Lawrence E Hussman
Inkwater Press, 2016 

♦♦♦◊◊
3.5/5 Stars

 

There is a casual, conversational tone to Lawrence Hussman’s prose in Acanemia: A Memoir of Life in the Halls of Higher Learning. As he relates his life story in this memoir centered around his vocation as an English professor, we come to know the kind of man who still haunts the halls of academia and our culture as a whole. Hussman’s memoir maintains a steady pace and while a tad bit bland manages to pepper into his narrative observations making it unexpectedly savory.

Hussman belongs to that first Baby Boomer generation whose parents won World War II and ushered in the prosperity boom of the late 40s and 1950s. He served the military as the Cold War began to set its foundations and the conflicts in Greece and Korea provided the means for this generation to use the GI Bill. For many Boomers, it is the 60s and Vietnam that are their touchstones so reading Hussman’s recollection provides a deeper understanding of the various siblings that make up the Boomer generation that still dominates our culture.

So when he discovers the great American author Theodore Dreiser and by proxy the whole of American realism, he discovers the material he’ll mine to answer the question defining not just his academic career but his living aesthetic: “Why did the fact that the American reach nearly always exceeds its grasp, and that even the grasped nearly always disappoints, seem so striking to me back in 1956?” Reading how the author moves from youth to middle age to retirement, this question still lingers coloring every anecdote as he delves into critiquing the parade of collegiate presidents at his university. There is an honesty in this memoir provoking intimacy, which is why it succeeds.

There are times when Hussman reminds us of the gross privatization or, rather, corporate graffiti defacing the increasingly strangled collegiate world. Yet, these moments read as rather bombastic and a tad bitter undercutting its import. You can read an excerpt here. As a classic liberal in that every Aaron Sorkin male character way, Hussman often betrays a glaring misunderstanding of the contemporary moment. For example, this complete wrongheadedness or, rather, miscomprehension: “Recently, misguided humanities departments at a few universities have ponder or produced ‘trigger warnings,’ red flags to indicate pleasant subject matter in books best avoided. This political correctness run amok has embarrassed the teaching profession.” It is this kind of statement that reveals the ground the author shares with the supporters of the forty-fifth President of the United States. There are more than a few moments where Hussman makes it clear he is/was the audience for Chris Matthews and Lou Dobbs shouting tirades.

However, those moments are thankfully few and more an outgrowth of his generation as it ages. There are more than a few biting observations on the genuine administrative nonsense plaguing our higher education system. Coming from someone who was deep in the formation of a new university during the turbulent 60s, the narrative Hussman has crafted is a genuinely useful and needed cultural artifact. We all forget just how ‘heady’ the time period was as we all tend to view ourselves, our contemporary moment as somehow single in its resolve or innovation. Acanemia is the kind of memoir I hope more of Hussman’s peers decided to produce and the kind that ought to serve as a model for many other educators navigating the byzantine waters of higher education.

 

Author Bio

Lawrence E. Hussman is Professor Emeritus at Wright State University in Dayton Ohio.  Professor Hussman specializes in American literary naturalism. Among his published books are Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest, Harbingers of a Century: The Novels of Frank Norris, Counterterrorist, and Danger’s Disciple.  He has also edited Love That Will Not Let Me Go, Marguerite Tjader’s memoir about her time with Dreiser.

 

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