Geoff Mills
Big Trouble on Little Campus
What happens when college president Naomi Roth, an erstwhile radical whose mantra has always been ‘speak truth to power’, finds herself the subject of a student protest? This is the conflict, both public and personal, at the heart of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s latest novel. At an elite liberal arts college in New England, a ‘halcyon, evolved, rarified, creative, and intellectual college campus, where you are free to learn and nap and make things and have sex and get high and change your fucking gender even’, a disruptive and dangerous force erupts. Thus we are drawn towards a classic motif of the campus novel: paradise disrupted.
What begins as a quiet protest, in the form of a picket camp on the college’s ancient green, soon escalates into a public relations nightmare. Naomi stands accused of presiding over an institutionally racist college, having passed over for tenure an extremely popular black professor of anthropology. Leading
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