Dorothy Parker: Sharp-Witted Writer, Bitter Professor

In 1963, the Los Angeles State College of Applied Arts and Sciences, now known as the California State University, welcomed real-life Hollywood heroine Dorothy Parker to its campus as a one-year Distinguished Visiting Professor of English. Dorothy Parker was, in theory, a dynamite catch for the college: her short stories and poetry were widely renowned, she’d been a member of the esteemed Algonquin Round Table, and she was the mind behind the 1937 screenplay for A Star is Born. She had talent, experience, and personality—everything needed to excel at teaching English literature.

But although the new position seems like a perfect match on paper, it was actually a temporary band-aid solution to a chronic problem. Dorothy Parker and her long-term husband and work partner, Alan Campbell, were spendthrifts, and they had thrown away their fabulous Hollywood screenwriting salaries on mansions, parties, and alcoholism. Dorothy Parker took the teaching job largely for its financial benefits, rather than out of a strong desire to teach literature or the craft of writing. According to scholar Donald O. Dewey in his 2007 article for the Southern California Quarterly, she started the job with a less-than-enthusiastic attitude and was likely to leave it the same way.

“The image of this New York icon coping with young men and women on an almost exclusively commuter campus, most of them aspiring to become public school teachers, promised culture shock,” Dewey writes. “Months before she even dreamed of an academic career she had been critical of students whom she viewed as drudges struggling at colleges merely to enhance their economic future while, sometimes, gaining some education.”

Throughout his article on this brief and unfortunate period of Parker’s life, Dewey suggests that Parker lacked the mindset for teaching and that her appointment as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of English was, in many ways, an ill-suited match.

Parker’s relationship with her students reflected this disconnect. She believed they lacked a genuine appreciation for literature and were primarily concerned with earning credentials. She characterized them as overly focused on happy endings and too narrow-minded to pursue writing careers. The distance between Parker and her students widened when she conducted a mean-spirited interview with the Los Angeles Times, published on April 28, 1963, before her teaching term had ended. In the interview, Parker openly disparaged her students, signaling a level of resentment that left little room for reconciliation and appeared to confirm the mutual animosity between them.

During the interview, Parker criticized her students for failing to meet her expectations or match her intellect and did so with little of the wit for which she was known. As Dewey notes, “She added that she could never write a satire about her educational interlude: ‘It’s much too sad for that.'”

In his investigation, Dewey suggests that Parker may not have been as universally disliked as she believed. Some students reportedly admired her for her presence of character. Yet with her usual writer’s flair, she was prone to some exaggeration: “She told neighbors that resentful students who had read her comments about them countered by scrawling on the blackboards allegations that she had Communist affiliations. This was all the evidence she needed that they disliked her as much as she did them. Yet none of the eleven students from her spring courses who were interviewed could recall anything of the sort.”

Parker’s experience suggests that teaching was not her natural terrain, and that her literary gifts found a more fitting outlet in writing than in the fraught dynamics of the classroom.

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