Is the Campus Novel Dead?
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Stephanie Land didn’t know about office hours. She saw them listed on every syllabus during her undergraduate years at the University of Montana, but she didn’t know they were dedicated blocks of time where students could develop mentorships with their instructors, ask for clarity about curriculum, or inquire about scholarships and recommendation letters. She understood that networking was part of “the college experience,” but she assumed those opportunities were reserved for graduate students or an elite cohort of especially gifted undergrads. “I had no idea that as an Algebra 1 student, I could go to my instructor’s office during this hour and ask them questions about the assignment,” Land said. She considers office hours part of the “hidden curriculum” of academic jargon and social codes that excluded students like herself: a decade older than most of her peers and working multiple jobs to support her daughter.
Land’s new memoir Class, a follow-up to her smash debut Maid, spans her senior year of college, when, for a time, she subsisted on peanut butter and grape juice. She also noticed parallels between her experience as a low-income college student and her daughter’s experience as the kindergarten-age child of a low-income mother. “I saw how difficult it was just to get myself physically to class,” she said, citing a broken-down car, exhaustion, lack of food, and the stress that compounded all of those things. “It was important to me to show all of that.”
Land’s experience is increasingly common in real life, but rarely seen in fiction. We often associate the phrase “campus novel” with coming-of-age stories set in the constructed reality of a cloistered campus bubble (which is frequently a microcosm for the wider world). These narratives tend to have a built-in sense of urgency thanks to their semester-based timeline, and they often take the form of a love story, traditional or not. But for many of today’s students, the stakes are higher. And now, those stakes are starting to appear on the page.
Katherine Damm teaches a course on “campus fiction” at Marymount Manhattan College. Her Gen Z students’ experiences have diverged from the campus novel mostly, she said, due to “bigger-picture financial trends” like anxiety over student loans, the necessity of working multiple jobs while in school, and choosing a major based around future employability. In many campus novels (like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, for example) the protagonist is a scholarship student who is an “isolated atypical figure” in a “place of wealth,” according to Damm, but “with the shrinking middle class and the rising costs of education, it's actually the norm for students to be navigating financial aid, working part-time jobs, and figuring out loans.”
Many of the student discussions in Damm’s classroom have focused on money, but also a desire to see non-traditional student paths like Land’s represented in fiction—students dropping out and returning to school, taking more or less than four years to graduate, or commuting to school rather than living on campus. Damm’s students “are aware of the reality that the four-year college experience is becoming increasingly rare,” she said. “Or it's not the expectation, necessarily.” And while they have no desire to see COVID-era virtual school represented on the page, they would like to read a post-grad novel about Gen Z’s coming-of-age on the other side of hybrid learning.
Molly McGhee, who has written extensively about student debt, and whose surrealist novel Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind tackles debt head-on, believes that “student loans are going to be a stain on our existence for quite a long time.” Meanwhile, Caroline O’Donoghue’s debut The Rachel Incident features platonic soulmates who meet at their off-campus job at a bookstore, based loosely on her own experience working at a megastore while attending a regional university in Ireland during the global recession that started in 2008. “My campus experience happened off-campus while working in a part-time job,” she said.
Michelle Hart set her novel We Do What We Do in the Dark during that recession. “I was in college then and there was a sense of feeling at once cocooned and utterly doomed,” she said. “We didn't know what we were going to graduate into. Some of us didn't even know if we were going to graduate at all. The future was so uncertain. I imagine Gen Z feels this tenfold.”
Today’s students, it seems, are never not thinking about money. Lynn Steger Strong, whose novel Want is a precarity novel set in the world of academia, said that her students at Columbia and Princeton “are so aware of the ways that this won't work”—this being the occupation of writing. “There is a level of fear in the world right now that's so intense,” she continued. She herself thinks of the campus as an “endlessly precarious place” where students are fighting for a prosperous future as contingent laborers (think: adjuncts) are always fighting for another semester of employment.
Hart—whose novel centers on a romantic relationship between a student and an adjunct—said it was a conscious choice to make the love interest an adjunct and not a professor, because the ethics of the relationship would be more complicated. She herself was an adjunct for four years, and during that time, she felt “part of the world but also apart from it.” She added, “You're on your own for health insurance. You're on your own in general, a free agent. You're a steward of your students' future—how can you not take that super seriously? But how much energy an adjunct is putting into the relationship is a little more complex.”
Contingent labor also means that students are navigating shifting power dynamics in the classroom, as many of their teachers are not full-time faculty at the university. “Anyone who is contingent is much more at the mercy of their students and has much less power than they have historically had,” said Steger Strong. That insecurity, she continued, “inevitably seeps its way into the classroom in terms of fear of losing your appointment because of a student evaluation.” According to data gathered in 2021 by the American Association of University Professors, 68% of American college instructors are contingent laborers.
“The idea that the power lives with the professor—and then that power is wielded in complicated and interesting narrative ways—makes for a good campus novel,” Steger Strong explained. “But it's much more complicated now because there's this ‘customer service’ feeling of being an adjunct professor. I always felt like I was singing for my supper because I was an adjunct. It took me awhile to clock the ways that some of the students knew that, too.”
Hart agrees that there’s a “blurred-line liminality to adjuncting that might further complicate the already complicated student-teacher dynamic.” Social media has made higher education “more and more public,” Hart said, with students posting about their classes, dissecting the texts on the syllabus, or calling out professors’ behavior. This access to the wider world beyond the campus, and access to the campus from the wider world, means that the campus bubble is less of a bubble today—and thus, the stakes of the campus novel are more in tune with the real world.
Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans features a cast of characters attending graduate school in Iowa as they also work part-time jobs and interact with locals who have nothing to do with the university. “College towns are incredibly diverse places in terms of class and culture,” he told Esquire in the spring. “Before they were college towns, often they were just towns where people lived and worked. It's like any industry town. Where I've landed in my practice is thinking of college towns as industry towns, where it just so happens that the industry is this weird academic setting.”
The cloistered nature of a campus long made for a constructed reality where, according to Vladimir author Julia May Jonas, “what can happen inside of that constructed reality can be earth-shaking.” In the constructed reality of a campus, every glance is charged with the knowledge that you will never be this young and beautiful again, so you may as well take advantage of your beauty. Every night out is charged with possibility. Every day spent in community with your closest friends is charged with the dread that unless everyone makes a sincere effort, you will likely never again live in the same city with all of these people at the same time. A campus plot might not be as high-stakes anywhere else in the world, because the stakes of the real world would be totally different. Nash Jenkins, author of Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, said the campus itself “provides a sort of infrastructure that makes emotional intensities more coherent and less solipsistic.”
But this is no longer entirely true, as the borders between the campus and “real life” are much more porous, and the campus is open for public scrutiny. We see this in Vladimir, where the protagonist, a professor reeling in the wake of her husband’s sexual misconduct scandal, “felt herself to be for the majority of her life on the right side of history, then felt like the world shifted underneath her, and found herself to be somehow on the wrong side of history,” Jonas said.
Some students are mourning that cloistered feel. One of Damm’s students told her that they don’t want the campus novel “to look more like college,” she recalled. If the student got their wish, “College would look more like the campus novel.” For some students, the fantasy or wish fulfillment element of a campus novel is a feature, not a bug, because the realist campus novel is so obviously a fantasy. That the campus novel is a fantasy is a core tenet of “dark academia” Instagram and TikTok accounts that channel books like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
“When I think of those classic, white, typically East Coast liberal arts campus novels, to me, they're so foreign from my experience that I never saw them as anything else than a genre,” said author Elaine Hsieh Chou, who compared the campus novel to 19th century Russian novels in terms of relevance to her life. “I always viewed them as telling a certain type of story that doesn't relate to me.”
Hsieh Chou attended U.C. Irvine, a large public university whose student body was 60% Asian during her time there. “That’s where I really came to learn about Asian American identity,” she said. Her novel Disorientation deals with the ways white supremacy has affected East Asian studies; it was sparked by Hsieh Chou’s viewing of the 2014 film Dear White People. “It was about racial tensions and how we relate to race in America, but it was set on a campus,” she said. In fiction, she was inspired by Don Lee’s The Collective and Percival Everett’s Erasure, which was recently adapted into the film American Fiction by Cord Jefferson.
In addition to seeing the campus novel adopt more nuanced perspectives on race, Hsieh Chou suggested, “I'd love us to start breaking open the genre in terms of recognizing the subcategories within the campus novel.” For example, what is the role of education in coming-of-age stories set abroad, where people attend college later in their twenties? Hsieh Chou asked, “How would a global understanding shift our very American way of understanding them?”
Gen Z’s coming-of-age has been both porous and fractured. As a result, McGhee said, “They're looking towards traditional models with yearning. Somebody who's just now leaving home, who's in their early twenties or late teens, has been looking toward that narrative with hope.” When students get to college and see that campuses still reflect some realities of living through a pandemic, she said, “I would imagine it would be hard not to yearn for a more traditional, mythic ideal of the life that you're living.”
There are probably dozens of Gen Z authors furiously writing their own takes on the realist campus novel. But because the publishing cycle is notoriously slow, it will be a few years before we start seeing them on shelves. Whether these books show students splitting their time between the campus and service-industry jobs, road-tripping across America while studying remotely during COVID, or starting their creative careers while still in school, these “campus novels” might have less to do with the actual campus than in generations past.
As for Land, she was motivated to write Class about her college experience partly because she wanted to write the story she wished she’d had as a student. The only “bootstrap-y college story” that felt authentic to Land was Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, which discusses the author’s experience going to school alongside her mother. “College is a very isolating and lonely existence for a lot of people,” Land said. “I really yearned for some kind of accurate representation of what I was going through, and I never was able to find it.”
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