Abstract
In this chapter, Witherington examines how Girls critiques US perspectives of higher education. In addition to exposing biases in twenty-first-century public and private universities, Girls focuses on a particular sub-population of white, upper-middle-class students and graduates who remain blindly ignorant of the privileges they have been afforded by their race and class. The series’ timely exploration of how the value of tertiary education has shifted reveals the need for characters to mature beyond the institutions that have previously defined them.
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Notes
- 1.
The CUNY system is often compared to the SUNY system (State University of New York) and NYU (New York University). NYU is a private university and ranked highly, particularly in Girls. The SUNY system is generally more prestigious than the CUNY system, in part, because SUNY is larger and includes more residential campuses.
- 2.
Caroline (Gaby Hoffman) seems to have followed Jessa’s prescription, too, as she seems as unlikely a teacher as Hannah.
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Witherington, L. (2017). HBO’s Girls and Twenty-First-Century Education. In: Nash, M., Whelehan, I. (eds) Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52971-4_8
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