Missouri Williams. © Robin Silas Christian
Canceled graduate students, killer (literally) dissertations, an agitated cadre of revolutionary university landscapers, a Gen X professor fending off antifeminist allegations: this season’s batch of back-to-school novels isn’t satisfied with simply stirring the pot of campus controversies. This fall, novelists rendering universities are letting things boil over with surrealist takes on cancel culture, sharp satires of student activism, murderous iterations of intersectional theory, and philosophical meditations on what the academy has to teach us—not just about the canon, but about nuance, compromise, and knowing each other. Scale the walls of the Ivory Tower, and you might find yourself surprised by the view.
But as this cohort of campus novelists arrives at the gates, campuses are giving less Ivory Tower and more Leaning Tower of Pisa. Artificial intelligence, dramatic funding cuts, and right-wing censorship of campus activists and liberal academics alike are driving predictions of an upcoming “enrollment cliff”—a dramatic decrease in young adults attending four-year colleges. The New Yorker’s education columnist recently wondered whether the money currently in his daughter’s college fund might be better utilized in a “stable-growth account so that later I can cash it in to buy her an apartment, an iPhone, and whatever other tools she needs to deal with a world governed by our coming A.I. robot masters?” Recently, a high-school guidance counselor in Brooklyn told me that multiple students skipped their graduation ceremonies, instead camping outside Barclays Center to audition for Kai Cenat’s Streamer University.
