Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children's Literature by Melissa M. Terras (review)

In the current political atmosphere, in which academic rhetoric is equated with deception and the scientific proof of climate change is dismissed as fabrication, it is important to consider the portrayal of academia in our culture. Not only does the Trump administration implicitly discredit research on climate change by contesting mainstream scientific thinking, but it also diminishes the credibility of scientific processes in general. Melissa Terras's slim but comprehensive study on the representation of professors in picture books fits within this rising skepticism and suspicion regarding academics. Picture-Book Professors unearths the image that our culture has been adumbrating about teachers and scholars with ties to higher education and discovers "the societal undercurrents of patriarchy, uniformity and anti-intellectualism" (4).

Terras's longitudinal study examines 289 illustrated books for children published between 1850 and 2014. The author's impressively large sample includes texts featuring a combination of visual and pictorial manifestations of fictional academics. She deliberately omits representations of real scientists, as such inclusions would have unfairly compared public to imaginary figures. For Terras, the academics in the vast array of illustrated books that she examines stand for adult hegemony, "but also for what happens when this authority fails" (145), so that their expertise, prestige, and power are sometimes questioned. Terras discerns three prevailing stereotypes: "the kindly teacher who is little more than a vehicle to explain scientific facts; the baffled genius who is incapable of functioning in a normative social manner; and the evil madman who is intent on destruction and mayhem" (2).

The stereotype of the professor as trustworthy teacher includes academics as mentors who disseminate knowledge to the outside world. These professorial authorities appear in "creationist propaganda" promoting religious ideals as frequently as they appear in humorous texts that mock professorial expertise (152). The muddleheaded stereotype exemplifies academics with eccentric practices: the absent-minded, intellectually obsessed, yet confused professor with malfunctioning, useless inventions who is often outsmarted by children or animals. Terras argues that while this model "actively reinforces mistrust in expertise," it also gives "authors and illustrators a place to play with known constraints, using tropes to explore authority and intellect via nonsense" (167). This type, Terras purports, "underscores our society's devaluation of intelligence, thus keeping intelligence unattractive to people from an early age" (188). Finally, the stereotype of the madman conflates academic genius with questionable mental health. In some instances, madness is coupled with kindness and eccentricity to reveal the character's distancing from the normative; at other times, it is interlinked with malicious aspirations that turn professors into "comic villains" (179).

Terras's findings with regard to racial and gender stereotypes are far from surprising, since they do not deviate from the overarching conventions governing picture books in general. In an overwhelming majority of these books, Terras affirms, academics are white and male: "in children's literature academia equates to scientific enquiry, and scientific enquiry equates to male domination" (189). Women academics make up nine percent of the total, whereas the many women who appear in the texts fill subservient roles: housekeepers or wives who provide "stability and support for the helplessly dependent academics" (99). Male academics tend to be elderly with white hair, belong to the middle or upper class, and enjoy social and economic privileges. The majority represent subject areas in STEM, although a large number do not have a specific subject. For the most part, they are loners with overdeveloped intellects and peculiar interests.

Terras declares an affinity between the emergence of the fictional academic in the first illustrated books for children and the growth of the university sector during the Victorian period. When discussing the first instance of a fictional professor in The Parents' Best Gift: Professor Howard's First Step to Learning (1850), Terras acknowledges that he represents "intellectual, academic and social authority as a positioning device to promote and encourage children's learning" (52), but she does not see these characteristics as the only representation of academics at...