ABSTRACT
This chapter has a structure that mirrors Chapter 3, but focuses on the crisis of the arts and humanities rather than the racial crisis facing academia. The individualistic competition, disembodied knowledge, and clinical distance championed by increasingly powerful STEM disciplines has not only coincided with budget cuts in arts and humanities disciplines, but has also resulted in an infiltration of these STEM-associated values into every corner of the academy and the expectations placed on the theatrical professoriate. Counter to STEM rationalism is the disruptive potential of the amateur, which has inspired several recent books and articles in Theatre and Performance Studies. Taking the stance that interdisciplinary work that positions academic collaborators as always-already amateur is by definition a radical intervention in the values of the theatrical professoriate, I also acknowledge that the instrumentalization of theatre implicit in academia’s “theatrical turn” might be complicit in the corporatization of today’s university. Within this web of amateur entanglements, I analyze three case studies of plays that dramatize the STEM takeover of American higher education:
David Abramson’s Purely Academic (2013)
Will Cooper’s Margin of Error (2017)
Todd Salovey’s Losing the Nobel Prize (2018)
Australian computer scientist (and amateur playwright) David Abramson’s Purely Academic premiered at the Oxford and represents the evolution of a hapless computer science graduate student into an academic predator guilty of plagiarism, bullying, and sexual harassment. The twist comes when the audience realizes that the academic predator’s lack of humanity results from the discipline’s reward system, not necessarily some inherent character defect on the part of the academic himself. In 2018, I produced a staged reading of Purely Academic for two audiences of academics and analyze audience response data in the chapter. American playwright (and amateur scientist) Will Cooper’s Margin of Error was the premiere production of a new San Diego-based theatre company, the Roustabouts. Margin of Error centers on a renowned but heartless physicist whose time basking in the spotlight of an imminent Nobel Prize is cut short when his lack of research integrity and sexual harassment of a female graduate student are revealed. In 2018, I also produced a staged reading with the original Roustabouts cast for an audience of academics, and that response data is also analyzed in this chapter.
Finally, real-life physics professor Brian Keating’s memoir of his own brush with the elusive Nobel Prize—aptly titled Losing the Nobel Prize—was adapted by director and professor Todd Salovey (whose brother, Peter Salovey, is the President of Yale University) for its June 2018 premiere as part of the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival. While critiques of Keating’s memoir have noted the unacknowledged but toxic masculinity driving Physics as a discipline to emphasize winning its highest prize at any cost, the stage adaptation of Losing the Nobel Prize theatricalizes Keating’s contention that academic institutions profit from Nobel-winning professors in a manner very similar to how Hollywood production company’s make money off the backs of Oscar-winning actors. But both interpretations of what’s wrong with the Nobel drive emphasize the dehumanization of scholars (and those around them) that results. Having come full-circle to my initial comparison between #OscarsSoWhite and academia as a historically white institution in need of reform, I conclude Chapter 4 by noting the irony that STEM has become theatre’s newest patron, even as academic STEM’s takeover of the arts and humanities nears completion. I segue to the conclusion by suggesting that this patronage may enable theatre to act as a Trojan Horse in defying the death of the (arts and) humanities.
