In a new post at See Thru Edu, Robert Paquette compares the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with some of the “theater” we’ve been seeing on college campuses.

Hamilton College Professor: School’s Latest ‘Lie’

In the movie version of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “Big Daddy” Pollitt (Burl Ives), a rags-to-riches, blunt-talking, cigar-chomping lord over a dysfunctional family and thousands of acres of the best cotton-planting bottomland in Mississippi, confronts his alcoholic son Brick (Paul Newman), a former football hero, to shake him out of his self-pitying tailspin into ruin. Brick can’t stand lies and the touch of his beautiful wife Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), whom, he thinks, bedded his best friend Skipper shortly before he committed suicide.

Big Daddy acknowledges that he has risen in the ranks by being able to handle the “ninety-proof bull” of life. Brick knows that Big Daddy is dying of cancer, but family members have kept the truth from him. When Brick lets slip out during a furious face-to-face that the results of Big Daddy’s diagnosis may not be what he thinks, Big Daddy demands the truth. “You said it yourself,” Brick responds. “Mendacity is the system we live in.” Brick, honey, have you been back to campus lately?

For all his faults, Brick Politt, unlike many of the denizens of elite college campuses, recognized his own mendacity, couldn’t stomach it, and tried to drown it in alcohol. Other members of the Politt clan, while they became so inured to lying that they couldn’t recognize the truth when it stared them in the face, never denied truth existed. Nor did they expect the state of Mississippi to reward them or subsidize them for their mendacity. Let’s face it. Only a system of mendacity could have kept Richard Brodhead in place as president of Duke University in the aftermath of the Duke Lacrosse scandal, extended his tenure there, and raised his salary despite one of the most disgusting, mealy-mouthed, and costly displays of failed academic leadership of the last half century.