S1.E06:

[cambridgeguy]

On 8/29/2021 at 11:44 PM, stealinghome said:

On a different note, am I the only one who found Joan becoming chair really unsatisfying? I know they played it as a big moment of triumph for her, like she's finally getting her due...except it continues the well-documented problem of women taking on a disproportionate amount of departmental service relative to men. Not that I wanted the Melville professor to be chair, mind, but it just seemed odd to "reward" Joan--who had a lovely, lovely moment when she breaks down and talks about never going up for full because she shelved her research and did all the service (best moment of this episode)--with what has been characterized as the worst service position of all.

It could be worse.  At least she gets the fancy office, (possibly) extra salary, and a reduction in some other part of her responsibilities.  The worst would have been Melville prof being names chair and him immediately deciding that Joan would make a good associate chair to handle all the crap he didn't want to look at.  You don't get a nice office or extra money for that job.

[shapeshifter]

21 hours ago, cambridgeguy said:

It could be worse.  At least she gets the fancy office, (possibly) extra salary, and a reduction in some other part of her responsibilities.  The worst would have been Melville prof being names chair and him immediately deciding that Joan would make a good associate chair to handle all the crap he didn't want to look at.  You don't get a nice office or extra money for that job.

The small college where I was librarian didn’t have any Associate Chair positions that I can recall, but I’ve been imagining Yaz becoming Associate Chair next season and then Chair by the end. It’s a plot arc that fits well with the series title.

But they better have a believable reason for Yaz not taking the position at Yale. 

[EdnasEdibles]

On 8/21/2021 at 1:38 AM, DB in CMH said:

I too felt like it wrapped up pretty well. 

So, who on the show has worked at a college or university? Because, as a junior faculty at small college in a humanities department, they absolutely fucking nailed it. Everything about it. Right down to the old professor not being able to work the copy machine, not bothering to look at student evaluations, young faculty needing to bite their tongues around older faculty (I have a colleague who still hauks around aTV cart with VHS!), and the Title IX officer being expected to do 8 other jobs, and none of them well. I could go on and on and on.

For the record, all of our offices look like Holland Taylor's. 

For me, it was six episodes of cringe comedy. While narratively I didn't think it was the best show in the world, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Yep! I was staff at a University and the same. The only thing I found to be unrealistic is how much power the Chair had. At my school they mostly just go to extra meetings. No one wants to be the chair. The Dean holds most of the power. But I worked at a much smaller school than the fictional school in this. 

[qtpye]

I have mixed feelings about this show.

On one hand, hate the idea of people being shelved because they are getting older.

Yet, I know there is a giant problem in the Academia of older professors refusing to leave and actually dying in office. This does not allow for younger professors to receive tenure.

Since many of these older professors are white men with pretty sexist and racists views that they refuse to change and the department stagnates.

The three elderly professors we saw got their jobs because when they were young, other professors retired and made room for them.

If this gets a second season, I hope they tackle how messed up Academia is for those who want to make it their profession instead of spending all their time coddling Bill.

It reminds me of in my law firm how the older ladies would coddle the male lawyers (because they needed to be cared for) and how women were just expected to "suck it up" and take care of themselves.

If your husband dies, you get a week off, and then it is no longer the firm's problem. It is laughable to think people would be bending over backward to help you keep your job a year later.

 

[dubbel zout]

If professors stay engaged in teaching, age isn't a problem. 

[SailorGirl]

On 8/22/2021 at 9:48 AM, greekmom said:

 

6. Did it seem that Bill and Ji-Yoon had a history? I wonder if Bill cheated on his wife at some point with her.

 

 

 

I don't think so. I think there was significant mutual attraction between them but because he was married they didn't cross the line. It was either Holland Taylor or Yaz who made a comment along the lines of the "barrier no longer being there." Meaning the wife is deceased so now they can pursue the chemistry between them. 

Plus, Ji-Yoon kept stopping things when it started to get too close because she knew he was still grieving, and said as much. I think it would be out-of-character for them to have cheated. 

Edited September 4, 2021 by SailorGirl

[AuntieMame]

There were a bunch of things that I hated about this show. I’m not an academic but I’ve worked at big universities as a young woman. Not to mention attended them. I’m a GenXer, 52 and I think generational placement does affect how people respond to this show after reading all of the comments here. 

First, I hated the elderly professors, all of them because they were ridiculously, unrealistically elderly. Watching Holland Taylor in the first episode I thought to myself, this lady is eighty years old or close to it. It’s the stiffness in the hips and pelvis with most people that’s a giveaway. I checked Wikipedia and the actress is 78 almost 79. Sorry, but it isn’t working having her and her other oldsters play damn near twenty years younger. It isn’t believable. Diapers on the one old guy and nursing home type sleeping and farts for the other guy? C’mon. It made the comic relief painful and weakened the good plot line of how literature is viewed and taught to a generation that has taken a huge step towards literal and cultural illiteracy. Those old professors should have been leading edge generation xers in their late fifties and early sixties. That would have been interesting. Instead we don’t know if university professors really do have an average age of 75 to 80 or if we’re supposed to believe that they’re younger. But with the diapers and asleep all day that just doesn’t track. 

I completely agree about Bill as a stereotypical privileged, white male mess but aren’t the women around those guys still expected to take care of them? Examining the clashing expectations would have been interesting. As for Bill’s non apology apology, I really appreciated other posts here about why that non apology is such bullshit and so offensive. BUT, BUT, but, I thought the reason for the apology being needed was a ton of ridiculous nonsense. The very definition of tempest in a teapot. It wasn’t offensive. Bill was saying nazism was absurd and ridiculous and in the course of lecturing with an engagement he hadn’t shown in a while. Plus, why didn’t more context get posted somewhere? As another poster noted multiple students were filming and and not all students hated Bill. In theory the students deserved a sincere apology but the first needed an actual offense. Though I know that this at least was incredibly realistic. People being canceled because speech is now monitored. 

I’ll stop there but this would be a hate watch for me second season unless the show starts being really critical of the issues it’s trying to explore. It’s like an unedited thesis that shows promise right now, not a fully realized show. Let’s hope Season 2 undoes the growing pains. 

Edited September 4, 2021 by AuntieMame

[shapeshifter]

6 minutes ago, AuntieMame said:

...the elderly professors, all of them because they were ridiculously, unrealistically elderly. Watching Holland Taylor in the first episode I thought to myself, this lady is eighty years old or close to it. It’s the stiffness in the hips and pelvis with most people that’s a giveaway. I checked Wikipedia and the actress is 78 almost 79. Sorry, but it isn’t working having her and her other oldsters play damn near twenty years younger. It isn’t believable. Diapers on the one old guy and nursing home type sleeping and farts for the other guy? C’mon....

But were Holland Taylor (age 78 years)/Professor Joan Hambling, Bob Balaban (age 76 years)/Professor Elliot Rentz, and Ron Crawford (age 75 years)/Professor John McHale playing 20, or even 10 years younger???
I thought the actors were playing 5-10 years older. I haven't seen Holland Taylor in any of her other recent roles, but I would assume her stiff walk was to appear older. 
But you seem to be right, @AuntieMame! 
Joan said she hadn't looked at student evaluations since 1987, or 33 years earlier (assuming the setting is 2020).
I think they alluded to this being the first year she had tenure, which often takes 7 years, which puts her hiring around 1980, or 40 years ago.
So, even to be 77 in 2020, she would have to be hired at age 37, which only makes sense if she had first worked at another college, or if she took time off to stay home with children, which I think they said she did not?

I'm now tempted to cry "Ageism!" against the show, except the professors I've seen retire usually do so around Holland Taylor's real age in 2020 of 77, so playing 80 fits the story line to me. Maybe the script needed someone to check their math?

IDK. More thoughts @AuntieMame or anyone?

[AuntieMame]

17 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

But were Holland Taylor (age 78 years)/Professor Joan Hambling, Bob Balaban (age 76 years)/Professor Elliot Rentz, and Ron Crawford (age 75 years)/Professor John McHale playing 20, or even 10 years younger???
I thought the actors were playing 5-10 years older. I haven't seen Holland Taylor in any of her other recent roles, but I would assume her stiff walk was to appear older. 
But you seem to be right, @AuntieMame! 
Joan said she hadn't looked at student evaluations since 1987, or 33 years earlier (assuming the setting is 2020).
I think they alluded to this being the first year she had tenure, which often takes 7 years, which puts her hiring around 1980, or 40 years ago.
So, even to be 77 in 2020, she would have to be hired at age 37, which only makes sense if she had first worked at another college, or if she took time off to stay home with children, which I think they said she did not?

I'm now tempted to cry "Ageism!" against the show, except the professors I've seen retire usually do so around Holland Taylor's real age in 2020 of 77, so playing 80 fits the story line to me. Maybe the script needed someone to check their math?

IDK. More thoughts @AuntieMame or anyone?

Thanks @shapeshifter!! It really does call a lot of the show into question doesn’t it? 
 

I think someone needed to check their math both literally and culturally. People in academia don’t work into their seventies unless they’re absolute superstars and even then. This would be more scientific superstars that add patents to the university coffers or still publishing crossover academic bestsellers ala Elaine Pagels. Except that Pagels was in her forties when the Gnostic Gospels were published. She might still have an office at Princeton and the very occasional seminar but she’s still receiving medals in the humanities and the late career lionization and I very much doubt that she’s keeping Princeton from hiring younger professors.
 

So the old profs would be people my age and a bit older. People in the second half of their fifties and early sixties who are often retired early unless they’re the real superstars. In any field, not just academia. I remember people in their fifties getting bought out when I was a whippersnapper of thirty in the corporate world. So the old guard fighting the holding action would be five to fifteen years older than Ji Yoon. Colleagues, friends and mentors. People you would fight some for. But fighting for people that played like they had one foot in the grave? And needed diapers and a nursing home? When the Dean told you to retire them? When they were all at least a decade beyond retirement age? And most likely wouldn’t suffer? And you needed the salary budget to save the department and the college in culturally shifting times? I didn’t understand why the three oldsters weren’t at the local senior center filling out their social security paperwork. 
 

It’s true that there aren’t enough jobs in academia for the Ph.Ds that are trained. It’s also true that Boomers born in the late fifties and very early sixties might be out staying their professional welcome in some fields but this was so badly done that it threw everything off for me. 
 

Our young people need a way to direct their energies. That’s clear. Because even though it’s supposed to be justice and righteous, cancel culture and the culture of offense just baffles me. By the measure of the Nazi salute brou haha?  We will no longer be able to watch Charlie Chaplin sending up Hitler in The Great Dictator or Modern Times. The professor (however annoying the rest of the time) wasn’t doing anything worse than Chaplin bouncing the world on his butt dressed as Hitler. 
 

I’m hoping for a better second season because this show could have been sharp and clever about a lot of things but instead of exploring it built straw men while ignoring the flesh and blood issues. 

[possibilities]

9 hours ago, SailorGirl said:

Plus, Ji-Yoon kept stopping things when it started to get too close because she knew he was still grieving, and said as much. I think it would be out-of-character for them to have cheated. 

At one point, when he was thinking she was going to say yes to sex, Bill said "I've wanted this to happen for so long" or something similar, which to me implies they had not actually done it before.

 

My biggest beef with the show is that it basically showed Ji-yoon to be her own worst enemy, more loyal to and basically co-dependent with the man she wanted to bone and the past their prime dudes who came before her and were now hampering progress. She put them over herself and Yaz and the students and the department. Institutional sexism was not actually the problem here. She was actually acting on what looked to me like internalized patriarchy rather than being hampered by the real stuff out there.

[shapeshifter]

8 hours ago, possibilities said:

My biggest beef with the show is that it basically showed Ji-yoon to be her own worst enemy, more loyal to and basically co-dependent with the man she wanted to bone and the past their prime dudes who came before her and were now hampering progress. She put them over herself and Yaz and the students and the department. Institutional sexism was not actually the problem here. She was actually acting on what looked to me like internalized patriarchy rather than being hampered by the real stuff out there.

Wow. Somehow I missed that Ji-Yoon really was "acting on…internalized patriarchy rather than being hampered by the real stuff out there."  And I can't recall reading an interview with Sandra Oh where she mentions it. But you have really nailed it, @possibilities!

Edited September 5, 2021 by shapeshifter

[AuntieMame]

Exploring the internalized patriarchy, misogyny and racism while contrasting these things with the well intentioned but often insincere wokeness would be interesting. Not to mention a little dangerous in our current moment. 

[pasdetrois]

I enjoyed this through the lens of having two best friends who are West Coast professors (one tenured) and an in-law who is tenured at an Ivy League school. I have spent most of my adult life listening to them tell stories about what university teaching is really like.

That said, all three of them adore their students and suffered during the pandemic/virtual teaching trials, not being able to interact personally with the kids. Two of them love research and writing and prefer them to teaching. Two of them have made excellent money and they all have great benefits. And their own children received phenomenal, free educations.

I know it was intentional, but Duplass was so disheveled that he looked like he smelled. Ugh to the man/boy characterization.

Oh is a goddess, as is Taylor, and I will enjoy either of them in anything.

Some of the script and visual gags were hilarious. But a lot of this was steeped in tired tropes.

 

Edited September 6, 2021 by pasdetrois

[Diapason Untuned]

On 9/4/2021 at 6:12 PM, AuntieMame said:

As for Bill’s non apology apology, I really appreciated other posts here about why that non apology is such bullshit and so offensive. BUT, BUT, but, I thought the reason for the apology being needed was a ton of ridiculous nonsense. The very definition of tempest in a teapot. It wasn’t offensive. Bill was saying nazism was absurd and ridiculous and in the course of lecturing with an engagement he hadn’t shown in a while. 

For me, the issue was not so much Bill's gaffe with the Nazi salute, but how his lazy, privileged way of dealing with the issue escalated it far more than it needed to go.

All he had to do at the start was sign the HR letter, lay low for a few weeks to a month (and use that time to get his shit together) and that would have been the end of the matter. But he refused because he thought the students would "smell the bullshit", so he goes up there and gives a insincere apology and guess what, the students smelled the bullshit and the whole thing went from bad to worse. 

Bill is the reason it became such a big issue, no one else. Literally everyone warned him about it too, but he ignored them because he felt he could just snap his fingers and make it go away.

[qtpye]

13 minutes ago, Diapason Untuned said:

For me, the issue was not so much Bill's gaffe with the Nazi salute, but how his lazy, privileged way of dealing with the issue escalated it far more than it needed to go.

All he had to do at the start was sign the HR letter, lay low for a few weeks to a month (and use that time to get his shit together) and that would have been the end of the matter. But he refused because he thought the students would "smell the bullshit", so he goes up there and gives a insincere apology and guess what, the students smelled the bullshit and the whole thing went from bad to worse. 

Bill is the reason it became such a big issue, no one else. Literally everyone warned him about it too, but he ignored them because he felt he could just snap his fingers and make it go away.

Yes.

If anyone asks me what this show is about, I would say, "A guy wallowing in his sorrow and everybody catering to him because he is supposed to be that awesome".

Oh, and there might be some stuff about academia. 

[tvfanatic13]

JuJu certainly looked Asian. I wasn’t paying attention half the time- was she Mexican?

[shapeshifter]

36 minutes ago, tvfanatic13 said:

JuJu certainly looked Asian. I wasn’t paying attention half the time- was she Mexican?

Yes, because JuJu was doing a Mexican Day of the Dead presentation for her class to represent her ethnic heritage.
The young actor's IMDb page says she's of Italian descent. imdb.com/name/nm9027655/bio

Edited September 7, 2021 by shapeshifter

[roseslg]

On 9/4/2021 at 8:56 PM, AuntieMame said:

Thanks @shapeshifter!! It really does call a lot of the show into question doesn’t it? 
 

I think someone needed to check their math both literally and culturally. People in academia don’t work into their seventies unless they’re absolute superstars and even then. This would be more scientific superstars that add patents to the university coffers or still publishing crossover academic bestsellers ala Elaine Pagels. Except that Pagels was in her forties when the Gnostic Gospels were published. She might still have an office at Princeton and the very occasional seminar but she’s still receiving medals in the humanities and the late career lionization and I very much doubt that she’s keeping Princeton from hiring younger professors.
 

So the old profs would be people my age and a bit older. People in the second half of their fifties and early sixties who are often retired early unless they’re the real superstars. In any field, not just academia. I remember people in their fifties getting bought out when I was a whippersnapper of thirty in the corporate world. So the old guard fighting the holding action would be five to fifteen years older than Ji Yoon. Colleagues, friends and mentors. People you would fight some for. But fighting for people that played like they had one foot in the grave? And needed diapers and a nursing home? When the Dean told you to retire them? When they were all at least a decade beyond retirement age? And most likely wouldn’t suffer? And you needed the salary budget to save the department and the college in culturally shifting times? I didn’t understand why the three oldsters weren’t at the local senior center filling out their social security paperwork. 
 

It’s true that there aren’t enough jobs in academia for the Ph.Ds that are trained. It’s also true that Boomers born in the late fifties and very early sixties might be out staying their professional welcome in some fields but this was so badly done that it threw everything off for me. 
 

Our young people need a way to direct their energies. That’s clear. Because even though it’s supposed to be justice and righteous, cancel culture and the culture of offense just baffles me. By the measure of the Nazi salute brou haha?  We will no longer be able to watch Charlie Chaplin sending up Hitler in The Great Dictator or Modern Times. The professor (however annoying the rest of the time) wasn’t doing anything worse than Chaplin bouncing the world on his butt dressed as Hitler. 
 

I’m hoping for a better second season because this show could have been sharp and clever about a lot of things but instead of exploring it built straw men while ignoring the flesh and blood issues. 

My FIL is a professor in his 70s. He's in Sociology. I've had professors during undergrad (in English) who were in their 70s.  I work at an R1 uni. They are always trying to get folks to retire.

[Ms Blue Jay]

I knew several professors in their 70s when I was in uni.  I had a professor who was nearly blind; he could not see our raised hands or read the chalkboard.  I'm not saying senior citizens go blind or something, but ...... he was very old and frail.

@stealinghome, I loved your post on this show.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Ms Blue Jay

[MicheleinPhilly]

I've only just finished this and feel like I may need to re-visit as a binge as my sporadic viewing left a lot to be desired. 

I enjoyed this a LOT more than many others but some of that may have been attributable to my time as an admin assistant to the Dean of our college of Arts and Sciences when I was an undergrad. I was able to witness so many of these shenanigans close up and it was almost scary how well Amanda Peet translated it here. I'm familiar with Peet as an actress but don't know anything else about her so I'm curious as to how she was able to pull this off. 

I adore Sandra Oh and would watch a season of The Bachelor if she was on but I actually felt like she was somehow under-utilized here (again, a binge may be in order.) Not in terms of screen time, but how every single thing she did seemed to revolve around fucking Bill. 🙄 I loathed Bill with the fire of a thousand suns and hated to see this seemingly professionally competent woman derailed at every turn by this disheveled buffoon. Admin isn't for everyone and I was thrilled to see her so in her element teaching at the end, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise? 🤷‍♀️

JuJu is a budding psychopath. Ji-Yoon should just give her to Bill and pay them to move away. 

Holland Taylor was the show's MVP for me. 

I really enjoyed the explorations of ageism, sexism, racism, cancel culture, etc. but feel like the show gave those topics short shrift in this 30-minute, 6-episode format. I would 100% follow this for a second season but feel that it wrapped up nicely enough and isn't necessarily needed. 

[qtpye]

43 minutes ago, MicheleinPhilly said:

I've only just finished this and feel like I may need to re-visit as a binge as my sporadic viewing left a lot to be desired. 

I enjoyed this a LOT more than many others but some of that may have been attributable to my time as an admin assistant to the Dean of our college of Arts and Sciences when I was an undergrad. I was able to witness so many of these shenanigans close up and it was almost scary how well Amanda Peet translated it here. I'm familiar with Peet as an actress but don't know anything else about her so I'm curious as to how she was able to pull this off. 

I adore Sandra Oh and would watch a season of The Bachelor if she was on but I actually felt like she was somehow under-utilized here (again, a binge may be in order.) Not in terms of screen time, but how every single thing she did seemed to revolve around fucking Bill. 🙄 I loathed Bill with the fire of a thousand suns and hated to see this seemingly professionally competent woman derailed at every turn by this disheveled buffoon. Admin isn't for everyone and I was thrilled to see her so in her element teaching at the end, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise? 🤷‍♀️

JuJu is a budding psychopath. Ji-Yoon should just give her to Bill and pay them to move away. 

Holland Taylor was the show's MVP for me. 

I really enjoyed the explorations of ageism, sexism, racism, cancel culture, etc. but feel like the show gave those topics short shrift in this 30-minute, 6-episode format. I would 100% follow this for a second season but feel that it wrapped up nicely enough and isn't necessarily needed. 

Amen to everything you said.

[AuntieMame]

Who knew there were so many people in their seventies still holding professorships? Granted, it has been well over twenty years since I was at a university so the professors I knew in their forties and fifties would be in their seventies now. If this is the case, why the hell aren’t they retiring? I know college professor is one of those careers that falls into the nice work if you can get it category but I’ve never gotten the feeling that it is the kind of vocation where you want to die in harness as with some physician scientists I’ve known. A professor that was a true scholar would welcome retirement as time with their books and writing unsullied by the demands of academia. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t retire. For so many reasons, only one of which is allowing the next two generations behind you to progress, this just seems crazy to me. Thank you to the posters who’ve seen these creatures on the hoof. 

[pasdetrois]

Many baby boomers' retirement plans were scuttled by the recession plus COVID. If a professor held onto a job, a spouse may not have, the young adult children may not have been able to find jobs, or the boomers' parents have needed expensive care. Many of us "should retire" boomers have financial responsibilities we were not expecting.

[Black Knight]

On 8/26/2021 at 11:32 AM, DearEvette said:

I was also pretty  disappointed that Yaz got no interiority. Her issues are facts.  100%.  But I felt we saw Yaz's story from an outsider sympathetic gaze and not from how the person inside the issue would see it.  Maybe they felt that wouldn't be funny?  I dunno.  But it also impacted my reception of the show.

And finally, I know it is also pretty realistic, but I was also very disappointed that the show chose to make Bill's issues and story such a main plot propeller.  We've seen Bill on 1,000 other shows.  We haven't seen Ji-Yoon.

Having just finished this - I watched 3.5 episodes, then had to take a two-week break because I can't stand Bill, then finished the series just now - I have to say it's not particularly surprising when you look at who's behind the show: Two mediocre white guys and the woman who's married to one of the mediocre white guys, who cast Bill with someone who just happens to look like a bit schlubbier version of the woman's husband. Bill's the one they all really wanted to center the show on, with name actress and thus hook Sandra Oh being the ostensible lead whose story is actually also centered largely on her infatuation with and cleaning up after Bill, while the black woman gets zero interiority and little screentime.

Further food for thought is that Benioff and Weiss were the subject of think pieces for their atrocious handling of race on their previous TV show and then had their first proposed follow-up quickly axed after the announcement of it, when people pointed out that maybe doing an AU series where the Confederacy won might not be the greatest idea. So you can see where Bill is especially relatable for them.

If there's a second season, I'm not bothering watching. I have little tolerance for the incompetent man-baby archetype, and Jay Duplass, who I didn't like on Transparent either, is not the actor to change that for me. The rest of the characters/actors are great, if only they got more screentime in certain cases and in other cases didn't have to have their stories center on Bill, but with Peet, Benioff and Weiss in charge I doubt anything much is changing. Bill's the real lead.

I'd like to watch the version of this show where it was headed up by Peet's co-creator Annie Julia Wyman, who has the background in academia that enabled the show to be true in all those details, and someone else who was actually interested in really writing for Ji-Yoon and Yaz, while making Bill a secondary character. Oh well.

[cambridgeguy]

On 9/20/2021 at 6:27 PM, AuntieMame said:

Who knew there were so many people in their seventies still holding professorships? Granted, it has been well over twenty years since I was at a university so the professors I knew in their forties and fifties would be in their seventies now. If this is the case, why the hell aren’t they retiring? I know college professor is one of those careers that falls into the nice work if you can get it category but I’ve never gotten the feeling that it is the kind of vocation where you want to die in harness as with some physician scientists I’ve known. A professor that was a true scholar would welcome retirement as time with their books and writing unsullied by the demands of academia. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t retire. For so many reasons, only one of which is allowing the next two generations behind you to progress, this just seems crazy to me. Thank you to the posters who’ve seen these creatures on the hoof. 

Let's see, it's decent money.  You get to (kind of) set your own schedule, which usually means you don't have to drive in every day.  Unless you commit a crime or have inappropriate relations with a student you won't be fired.  You've probably aren't angling for another job (i.e. dean, chair, etc.) so you don't have to care about being diplomatic.  It's not a physically taxing job.  You can probably get away with teaching the same set of classes, so there's not much prep work there.  You still have plenty of time to write, read, etc. 

And if you're blocking a new person from coming in?  Well, it's obviously the administration's fault for not allocating enough resources to allow for the hire of someone new without pushing out a current faculty first.

[shapeshifter]

2 hours ago, cambridgeguy said:

You can probably get away with teaching the same set of classes, so there's not much prep work there.

The really good tenured, older professors redo their material at least every couple of years.
It wasn't clear to me if Joan was one of the better ones.

[memememe76]

I am very disappointed that Ji-Yoon lost her position as Chair. And to a white woman. And the show made this seem like a good thing? And with Joan as Chair, why would Yaz hightail it to Yale? Why would Yaz expect Joan to have her back when she didn’t have Ji-Yoon’s. 
 

I watched this show knowing nothing about it but that it started Sandra Oh. I am sad that the show never really centred Oh as the actual lead. It was like an academic version of House, and I hated House.
 

Man, I hate JuJu.