Rooster looks at the virtues of college campus life

There’s been a lot of talk recently dismissing the value of a college education. Look closely and you may notice that those with the loudest voices have college degrees, social standing, good incomes, and high wealth. The two biggest factors influencing social mobility are ascription (family background) and education. This isn’t speculation; it is a fact. Ask any sociologist or simply Google “factors that influence social mobility,” and the responses will echo this. Looking at AI job posts on LinkedIn and other sites tells you that this new technology doesn’t change these factors. The bulk of them call for candidates with college degrees; yet, still, the rhetoric poo pooing the virtues of a college education persists, which is why it is pleasantly surprising to see the new HBO television series, Rooster, offering an alternative point of view.

I must admit that I like movies and TV shows about academia, particularly those centering on the vicissitudes of campus life from the faculty and staff perspective. Rooster, the comedy headed by Steve Carell, is such a show, and it is based on a fictional higher ed institution located in the Northeast called Ludlow College. The liberal arts institution is so quietly wealthy and steeped in tradition that faculty reside in on campus housing—structures more akin to furnished, single-family homes with living spaces like those at the Osthoff Resort than the one-room dormitories typically occupied by students. With cobblestone streets and concrete sidewalks, Ludlow is a self-contained community. Besides athletics teams, it has everyday eateries, a noncasual restaurant, an ice cream shop, and other campus-friendly outlets.

The show opens on a bright but cool, fall day with Steve Carell’s character, Greg Russo, arriving on campus for a scheduled visit. He pauses when he spots a shirtless, shorts-wearing, sixty-something year-old man briskly walking, with water dripping down his body as if he has just climbed out of a pool and decided to go for a run in fifty-five-degree weather without drying off and getting fully dressed first. Momentarily distracted by him, Russo turns to a student nearby to comment on the man but then loses sight of him. This opening scene sets the tone for the show, with the early depiction of Russo as a quirky man who frequently has weird thoughts going through his head. It turns out this quirkiness is not unique to him.

Rooster is named after Russo’s eponymous trade book series about a man who embarks on various adventures, and the best-selling author is on campus to give a lecture about his stories. He is greeted by Dylan Shepherd, an English professor played by Danielle Deadwyler of The Piano Lesson and 40 Acres—dramatic roles that are a complete departure from this one. A poet laureate, she prints students’ poetry in an award-winning publication and has invited Russo to campus to speak about his books. When he expresses to her that he is nervous, she calms him down by telling him if he sees any big words to just skip over them. The only Black professor on campus, Shepherd, like the other characters, is quick-witted, masterful at her subject, and supportive of Ludlow’s students. 

Exemplary of the school’s commitment to students’ development is the exchange that occurs at Russo’s lecture. During the Q & A portion, a female student accuses him of “hat[ing] women” since he compares Rooster’s favorite popsicle flavor to what she interprets as his girlfriend’s genitals. In dismissing this interpretation, Russo adds that the girlfriend is a strong character as demonstrated by her applying a tourniquet to the protagonist when he is injured. A male student, however, interjects, describing this scene as “hot” since the girlfriend had to remove her bra to make the tourniquet, leaving her topless at the time. Russo quickly moves on, but his funny, extemporaneous response to the original question inadvertently lends credibility to the student’s assertion that some aspects of his writing reflect sexism.

Some faculty might be inclined to run interference to protect guest lecturers from embarrassment. The leeway Shepherd allows students to ask such questions, though, regardless of how uncomfortable they might be to guest(s), is indicative of her commitment to the students’ growth. Indeed embarrassed for him, Shepherd scrunches her face as if to signal to Russo that he lost that round of the Q & A.

Walter Mann is the college president, played by John C. McGinley of Scrubs and Stan Against Evil. You might also remember him as Detective Strode from the 1996 theatrical release, Set It Off. As the top school administrators, college presidents typically don’t endear themselves to people on campus; essentially, they are the campus bureaucrats. True to form, Mann is quite eccentric. For instance, he frequently takes important one-on-one meetings in the dry sauna located in his home’s back yard. Upon exiting, he routinely dunks himself in a large tub of ice water which he keeps prepared just outside the door. 

The role of the sauna in the creators’ efforts to humanize Mann is crucial to positioning Ludlow as a community rather than just a college with a set of disparate department agendas. The sauna is where Mann reserves his serious talks with graduate students and faculty. Sometimes the talks are invitations he extends that cannot be declined. At other times, faculty members or graduate students initiate them. In both cases, the understanding is that the meeting will occur in the sauna, which amounts to Mann pulling the “president” card. Interestingly, neither students nor faculty seem to mind.

During these talks, Mann listens intently to the person’s concerns and quandaries before thoughtfully weighing in while wearing only a towel. When a graduate student seeks his advice on accepting or declining an offer at a prestigious research laboratory, she mulls it over with him without any outward appearance of discomfort. As if to show that this is not an anomalous dynamic, her roommate joins several sessions to chime in, again with no apparent unease about being alone with the school president in a sauna where everyone is wearing only a towel. Indeed, the comfort level is so high that the meeting feels more like honest, unequivocal talks over tea with a longtime respected mentor than a school president. As for Mann, it’s as if he realizes he needs to shed the trappings of his office to be accessible and useful to the people he genuinely cares about. As a result, we come to love this bureaucrat who hasn’t forgotten why he became an educator and administrator in the first place.

While Rooster doesn’t get into matters of tenure, the show does get into faculty members’ sometimes complicated relationships with students. Professors are often viewed as standoffish and uppity, and the series includes a few of these. However, it humanizes them by also depicting them with personalities and wanting to develop relationships with their students. For instance, Professor Katie Russo (Charlie Clive), who is also Greg Russo’s daughter, is separated from her husband, Archie, who is also a professor at Ludlow. At times, she lets her lingering affection for Archie slip in class and during conversations over lunch with two of her female students who have what can best be described as a “girl power” friendship trio. When the students go too far in showing their loyalty to their teacher, she tells them to stay out of her personal business but later returns to the group for support.

We also see this when Greg Russo’s students talk him into going to a Friday night kegger. Despite being twenty to thirty years their senior, Russo enjoys being one of the guys so much that he joins them in referring to one of the students by his nickname, over the student’s objections. Russo becomes so exuberant during the night that he overindulges to the point where the group must make him coffee before letting him leave for his home that is just a walk across campus. While drunk, he still has the wherewithal to discourage a student from dropping out of school because he is experiencing academic struggles.

Interestingly, this nurturing of relationships is enabled by Russo’s light and humorous approach to teaching his writing seminar using his book series for the class’s text. To his surprise, students frequently hijack the discussions with comments and questions about his protagonist’s actions. This catches the author off guard, landing him in front of the faculty review committee for unwittingly saying something inappropriate or particularly offensive. For instance, when he announces that Rooster will be used for the seminar, a female student who is disappointed with the reading choice voices her concern, stating “I’m not sure if this will speak to me.” Russo responds facetiously, “Just you wait Ronnie, you are going to be my white whale,” a comment that humorously lands him, yet again, in front of the committee, where again, he clumsily explains he meant it as a metaphor. 

This exchange along with those in his initial lecture, though, highlight generational differences in sensitivities and sensibilities about matters of race, gender, and body image and hints that Russo pens his stories with little consideration of perspectives other than his own. This can lead one to wonder if presenting Carell’s character as a writer was intended to teach aspiring authors some of the pitfalls of writing in isolation.

Rooster suggests that there is something virtuous about college campuses, particularly small liberal arts college campuses, and that there is value in collegiality and coexistence in an environment where students, faculty, and administrators allow space for respectful and mutually supportive relationships. In the case of Ludlow, living on campus together increases opportunities for these groups to bump into one another while crossing the quad, grabbing ice cream, eating a meal, or getting in a shirtless walk after an ice bath because the campus is its own self-contained community. Individuals develop meaningful connections as a result of this sustained and serendipitous contact, and the unique needs of all are better addressed because of it.

Most cinema centered on college campuses are stories about dilemmas students face. They range from Spike Lee’s School Daze about sorority and fraternity clashes to Charles Stone III’s Drumline about a student struggling to get back into the school marching band, to The Paper Chase about a law student struggling to balance his coursework. While different in tone, the show most similar to Rooster is The Education of Max Bickford, a short-lived, 2001 TV series about a history professor that teaches at a college where his daughter is a student. Sound familiar?