..."and you're history!:" Buffy vs. The University

Being a semi-procrastinatory interlude from paper writing, in which i dispense on Buffy and academe.

In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the eponymous (is that the correct usage?)protagonist, having, the previous spring, blown up her high school in order to kill the gigantic snake demon into which the mayor of Sunnydale transformed himself, begins college at the (obviously fictional) UC Sunnydale. In her first days of college, Buffy has to deal with feelings of inadequacy as a student, gets yelled out of a lecture hall by a sexist cultural studies professor on her first day of classes, and must fend off the soul-sucking advances of a demon roomate, who doesn't pee on floors, but does listen to copious amounts of Celine Dion and attempts to siphon off Buffy's life force while she sleeps. A couple of months into the semester, Buffy starts dating her Psychology TA, a strapping young grad student from Iowa named Riley Finn, who is secretly not only a graduate student but a steroidally-enhanced commando secret agent working for the shadowy military initiative operating beneath the campus, which is attempting to control, breed, and harness Sunnydale's demonic population for covert military uses.

No one bats an eye over the fact that Riley is dating Buffy while he is grading her work. The writers at times seem unsure of whether he is a graduate student or simply an older undergraduate - he refers to himself as a "psychology major," but Buffy observes in a later episode, "you know, there's nothing more dangerous than a psych grad student". Later, after he says something ridiculously cheesy to Professor Walsh, she refers to Riley as a "college boy in love." The list goes on, but let's operate under the presumption that, despite the fact than in many psych departments (as is the case at NYU,) undergrads are TAed by other undergrads, while PhD students tend to TA Masters courses, Riley is a graduate student.

Riley and his buds know all the ins and outs about which undergrads on campus are dating each other and which upperclassmen prove to be total man-skanks. They live in frat-houses-cum-secret-government laboratories and hold frat parties at which undergrad bands play. Now, i have never attended a large state university like the fictional UC Sunnydale, and I don't really know what grad student life is like there, but i kind of doubt that a teaching assistant would tell one of his undergraduates he barely knows about the sexual habits of another undergrad, much less know anything about said habits. But then again, I'm not a TA yet, and won't be ever if i don't finish these damn papers. Nevertheless, this is one of the few things over the course of the series that the writers simply get wrong. I posit that graduate students are something of a semi-subaltern category in Buffy who can be integrated into the show's representative schema of university life only as older undergrads with secret lives who occasionally grade papers and dress up in camoulflage. This is not the same kind of subalternity as that occupied, say, by the high school lunchlady in the Season 3 episode "Earshot," in which said food service employee only becomes visible and audible when she attempts to murder all the students by pouring rat poison in the Jello mixture, chases down Xander with a butcher's knife, and is beaten senseless by Buffy. Instead, following Kathy Newman's analysis of 90210 and other texts, Buffy constructs TAs as potential objects of romantic attachment and also calculating and dissimulating, posessing hybrid and shifting identities, suspended between graduations, and between the university and the military-industrial complex which sits, quite literally, beneath it.

(We will skip over entirely Maggie Walsh, our tenured(?) psych professor/murderous mad military scientist,whose secret project is to create "Adam," a hybrid subject, of sorts, assembled from computers (complete with floppy disk drives) and the body parts of humans, vampires, and demonic entities.)

Newman links representations in Marathon Man to the early years of the explosion of casualization of teaching. She then turns to the college years of Beverly Hills 90210, exploring the politics of social and sexual reproduction in the academy between Brandon, Dylan, et. al. and their shady/sketchy TAs during the early years of GESO's organizing campaign. "Beware graduate students - they might study something useless, kill you, or seduce your children." ("Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph. D.'" Kathy M. Newman. Social Text, No. 49, The Yale Strike Dossier. (Winter, 1996), pp. 97-131.)

The fourth season of Buffy began airing in the fall of 1999 and ended in the fall of 2000. (Riley's story, in which, feeling taken for granted by an otherwise occupied Vampire Slayer, the now ex-graduate student, ex-commando becomes addicted to dangerous intercourse with the undead and leaves Sunnydale to hunt monsters in South America, concluded midway through the fifth season, in an episode which aired in December of 2000.) These years were tumultous and crucial in the shifting dynamics of academic capitalism and the social construction of graduate employees. They saw new arrangements of casualization - adjunctization, "postdoc"ization, etc., and renewed organizing at several private universities and a series of National Labor Relations Board decisions which ultimately granted workers at NYU and other private universities the status of "worker" and the right to Wagner act protections concerning organizing and bargaining. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's deft exploration of the logics and contradictions of secondary schooling through metaphor and parody has been repeatedly noted by critics and scholars, but the deep skepticism in the post-high school years over the politics, entanglements, and assumptions of contemporary universities demands deeper inquiry.