ABSTRACT
The Introduction offers the concept of a “theatrical professoriate” in order to understand the increasingly artificial and spectacularized experience of being an academic, particularly in the United States but, increasingly, throughout the Western academy. I argue that being a professor feels theatrical because of the following experiential dimensions of contemporary higher education: the epidemic of “imposter syndrome” suffered in the face of scripted precariousness and a pervasive audit culture (e.g. “performance-based funding”), the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) contagion of individualistic competition and self-promotion, administratively controlled diversity charades, and the spectacular gatekeeping that maintains academia’s myth of meritocracy. I connect this theatrical habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the embodiment of a social class) to various crises in representation that have eroded public trust in higher education and spectacularized its players.
In the face of public scrutiny over the value of higher education and the increasing disparities between STEM disciplines and the rest of us, not to mention the racial disparities that continue to plague access to higher education in the United States particularly, I argue that institutions of higher education have taken what we might call a “theatrical turn” that involves turning to theatrical strategies to address the disparities of the academy. I position myself as a theatre historian and performance scholar, but also as a practitioner of interactive diversity theatre in the University of California system, and document academia’s theatrical turn through three campus trends toward using applied theatre: commissioning interactive theatre for diversity work, hiring actors as “Standardized Patients” for medical education, and the ubiquity of faculty TED (technology, entertainment, and design) talks on campus and off.
