Directrospective: HIGHER LEARNING (1995)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

Professor Phipps (Laurence Fishburne) gets into it with Malik (Omar Epps) and Fudge (Ice Cub) in Singleton’s college ensemble piece.

Like most people, I have seen the film PCU at least a dozen times. All of us have had the experience of our mother marrying a SAIL Magazine-subscribing Cornell Republican and watching as the family DVD collection expands here and there with FLETCH in fullscreen and a 2-disc Special Edition of BULL DURHAM and most but not all of the BBC sitcom Coupling and, of course, Hart Bochner’s 1994 ANIMAL HOUSE for the Clinton era, PCU. This is a universal thing that we all went through. It’s part of what unites us as human beings.

I’m having fun. PCU is not, in the parlance of the Blank Check Podcast, a movie that exists all that much; its cultural footprint is so slight that I double-checked whether it even got a theatrical release (it did). It’s just one of those movies that I watched over and over, well past the point of finding any of it funny. I don’t know how much of it I ever found funny, really, and having rewatched it now in 2020, I pray the answer is very little. Still, I took my stepfather’s DVD with me to college and have schlepped it from apartment to apartment since. It felt like something worth revisiting in conversation with John Singleton’s third film, HIGHER LEARNING, an ambitious ensemble campus drama released only a year after PCU.

This is not (supposed to be) a piece on PCU, so I’ll just outline that film quickly. It follows a WASPy “pre-frosh” over one wacky weekend visit to Port Chester University, a fictional New England liberal arts school to which he has been accepted. Political correctness has taken hold in a dramatic way at PCU (Do you get it???? Take your time!!!!!!!!!), to the point that fraternities have been completely outlawed and activist cliques centered around identity politics have taken their place, vying for influence over school policy. College in 1994 is a very different place than it was in 1978, when ANIMAL HOUSE came out, let alone 1962, when that film is set. It’s not for fun anymore! Keggers are antifeminist and have been banned! School spirit is insensitive unless and until the mascot is changed to the endangered Whooping Crane! “Taking a joke” has been declared counterrevolutionary! All that stands between Port Chester and total multiculturalist misery is The Pit, a former fraternity turned party house where live the only sane students, the brave (almost entirely white) slackers who dare to tell the Womynists and the Afrocentrists and especially the goddamned vegans that they’d have a much better time if they’d just relax and drink some shitty beer. Of course they’re rewarded for their bravery with insensitivity complaints, enough of them now that the school will take the house away if they can’t raise enough money by Monday morning, etc. That the Party Supremacists of The Pit appear to hold the smallest minority viewpoint of any group on campus is of little interest to the film.

While the ultimate evil in both ANIMAL HOUSE and PCU is the denial of college students’ right to have a good time, the agents of that evil have shifted from a rigid old guard administration to an oversensitive student body. The 1960s rebellion by ANIMAL HOUSE’s Delta House is directed at the unjust hegemony of a small white male establishment only by default; that’s just who runs the college. True enough, there’s plenty of racism and misogyny in the comic antics of that film’s slacker heroes. Translated to the politically correct 1990s, the slacker ideology hasn’t changed, it’s just that the (relative, campus-isolated) social justice victories of the past three decades have given a larger, more diverse group of people the power to challenge the slackers’ good-time autonomy. It’s the same process by which all the first-wave punks became reactionary cranks. It looked like they were opposed to the establishment for what it stood for, but what they were actually resisting was being told what to do.

That’s not the only way to make a college movie for the 1990s. Enter John Singleton’s HIGHER LEARNING, a sprawling ensemble drama about three first-year students adjusting to campus life at the fictional Columbus University. To his immense credit, Singleton, himself a very recent college graduate, paints the campus not as the repressed dominion of a tyrannical multiculturalist cabal but as a school full of bright young people figuring out what’s important to them. When Kristen (Kristy Swanson), a sheltered white girl from the suburbs, Remy (Michael Rapaport), a pasty, socially inept loner from Iowa, and Malik (Omar Epps), a Black relay runner attending Columbus on an athletic scholarship, first arrive at school, none of them has much of a conscious ideology at all. Very quickly, each of them develops a friendship with an older student who turns them on to more radical ideas about political identity - Kristen with Taryn (Jennifer Connelly), who is openly gay and leads a feminist discussion group, Malik with Fudge (Ice Cube), whose militant Afrocentrism leads Malik to question his role at Columbus, and Remy with Scott, a neo-Nazi skinhead who leads a group of white supremacists.

The three freshmen are radicalized to varying degrees, all while Malik and Kristen’s political science professor Maurice Phipps (Laurence Fishburne) tries to convince them (and us) of his conservative worldview. Phipps strongly downplays the role of systemic oppression and holds that success is determined exclusively by one’s work ethic. Fudge encourages Malik to read more radical Black writers than the ones he is assigned in class, and points out the exploitative nature of his track scholarship. But when Malik argues that structural racism is to blame for his poor performance both in class and on the track, his new girlfriend Deja (Tyra Banks) pushes him to practice more and study harder, and her advice ends up proving Phipps right. Kristen’s relationship with Taryn and her group intensifies after Kristen is raped by Billy (Jay R. Ferguson), a frat boy whom she had been dating, and she begins to develop a romantic attraction to her friend. Taryn cautions Kristen about jumping into a relationship with a woman unless she’s sure that’s what she wants, and a sequence intercutting shots of Kristen kissing new boyfriend Wayne (Jason Wiles) and Kristen kissing Taryn makes it somewhat ambiguous as to whether the two women actually have a physical relationship beyond Kristen’s fantasies while she’s with Wayne. Remy’s indoctrination into Scott’s skinhead gang occupies a surprisingly large chunk of the film. Scott so effectively manipulates Remy’s feelings of isolation and inadequacy that I think Facebook owes Scott money for stealing his idea. Plied with enough rhetoric about white genocide, Remy eventually shaves his head and pulls on some combat boots.

Everything comes to a climax at a peace festival organized by Kristen to unite the factionalized activist groups on campus. Remy take a sniper rifle onto a roof and opens fire on the attendees in defense of white supremacy. Deja and another student are killed. Remy shoots himself when cornered by police. In the aftermath, Kristen and Malik realize they’ve never spoken despite seeing each other in Phipps’s class, and have a moment of connection in front of a memorial for the shooting victims.

The Phipps character is an odd one for a number of reasons, not least of which is the Caribbean accent Fishburne affects to play the role. He’s one of the best in the business, but this accent feels like the acting version of those weighted vests that fitness lunatics put on to make jogging harder. About 70% of the time it’s decent enough, but the 30% that veers into Lucky the Leprechaun territory is alienating and unintentionally silly. It’s a needless and completely unmotivated obstacle to his performance and to our engagement with the character’s ideas. I assume Singleton must have had a Caribbean political science professor who made a significant impression on him, because there’s no other reason to hire an actor who doesn’t have that accent and ask that he (try to) put it on when the character doesn’t have anything to say about his own identity outside of his Blackness. If his office hours arguments with Malik about race touched on colonialism or the role of the Caribbean in the African diaspora it would make some sense. Within the film, though, Phipps doesn’t say anything that wouldn’t make just as much sense in Fishburne’s usual voice.

Crucially, it’s hard to pin down exactly how aligned Phipp’s views are with Singleton’s own. Phipps and Fudge represent the two poles between which Malik is finding his own position. Phipps urges him not to expect special treatment based on his race and that if he is less successful than white students it’s because he doesn’t work hard enough. Fudge encourages Malik to think for himself and makes some trenchant points about the racism inherent in the higher education system. Fudge is clearly intelligent, and as played by Ice Cube is obviously cool as hell, but he isn’t a great student. His ideals, or at least Malik’s interpretation of them, don’t help anyone to succeed materially or emotionally within the film. While Phipps is depicted as a bit of a hard-ass, the approval and support he shows once Malik starts playing by Phipps’s rules are intended as a satisfying victory. He’s a tough love father not terribly far removed from Fishburne’s Furious Styles in BOYZ N THE HOOD, with Singleton’s theme of personal-responsibility-as-manhood turned here into a bootstrap conservatism that bums me out. Deja’s pragmatic approach to college, the one that Malik eventually accepts and appreciates, is just a less dogmatic version of the Phipps ideology. When she’s shot at the peace festival, Phipps is the one who rushes to apply first aid while Malik wastes his time chasing after Remy, who ends up killing himself anyway. He’s the one who holds a shell-shocked Malik in a fatherly embrace that helps him begin to process his grief. Within the text, Phipps’s is certainly the worldview that gets things done.

At the same time, the film takes a supportive, if cautious, view of student activism against structural inequity. Taryn’s feminist group directly addresses the very real issue of campus sexual assault, and an event they hold provides a safe outlet for Kristen to start confronting her trauma. The specific circumstances of Taryn and Kristen’s relationship lend it some uncomfortable implications about lesbianism as a response to men rather than a valid separate sexual identity of its own, but for her part Taryn’s sexuality seems to be a part of who she is, not the result of trauma. As imperfect as he turns out to be, Fudge points out the pattern of racist policing on campus, culminating in their failure to prevent a shooting spree because they mistakenly detain a black student and let his neo-Nazi attacker get away. While Singleton doesn’t exactly say that Scott and Remy’s white nationalism is the logical endpoint of the same kind of balkanized identity-based activism that Taryn and Fudge represent, he doesn’t not say that, either. The final shot of the word “unlearn” in front of an American flag is meant, in my mind, to refer to unlearning the notion that we’re insurmountably different from one another. There’s a way that kind of message can lean toward some privilege-denying libertarian bullshit, but I don’t think that’s Singleton’s intention. It’s clear that at the very least he’d argue solidarity among marginalized groups (and the justice-minded less-marginalized) is the only thing that stands a chance at stopping violent white male oppression. I’m not mad at that, especially considering this film was made two decades before mass shootings and white nationalism were constant parts of our lives and the word “intersectionality” meant anything to anyone outside a graduate seminar. Pretty good for 1995.

Here is the part where I justify all that nonsense up at the top. HIGHER LEARNING gets right what PCU gets so horribly wrong: the opposite of social justice and inclusivity isn’t partying, it’s hate crime. If you go to college looking to crush Solo cups and get chicks, you’re not a noble defender of the lost art of hedonism. You’re a shithead and potential rapist and/or mass shooter. In expanding his scope as a filmmaker, Singleton does exactly what this movie asks of the viewer and what college should be all about - he makes an effort to empathize with experiences beyond his own.