But the most striking aspect of a comparison of three 1990s academic novels to a survey of faculty work in the 1990s lies in the top row of Table 2: in the percentage of faculty effort devoted to teaching. If you look at the top line across all columns, you can see what academic novels tell us about teaching, and that is: very little. Almost nothing. They tell us about research and service in roughly the same proportions as they occur in real life. They tell us about sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll in probably even greater proportions than they occur in real life, at least in my real life. But they don't tell us much about teaching—60 percent of faculty work in real life, but only 9 percent in all three of the novels. Our own experiences, as well as federal survey data, tell us that faculty devote most of their time to teaching, so it is striking that teaching shows up so infrequently in books that purport to represent the academic life. Why isn't teaching more thoroughly and comprehensively portrayed in these pages?

The novels themselves give us an answer: teaching is the most private and solitary act in academic life, and teaching is almost always done behind closed doors. In these novels, even the sex is more public than the teaching is. The characters have sex in the stacks at the library, in the stairwells, in campus greenhouses, in any available open space. But teaching is always private, unseen, invisible, imperceptible to the general academic community. This central fact about teaching is pungently illustrated in a scene from Straight Man:

The main character Hank Devereaux says:

I stop outside Finny's classroom and peer in through the small window in the door. [. . . ] His students have the grim look of death camp dwellers, [. . .] six of the eleven consult their watches. Four yawn. One starts violently awake. And they're only fifteen minutes into class. [. . .] I make what I think is a clean getaway, but then I hear the classroom door open behind me and feel pursuit. "This," Finny hisses at my retreating form, "is harassment." [. . .] I hold up my hands in surrender. "Finny—" "Stay away from my classroom, or I'll file a grievance," he warns me. "I'll get a restraining order if I have to" (63).