'Changing Places' in Changed Times

Thirty years ago, every American academic going on a research trip or a sabbatical to England carried a copy of David Lodge's comic classic, "Changing Places" (1975), which told a tale of two 40-year-old professors of English literature and two embattled campuses in the eventful spring of 1969. An ineffectual British academic, Philip Swallow, from the University of Rummidge (think Birmingham), and a hotshot American star, Morris Zapp, from the State University of Euphoria (a fictional state between Northern and Southern California), in Plotinus (Berkeley), switch places for a six-month exchange of offices, courses, and even wives. Both are transformed by the experience. Decades later, Lodge is now writing about an aging academic who must come to terms with deafness. But the interesting question about his best-known novel is whether the places are still the same, and academics would still like to exchange them. In this article, the author discusses the changes in the American and British educational landscape thirty years after Lodge's book was published.