographic shifts in higher education. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, dramatically expanded college attendance. Once the bastion of the privileged few, the campus soon came to be seen as a way station along the road to the middle class. In 1930, only 12 percent of 18-to-21-year-olds attended college; by 1950, that number was nearly 30 percent. (Statistics from 2020 place enrollment at 62.7 percent.) More women also arrived on campus; women now make up nearly 60 percent of students. Racial diversity has similarly expanded; the National Center for Education Statistics reports that almost half of college students now self-identify as a race other than white.Despite this evolution, the campus has remained surprisingly unchanged in the collective imagination. Part of that fixity comes from nostalgia. For many, the college years are the most fun and formative time of life. It’s an age of self-fashioning, when people claim possession of their identities — racialized and gendered, sexual and social. As such, it’s an exciting place at any age, whether you’re in the process of your own becoming or submerged in the ambience of other people’s awakenings.Reese Witherspoon (far right) in “Legally Blonde” (2001).Everett CollectionThe campus is also a workplace, increasingly reliant on underpaid part-time instructors rather than tenured faculty. College presidents warn of an impending enrollment crisis, born of the Great Recession’s baby bust. Higher education’s financial model, reliant on escalating tuitions, appears broken, leaving a generation of students — low-income and Black students most especially — saddled with crushing debt.Yet something about the campus novel, film and television series bends not toward tragic depictions of dire reality but toward satire. Maybe it has to do with ecology. The campus is a nexus of social relations: courtship, custom, identity formation, instruction, service, competition and hierarchy. It’s governed by a seasonal calendar, with certain designated periods of intense activity and others of rest. It’s conceived as a place apart, an ivory tower or, to borrow Don DeLillo’s name for his fictive school from his satirical novel “White Noise” (1985), a College-on-the-Hill. It cultivates its own set of rules and rituals, many of which are inscrutable to outsiders and therefore vulnerable to critique as elitist and out of touch. At a time when values and norms are in flux in almost every sector of society, the campus, by outward appearance, promises stasis. Everyone is enlisted in living — or at least supporting — the life of the mind, or maybe they’re just there to have a good time. Perhaps that is why the campus lends itself so readily to satire; it’s one of the few places contained yet familiar enough in which to stage a comedy of manners.Melissa McCarthy in “Life of the Party” (2018).Hopper Stone © Warner Bros., courtesy of Everett CollectionJohn Belushi in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978).© Universal Pictures, courtesy of Everett CollectionYOU ARE MORE familiar than you might think with the comedy of manners, even if you haven’t spent much time reading British Restoration theater. William Congreve’s “The Way of the World” (1700), one of the best examples of the form, relies on an audience initiated into the rituals of courtly life, the petty squabbles and vanities of the privileged class. Time-travel three centuries to 2001’s “Legally Blonde” and you’ll find many of the same comic mechanisms at work. Reese Witherspoon’s sorority girl and recent college grad, Elle Woods, is out of place and maybe out of her depth in the staid confines of Harvard Law School but, over the course of the film, she bends and snaps the square-toed culture to her fashionable ways, all while proving she can hang with the brightest minds on campus.Satire is generally built on types like these, stock characters that an audience can recognize and learn to anticipate, comprising a shorthand vocabulary that creators may enlist in forging their fictions. Think of the absent-minded professor, so brilliant as to have a hard time with everyday things. That comic idea coalesced in the 1961 film of the same name, starring Fred MacMurray, and in Jerry Lewis’s “The Nutty Professor” two years later. It lives on today in characters as far removed from one another as Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth in the long-running Fox animated series “Futurama” (1999-present) and Professor Mito Fauna, D.V.M., Ph.D., Ed.D., etc., from Adam Gidwitz’s delightful children’s book series “The Unicorn Rescue Society,” which began in 2018. Or consider the rare but relatable species of the binge-drinking, too-old-for-college party animal, as exhibited by John Belushi’s seventh-year frat bro, John “Bluto” Blutarsky, from “Animal House”; Will Ferrell’s Frank “The Tank” Ricard from “Old School” (2003); and Melissa McCarthy’s Deanna “Dee Rock” Miles from “Life of the Party” (2018). Types like these invite a smile, maybe a shake of the head, rather than a finger pointed in judgment.Some satirical types are fashioned to fight. When Ishmael Reed wrote his campus satire “Japanese by Spring” (1993), he was fully enlisted in the 1980s and ’90s culture wars — a time, not unlike our own, when conservatives and progressives waged battle over affirmative action and gay rights, family values and censorship of the arts. Reed’s novel is a satire in the old-school sense of the word. He makes no pretense at realism. Instead, he juxtaposes wild and obvious exaggerations of character (his protagonist is an opportunistic and ideologically mercenary Black professor with the downright silly name of Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt) with even greater absurdities of historical fact (the novel’s fictional Oakland campus, Jack London College, is named for the beloved author of “The Call of the Wild” [1903], who was in fact also an avowed white supremacist who advocated genocide of the “lesser breeds”).Courtesy of Penguin BooksReed, now 84, credits his use of types to his childhood love of comic books and folk tales. “Well, types exist in Black folklore,” he explains. “That’s the basis for a lot of my work in terms of what I call comic aggression, which is used by people who are persecuted.” He points to stand-up performers from Redd Foxx to Richard Pryor, Jack Benny to Lenny Bruce. Comic aggression embodies satire’s seeming paradox: that so much raucous humor can be born out of anger and pain.The mid-20th-century literary theorist Northrop Frye once wrote that satire must have “an object of attack.” It casts an othering gaze, one that essentializes and passes summary judgment. Satire is generally incurious of motive, unconcerned about the conditions that produced whatever distortion of personality, misdeed or excess it targets for opprobrium. Simien’s “Dear White People” makes clear early on that its object of attack is white supremacy. It renders the campus in Black and white rather than as the multicultural community it is today.As such, the film does not invite its viewers to ask why the white kids who run the humor club Pastiche on the fictional Ivy League campus of Winchester University choose to host a party inviting their fellow white students to “unleash their inner Negro,” donning blackface and hurling racist slurs. In a meeting to plan the party, one of the club’s leaders invokes Pastiche’s motto, “Sharpen thy sword.” “It’s a reminder that satire is the weapon of reason,” he explains. Then he ominously asks, “So who on campus is being unreasonable?” Their answer is Black students, particularly a biracial woman named Sam, played by Tessa Thompson, whose radio show, “Dear White People,” insists that white students confront their anti-Black bias. Pastiche’s satire itself becomes the film’s satirical target, upending the insidious claim that those who decry racism are somehow the racists. To underscore the point, the film’s closing credits intersperse real images of blackface parties from campuses across the United States.Courtesy of Penguin BooksCourtesy of Simon & Schuster“ ‘DEAR WHITE PEOPLE’ really shifted how we think about the campus,” the novelist Elaine Hsieh Chou says, reflecting on the racist party scene. Chou’s debut novel, “Disorientation” (2022), centers on a literary hoax: a white male poet assumes a Chinese name and identity, going so far as to masquerade using yellowface and eye tape. It is a grotesque conceit but, as with Reed’s novel and Simien’s film, grounded in fact. Chou, 35, was inspired — and enraged — by the strange case of Yi-Fen Chou, the nom de plume assumed by a middle-aged white poet from Indiana named Michael Derrick Hudson, who hoped that a Chinese name would improve his chances of finding a publisher for his poems. It worked, and one of his poems was published in Prairie Schooner and later reprinted in the 2015 edition of “The Best American Poetry.”“The word ‘satire’ makes us think something is so outrageous and absurd that it could never happen,” Chou says. “But nearly everything in the novel happened.” Chou brings receipts, in the form of endnotes, that include, for instance, a 2014 Seattle Times article detailing a production of the comic opera “The Mikado” starring 40 white actors in yellowface. “I wanted to say [to the reader], ‘Don’t just put down this book and say, “Well, that was a wild ride!,” and never think about any of those implications again.’”The implications of “Disorientation” are inescapable. The novel follows Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese American graduate student, as she struggles to complete her dissertation. Chou, a former doctoral student herself (she studied literary modernism), knows Ingrid’s world well. She peoples her novel with characters readily available for satire: the arrogant white male professor of East Asian studies, the self-serious campus radical, the model minority conservative. Rather than reveling, as Reed does, in satirical types, however, Chou burrows under them to expose the human complexity that lies beneath. This humanizing approach, common in today’s satirical fictions, blunts the satire as it sharpens the psychological complexity of the characters.“Sometimes with satire, you can make a point with a very broad brush. Ishmael Reed is in that category; Percival Everett — other writers who are outlandish and having fun with being outlandish,” explains Julie Schumacher, 63, the author of two comic novels set on campus, including “The Shakespeare Requirement” (2018). Schumacher’s first campus novel, “Dear Committee Members” (2014), won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, a first for a book by a woman author. Both books center on Jason Fitger, an irascible but idealistic creative writing professor and English department chair at the fictional Payne University. Like Chou, Schumacher considers herself an accidental satirist. “I would never say that I started out thinking, ‘OK, I’m writing a satire,’” Schumacher says. “I don’t feel like that’s my strength as a writer. I want a character to play against type, to not quite fit the category.”For a character to play against type, of course, a writer must first render that type legible to readers. In “The Shakespeare Requirement,” Schumacher does this most pointedly with one of Fitger’s colleagues, a Shakespearean scholar named Dennis Cassovan. Like the colonoscopy-conversing codgers in “The Chair,” Professor Cassovan presents as a familiar comic figure: the elderly curmudgeon upholding antiquated ideals. Cassovan’s particular inflexibility, memorialized in the novel’s title, lies in his conviction that all undergraduate English majors should be required to take a semester of Shakespeare. Schumacher generates some good laughs at “the old mossback” Cassovan’s expense, mostly through Fitger’s acerbic voice. But she also does something that no doctrinaire satirist would ever do: she ventures into Cassovan’s point of view, exposing the emotional complexity that accounts for his beliefs. We learn that he is a widower and that he lost his teenage son to cancer. Schumacher nonetheless resists the consolation of pity, inviting her readers instead to recognize that “Cassovan’s true existence had flowered within the confines of this dingy 8-by-10-foot room.”In this passage Schumacher gifts her character something no stock satirical type could claim: dignity. In doing so, her novel, like Chou’s “Disorientation” and like “The Chair,” joins a new wave of campus satires, many of which are written by women, that aren’t really satires at all. By exposing their characters’ human motives, their frailties and failings, deflated aspirations and unarticulated hopes, they offer something more radical than righteous critique: avenues for empathy and, perhaps, pathways back to community for those who have strayed far away.Winant’s third collage, made with images from “Dear White People,” the 2014 film that inspired the 2017-21 television series of the same name.Carmen Winant, courtesy of the artist. Source photos: courtesy of NetflixTHESE UNSATIRES OF the campus are cropping up onscreen, as well, without sacrificing the outrageous qualities that attract audiences. Consider “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a series that stands out for truth in advertising, as we witness the aforementioned college girls having sex in an inspired range of locations. (“None of my friends get down like that!” my 21-year-old research assistant, Chazz Hannah, recently said to me.) Shows like “Grown-ish” and “A Different World” also focus on attractive people consciously coupling and uncoupling, and sex remains a fundamental element of the campus novel, too. In “Moo” (1995), for instance, Jane Smiley titles a chapter “Who’s in Bed With Whom,” then calls roll of campus bedfellows: an undergrad with a grad student, two professors in perfunctory congress, two others in passionate embrace, before arriving at an econ professor who’s “in bed” in a figurative sense, colluding with a billionaire.Of course, sex is central to these fictions of the campus because it features so prominently in the real college experience. Mindy Kaling and the series’s co-creator, Justin Noble, spoke about returning to campus — Kaling’s alma mater, Dartmouth, and Noble’s, Yale — to interview current students, but “The Sex Lives of College Girls” does not rely on capturing current trends. Quite the contrary, it is built on types — even stereotypes: Bela, a newly unsheltered South Asian girl looking to make up for lost time with lots of sex; Kimberly, a guileless suburbanite hanging on to a platonic long-distance relationship; Leighton, a blond socialite with a legacy pedigree; Whitney, a Black talented tenth striver whose force-of-nature mother is a prominent politician. The series begins with these stereotypes, then works to reveal the humanity that the stereotypes occlude. By the end of Season 1, for instance, Leighton has begun to embrace her lesbianism.This evolution of character enacts a process of identity formation inherent in college students everywhere. It’s an intimate undertaking often acted out in public, drawing on the influence of others, including professors. “There’s a great craving among students to be told about who they are,” the novelist, playwright and theater professor Julia May Jonas tells me. “And that unasked request, if you answer it, can be very dangerous. It can be at best confusing and at worst dangerous.”Jonas’s 2022 novel, “Vladimir,” surveys the limits of student-professor intimacy — including sexual relationships. One of the animating forces of the plot is a long history of a married male professor’s affairs with his students. This is a familiar story, enough to be a common satirical plotline in its own right; it’s also a topical one, with recent scandals at both Harvard and Yale surfacing the damage done when professors abuse their power. Jonas, 41, plays an intriguing variation on the theme, however, grounding her novel in the seductive first-person perspective of the philandering professor’s wife and, more than that, having her give voice to a nuanced understanding of campus sexual relationships. The book announces these subversive intentions from its opening lines: “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.” Among other things, the line is a riff on one of Jonas’s inspirations, Vladimir Nabokov and his controversial classic, “Lolita” (1955). (Nabokov was also the author of two satirical academic novels of his own, “Pnin” [1957] and “Pale Fire” [1962].)“Vladimir” is alive to a range of intimacies. Early in the novel, Jonas’s unnamed protagonist revels in its ambience: “I like feeling the thrum of the students’ brains and hearts, uncensored by the classroom setting. In the library their lives swirl around me — I’m aware of their romantic entanglements, their grudges, hatreds, obsessions, all vibrating at a frequency I won’t ever feel again. Never will I love as they love, or hate as they hate or want what they want with such strong and solidified identification.” Jonas’s protagonist looks on her world with an eye alive to both the comic excesses and the enviable vitalities of her students. It invites us to revisit scenes so often played for broad comic effect — the sex lives of college girls, boys and otherwise — as deserving of more nuanced reflection.Fred MacMurray in “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961)Everett CollectionWE LONG FOR all that satire provides — its moral certitude, its keen eye for hypocrisy, its sanity-saving comedy — even as the writers and creators of today’s satirical art bridle against the narrow dictates of the form. This crisis of satire is nothing new. Seventy years ago, in “Notes on the Comic” (1952), the poet W. H. Auden cautioned that satire was exhausted, a relic of a bygone era when satirists wrote for a privileged audience of thousands rather than diverse communities of tens of millions or more. “Satire flourishes in a homogeneous society where satirist and audience share the same views as to how normal people can be expected to behave,” he writes. But what happens when one segment of society’s idea of “normal people” comes up against a resounding chorus of college students across the country — and, indeed, the world — who are naming and claiming their particular identities beyond the confines of gender binaries, inherited racial and ethnic categories, ability and disability? Satire, a form that thrives on homogeneity, cannot help but change in the face of such diversity. One wonders, though, if it can survive.When “The Chair” landed on Netflix in August of 2021, it provoked a spate of think pieces on academic satire — and an equal but opposite number of essays explaining, if sometimes pedantically, that the series was not, in fact, a satire at all. Annie Julia Wyman, 36, the show’s co-creator (along with the actress, writer and producer Amanda Peet), is definitive on the matter. “ ‘The Chair’ is not satire,” she says. “Satire is a kind of decadent, exhausted, austere and cold form.” Wyman, who holds a doctorate in English from Harvard and has taught courses on comic theory, describes the series instead as “something much closer to pure comedy.” She and Peet conceived the show’s central relationship — between Oh’s Professor Kim and Bill Dobson, played by Jay Duplass — in homage to the long tradition of the romantic comedy. “It’s about renewal and reintegration and what it takes to go on,” she says. “How can we remake our little society while we keep it afloat in a spirit of love and companionship?”That spirit is tested in the very first episode. Duplass’s Dobson, an acclaimed novelist, recent widower and now an empty nester, is struggling to hold himself together. He makes his way across campus to teach his lecture class, Death and Modernism. He begins by writing on the chalkboard.“Absurdism.”“Life isn’t what you think,” he says. “It will never be what you think.”“Fascism.”He points to the word.“All meaning is ascribed to the State.”Then he points to “Absurdism.”“There is no meaning.”His gesture becomes a Nazi salute. Then he utters a muted “Heil Hitler.”It’s a horrific moment to watch, all the more so because of the disconnect between the students’ shocked responses and Bill’s unabashed confidence that he’s simply indulging in a bit of pedagogical theater, ironically weaponizing the hateful gesture against itself.Except he’s wrong.The camera cuts to students’ faces. No one laughs or cracks a smile. The expressions range from befuddlement to concern. Through it all, Bill continues lecturing, oblivious to the growing commotion, unaware that his career may have just come to an end. By Episode 2, he’s a meme, his ironic stunt now source material for the students’ own satire of him.So why does it go so wrong? The series offers plenty of satirical reckoning to go around. Bill is out of touch, quick to exercise his freedoms without consideration of his responsibilities. For their part, the students willfully ignore the context of Bill’s gesture, not because it evades them but because they resent his entitlement. His actions after the incident don’t help; he calls a town hall to not apologize. “I want this to be a forum where everyone can voice their opinion,” he says. “You’re a white tenured professor who writes Op-Eds for The New York Times,” one student snaps back. “You really think this is an equal forum?” At season’s end, the tension is unresolved: Bill is fired but fighting it. On the campus of “The Chair,” on campuses everywhere, satire may well be dying. Who will mourn it?I’m thinking about this in the operating room, positioned on my side, gown open in back. In the final moments before the propofol takes effect, my gastroenterologist attempts to assuage my anxiety — not knowing that its source isn’t my concern over neoplastic polyps but of falling prey to Bill’s mistake. Lecturing is a vulnerable thing; it’s liberating, too. A good lecturer is part teacher, part preacher, part stand-up comic. I’ve danced a two-step, broken into song, laughed and even cried. I’ve marched a 100-student lecture across the quad to teach in an open-air amphitheater. I’ve even taught a semester-long course accompanied by a student D.J. and rapper. I’ve done all of this with the hope that I might inspire my students, or at least entertain them. The experience often leaves me exposed. The only protections are humility and respect for the sensibilities of the young people in your charge. That’s what it means to teach.“What do you teach?”My doctor must have seen my salutation in my chart.“I’m an English professor,” I tell her.This is usually a conversation stopper in Los Angeles, but not today.“Well, you must have watched ‘The Chair,’ right? My partner and I binged it in two nights. What did you think?”I’m out before I can respond. When I come to, I’m in the recovery room, head still cloudy, soul unsettled but clean as a whistle. More

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    James Maraniss, Librettist of Long-Silent Opera, Dies at 76

    A Spanish scholar who taught for more than four decades at Amherst College, he waited, along with the composer, 32 years for “Life Is a Dream” to be staged.James Maraniss, a Spanish scholar who wrote the libretto for an opera that was finished in 1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but was not fully staged for another decade, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Chesterfield, Mass. He was 76.The cause was a heart attack, his brother, David, said.Mr. Maraniss, a professor of Spanish and European studies at Amherst College, had never written a libretto when the composer Lewis Spratlan, a faculty colleague, approached him in 1975 to collaborate on an opera based on Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s early 17th-century drama “La Vida es sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”). The piece had been commissioned by the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut.Excited at how Calderon’s vivid writing quickly conjured musical images in his mind, Mr. Spratlan told Mr. Maraniss the news about the commission — not knowing that Mr. Maraniss was an expert on Calderon’s work.“It was a wonderful happenstance that this was the case,” Mr. Spratlan, now retired from Amherst’s music department, recalled in a phone interview. The two men, friends and neighbors in adjoining apartments in a campus house, soon started working together and completed the three-act opera in 1978. That year, Mr. Maraniss also published “On Calderon,” a study of the writer’s plays, including “La Vida es sueño,” which is about a prince in conflict with his father, the king.Mr. Maraniss’s familiarity with Calderon’s rhythms and language animated the libretto.“Jim managed to take extremely elaborate 17th-century Spanish, the equivalent of Elizabethan English, with very exalted levels of diction, and rendered it into modern English that preserved all the grandeur of Golden Age Spanish,” Mr. Spratlan said.By the time they were finished, though, the New Haven Opera Theater had gone out of business, and no other opera company would produce it. Frustrated for many years, Mr. Spratlan finally raised money for concert performances of the second act in early 2000, first at Amherst, then at Harvard. Mr. Spratlan nominated himself for the Pulitzer for music and won.Still, “Life Is A Dream” did not receive a full production until 2010, at the Santa Fe Opera.In his review in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described the libretto as “elegantly poetic,” and said that Mr. Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan “honor Calderón by adhering closely to the philosophically ambiguous play, considered the ‘Hamlet’ of Spanish drama. Sometimes too closely.”A scene from the Santa Fe Opera’s production of “Life Is a Dream,” by the composer Lewis Spratlan and Mr. Marannis, colleagues at Amherst.Ken HowardDavid Maraniss said that his brother didn’t complain about the long wait for a full production.“But that libretto meant as much to Jim as anything he had done in his life,” Mr. Maraniss, a journalist and biographer who won a Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign for The Washington Post, said in a phone interview. “I can’t say the waiting was as torturous for Jim as it was for Lew, but it was a great feeling of relief when it was finally produced.”James Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan won the 2016 Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.James Elliott Maraniss was born on March 22, 1945, in Ann Arbor, Mich. He moved several times with his family before settling in 1957 in Madison, Wis., where his father, Elliott, a journalist who had been fired from his job as rewrite man at The Detroit Times after an informant identified him as a Communist, found work at The Capital Times. His mother, Mary (Cummins) Maraniss, was an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.After graduating from Harvard in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature, Mr. Maraniss earned a master’s there in the same subject. He then began work on his Ph.D in Romance languages and literature at Princeton University. It was granted in 1975.Following several months working for Wisconsin Gov. Patrick Lucey on Native American and migrant worker issues, Mr. Maraniss was hired at Amherst in early 1972 where he remained until he retired in 2015. He taught Spanish culture and literature in Spanish.Until recently, he had been working on a translation of “Don Quixote.”In addition to his brother, Mr. Maraniss is survived by his wife, Gigi Kaeser; his daughter, Lucia Maraniss; his sons, Ben and Elliott; his stepson, Michael Kelly; and his sister Jean Alexander. Another sister, Wendy, died in 1997.Mr. Maraniss in 2015, the year he retired from Amherst College after teaching there since 1972. Amherst CollegeAfter his work on “Life Is a Dream,” Mr. Maraniss wrote the Portuguese lyrics to James Taylor’s 1985 song “Only a Dream in Rio” and translated fiction and essays in the 1990s by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a Cuban émigré and a major voice in Caribbean literature who was a professor of Spanish at Amherst.“I was bored with being an academic until I began a new life as his translator,” Mr. Maraniss said in an obituary of Mr. Benitez-Rojo, “and in a sense his presenter to the English-speaking world, to share that degree of his power, which was that of a great art.” More