Lords of Serendipity

This story is a satirical depiction of the many dysfunctions of the western university system as it relates to students coming from third world nations. I read this book because it was reviewed favorably in the WSJ and it had a nice cover blurb from Gary Shteyngart. The story is amusing and has depictions of student cheating, academic cheating, AI usurpation of liberal arts, all manner of performative political correctness by students and administrators, scams carried out against foreign students. Is this a fair account of academic folly? Who knows but it has some good prose and plausible plot lines.

The story has a number of protagonists but in the US, it follows Jack Bayern an associate professor of statistics at a small private college. Jack has a mixed status because he teaches an important, mandatory class, put succinctly, “Statistics for Dummies”, yet he is not tenured nor in a high status STEM curricula. His plan is to take on an extremely high load of students over at least three years which will earn him tens of thousands in extra after-tax income so he can afford to sent his daughter to a more elite private college. When he discovers that his TA has been carrying out a grade selling scheme under his nose he attempts to report the cheating but is instead, the cheating is ignored and Jack is forced out of his teaching position because a student gave him a gift he never thought about but which the administration interpreted as a bribe through smothering legal and political caution. Yet through the same caution, the lost teaching becomes a paid “sabbatical”, with a bonus. It seems that Jack lands on his feet with a well compensated job at Sri Lanka’s Serendipity university managing data for famous astronomer. Yet as the novel comes to a close Jack is under pressure to ignore his discovery that the astronomy data has been tampered with.