Russ Bradburd is a funny guy.
The fiction writer has a new satirical novel, Big Time, and he will be holding a reading from the new work at 7:30 p.m. on March 21 at Milton Hall on the New Mexico State University campus. The reading is free.
With his new novel, Bradburd, who retired from teaching fiction writing at New Mexico State University last year, is poking fun at the way the university system works with his new book. Bradburd said his inspiration for the novel came during a faculty committee meeting during which the faculty established a new committee to study how to reduce committee work.
“It’s illogical,” Bradburd said. “If a building was on fire, half the professors would say let’s start a fire committee.”
Bradburd set the world of his fiction novel at a university that, to solve financial problems, rebrands itself Coors State University. But the beer company stipulates that all of its donation must go to the university’s sports teams.
This means academic departments find themselves working in the service of the football and basketball teams. Two elderly historians, working the concession stand, decide to revolt.
Bradburd said the heroine of the novel is a poet who is the one character with common sense. Although Bradburd is married to poet Connie Voisine, he said the character is not based on his wife.
While this is Bradburd’s fifth book, it is his first novel. He said it is hard to write funny. He said the trick is to play the characters straight.
“It’s an absurd world to the outside viewers. It’s funny to us but not to them,” he said.
But even if the novel is comic, it is focused on a serious problem in higher education. Bradburd said he was drawn to writing a satirical novel because it’s a way to expose a problem in a way that serious writing doesn’t in quite the same way.
“It’s a fallacy, in my view, that academia is a bunch of liberals and radicals and Marxists,” Bradburd said.
He said the president of a university makes hundreds of thousands of dollars while the bulk of classes are taught by under paid adjuncts who have neither job security nor health insurance and make around $3,000 per class.
“It’s not a progressive, Marxist system,” Bradburd said. “It’s performative.”
Bradburd started out not as a fiction writer but as an assistant basketball coach, first for the University of Texas-El Paso, then for New Mexico State University. He said he lived in that world for 14 years.
But he said his real interest was always in the stories behind the sports. He said a formative book for him was Out of Their League, a best-selling autobiography by David Meggyesy. Meggyesy is a former St. Louis Cardinals linebacker who quit his NFL career to protest the Vietnam War.
Bradburd, who loves to read, said he found creative ways to sneak books on the airplane when he traveled as an assistant basketball coach. In 2000, he quit basketball and joined the creative writing faculty at NMSU.
But at the end of the day, Bradburd said the person he’s making fun of the most is himself.
“I’m an academic,” he said.
