Welcome to Beet College, founded in 1755 by Nathanial Beet, New England’s wealthiest pig farmer, as a “Collegium for Young Men in the Service of Almighty God and Livestock.” Don’t remember visiting this elite liberal arts college outside of Boston? That’s because it doesn’t exist. Rather, it’s the subject of Beet, the latest book by essayist Roger Rosenblatt (HarperCollins, $23.95) and the newest satire about college life that will have you rolling on the floor (or in the mud) with laughter.
But Beet’s not the kind of school that’s hogging the college admissions spotlight in this uproarious novel. In fact, there’s something truly stinky about it, and it’s more than just the school’s mucky mascot Latin the Pig, who frequently breaks out of his pen and takes to “peeing everywhere with the range and power of a golf course sprinkler.” The combination of insolvency––its endowment squandered by its piggish Board chairman––and a hogwash of a curriculum––featuring departments like Native American Crafts and Casino Studies––has driven the college into a crisis of conscience, sending students and faculty squealing in outrage. With the impending threat of a permanent shutdown, the Board of Trustees has called on English professor Peace Porterfield, the only faculty member who doesn’t have his head in the pig sty, to develop a new, practical, yet intellectually-stimulating curriculum that will attract more students to the school in an effort to “save our asses” and this pig pen of an institution.
The task is monumental, and consensus among its screwball faculty members seems as realistic as pigs flying. Porterfield, the college’s sole old-fashioned intellectual who is completely devoted to the study of literature and genuinely interested in teaching, is being outnumbered by his eccentric colleagues, most of whom spend their time drumming up new, unconventional paths of study. At Beet, the academic departments are split between two buildings, shrewdly dubbed “The Old Pen” and “The New Pen,” in keeping with the college’s pig roots. The Old Pen is made up of the traditional academic disciplines, plain vanilla English, History, Philosophy, Classics, Mathematics, Government, Economics, and Science departments. The New Pen, on the other hand, houses a number of nonsensical disciplines that make readers snort with laughter and push the envelope of what is considered academic, like “Ethnicity, Gender, and Television Studies,” “Little People of Color,” the “I Am Woman Center,” “Humor and Meteorology,” “Bondage Studies,” “Wiccan History,” “Serial Killers of the Northwest,” and “Homeland Security.” Beet’s reputation as a paradigm of intellectual study is being challenged by such ludicrous courses. Students are flocking towards the easy-A classes in The New Pen and deliberately avoiding the classes in The Old Pen where they may actually have to do some serious work.
And surprisingly, the professors, with the exception of Porterfield, are just as bad as the novel’s students in terms of their intellectual inclinations. During one of the many futile meetings of the “Committee on Curriculum Reform,” the professors come up with a comical and pretty disturbing array of ideas for overhauling Beet’s curriculum. Professor Marigold of the I Am Woman Center, who once performed a monologue entitled “Yeast” in which she took on the appearance of the infection itself, insists that the curriculum should include Mariah Carey, for she is the “nexus of American song and dance.” Fine Arts Professor Kettlegrorf suggests an interpretative-dance-based curriculum that would culminate at the end of the year in a festival, in which “students would dress up as disciplines and sing.” The History Department’s “military historian,” Molton Kramer, proposes that students re-enact history’s pivotal battles. Theater Professor Heine Heilburn suggests a curriculum reminiscent of that in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, in which students are taught useful bits of knowledge that they can then parley at cocktail parties and social events. He later amends that idea, proposing instead that the school, in keeping with its pig heritage, be transformed into a student-run pig farm where pupils would study everything from the significance of the pig in literature, history, and science to the running of a business as well as the slaughter and castration of the gluttonous animals.
This anti-intellectual trend is at the core of Beet’s dilemma and comprises the moral message of this novel. Rosenblatt insinuates with this biting spoof that a growing number of colleges have been adding specious classes to their curricula. Instead of devising new, creative ways to make the works of Freud, Dickens, and Plato seem more appealing to students, professors are devising a multitude of courses with dubious academic purpose to cater to their students’ pop-culture-centric interests. But that’s not the purpose of college, Rosenblatt clearly believes. College is not supposed to be a place where you study obscure, marginal subjects available on the Internet or trendy, contemporary subjects that you can easily read about on your own. College is supposed to be a place where you study society’s great thinkers, pivotal events in history, and breakthrough developments in science and the arts. For without a fundamental knowledge and understanding of the past, you cannot comprehend the present.
In fact, Beet Government Professor Derek Manning, a known “wiseass” whose wife died from an excruciating eight-month battle with mad cow disease, believes that deep down, students laugh at their professors’ new nonsense classes and would take their academic careers more seriously if their courses were more challenging and intellectual: “What students want, they crave, is quality,” Manning points out to Porterfield during a tête-à-tête about the problems with the Beet curriculum. “They want to rely on people who know more than they do, and they want to come out of Beet College a little smarter than when they went in.” And given sky rocketing tuitions, they should come out smarter—not a little but a lot!
