Harold and Kumar Go to the Ivy League

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By MARK OPPENHEIMER

The movie about two postcollegiate buddies, one Indian-American and the other Korean-American, in all-night, munchies-inspired pursuit of tasty burgers from their favorite fast-food joint, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, has achieved mild cult status since its release in 2004. It's witty and well acted, and it defies stereotypes, persuasively depicting Harold and Kumar as fully American stoners, not do-gooder children of striving immigrants. The lead actors John Cho and Kal Penn deserve their fame, their million-dollar paychecks, their groupies. Still, one has to wonder: Do they deserve Ivy League teaching jobs?

This spring Penn (whose real name is Kalpen Modi) taught a large lecture class, "Images of Asian Americans in the Media," at the University of Pennsylvania. By most accounts, the class was a success — serious, engaging, and well attended. But there's no question that Penn lacks the normal qualifications for teaching at an elite research university. With no doctorate or scholarly publications, just a strong professional résumé — he's now on Fox's medical drama House — Penn is arguably qualified to teach acting, but not media studies. For that gig, he clearly has his celebrity to thank.

Penn is a particularly newsworthy example of the celebrity professor — which we might define as one who owes his job to fame in the nonacademic world — and because his breakthrough movie is famous for its silliness, it's tempting to dismiss his hiring as a publicity stunt. But he is actually an example of a much wider trend, one that is decades old and appears to be growing. And unlike at least one celebrity professor — Isaac Asimov, the legendary science-fiction writer — Penn actually taught his class.

Asimov, after receiving a doctorate at Boston University, became an instructor there in biochemistry in 1949; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1955, and full professor in 1979; and he held this last title until his death in 1992. But according to Laura Russo, an archivist at the university, Asimov taught only until 1958.

Nobody at BU responded to my queries about why Asimov was still considered a professor, even after he stopped teaching (a spokesman also refused to say if Asimov was paid after he stopped teaching). But it seems safe to assume that his extraordinary fame in the world of science fiction made him an appealing name to have on the faculty roster. Asimov stopped teaching five years after completing his acclaimed Foundation Trilogy, and by 1969 he had published 100 books. His next 100 books took him only until 1979, the year he was made a full professor. What did having Asimov tenuously affiliated with Boston University do for the students there? It's hard to measure an abstract quality like "faculty luster added," but somebody at the university must have valued it highly.

The university has had other celebrity professors, including Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel, Derek Walcott, and the late Saul Bellow. But they are all accomplished writers, to say the least, and arts professors like those complicate the question of when hires are based on merit and when on fame. English faculties, for example, often divide their offerings between classes in literature and classes in creative writing; professors teaching the classes in literature are usually expected to have a doctorate in English, which is to say a degree in literary theory or criticism, while the professors in creative writing may have no advanced degree, not even a master of fine arts. And because even a mildly successful novelist or short-story writer sells far more books than most esteemed literary critics do, the creative-writing professoriate is much more famous than its colleagues with Ph.D.'s. Thus fiction writers like Jim Shepard at Williams College, Lorrie Moore at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Princeton's Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates all have more name recognition than any of their colleagues in, say, the chemistry department.

Law schools, too, are relatively comfortable with celebrities in their midst. As professional schools, they don't mind that some of their faculty members actually practice the profession, although they certainly don't require them to. When Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, argues high-profile appellate cases, getting his name on the evening news does not detract from his professional standing. It surely helped Noah Feldman land a job on the same faculty that he writes for The New York Times Magazine, advised the Iraqi governing council on its interim constitution, and is often on television. Visible service in politics is acceptable, even when that service is ignominious, like that of the "torture memo" author John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. And it doesn't seem to have hurt Kathleen Cleaver's career as a lecturer at the Emory University School of Law that she was a Black Panther and is the ex-wife of Eldridge Cleaver.

Harvard even has a job title appropriate for teachers who have made their mark outside academe. One "professor of the practice," James Wood, currently on a five-year contract in the English department, has never written a traditional scholarly book, nor does he have a doctorate. Instead, he is widely known for his popular criticism in The New Republic and now in The New Yorker, where since last year he has been a staff writer. Unlike writers who teach only their craft, Wood says that he teaches classes that an "ordinary academic" would teach, like his lecture on British and American fiction since World War II. But his experience outside academe gives his pedagogy a different twist.

"I think obviously the fact that I haven't come up through the academy, and that I spend the other half of my life earning a living writing reviews, probably does affect the angle at which I teach," Wood says. "I'm likely to be more evaluative on the success or failure of a piece of work than probably most academics are. We did a Graham Greene novel this term, The End of the Affair, and I decided I didn't like it very much, that it stacked up poorly against [Vladimir Nabokov[']s] Pnin, [Saul Bellow[']s] Seize the Day, [Muriel Spark[']s] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and [V.S. Naipaul[']s] A House for Mr. Biswas. So that became an opportunity to talk to the students about a certain kind of brilliant but professionalized level of conventionality, and to try to get them to think in terms of aesthetic success — in other words, thinking a bit more like a reviewer would than like an academic."

One question Wood's appointment raises, then, is whether it's desirable that students think more like reviewers than like academics — in other words, more like popular reviewers than like scholarly critics. I agree with my friend Bennett Lovett-Graff, who argued on his blog, Polymath Paradise, that most college English classes teach the writing of criticism not because students will ever have to do it — almost none will earn a living that way — but because it gives the professor an excuse to read and talk about good books.

If the goal is equipping students to be thoughtful appreciators of good books, then Wood's mode of criticism may be a better one to teach: It's more connected to a sense of what's "good." That means that it makes sense to hire reviewers for the popular press in addition to theorists who write for scholarly journals and whose classes will be of interest to upper-level students and those bound for graduate school.

"Most [students] are not going to be reviewers," he says. "But we can make them readers of discernment. As a critic, something I have been very interested in is trying to show people why some things are good and why other things are simulacra of the good — that it's a waste of time reading Tom Wolfe if you could be reading more sustaining fiction that does everything he does and more. So in the classroom, as in print, I am trying to set those students up for a lifetime of reading in which they would be taking on more difficult books."

For most of us who try to have such a "lifetime of reading," it is sustained by the continued reading of reviews in newspapers and magazines. That's an ancillary literature that college English teachers should familiarize students with, and for that the best professor will often be a popular, perhaps celebrated, critic.

Which brings us back to Kal Penn's class. How qualified any professor is depends, naturally, on the goal of the class. If the University of Pennsylvania were looking solely to offer the most rigorous, informed course possible on depictions of Asian-Americans in the media, they could find a scholar with more credentials than the actor who plays Kumar Patel. (To be fair, Penn "had three very advanced grad students" for teaching assistants, according to Grace Kao, director of Asian-American studies at the university, and she helped him write the syllabus.) But no class has just one goal. The university would not release Penn's syllabus, and students were required to sign agreements not to speak to the media about it, but one freshman in the class told me that Penn spent a lot of time discussing obstacles faced by Asian-American actors today — a topic that, while not highly theoretical, is important, and is something Penn surely knows about. It's a topic that may open students' minds, even if it doesn't stretch their abstract thinking.

Rahima Dosani, a junior who did not take Penn's class but who is active in Asian-American issues on the campus, was frank about an obvious value in having Penn teach. "For a small and flailing department like Asian-American studies," she said in an e-mail message, "that is constantly underfunded (we had to have a serious fight with the administration this year about cutting our funding, a battle which we thankfully won), I think having Kal Penn here was a great and necessary boost for the department. … Many new students took the class. This allowed us to get our name out, and we will hopefully increase enrollment in the future, which is key to sustaining our program."

If Dosani is right, then a celebrity professor can have a usefulness beyond what his credentials would suggest. In that regard, Professor Kal Penn is like the actor Kal Penn. The Harold-and-Kumar movies aren't good, not if by "good" we mean, well, good. But Kal Penn and John Cho are pathbreaking movie stars, the most recognizable young actors of their respective ethnicities, playing roles we don't expect for Indian- and Korean-Americans. Penn has expanded our ideas of what roles his people can play — just as he has helped introduce college students to a discipline they might otherwise have avoided.

Is Asian-American studies as mind-altering as the pot Kumar is always urging on Harold? Maybe not, but it too is probably worth a try.

Mark Oppenheimer edits the New Haven Review, coordinates the Yale Journalism Initiative, and is author, most recently, of Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).