Lost Books: “Purely Academic” by Stringfellow Bar
Cover for “Purely Academic” (1956).
Purely Academic is a 1958 satirical novel by ex-St. John’s College president Stringfellow Barr. The year it was published, Swarthmore students checked it out nine times. They slowed down in the early 60s until the book had a brief renaissance at the end of the decade. In 1971, though, it was checked out for the last time. Once it migrated off the “new books” shelf and landed in the stacks, Purely Academic’s reputation died the same quiet death as hundreds of other pop novels. Even so, it still has all the charisma and acidity that made it popular 64 years ago.
Purely Academic satirizes higher education as it existed in 1958. The plot is a Mad Libs parody of spy thrillers: the protagonist, Schneider, is a professor of diplomatic history on a mission to find a job he doesn’t hate. He takes orders from the head of a shadowy educational foundation, and he accidently goes undercover when an offhand comment to a TA spirals into a universal misunderstanding that he’s a government agent. His femme fatale is the relentless commander of a guerilla force fighting for control of the faculty cocktail parties. When she entangles Schneider in her conspiracy to divorce the head of the economics department, she plunges him into the white-hot intrigue behind her husband’s (unopposed) race to become the college’s next president.
As a novel, Purely Academic still works. The plot is structurally sound, the pacing is good, and the characters hit the right balance between gimmick and personality. Schneider is both believably competent and believably inept. Most of the jokes are funny. The novel isn’t a lost gem, but it’s entertaining, and it’s the kind of basic fun that I’ve missed since I was able to read outside of class.
If it has to be more than that, Purely Academic is a snapshot of a very different moment in academic history. After the jokes about faculty wives and overfunded physics departments, the real culture shock is how much American universities were boot camps for the Cold War. In Purely Academic, accusations of communist sympathies and ritual displays of loyalty aren’t reserved for Senate trials. They’re a daily routine.
The Cold War climate makes Purely Academic’s version of college seem remote, but the opposite is also true. Setting the Cold War on a college campus makes it familiar. Every stance on every issue still belongs in one of two camps, even if those camps are “all-American” and “suspicious.” University leadership takes a heroic, uncompromising stand whenever the fundraising cycle calls, the donors generously prove they agree or face the consequences, and the president personally ensures that the economics department hires a closet socialist. Looking back, I could say that college politics, and American politics in general, have always been the way they are now. I think it’s more interesting to ask whether the culture we have now exists because of the Cold War.
The college-satire tropes, though, haven’t changed. Purely Academic’s students graduate college as stupid as they were when they matriculated; classes are blizzards of meaningless jargon; the administration exists to raise funds at all costs; faculty politics is a circular firing squad. The characters are victims of their own careers, including Schneider, but he lives out the timeless fantasy of gaming the system and finally telling your boss to go fuck himself. In the end, under all the cynicism, Purely Academic defends education. Despite the best efforts of its administration, its faculty, and its students, when the light hits it just right, the university still means something.
The main difference between Purely Academic’s era of satire and ours is the fake-major jokes. They used to target sociology, not gender studies or liberal arts. They also used to be funny: mocking sociology’s thesaurus of incomprehensible ways to say the blindingly obvious is both much funnier and much harder-hitting than any of its modern equivalents. Academic sociology credits Ernst Engel with discovering that richer households spend a smaller fraction of their income on food. When Schneider looks up the definition of Engel’s Law, and it pulls back the curtain on academia and sets him irrevocably on the path to the private sector, it’s one of the strongest jokes in the book and a criticism of higher education that holds up now.
Culturally, Purely Academic is built around a distinctly midcentury anxiety. Modern writers agonize that, allegedly, education buries potential great men by treating them the same as their classmates. In Purely Academic’s world, great men are extinct. The leftovers are either self-aware grifters like Schneider or pretenders whose highest ambitions are to be college presidents, or else they’re so anonymous that they’re forgotten while they’re still alive. Barr doesn’t try to justify that pessimism, or that great men existed at all; in Purely Academic, it’s just a given. It’s hard to say what’s happened to those ideas since. They could be rare now because they were rare even in 1958. Something might also have renewed American faith in great men, or the loss of that faith could have mutated into something new.
Purely Academic itself isn’t concerned with cultural evolution. Its story exists in a middle-class eternity where nothing really changes, because nothing really could and nothing really needs to. That’s what lets it be a low-stakes comedy, and it’s also what makes it a unique relic of its era. It records the assumptions that seemed, in 1958, like they’d always be true.