It’s Hard For Professors to Say Anything Good

“It happened at Yale,” reads the opening screen of After the Hunt, the recent campus drama directed by Luca Guadagnino. A philosophy Ph.D. student named Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) says a male professor “crossed the line” with her: “He kept going after I said no.” She asks her mentor, Alma (Julia Roberts), whether she should press charges. Alma knows that this is a losing move and tells Maggie to drop it. Maggie drops Alma instead, and writes an editorial denouncing her one-time role model. Maggie says that she wants to do the “right thing,” but by the film’s end, we learn that integrity was never an option. Five years later, Alma is shown lounging in a wood-paneled office and giving orders to her personal secretary. Maggie also lands on her feet. After excavating her pain to applause from her fellow student activists, she gets engaged to a head curator at the Whitney Museum and sports a diamond engagement ring. This, according to the film, is the world of the elite university. Everyone is a material winner; everyone is a moral loser. In the words of Theodor W. Adorno, read out by Alma during an on-the-nose class session: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”