Power and Privilege within the Academy: The Study of Oppressed Identity in David Mamet’s Oleanna

Teresa Diviachi

Power is a force which does not allow one to self-determine but rather privileges one with the allowance of self-determination. To wield power is to decide one’s value, to decide the value of one’s thoughts, to place oneself into the larger relationship of society as a recipient of attention, of desire, of comfort. Despite the variety of critical responses to Mamet’s Oleanna, the general agreement is that it is a play about power. Between whom the power dynamic occurs, however, is where disagreement becomes rife with academic accusation and politically motivated attack. Is it a play of teacher against student, feminist against patriarchy, the Right Wing against identity politics, academic against academy? There is an expectation to separate and define dichotomous perspectives for Carol and John; put simply, the characters are asked to pick a side. The very notion of the discourse between the identity of Carol and John being an action of singularity—they are one and not the other—is the very problem that the play highlights and falls victim to. 

In academia, words are everything. Language is power, and it is weakness. Who can speak, what they can speak about, the words they can use in order to garner respect and therefore power, is determined by a very small subset of society and always has been. It is a privileged identity⎯ male, white and bourgeois⎯ that has repeatedly answered the former questions, and due to limited input, which is due to the limitation of contributor, the answers have delimited a set of narrow identities within which someone seeking access to the power afforded high-level academics must perform. There is an ideal “humanism” imagined by the characterizations of John and Carol, powerful beings and subordinate beings who speak the preconceived language and therefore agree to respect the ideal. Carol proves herself the perfect student not because she obeys John’s direct lesson, but because she learns the lessons John inadvertently teaches her about power being gained not through self-expression but by succumbing to the expectant identity of the academy. Carol must shed the possibility of being merely a student and be an angry feminist, in the form that feminism is allowed within the sphere of academia. If the spectator is not allowed to explore the play in the context of oppression within the academy (and society), then the spectator will easily fall into the trap of picking sides—either Carol is right or John is right, the student or the teacher, the woman or the man—instead of realizing that this forced “unity” corrupts the liberalized self-expression of plural identity.

It must be made clear that this is not a play with an antagonist and a protagonist. This is a play with two protagonists who also happen to be each other’s antagonists. John and Carol have a mutually oppressive and violent relationship in which they perform as teacher/student and student/teacher.^[1] The roles are clear in Act I of the play where John has control over the direction and intention of the conversation with Carol, a student with little grasp of the class’s subject matter who can only think of fixing this problem by filling a notebook with her professor’s regurgitated lesson plan. The use of “fix” and “problem” is significant, as it symbolizes the itemization of education which is broken into parts each with a specific job and qualitative value. John uses this language in Act II, claiming “I don’t want to fix you” (Mamet 54). His tone is defensive, the emphasis his own, as he knows that this vision of the professor as the one who puts the student together in the form he believes is right, is the vision that is being brought to trial, and he imagines himself in opposition to it. According to this vision, a student is worth less than a professor, and a student’s papers are assigned worth according to a professor’s appraisal. If a student does not understand something, that is a “problem” and it is one that must be “fixed,” like putting an Ikea table together according to the directions and with the provided tools. Eventually, John decides to completely disregard the work Carol has done so far and give her a ranking, an A, in exchange for certain actions he deems to be of equal worth: her coming to his office a number of times to talk (Mamet 25). In this scene the rules of the academy do not state that her grade is dependent upon the paper, what she has to say, and how she says it. In fact, John has already decided that her paper is subpar (Mamet 8-9). Instead, the rules are what those in power within the university decide they are. If John wishes to dismiss Carol’s paper or assign her an A, then he, as teacher, is able to do this. All Carol, as student, has to do is accept his authority, to participate in the dialogue as a student of her caliber and position is expected to. However, Carol is not willing to accept this role. She and the group she comes to represent want more; they want power, and John’s offer becomes the opening through which she can gain access to the elitist hierarchy that distributes power. 

John’s power becomes his vulnerability. What should have been a normal exercise of his dominance, as white, male, bourgeois professor towards a female, lower class, student, instead falls into the “trap” laid by the marginalized group seeking restitution through identity politics. The term “trap” is placed in quotations because it is only a trap according to a reading of the play that favors what Marc Silverstein refers to as the New Right agenda and, on a larger scale, what Paulo Freire calls the oppressor’s humanism. I will not pretend that the New Right is not a familiar political constituency : a homogeneous, elitist class with a powerful role in society due to a history of oppressing alterity by portraying the “Other” as the cause of societal discord and economic deficiency. Silverstein defines it more specifically, in relation to Oleanna, as a movement focused on the “return of ‘family values,’ a nationalism bordering on xenophobia, the reconstitution of the American community⎯ a ‘community’ defined more on the basis of exclusion than inclusion” (Silverstein 105). While Oleanna does not necessarily defend or articulate this neoconservative ideology, it does present a situation in which the idealized “humanism” of the oppressor appears as the most appropriate solution.

What is meant by “humanism?” According to Freire, the oppressor’s “humanism” is meant to integrate and incorporate marginalized people as if they are “the pathology of the healthy society” and must be turned into “automatons” (Freire 74). The healthy society, according to the oppressor, is what Silverstein refers to as a unifying “common culture.” The university is intended to disseminate the common culture amongst its students, promising to eliminate identities of difference and, along with them, racism, sexism and other ideological prejudices that allow for the systematic abuse and violations of people’s rights, minds and bodies. However, as Silverstein points out, the application of this concept is actually a corruption of potential unity through academic discourse, which reflects the broader corruption of the term in social and political discourse. In Act II, John makes an appeal to Carol by referencing this idea that they are both “human”:

John, representative of the institution of education, is trying to teach the student “to (mis)recognize the irrelevance of such difference when compared with their membership in a ‘common culture’” (Silverstein 109). Carol’s insistence that she must bring John down for the sake of her group becomes an attack of blind allegiance to a political correctness that is endangering the unity of humanity. The spectator becomes angry at Carol because she is actively twisting John’s actions and words in order to take away his power (and its accruements) and, in doing so, perpetuating division within the academy which represents division within the larger scale of society. The use of the word “conventional” is key. John means this word to establish that there are conventions which are shared agreements between humanity as a unit, spaces of commonality, instead of separate group customs for communication. If Carol is “human,” meaning if she is invested in what is best for society, then she should understand and obey these conventions. In Act III, Carol confronts the bigotry of John’s charge of her lacking humanity:

John: Don’t you have feelings?

Carol: That’s my point. You see? Don’t you have feelings? Your final argument. What is it that has no feelings. Animals. I don’t take your side, you question if I’m Human. (Mamet 65)

Carol is pointing out what John’s expectant privilege prevents him from noticing: that there must be a source of this conventionality. Someone must decide what aspects of individuality need to be sacrificed in deference to standardized norms. An “human” ideal must be established that consolidates and legitimizes the social hierarchy that privileges particular characteristics by assigning power in direct correlation to how closely one aligns with said “human” identity (Silverstein 114). This decision definitely does not belong to Carol or her group, which is the reason she moves to take John’s power in the confrontational manner that she does. She represents a body that seeks an identity that can access the power of the ideal human, and it initially appears that she desires to do so without forfeiting her identity as Other. She insists upon differentiating herself from John, describing them as having “side[s]” (Mamet 65) and talks of how “you [John] mock us” (Mamet 52), separating John and the group he represents from herself and her group. And yet, even as she argues that convention should not dictate her identity, convention dictates the manner by which she can reach for power. She must go through the Tenure Committee; she must speak in the convoluted language of a (male) academic; she must affect the book lists for courses, as this is what she, as the oppressed, has been taught grants power. Her power must come from the same source and means as John’s power, and she must operate within the boundaries of convention to bring down convention. One cannot help but wonder whether Carol really is “taking down the man” or whether she is “becoming the man.” Is she a student/teacher or is she a student who becomes a teacher?

If John did what is conventionally expected of him, if he acted as (superior) professor to the (subordinate) student, then why does it end so badly for him? The cultural context of the play’s publication and earliest productions should be considered. The sociopolitical changes of the 1990s in the U.S. may not have been as visibly activist or radical as the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but they were still bubbling with anger and anxiety. It was the era of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas trial, a case which ended in the man’s favor and around which a misogynistic vision of feminism was imagined, one in which the women’s liberation movement became a “subversive cadre threatening the democratic process” (MacLeod 207). Feminism, and by extension multiculturalism, was vilified, its entreaties for equality denounced by the fear of an oppressor who saw his way of life disappearing. There was a large sector of middle America that saw its way of life vanishing and searched for an explanation that “does not call into question the economic order from which it has derived its well-being” from in the first place (Silverstein 113). While Silverstein’s essay is from 1995, the fears he describes have not abated, and the direction in which they are aimed have remained fairly static. One has only to follow Trump’s Twitter account for a day to learn that there is still a sector of middle America that feels its economic loss is due to marginalized groups’ drive for identity legitimation, including gender and sexual equality. Carol represents these marginalized groups, acting as a stereotype of feminist ideology. John’s elitist vanity becomes a weakness exploited by feminists as they are imagined by a sector of the elite who feel their power being threatened by the pressure of marginalized groups insisting on entry into the hallowed halls of higher education. It is a pervasive imagined “Other” that has been absorbed by student and teacher alike.

There is a debate over whether or not Carol and her group represent feminism or at least gender and sexual equality. It seems a fair stance to take, on several occasions she points to the difference of gender between John and herself as a source of contention and injustice, and the same for references to sexual desire and sexuality: “To speak to a woman in your private” (Mamet 51), “some of us. Overcame prejudices…sexual, you cannot begin to imagine” (Mamet 69), “You think I’m a…frightened, repressed, confused…abandoned young thing of some doubtful sexuality” (Mamet 68). The list of inappropriate behavior Carol reads aloud in Act III all reference his behavior towards female students and the sexist or sexual undertones are apparent in the condensed format:

The twelfth: ‘Have a good day, dear.’ 

The fifteenth: ‘Now, don’t you look fetching…’ 

April seventeenth: ‘If you girls would come over here…” …I saw you…stand there and exploit your, as you thought, “paternal prerogative” (Mamet 66, emphasis my own)

After John describes the Tenure Committee as a group of “Good Men and True” (Mamet 50, emphasis my own), Carol is angered by his purposeful oversight of the female member of the committee. She points out the bias of his language, that he could easily claim his description is “Good Fun,” “An Historical Phrase,” “An Oversight” or “All of the Above” (Mamet 51) and he would not be condemned for ignoring the female member of the board. The capitalization of each phrase points out how these reasons are firmly established as acceptable by society. It is Carol who challenges this acceptability: “it is a demeaning remark. It is a sexist remark, and to overlook it is to countenance continuation of that method of thought” (Mamet 51). The language is clearly emulating feminist ideology, pointing out the misogynistic slant of John’s phrasing and how that represents a misogyny perpetuated on a larger scale for John does not just represent himself but is a symbol of a “group” that has misused their power (Mamet 50). Kellie Bean identifies this “group” as a patriarchal authority. John is a “symptom of the masculinist ideology guiding his identity and behavior” (Bean 121). While John may not be willing to admit his own power, Carol is ready to point out that he sits in a “so-protected, so-elitist seat” (Mamet 52) that draws power from an established patriarchy in contrast to her own weaker station that does not (initially) align with the status quo of elitist identity. 

John’s failure as a teacher is that he imagines himself as a transgressive and empathetic professor while merely using the language of this image to fulfill his own material needs. In the “academic setting of Oleanna…its participants share a specialized language that assigns status according to an individual’s ability to employ that discourse” (Badenhausen 3). Richard Badenhausen points out that language is the most important semiotic system in the cultural institution of the academy and that Carol’s disadvantage due to her inability to fully utilize the language is immediately established as a source of contention in the play (Badenhausen 3-4). The entirety of Act I is a testament of John’s self-absorbed, purposeful implementation of a language that highlights Carol’s outsiderness. He interrupts, corrects and belittles Carol while waxing poetic about taking off “the Artificial Stricture, of ‘Teacher,’ and ‘Student,’” (Mamet 21) which is really one of many openings for him to discuss himself and his book, the utmost symbol of academic duty. He gives long speeches about the banking model^[2] and educational value which are underhanded insults directed at Carol and her lack of understanding and fluency with academic language:

How can such a monologue not be both confusing and hurtful to a young student? The references to contemporary pedagogical theory will make no sense to Carol, a student who has come to his office because she does not understand his course on education. Carol’s line right before this little speech—“I do not understand” (Mamet 22)—applies to both John’s preceding comment but also to his general language. His terminology and references are perplexing, and Carol must repeatedly ask him to define a word or clarify a statement. The use of “I” does not distract from the analogous insult of John’s speech. It is obvious that John is using the cover of “I” to describe Carol and her failure to grasp the system of success employed by education. She must be a “failure” for not being able to understand tests created by “idiots.” If Carol’s behavior in Act II and III is labelled abhorrent by audiences because she disregards John’s fears, desires, and values, then John’s mistreatment and purposeful disdain of Carol in Act I deserves a similar criticism. It is verbal abuse ⏤ insulting who someone is and dictating what they should be ⏤ and is a form of violence. Peter Chiaramonte puts it simply: “Violence doesn’t necessarily involve physical force…Destructive energy impulses directed at intimidating the emotions will suffice as violence whichever way you are prone to tag it” (43).

When Stanton Garner taught the play to his sophomore theater class, he found that much of the response to Carol was a furious and aggressive hatred. He was “taken off guard by the force with which [the students] attacked their surrogate in the play and their unwillingness to entertain the possibility that the responsibility for the play’s climactic violence was shared” (43). How accurate a use of terminology, “surrogate,” as that is what Carol is for the students of his class: their immediate representative. Yet they withdrew from her and defended John because they could not perceive her experience as parallel to their own. They had absorbed the lesson that John expects Carol to have absorbed, that the authority of the educational institution should be respected, what it says is the rule of law. Reading the students’ responses to the play and the performance, it is clear that they were not able to see why Carol could be angry, where her anger came from. They could not see that a lack of voice meant a lack of self, that she has to do as John says, as the university says. If John wants her to come to his office for private conversations in exchange for an A, then she should agree. Garner explains “Mamet’s play not only highlights the environment of its academic reception, it intervenes in this environment, ‘framing’ the positions that one can adopt toward it, in both senses of the word” (44). The students have been taught the specific framework through which they should view higher education, and it is through John’s framework, not Carol’s. While he is referring to the play, I believe that Garner’s description of Oleanna as stacking the “emotional and ideological deck against Carol” is one that can be applied to his practical experience with student’s understanding of the institution of education. The students feel obligated to quiet their voice and replace it with the common culture’s voice, and are not aware they are doing so.

After watching the Clarence Brown Theatre Company production of Oleanna, Garner’s students continued to blame Carol for any behavior of John’s that could be construed as inappropriate. They mainly relied on her physical appearance and movements as the source of their reading, which ties in with “a wider cultural tendency to read character in terms of the performer’s body when female roles are concerned” (Garner 47). One female student wrote “[Carol] had provoked John to ‘sexually harass’ her…she doesn’t have to go to his office every day, but she does…And she doesn’t seem to mind him touching her knee or shoulder” (Garner 46). Several students wrote that the actress was not attractive enough to “justify any sexual approach on John’s part,” clearly parroting the cultural myth that sexual assault is about sexual attraction, not power. The students repeatedly revealed they had absorbed these inaccurate, oppressive prejudices encouraged by an elitist hegemony. Garner’s students appear completely unaware of where the source of John’s power comes from, and why Carol wants it or how she means to take it. For all intents, Garner’s classroom experience seems to reveal a failure of education to create a truly critical and forthright space for enquiry. Even more so, it reveals “the limits of classroom framing and the powerful cultural pressures conditioning student response” (Garner 49). It also reveals how important it is to include gender identity and politics in a reading of the play. These issues need to be addressed in classrooms if there is to be a greater shift in societal attitudes towards male and female roles. Carol cannot be viewed only as a student, she must be seen as a (white) female, student while John must be viewed as a (white) male, professor.^[3] These characteristics are deciding factors of how the tension between them and the violence of their exchanges, both verbal and physical, occur.

The easiest way to prove the importance of their gender is to consider what happens by changing their gender identities. What if Carol were Carl, a heterosexual, young, white male? The plot would function very differently. From the viewpoint of heteropatriarchy, the charges of sexual assault would become unconvincing, especially within a play that very obviously makes the nuclear family⎯ husband, wife, son⎯ and the man’s authority as its head a loss that John is threatened with. This challenge to male authority would be reconfigured if it were a man challenging a man for power. The characterization of Carol is dependent upon her female identity as much as it is her student identity or lower-class identity. While Carol’s position of power comes at the cost of John’s, it is not an “eye for an eye” trade. Carol and John are not interchangeable. John’s power comes in a form that belongs to him and so Carol’s power must take that same form. She must perform as a feminist is expected to perform by the patriarchy, which means both performing as male and performing as non-female.

Part of the horrific nature of her attack on John is that it is one based in language. She controls John’s language in a way that imitates the traditional oppressor’s control of the traditionally oppressed’s voice. This oppression of voice is the power structure that the hegemony has put into place. When describing her charges of assault, it is not about what John did; it is about what she says John did. A common description of sexual assault cases is that they are a “he said/she said.” They are not about what actions took place, it is not a case of “he did/she did.” It is about who has the authority to say what he or she did, and have their words become the truth. Traditionally, as is implied by the syntax of the saying, the male voice is granted authority over the female. The “he” comes before the “she,” so if Carol wants to have power, she must have the authority of speaking that John has, so much so that what she says means more than what he says to the extent that she can decide what he did and what his actions mean.^[4] Carol says to John, “You think, you think you can deny that these things happened; or, if they did, if they did, that they meant what you said they meant” (Mamet 47). Her accusations are false according to John, and if he still held power over her, then the accusations would be false according to the Tenure Committee. However, Carol has proven to be an apt student and learned to maneuver the avenues through which education authorizes power. Her language is more confident: whether or not she has knowledge to back up what she says, she sounds as if she does, and she makes reference to assiduously kept and time-stamped quotes. She has realized that she must appeal to the ego of the Tenure Committee, to threaten their own power in order to usurp their power. John is a representative of the group that holds power over her and her own marginalized group, “You. Do. Not. Have. The. Power. Did you misuse it? Someone did. Are you a part of that group? Yes. Yes. You are. You’ve done these things”(Mamet 50). This is not simply about silencing John. It is about silencing the institution which has silenced her.

And yet, Carol becomes a victim of her desire for power as much as John. Her conviction that the institutional authority of educational norms, that ideal “humanism,” are the source of potential power means she must lose herself and become the feminist figure the patriarchy expects. The play does not end badly for John; it ends badly for both of them. They have both lost themselves within the violent exchanges of linguistic and physical power. Carol must become the “bitch” (Mamet 79), she must emulate the male form and attack the nuclear family because this is what she has been taught is the expected way a marginalized person can seek power. According to Bean: 

Typically, dramatic portrayals of women rely upon a heterosexist notion of gender as a binary contract in which men and women occupy oppositional and mutually exclusive positions…these binaries reflect cultural stereotypes of gendered behavior: active male/passive female; strong/weak; subject/object; dominant/submissive. (Bean 113)

In the original production of the play, directed by Mamet, Carol’s appearance shifts drastically from Act I to Act II and III. Her shift in power is apparent not just by her newly acquired skill with academic language, but also through a very direct visual acquisition of male power: a power suit, a form of masculine dress which is intrinsically bound to men’s position in the most privileged economic and political structures. Her language must become the language of the patriarchy, and her body, the visually preferred source of female character identity, must become male (as well as bourgeois) in appearance. Carol’s options are limited by the patriarchal academy’s conception of an academic.

In conjunction with the binaries of gender, John turns to physical violence when language is no longer a source of power. This is an avenue historically afforded men and closed to women. Carol manages to dominate John with words, yet she ends the play beaten and cowering below him. Her final words “Yes. That’s right,” with the directed action that she looks at John and then “lowers” her head, a movement of deference or submission (Mamet 80), signify that his domination of her body is to be expected. Under patriarchy, this is the conventional way for a man to respond to a woman subjugating him. John’s physical violence was generally welcomed by audiences. Elaine Showalter quotes an audience member next to her as saying “I nearly climbed up on stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself” (Showalter). John is easily justified in attacking the woman who is taking away “The Material” as he refers to it (Mamet 44). Carol will “cost me [John] my house” (Mamet 48) and “deprive a family” (Mamet 50). It is slowly revealed that instruction or being an educator is not John’s primary agenda. In Act III, it is Carol that finally states John’s foremost intent:

Even as Carol recognizes that John has gone through the state of being a student and done the work needed to become a professor, she points out the difference of their experiences. That “some of us. (Pause) Overcame prejudices. Economic, sexual, you cannot begin to imagine. And endured humiliation I pray that you and those you love never encounter. (Pause) To gain admittance here…We, who, who are, at any moment, in danger of being deprived of it. By…” (Mamet 69). Carol sounds pained, her pauses are timed for someone who is holding back overwhelming emotions of hurt and frustration at not being understood, perhaps holding back tears. And she has to hold them back, crying would reveal her vulnerability and threaten the fragile power she has managed to gain by not appearing feminine. She uses John’s word, “deprive,” to point out that despite being in supposedly parallel positions, their experiences are divergent. John speaks of depriving his family of a bigger house while Carol speaks of being deprived of the right to education. There is a vast difference in what John and Carol expect from life and from the university.

Carol does not only threaten The Material. She threatens the privilege of the identity John believes he deserves. At first John is willing to agree to the stipulations put forth by Carol and her group. Banning books is a possibility until he realizes that they want to ban his book. This is a direct silencing of his voice and a cutting off of his legacy. Carol becomes the feminist waging “linguistic terrorism” (Silverstein 112) on the academy. She is not interested in promoting open dialogue, she is interested in suppressing dialogue. Only voices which promote the correct messages should be allowed. It is an (mis)application of the oppressive practices of supposed “humanist” education onto multicultural ideology. An actual twisting of words. Instead of the oppressor (patriarchy) suppressing the oppressed (the Other, i.e. women), the oppressed is suppressing the oppressor. John’s realization that his book is on the list becomes the catalyst for his physical rage. He finally says no to Carol’s demands and regains enough of his voice to insist that he has a responsibility, not to his students or to education, but to his profession, to his son and to himself (Mamet 76). He must protect his legacy. As Carol leaves, she regains her verbal power by challenging his role as head of household, just as she has challenged his role as head of the classroom and patriarchy’s role as head of Western society, telling him not to refer to his wife as “baby” (Mamet 79). John calls Carol a “cunt,” an insulting reference the female anatomy that turns her into nothing but the body part which women have been defined.

The power Carol seeks is not her own and does not rival the power that John can access. As said before, true power means one has been privileged with the allowance of self-determination. Carol never has that privilege. In fact, she becomes exactly what society determines she can become; a “vicious little bitch” (Mamet 79). Women are traditionally denied the privilege of a multiplicity of female identity in literature, which reflects the denial of a multiplicity of “Othered” identities in society. 

While multiculturalism on campus is not new, it is a recent and still developing space within institutional education in relation to the history of established universities. San Francisco State University added the first black studies department in 1969 (Mayberry). That was only 50 years ago. “Identity” on campuses has evolved, influenced by the return of  WWII veterans, followed by Korean and Vietnam veterans, taking advantage of the GI Bill to seek access to institutions of higher learning that had been closed to a marginalized majority of population. Diversity entered the educational space and identity “was no longer a personal, individuating matter, but a function of those phenomenological characteristics one shared with others” (Mayberry 2). bell hooks connects the shifting conceptualization of identity with postmodern pedagogy,” arguing that the deconstruction of identity for the benefit of uniformity is the taking away of marginalized people’s critical voices. This is what Silverstein warns can be seen as encouraged by a New Right, an oppressor’s reading of Oleanna. The appeal to being “human” means an appeal to being human as John and the patriarchy see humanity as existing. However, “critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency” (hooks par. 10). Students must be engaged in open discourse, certain topics cannot be avoided or excluded because they do not fit into the mindset of the institution or they do not agree with the strictures of dominant society. To say that Oleanna is a play about power and not gender or feminism, is an example of constricting thought and theory. Just like Carol becomes a victim of her own violently enforced, objective identity, so to does the student become a victim of the singular opinion they are allowed to operate within.

If theater is a stage upon which culture is played, or as Silverstein (referencing Mamet) says, “theatre stages the contents of America’s collective unconscious and…translates those contents in consciousness” (104), then Carol and John’s gender cannot be taken out of a study of Oleanna. As Kellie Bean explains, “representations of masculine and feminine identity are not ideological equivalent,” (111) and so they cannot be treated as such within literary criticism or studies. Gender is a topic rife with controversy, as is education, and there is an active dialogue around shifting societal attitudes towards gender, sexuality, education and equality occurring in the U.S. To write about power within an influential and elitist site such as the university, using a male professor and a female student, is to write a play about gender dynamics as well as a play about teacher and student dynamics. This is undeniable. What matters now is that the institution of education does not fail its students as John failed Carol. It must recognize that educational tactics need to continue to change in order to challenge the idealized “human” that John contrasts to Carol, so that students do not align themselves with the oppressive expectations of conventionality. Multiplicity, plurality, diversity, whatever term one wants to use, the importance of the concept of difference remains invaluable to the intellect and therefore to the possibility of a more peaceful and united society.

Notes

Works Cited

Badenhausen, Richard. “The Modern Academy Raging in the Dark: Misreading Mamet’s Political Incorrectness in ‘Oleanna.’” College Literature, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25112400.

Chiaramonte, Peter. “Power Play: The Dynamics of Power and Interpersonal Communication in Higher Education as Reflected in David Mamet’s Oleanna.”The Canadian Journal of Higher Education, vol. 44, no. 1, 2014, pp. 38-51. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/docview/1536865685?accountid=13802.

Freire, Paulo, et al. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed., Continuum, 2000.

Garner, Stanton B.”Framing the Classroom: Pedagogy, Power, Oleanna.” Theatre Topics, vol. 10 no. 1, 2000, pp. 39-52. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tt.2000.0002.

hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.” African Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 19 Apr. 1994, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html.

Mamet, David. Oleanna. Pantheon Books, 1992.

Mayberry, Katherine J. “Introduction: Identity Politics in the College Classroom, or Whose Issue Is This, Anyway?” Teaching What You’re Not: Identity Politics in Higher Education, edited by Katherine J. Mayberry, NYU Press, NEW YORK; LONDON, 1996, pp. 1–20. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfbvx.4.

Showalter, Elaine. “Acts of Violence.” Times Literary Supplement [London, England] 6 Nov. 1992: 16+. Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive. Web. 14 Nov. 2018. http://find.galegroup.com.jpllnet.sfsu.edutlshinfomark.do&source=gale&prodId=TLSH&userGroupName=sfsu_main&tabID=T003&docPage=article&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&docId=EX1200468285&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0.
Silverstein, Marc. “‘We’re Just Human’: ‘Oleanna’ and Cultural Crisis.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 1995, pp. 103–120. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3201303.