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The quiet epiphany: what ‘Stoner’ teaches us about academic life

by Dr Goran Erfani

Over the recent holidays, I finally had a chance to read Stoner by John Williams. This novel has quietly become a cult classic since its original publication in 1965, despite selling almost nothing at the time. It tells the story of William Stoner, who teaches English literature at the University of Missouri (US) for forty years, and whose life, on the surface, is unremarkable: no great triumphs, no dramatic falls, just the long accumulation of an academic career.

And there is as yet very little about it that feels outdated. The perceived career barriers, the departmental politics, the strange intimacy of a life built around a library and a lecture hall all read as though they were written last year, not eighty years ago. Reading the novel raised a few academic-life questions for me: how much of a career is really chosen versus tripped into, how little control academics may have over the wider forces that shape their work, why the office can so easily become a refuge from everything else, and why recognition so often arrives too late to matter.

The epiphany that redirects a life

The protagonist, Stoner, begins his journey as an agriculture student, sent to university by his farming parents to learn better methods for the land he’s expected to inherit. Then, almost by accident, he takes an optional literature module which was not very popular among students from other departments. A single class, a moment his teacher, Archer Sloane, later calls his epiphany, reroutes the entire course of his life. He abandons the farm, and the future his parents assumed for him, to become an academic instead.

This story is a powerful reminder of something many of us recognise from our own paths: academic careers are rarely the exclusive product of a grand plan. More often our careers turn on one unplanned module or a seminar, one conversation, one person who saw something in us before we saw it ourselves. The novel is generous in this sense, and it doesn’t treat Stoner’s choice as either triumphant or tragic, just as the quiet hinge on which everything else swings.

When the wider world intervenes

The novel doesn’t pretend the wider world stays outside academia, although Stoner’s career unfolds almost entirely inside university walls. His two closest friends from graduate school, Dave Masters and Gordon Finch, both go off to fight in the First World War: Masters is killed within months, while Finch survives and later becomes dean of the faculty. Despite the prevailing social disfavour, Stoner stays behind, choosing to finish his PhD rather than enlist. The novel doesn’t treat this decision as cowardice, or even really as a deliberate choice. In fact, Stoner just quietly stays where he was, against a backdrop of events entirely beyond his control. He rarely dwells on it afterwards, but the war reshapes his career as much as his friendships: with so many young men gone to fight, teaching posts open up that might otherwise have taken him years to reach. He ends up moving up faster than he probably would have otherwise, and it’s not something he ever really has to reckon with. The same war that costs his closest friend his life is the one that clears space for Stoner’s.

It’s a useful corrective to how we sometimes talk about academic careers as though they were shaped only by our ambition, ability, and choice. Wars, recessions, pandemics, policy changes, and funding cuts imposed from far outside a department are just as often what redirect them. And as Stoner’s case shows, that redirection isn’t always a loss, since it sometimes opens a door for one person precisely because it closes one for somebody else. The university, however insulated it can feel, has never really been separate from the world beyond it.

Perfunctory interest, and the retreat into work

What struck me most, though, was how Williams describes Stoner’s relationship to everything outside his academic work. His marriage fails early and never really recovers; his daughter drifts from him; and increasingly he treats his own home life with a kind of ‘perfunctory interest’— present, dutiful, but never fully engaged. The office becomes his real home. Long hours grading papers or losing himself in medieval literature aren’t just work; they’re an escape from a domestic life he can’t fix and, eventually, stops trying to.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to recognise, but many academics will know some version of it: the pull of the office as sanctuary, ‘one more hour of reading’ as a fairly acceptable form of avoidance. The pressure to keep publishing more and more doesn’t help either. I’ve caught myself judging a whole day by how much I’d written, not by much else that happened in it. The novel doesn’t moralise about any of this. It just leaves you sitting there with it.

A career recognised too late

Stoner’s professional life follows its own quiet cruelty. A departmental rival, Lomax, pushes him away from the teaching and supervision he loves most and is best at. Recognition, becoming a full professor in more than title, comes only at the very end of his career, at the point of retirement, when it can no longer change anything. It’s a sharp, understated commentary on how academic institutions can delay or withhold recognition until it’s almost beside the point.

This is also a familiar pattern in academic life more broadly. Promotion panels and tenure timelines are often slow to catch up with what someone has actually contributed, and by the time recognition arrives, sometimes years after the work that earned it, the person it’s meant for has usually moved past caring about it.

The balance we still struggle with

Reading it today, it’s hard not to measure how far academic culture has moved on this front, or how little. It also raises a potentially uncomfortable question: would Stoner survive in today’s academic culture? Everything quiet about him, the private choices, the unhurried devotion to reading and writing, is perhaps what current academic life has the least patience for. His love of the discipline was rooted in learning and literature for their own sake, not in being judged primarily by his publication outputs — an orientation that sits awkwardly with how academic worth is now measured by metrics, the REF (Research Excellence Framework), or grant income.

But the main loss may not be the metrics themselves so much as what they’ve gradually displaced: unstructured time to simply read, think, or sit with a text without needing to turn it into a deliverable output. Stoner’s long hours in the library produced nothing that would count on a REF return, and that, more than any single policy, is what makes his kind of academic life hard to imagine now.

Even so, higher education institutions (in the UK and beyond) now talk openly about work-life balance, wellbeing, and boundaries in a way Stoner’s generation never could, and most of us have absorbed at least the language of it (I catch myself using it in meetings I attend). Yet the pull he feels towards the office, the sense that there’s always something else waiting to grade, read, or write, will still be familiar to plenty of academics negotiating where work ends and home and social life begin. We have the vocabulary now to name the imbalance Stoner never thought to question. I’m not sure we’re any better at actually living with it.

Why it still resonates

Stoner isn’t a true story, but it captures something true about academic life all the same: the ongoing tension between institutional demands and personal passion, the way one small decision can redirect a life, and the cost of retreating into work instead of confronting what’s difficult at home. It’s a quietly unsentimental book. It doesn’t romanticise academic life or condemn it. It simply shows it in full and trusts the reader to feel the weight of it. Reading it now, in a very different era of higher education, I find it less a period piece than a mirror.

Reference: Williams, J (1965) Stoner. New York: Viking Press. Currently available through NYRB Classics (US) and Vintage Classics (UK).

Dr Goran Erfani, FHEA, is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Healthcare and Nursing Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. His research interests include people-place-health dynamics, public health, digital inclusion, and health equity. Email: goran.erfani@northumbria.ac.uk. X/Twitter: @GoranErfani.


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The Chair

by Paul Temple

The best novel about university life – and I’m afraid this isn’t up for debate – is John Williams’ Stoner. Published in 1965, its setting is the micropolitics of the English department of a US Mid-Western university, from the 1920s to the 1950s: “A terrific novel of echoing sadness” is how Julian Barnes sums it up on the cover of my edition.

The Netflix series The Chair, with the Korean-American actor Sandra Oh (you may have seen her in Killing Eve) as the newly-elected chair of the English department of a “lower-tier Ivy”, has some similarities with Stoner. The story here also revolves around the micropolitics of an English department, exposing the tensions between older academics whose professional lives have centred on a single narrow (but is it?) topic – Melville in one case – and younger ones, notably Bill Dobson, whose popular classes play around with modish themes. (I assume his use of chalk on an actual blackboard – do they really still exist? – is intended to demonstrate iconoclasm.) But whereas the departmental chair in Stoner is creepily vile, in The Chair she exhausts herself with emotional labour (“playing nice” as an exasperated colleague puts it) trying to help everybody, even when that isn’t possible (Dobson’s joke Nazi salute in class doesn’t go down well).

TV dramas set in workplaces such as police stations or hospitals tend to take a single case which absorbs the characters involved to the exclusion of all other business (Line of Duty or Unforgotten, say), sidestepping what must actually be the complex, confusing reality of these settings. That sort of dramatic plotting can’t easily work with universities, which perhaps helps to explain why campus TV adaptations tend to be satire (The History Man) or knockabout comedy (A Very Peculiar Practice). The Chair, though having elements of both satire and comedy, is more nuanced, with the Sandra Oh character having to deal with declining enrolments, preventing Dobson becoming his own worst enemy (unsuccessfully), supporting a black woman in her struggle to gain deserved tenure, as well as coping with single parenthood. In that it portrays the “one damned thing after another” aspect of university management, The Chair is perhaps a more accurate reflection of university life than Line of Duty is of police work, but what do I know? (The issue of faculty tenure, which features significantly in The Chair, interestingly seems to assume quite a lot of prior knowledge of university processes on the part of the viewer: perhaps the producers think that graduates will be the main audience.)

Departmental chairs, or heads of departments in the UK, are classic middle-management jobs, an insulation layer between senior management and the workforce, but usually without the authority or resources to respond effectively to the needs of those for whom they’re supposedly responsible. It’s significant that in both Stoner and The Chair the university top brass feature only as distant, vaguely threatening, entities, divorced from the action at the departmental battlefronts. The main exception in The Chair is the man from Communications, sent over to the department to deal with the “reputational management” issues that Dobson has supposedly created: Dobson here shows hitherto unexpected reserves of restraint by not punching him in the face.

The Chair can be viewed as a case-study of institutional change, with structural pressures of declining enrolments, changing expectations of academic life, and student activism coming into sharp focus at the micro-level of the department. The chair herself becomes the personification of all this, the point around which swirl the conflicting pressures of institutional structures, power distribution, and individuals’ goals. In university life, it’s the detail that counts, and The Chair gets this brilliantly.

They’re apparently thinking of a second series: I’ll be watching.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, London. His latest paper, ‘The University Couloir: exploring physical and intellectual connectivity’, will appear shortly in Higher Education Policy.