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I know I am a bit behind time for this, but here are some thoughts on the latest Netflix series, The Chair.
Last week, I binge-watched The Chair that premiered on Netflix last month and is much talked about in the media, blogs, and all over social media. II know I am a bit behind time for this, but I confess that I was putting off watching the series because, honestly, why would I want to watch a dramedy of what I see IRL every day? Yet FOMO and curiosity won and at last, I pushed play on my TV the other night. The truth is that I did not intend to see all the episodes in a single night, but I watched one episode after another until I suddenly realized that I was on the last one. It helped a lot that, by today’s series standards, The Chair has a short season: six episodes of 30 minutes each.
This academic dramedy stars Sandra Oh, who plays Ji-Yoon Kim, a university professor and the new chair of the English department at Pembroke University. The premise is that Ji-Yoon Kim is the first non-white woman to head the English department of this university. The story develops around the obstacles and adventures that she faces in this position at the university.
It is not my intention to thoroughly analyze this first season or give spoilers. It is better for those who have not seen it yet to watch it with as little information as possible and draw conclusions. Nevertheless, I would like to share my reflections on some of the themes touched on in this series. I will focus principally on the first episode because it caught my attention in the first minutes that the show is highlighting many of the problems currently experienced.
[Warning: Although it is not my intention to give spoilers, I mention some relevant details developed in the first episode, but nothing that is not already revealed in the trailer.]
Not even five minutes into the first episode, the English Department Chair, Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim, begins a speech in a faculty meeting extremely familiar to us who work in higher education:
“I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are in a dire crisis. Enrollments are down more than 30%. Our Budget is being gutted […] But in these unprecedented times, we have to prove that what we do in the classroom […] is more important than ever and has value to the public good […] What we teach them cannot be quantified or put down on a resume as a skill […].”
Higher education is in crisis; the Humanities are in crisis; enrollments are down; there are budget cuts; we have to demonstrate the value of a college education; we live in unprecedented times. How many times have we heard (or read) these omens? Even before the pandemic, they were familiar to those of us who work in higher education.
From this scene, we move to Ji-Yoon’s first meeting with her Dean, who assigns her first task as Department Chair: to choose from a list of names three professors with the most years of service or the highest salaries and fire them or, preferably, “encourage them to retire.” From the start, it is clear that her new position will bring Ji-Yoon many headaches. The funny thing is that the most significant challenges confronted by Sandra Oh’s character have less to do with her responsibilities as Department Chair and more with her role as a mother (and all that this entails).
Although the series touches on serious, topical issues such as freedom of expression, the conflicting role of the police on university campuses, the crisis of the Humanities, the changing paradigms of higher education, and the discrimination faced daily by millions of women in the workforce (especially those belonging to a racial minority), the central theme of the series is motherhood, specifically, that of caregiver.
Ji-Yoon is both a mother and a father. She does not have public daycare or a support network available for the care of her daughter, Ju-Hee (or “Ju Ju,” as they call her affectionately). Moreover, with her new responsibilities as Department Chair, she has even less time left to take care of her daughter, so she must turn to her father (already very old, by the way) to take care of Ju Ju while she works. This is a reality experienced by millions of mothers and fathers worldwide, a topic we have discussed in The Observatory on more than one occasion.
The appointment of Ji-Yoon, far from giving her more freedom or advantages, brings more challenges. Beyond the promotion, the new position as Department Chair entails more responsibilities and working hours since Ji-Yoon must assume new administrative and bureaucratic tasks in addition to her teaching load. Moreover, although she expects that her new job will empower her to make decisions, she soon realizes that her appointment is more strategic and political.
“I feel like somebody handed me a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it explodes.”
To finish and not give spoilers, I want to concentrate on the small details because many are not obvious but provide much information about the problems currently experienced in universities. Let us begin with the decore of Pembroke University’s buildings. In every scene, you see huge paintings and framed art of white men. In none of the classrooms, corridors, or offices does the viewer see any woman represented, not even Emily Dickinson, a great poet, and Ji-Yoon Kim’s field of study.
On the first day of classes, Professor Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah), who, along with Ji-Yoon, is the only professor of color at the university, gives her office hours to her students (Tuesday and Thursday from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm). However, she soon clarifies, “Actually, you can come at any time because I practically live here.” She is expressing a symptom of job insecurity shared by many teachers who do not have a permanent contract or stable employment.
In another scene from the first episode, we see how Professor Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor) finds that her office has been moved (without warning) to a room below the university’s “Wellness Center.” It is noteworthy that nothing similar has happened to any of her male colleagues.
We also observe through the character of Lila, played by Mallory Low, all the unpaid work performed by the teaching assistants (TAs) before each class so that the full professors only have to worry about teaching the class. Students or adjunct professors do all the support work behind teaching – making copies, passing lists, reviewing assignments and exams, and other administrative work.
I could write a few more pages breaking down this series, but I prefer not to give many details, as I said initially. I encourage you to watch the series, discuss it with your colleagues, your partner, children, and friends. I am sure that anyone who works or has worked in a university will find it (painfully) familiar. The Chair is a television series with universal themes that present many of the social, economic, and political problems we all experience, whether we work in the education sector or not. Overall, it is a series with a little bit of everything. It is entertaining, and better yet, it is short. I do not know if there will be a second season, but this first one provides a lot to discuss. Watch it if you have not seen it yet, and share your impressions here.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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