Grading Max Bickford
Something rare for network television.

By Ronald Radosh, author, most recently, of Commies.
December 1-2, 2001

The Education of Max Bickford, CBS, Sundays 8 PM (EST) featuring Richard Dreyfuss, Marcia Gay Harden, Helen Shaver, Regina Taylor, Katee Sackhoff, Eric Ian Goldberg. Produced by Dawn Prestwich, Nicole Yorkin, Rod Holcomb, and Richard Dreyfuss.

BS television started its fall season with high hopes for its new drama, The Education of Max Bickford. Portrayed by the superb Richard Dreyfuss, Max Bickford is a professor of American History at a mythical Chadwick College, an all-women's liberal-arts institution, whose prototype is most likely Smith College. His colleague Andrea Haskell, a new faculty member on campus, is played by Marcia Gay Harden. Along with Dreyfuss, Harden is another Oscar-winning actor. Positioned after 60 Minutes on Sunday, the network obviously hoped they had a major new hit on their hands. But evidently, the first night's ratings of over 40 million slipped way down to some 14 million, a figure that has put fear in the hearts of the network's brass. Now they have let the producers and creators of the series know that they no longer will have approval over the scripts. A program which began trying to raise serious issues about the academy in America is obviously in danger of becoming yet another family drama about the widower Bickford, his two children, and his new emerging love interest.

This is unfortunate, because in the wasteland of network television, how many shows do we have in which the setting is the university and the hero an American-history professor? More important, how many such programs dare to take on the state of higher education, the epidemic of political correctness, the incessant department fights, and how our history is taught to naïve but smart and willing-to-learn students? And, even better, Richard Dreyfuss gives us an impassioned, if cranky and somewhat burned-out teacher, who has to suffer the improprieties of petty colleagues, the demands of the trustees, and the needs of his students. In one interview, Dreyfuss told a reporter that when he was twelve years old, he always said he wanted to be an actor first and a history professor second. Now, he can say, "I'm not a history professor, but I play one on TV."

His character, Max Bickford, is a widower who has taught too many years, coping with raising his elementary-school-age son and college-age rebellious daughter. In the first episode, viewers learn that despite his years of service, an available endowed chair, which he expected to get, was given instead to a former Harvard professor who years earlier was Bickford's student, with whom he once had an affair. His obvious anger at not receiving the appointment leads him to become quite angry, to which she retorts that he is simply jealous that she has already published three books in a few years, compared to very little output from him. Bickford quickly snarls back that "I taught you haute cuisine. You went and opened a McDonald's." It seems that Andrea Haskell's latest book was titled Class and Gender in the Music of Bruce Springsteen, a subject for which Bickford, a man committed to old-style political history, is not too impressed. In this Sunday's episode, a department member complains at a stormy department meeting that a vacant line awarded to their department will undoubtedly go to "the first Puerto Rican lesbian in a wheelchair who applies." In one or two moments, the program gives us a rare and biting look at what political correctness has done to the academy.

The problem with the program is that, like other shows with a message, it takes on too much — and the writers don't seem to be able to make up their minds what they think about the issues they have raised. Clearly, CBS hoped to have their version of The West Wing on tap, but set this time in academia. On one episode, Bickford is shown teaching about Hiroshima, and raising the question of whether the United States should have used the A-bomb. He asks his class "What do we value? That we should win at all costs?" After some discussion (this being television; there is obviously no time to bring in the actual historical factors that one has to consider before even dealing with the question of the A-bomb's use) Max ends by praising those who had the courage to die for their nation. When one student says "Are you saying that we should never have dropped the bomb?" Bickford firmly answers "No," and tells students to do their work and develop their own answers.

A recent episode was loosely based on the famous Joseph Ellis case, in which one of our most well-know historians was shown to have lied about his Vietnam-era experience, claiming both a role as a veteran and later as an antiwar activist, both of which were false. Ellis, as we know, was eventually penalized and removed from his post at Mount Holyoke College. In the Bickford show version, an African-American professor called Dr. Bernadine Lawford, once a student with Max at UC Berkeley in the 60's (naturally), comes to lecture and to tell the students at Chadwick about her riveting and dangerous experiences with Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the heyday of the civil-rights movement. Her comments accurately reflect the courage and commitment of those who demonstrated and were Freedom Riders in the days of segregation. The class of young women is mesmerized.

An enterprising reporter on the Chadwick paper, who was working on a profile of Lawford, learns that during the years of her supposed personal involvement in the Movement, Lawford actually was in Europe working on an advanced degree. Unlike Ellis, who in fact was both publicly humiliated and pilloried, and finally removed from his teaching post, the television version has Lawford telling the students that she was wrong, but that she was only trying to inspire them about the lessons of history by making it come alive. She does not get the Chadwick post she sought, but the knowledge of how she has regularly lied is left only to those Chadwick students who heard about it, leaving the professor to grapple on a personal level with her decision to exaggerate on her own life experience. The intent is in effect to say that perhaps her lying was wrong, but she meant well, and thus should probably be excused. Evidently the writers feel that a tougher punishment for the professor would be something that would not be uplifting to a television audience, however fitting it would be in real life.

The message, then, seems always to be that any behavior is excusable, as long as the protagonist eventually changes. The contradictions of the series are most apparent in this week's episode, airing this Sunday, which is perhaps the least satisfactory of the entire season. The theme is both truth and history. We hear Bickford's son, having been given the writings of Abraham Lincoln by his father, telling his class that Lincoln was a racist, and far from being a hero, was no better than anyone else. Later, Bickford explains to his son and to the school kids that what is important is that people grow and change — hence Lincoln, having signed the Emancipation Proclamation, can still be seen as a hero.

But the main part of the episode revolves around the response by a conservative student to an appearance in Bickford's class by none other than Daniel Ellsberg, who plays himself and talks about the Pentagon Papers. I'm sure NRO readers will agree that the portrayal of a conservative student is an extremely gross cartoon caricature. The student objects not to what the Pentagon papers actually reveal and mean in terms of one's view of the Vietnam War, but to having Ellsberg speak at all in a college, since she condemns him as nothing better than a traitor. Clearly, the producers and writers assume that being against the war was correct then and in retrospect was even more so, and that in a time of sorrow, Ellsberg was a rare hero. (Bickford is shown saying to Haskell, "I never would have thought 30 years ago that Daniel Ellsberg would be standing here in my class.") Moreover, the conservative student is shown to be rude, angry, and argumentative without any solid arguments of her own. All right, it is assumed, is on the side of those against the Vietnam War, and in favor of Ellsberg. And we see Haskell remove the student from class, since she calls her constant heckling and challenges to Ellsberg as more than inappropriate.

Then the plot turns. The student files a grievance against Andrea Haskell, whom she accuses of lowering her grade because she is a conservative. The student brings her term paper to the college's president, who sees that Haskell wrote in the margins that the student's work was nothing but "right-wing rhetoric."(But then, Haskell it seems only gave her an A-; is there any school where a student would actually bring charges against a teacher for getting an A-?) Haskell, however, readily acknowledges that in fact, she is so against conservatives that indeed she had unfairly given her an underserved grade, and so raises it to an A, which leaves the conservative student still angry and unforgiving for having to be subjected at all to liberal brainwashing instead of education. Again, we are left with the intended message; experience and years will hopefully even allow this young angry conservative woman to mature and to grow. Just as Lincoln ended slavery, in the future this woman might herself become another Hillary Clinton. And as for the war, we even have Bickford's class on Vietnam ending in the singing of the late Ed McCurdy's left-wing song "Strangest Dream," (sung off key, at that) and repeated by Bickford himself at a contentious department meeting.

So how does one evaluate The Education of Max Bickford? It has great acting, it addresses the issue of education and its debasement, and it addresses a lot of current social and political issues, hoping that the audience, like the young Chadwick students, will also address these issues and not avoid them. But it veers at critical moments in the direction of the very liberal shibboleths in academia that it has started to satirize. So, Professor Bickford, here is my grade: A for effort and acting, C for evading the tough questions and copping out with easy uplifting solutions — which gives the series a wholesome B. That's better than a lot on the tube these days, and maybe even the CBS honchos will, like Lincoln, think twice about their first reactions and allow the series to continue and develop its strengths.