Campus politics and the college novel

In this study, the researcher asks: how can college novels help us to understand the impact of internal and external political influence on the college campus? A close textual reading, along with a new historicist approach to the study of literature, which relies on an inductive process that asks literature what it can tell us about history, were used to analyze the college novel for its portrayal of institutional and personal responses to political influence on the college campus. While focusing on conformity and nonconformity and its effect on institutional neutrality and academic freedom, this thesis probes the novels for their depiction of campus politics influenced by academic stereotypes, campus power relations, socialization into campus culture, affirmative action, diversification of the curriculum, campus speech codes, and sexual harassment regulation. Simultaneously, the examination centers on the ideological prejudices and hierarchical divisions associated with interventions, such as McCarthyism, on the American college campus in the last fifty years.; American college novels written between the years of 1950 and 2000 are included in this investigation. In this dissertation, the researcher shows how these novels provide a more revealing picture of campus politics than any scholarly publication. By using satire, the novelists are able to push controversy on the college and university campus to the extreme. It allows novelists certain latitude not granted to authors of scholarly works. Satire can bring about social change by illuminating readers about the intended and most importantly the unintended consequences of relying too heavily upon formal rules (i.e. governmental and campus policies) and informal rules (i.e. pushing for harmony on campus at all costs). While the novels do not offer a definitive word, or a quantifiable term, regarding campus behavior, they do offer an understanding about how certain campus constituencies might act when placed in some of the most volatile and/or sensitive situations on the college campus.