The Student Body: Short Stories About College Students and Professors

Reviewed by Roger Platizky

The Student Body is comprised of seventeen campus short stories written mostly in the past ten years by well-known authors and several talented graduate students. In his introduction to the collection, John McNally notes his intention: to introduce readers to what he calls "the offspring—or perhaps, the lesser-known cousin"—to the campus novel. Though widely varied in narrative point of view and degree of verisimilitude, most of these stories do have a "family resemblance" that will be recognized, embraced, or resisted by academics. A few of the stories refer only obliquely to campus life (Stephen King’s "Strawberry Spring," for example), but most are at least loosely connected by conflicts that allegedly take place on campuses nationwide. Divided almost evenly into two parts—student stories and faculty stories—The Student Body concerns such problems as student plagiarism, bonding and disloyalty within the Greek system, alcoholism, student underachievement, the alienation of middle-aged faculty, and the infatuation between students and their professors, both heterosexual and gay.

Although the stories in the anthology are not equal in quality—some are more nuanced, thematically complex, and gracefully worded than others—the majority will be interesting to college teachers and especially useful for students in creative writing or education classes. For example, the lead story, Richard Russo’s "The Whore’s Child," takes place in a creative writing class in which both the graduate students and the teacher become baffled when an alternative student, Sister Ursula (an embittered nun), decides to write her memoirs. The students, who have been trained to write fictionally rather than autobiographically, have problems critiquing her confessionals, the first installment of which they approach "the way you would an alien spaceship." The unwanted daughter of a Belgian prostitute, Sister Ursula is described as finding herself "at the very bottom of the ecclesiastical food chain," and most of her readers, while respecting her, cannot connect with her experience. The only element really missing from this story is that the nun is never given the opportunity to critique the stories of her younger classmates. In fact, if reader reaction questions were supplied at the end of this story (or any of the others in the collection), students might be asked how the story would change if the nun were not only the object of investigation but also the agent.

A poignantly written story that will resonate with anyone who has ever been, known, or wanted to date a lonely scholar is Ron Carson’s "Hartwell." Recalling the psychological doubling in Herman Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener" and the rude awakening in James Joyce’s "Araby," "Hartwell" concerns a middle-aged professor who is stunned when his most introverted colleague begins to date a popular sorority girl who wears a red plaid kilt. The story culminates in an epiphany when the bewildered professor sneaks into the Tri Delta sorority and discovers that the five typed romantic poems his friend has sent to his sorority girlfriend have been defaced by the "red-ink marginalia" and "loopy scrawlings" of her roommates. The sororal comments are described as "filthy, puerile, and inane." Suddenly feeling "quite old, quite heavy, and very out of place," the alienated narrator retreats from this littered room of youth and "obscene ridicule."

For anyone who has ever witnessed an affirmative action policy debased by someone pretending to be a minority, Lucia Perillo’s dark comedy "The Wife of the Indian" will strike a familiar chord. In this story, an Italian art teacher and abusive spouse, Tony Domenici, pretends he is Native American ("Tony Drowningcreek") to land a plum job and other associated perks at a liberal college. Mocking the social pretensions that politically correct teachers sometimes unwittingly promote, the narrator describes the way that Tony, at least at first, easily manipulates the system:

Best of all, Tony has an excuse to wear his black hair long and ratty without someone breathing down his neck. They get invited to parties where people show up wearing interesting ethnic clothes, bearing hand-thrown clay pots full of interesting ethnic food, and when she [Tony’s wife] and Tony get loaded on the free booze their behavior is chalked up as merely interesting and ethnic.

If Perillo’s story mocks campus liberality, Gillian Kendall’s "In Loco Parentis" balances the other side of the academic equation. In this story concerning homophobia on American campuses, an out lesbian, falsely accused of having had a relationship with a top female student who has recently died in a car accident, imagines the reasons she would be far happier teaching at a top-ranked and more liberal college in Chicago. Any uprooted gay or lesbian who has taught in a small, conservative school can easily identify with her unfulfilled fantasy:

I had been visualizing the move to Chicago so bad I could taste snow and real scholarship. I was ready for wind and winter and a respected women’s studies department. I wanted to live where queers outnumbered Baptists. I sent resumes out to any city with decent gay bars . . . and [without] landlords who sent part of my rent to the radical right.

While The Student Body mainly offers interesting stories, some academics may be put off by the degree of cynicism that permeates the anthology. A’s are readily given to students for drugs or sexual favors; fraternities and sororities seem far more important than classrooms or libraries. Hardly any college students seem to take their studies seriously, and if they do, they are fated to resent their parents who teach at the same school ("Free Writing"), to plagiarize fascist theories ("The Banks of Vistula"), or to die intoxicated in a car wreck ("In Loco Parentis"). More problematically, there are stories such as Joe Schraufnagel’s "Like Whiskey for Christmas" that, while witty, seem more than a little self-indulgent. Schraufnagel’s nineteen-page, five-chapter satire concerns a gay male who is infatuated with a Spanish teacher who fails him on a language competency test. Occasionally scatological, the story, despite its innovative plot, reads like an unedited routine by stand-up comedian John Leguizamo, famous for his sexual explicitness. Do we really need to know how many eliminations the narrator had in his dormitory bathroom? I think not.

Perhaps in an attempt to explain or justify the Dionysian elements in the volume, McNally writes in his introduction that "one would be hard pressed to find anything more mind-numbing than reading a realistic portrayal of a department meeting where colleagues, using the often tiresome jargon of their own particular discipline, play games of petty one-upmanship." I am not sure whether The Student Body provides the antidote to such provincialism. In fact, while the anthology shows much concern for the physical aspects of the student body, this otherwise solid collection might benefit from including a few stories that focused on the intellectual, scholarly, and spirit-affirming dramas that are also part of campus life.

Roger Platizky is professor of English at Austin College.

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