Melrose Place, 1992. What happened?

When I was in New York last month, I ran across several ads on bus stops and phone booths for the new Melrose Place. These ads had charming, subtle catch-phrases on them, like "Tuesday's the new hump day" or "Tuesdays are a bitch." I admit, I didn't recall the old Melrose Place to be a particularly subtle series, but I thought these ads were tacky even by Melrose Place standards.

Because I hadn't seen the original Melrose Place since I was a child, I decided to watch the first season for free on CBS.com. I was shocked to discover that the show didn't actually start off as the crazy prime time soap opera filled with wicked villains that existed in my memory. The characters were full of ordinary brokenness, sad childhoods, unfulfilled dreams, and lots of ABC after-school special plotlines. The show starts with the sexually harassing boss that gets sued in the end. The offending harasser was not even a resident at Melrose Place; it's one of the poor young residents who has to cope with being harassed by her boss and rescued by her roommate. When some of the characters do something bad, it's out of stupidity or irrationality or accidental cruelty, but deep down they are all good people capable of apologies and redemption. Even the doctor, Michael Mancini, whom I remember as viciously evil, is just a kind of goofy and insensitive husband in those first episodes, capable of being devoted and loving when required. And the sex, well, there was some sex early on, but it wasn't exactly steamy. And the show tried to tackle serious topics like discrimination against Matt because he's gay, tensions between African American and Anglo Angelenos in the wake of the riots (the show first aired in 1992), domestic abuse, student loan repayment in a weak job market, and twenty-somethings lacking health insurance. It was amazing to see that the characters were realistically struggling to make ends meet. Of course, virtually none of the original characters could live in the apartment complex now in a much more expensive Los Angeles (even in a recession). A taxi driver, a receptionist, an aerobics instructor, a waitress, a mechanic.

So how did Melrose Place go from the ABC after-school special for twenty-somethings to the prototype of soap opera? I don't know; I haven't watched that far into the show. I do wonder if it's when Heather Locklear shows up, but I also wonder about what caused the shift (besides the beautiful blonde vixen). Was it a move to get better ratings? Or did viewer tastes change leaving behind the 1980s and moving into the 1990s? Was it about Bill Clinton and the end of Reagan-Bush; did the change in presidents signal a change in era, a higher desire for steamy subplots and catharsis watching truly wicked villains? What about 90210? Was 90210 a family-friendly drama once upon a time too that became the master of melodrama only after a while?

I haven't seen the new show; I doubt it's premiered yet. But the ads suggest that it will start out with high melodrama, outrageous villains, and plenty of sex from day one. What was the shift in popular culture that accounts for the very different series starts?

Blaming the faculty yet again

So I'm not completely sure what it is about professors that makes other professionals despise them so much. Maybe it's their narcissistic smug superiority, a characteristic that makes me despise spending time with many academics. Whatever it is, it may lead to the end of what's good about university life, because it seems like activists from the "liberal media" through to conservative bloggers are determined to make college faculty members into hyper controlled high school teachers, with no time for research or the life of the mind. Only teach what we can measure empirically. We live in a society that has fallen so in love with corporate capitalism, even though it has royally screwed most of us at least as often as it has helped us, that we refuse to allow that there are things we do, like police, healthcare, and education that probably shouldn't be profit driven.

Today, the New York Times questioned why college tuition goes up even in a recession, and never goes down. This is certainly a question I would like an answer to, but I'm baffled as to why the New York Times focuses the first part of the article on how cutting university costs is so difficult because of those pain-in-the-ass faculty (instead of wealthy donors or over-paid bureaucrats, let's say). So, damn those faculty because they fight for a life of the mind, for intellectual engagement that may not have tangible measures, like profit, but has other measures of success. So damn those professors for keeping us from cutting the art budget, which is expensive and brings in no wealthy donor alums.

On the other hand, let's never question why most private colleges spend so much money on sports, when very few sports are a profit revenue except at large schools (most $50,000/year small private liberal arts college spend a lot of money on sports that they certainly "lose" money on; though personally I think it's good the students have the sports to play and engage them physically. I think it's often money well spent, but it's not "profitable."). And let's not question that schools need large bureaucracies and overpaid bureaucrats, or that parents expect their children to have access to top-of-the-line technology, and professors are all expected now to teach in powerpoint and online. No, instead, let's question the comparatively small part of college and university budgets that pay for faculty to take research leave, or let's focus on the fact that professors only teach a few classes a semester. Surely they can teach more classes.

Of course, most faculty, even those at liberal arts colleges where they only teach two or three classes a semester, work 60 hours per week between teaching, working with students, and service to the university; that doesn't include their research time, which they are expected to do to get tenure (which most people working in the academy can no longer aspire to because 50% of professors teaching teach as adjuncts or contract laborers, and not as these tenured faculty anyways), but which the New York Times seems to think is fun hobby work that doesn't really make faculty into better teachers (yeah, I would certainly prefer learning biology from a sixty-year-old professor who still teaches from the biology textbook he learned from forty years earlier in graduate school). And they certainly don't get paid what a less well-educated lawyer or corporate executive gets paid. And the only reason a college professor teaches (especially in the sciences) instead of doing something else more lucrative is to have time in the winter, the summer, and every seven years to do more research, to keep up with their field. So, let's just eliminate the incentive for great scholars to teach as well, and maybe that will fix the university system in this country that we all think needs so much repair. Wouldn't it be better if all those smug brainiacs went and worked in finance too so we could tank the world economy that much faster next time?

And one more thing, I like how the New York Times and others care about the high cost of quality private education now that it is pricing upper middle class students how and hitting their pocketbooks. Twenty years ago, even public education became beyond the reach of much of the lower middle class, but now we have to fix these super expensive private schools because well-to-do parents may have to send their kids to the local public college instead.

Universities do cost more than they should, and there are a million reasons for that, a million things that could and should be changed about that, but why are faculty the first targets of all criticism? They are not likable people, but they are more often than not, hardworking and caring teachers whose research life makes them better at teaching students. There is another danger about really good faculty as James Baldwin observed a long time ago; if they teach too well, then yes, people do tend to question the things about society that are unjust or don't work. So, maybe we should pay faculty less to teach more. Maybe then everyone in this country will get the quality of education that will truly make the U.S. the idiocracy it is already becoming. Well at least we won't have to talk about those pain-in-the-ass, life-of-the-mind faculty since they will no longer exist.