Ottessa Moshfegh, a Fired Professor, and a Prudish College President

When creeping puritanism and red-state politics meet, literature loses.

The Chronicle; Istock.

The firing of South Florida State College (SFSC) English professor Vinita Prabhakar for teaching a short story that SFSC’s president, Fred Hawkins, decided was offensive is the most egregious violation of academic freedom I’ve read about since Hamline fired an adjunct art history instructor in 2023. Prabhakar is suing, alleging that SFSC violated Constitutionally-guaranteed academic-freedom rights, as well as Florida state law and the college’s own policies. My guess is that she will win.

Beyond the legal specifics, the case is interesting because of what it’s about: the transgressive power of literature. As Emma Whitford reports at Inside Higher Ed, the text in question is Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” first published in 2013 in the Paris Review. A student in Prabhakar’s class was made “a bit uncomfortable” by the story, and evidently raised the issue with an administrator; eventually, Hawkins himself set aside some Presidential time to read it.

He didn’t like it. Sounding like a cartoon philistine out of a Sinclair Lewis novel, he told Prabhakar that “he would not want his own college-aged daughter” to read “Bettering Myself.” In fact, he didn’t “ever want to see this story again.” The avant-garde can still épater le bourgeois, at least in Florida.

I’m a fan of Moshfegh’s; I once put her Eileen (2015), a funny and nasty little novel narrated by a grotesquely maladjusted female staffer at a boys’ juvenile prison, on the syllabus of a course I taught at Emerson College some years ago. “Bettering Myself” is cut from similar cloth as Eileen and as Moshfegh’s later novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). Its narrator is a depressed teacher at a Catholic school who regularly comes to class drunk and whose pedagogical tactics are unorthodox. Here’s a taste:

[M]y seniors were all very respectful. I was in charge of preparing them for the SAT. They came to me with legitimate questions about math and vocabulary, which I had a hard time answering. A few times in calculus, I admitted defeat and spent the hour jabbering on about my life.

“Most people have had anal sex,” I told them. “Don’t look so surprised.”

And, “My boyfriend and I don’t use condoms. That’s what happens when you trust somebody.”

Or a little later:

I’d been up on bad cocaine and drinking for days. I’d roped a few men back to my apartment and showed them all my belongings, stretched out flesh-colored tights and proposed we take turns hanging each other. Nobody lasted more than a few hours.

This is, for what it’s worth, about as shocking as the story gets. The canons of literary transgression contain many far eviler flowers, from the nineteenth-century decadents to Céline to, say, Bret Easton Ellis. But Moshfegh’s work does get under the skin. Despite the screwball humor — My Year of Rest and Relaxation in particular made me laugh out loud throughout — her work infects the reader with a genuinely deranging perception of what it might feel like to be so depressed that the world becomes unreal. Certainly I can see why it could make a student “a bit uncomfortable.”

It made Hawkins uncomfortable too, which convinced him, in a sign of the times, that “Bettering Myself” is, in his words, “political.” Obviously, there is no academic freedom exception for politically didactic literature; Hawkins’s charge should be irrelevant even if true. But it’s actually a very odd interpretation. While any literary work can be read for its politics, Moshfegh’s story is in no obvious way political art. It would be interesting to hear more from Hawkins about what he takes to be the politics of “Bettering Myself.”

In 2008, the literary scholar Layne Neeper identified a strange contemporary paradox: As popular entertainment becomes ever-more permissive, even extreme, transgressive art and literature have become newly problematic in the classroom. Teachers of “those old war horses of the contemporary seminar Lolita or Naked Lunch,” for instance, now “often find that when such works are to be taught in frank and serious-minded ways, there is … typically a surprising resistance, even outrage, on the part of students who, outside the classroom, are ardent consumers — as are we all — of whatever the popular culture disgorges for our leisure.”

If this was true in 2008, it is even truer now. Prabhakar has been teaching “Bettering Myself” for a decade now; this is the first time, it seems, that anyone complained. Outraged college students, whether Christians at Duke scandalized by Fun Home or social justice warriors at the University of Michigan scandalized by R. Crumb, today demand a curricular puritanism perhaps meant to compensate for the libertine permissiveness of our popular culture.

Student sensitivities are one thing; the sensitivities of college presidents quite another. Until and unless it is reversed by the courts, Hawkins’s imperious firing of Prabhakar will have an extreme chilling effect on the teaching of literature, art history, and similar fields in Florida. Across the country, a reluctance to teach potentially offensive literary material is increasingly widespread. Fear of student sensitivities — some associated with the right, some with the left — was already high; draconian actions by state governments are of course making things worse, especially in red states. But even in solidly blue Michigan, faculty self-censorship appears to be common.

One of the laws Prabhakar’s suit says SFSC violated is Florida’s “Campus Free Expression Act,” supported by Governor Ron DeSantis. Now would be a good time for Florida Republicans to remember that they once purported to be concerned about stuff like that.