An Orwell For Our Time?

Bruce Bawer reviews Crump by P.J. Vanston, a novel about the wackiness of academe:

Now along comes a remarkable – if extremely dark – comic novel, Crump, by a writer previously unfamiliar to me, P. J. Vanston. It is the story of Kevin Crump, a newly hired lecturer at the fictitious Thames Metropolitan University whose illusions about the nobility of higher education are soon shattered by the ignoble realities of today’s British university, which rewards mediocrity and laziness and whose most notable achievement these days is turning out Islamist suicide bombers.

I call the novel remarkable because even though it takes on a deadly serious topic – namely, the transformation of many universities, in our time, into Kafkaesque institutions ruled by lockstep PC groupthink, draconian speech codes, multiculturalism gone mad, and (not least) a see-no-evil approach to radical Islam – it also manages to be laugh-out-loud funny. Vanston mocks everything from the market-driven dumbing-down of curricula (one of Crump’s colleagues is a near-illiterate who teaches hip-hop studies) to the demonization of white men as racist, sexist patriarchal oppressors (Crump attends a diversity session taught by a chronically irate woman who targets him, the only white male in the group, from the git-go: “How dare you think you are superior to women or people of colour just because of your gender and race!”).

But it is Vanston’s frankness about British universities’ cringing appeasement of radical Islam on campus that is the gutsiest and most striking aspect of this book.

At Thames Metropolitan, three of the four buildings are named after famous black people – an effort by administrators to make the university’s largely black student body feel at home. But the fourth building, which houses the university’s new Centre for Islamic Studies, is named after Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, the Centre’s funder. The Abdullah building is a mysterious, unsettling presence on the campus: at his initial faculty meeting, Crump and other newcomers are informed that it is “out of bounds for all not studying, researching or teaching there.”

In naming the Centre after a Saudi royal, Vanston is, of course, only reflecting a contemporary reality on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, Cambridge University has a HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, the University of Edinburgh has the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, Harvard boasts the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, and at Georgetown University there’s the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding – all named, naturally, for the Saudi prince who endowed them. (And let’s not forget the American universities in Cairo and Beirut, both of which also have centers also named for King Abdullah’s munificent nephew.) On Harvard’s website, under a small image of the university’s seal, bearing the word veritas, you can read that Prince Alwaleed is “[c]ommitted to making the world a better place” and “seeks to promote change through mutual cultural understanding.” One of the achievements of Vanston’s novel is that it effectively reminds us that, for the right price, many a university will quite happily sell out its heritage of devotion to truth...

As everyone on campus knows, the truth is relative--and the Zionists are behind all the bad stuff. (Question: Can it still be called fiction when everything in it--save the names--is actual-factual?)