Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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SHEIN’s Hong Kong IPO wiped a $4.4 billion obligation from its books, but the fast-fashion giant still faces a payout of up to $3.5 billion to early investors.
3 min
Companies typically go public to raise money to supercharge growth. Fast-fashion giant Shein has another motivation.
The company’s initial public offering in Hong Kong this week is allowing it to avoid paying out billions to early investors.
If Shein hadn’t sold shares by the end of the year, the company would have been required to fork out nearly $4.4 billion in cash to holders of its convertible redeemable preferred shares. With the IPO, the $17.3 billion in preferred shares was converted to ordinary equity, and that obligation was wiped off the books.
But Shein was still on the hook for another payment. Holders of those preferred shares were entitled to a payout of billions more, in part because the company’s valuation has fallen from its peak. That payout came to nearly $3.5 billion in cash, according to regulatory filings.
The retailer on Monday priced its shares at 48.56 Hong Kong dollars each, equivalent to about $6.20 and near the middle of the range of HK$47.60 and HK$49.50 it provided last week.
The company pressed ahead with its IPO despite slowing growth and regulatory headwinds in the U.S. and European Union. Shein priced its IPO at a valuation of around $26 billion, roughly a quarter of the $98.2 billion valuation it achieved in a funding round in 2022.
Shein started selling its wares in the U.S. around 2012 and shot to popularity during the pandemic when more people shopped online. Its supply-chain prowess and vast range of styles at affordable prices made the brand a favorite among many U.S. consumers. It showed other retailers, including Amazon.com, that consumers were willing to wait more than a week for their online purchases to be delivered—if the price was right. But rivals soon emerged, such as Temu, which sells more products apart from apparel.
Shein’s business model of selling massive amounts of cheap goods lost some of its shine as more countries started imposing tariffs on small packages. The U.S. removed a trade exemption that allowed packages valued at or below $800 to enter the country duty-free, and the EU has introduced a €3 (about $3.50) customs duty on imports of low-value parcels.
Shein has worked toward its IPO for years, and the looming $4.4 billion obligation wasn’t the only reason it went public. But the threat of the big payout on Dec. 31 was certainly a part of its reason to press ahead, said Jianggan Li, founder and chief executive of Momentum Works, a research advisory firm based in Singapore.
“Complete the listing before then,” said Li, “and a very large liability comes off the balance sheet.”
While that liability will now be off its books with a successful IPO, Shein said it was saddled with another bill: the roughly $3.5 billion it owed its early investors upon going public.
That amount includes $1.3 billion that Shein had to pay several late-stage pre-IPO investors who had been guaranteed a cash payout at an 8% or 12% annual return, and up to $2.2 billion in compensation for the fall in the company’s valuation in the period after they made their investments. The $2.2 billion was a projection based on the lower end of the offer price range, or HK$47.60 per share, so the total bill will likely be smaller than $3.5 billion. The exact amount has yet to be disclosed by the company.
Notably, the amount it owes investors is more than the roughly $1.7 billion the company raised in the IPO. The company said it was paying the funds to its investors out of cash it has on hand.
The investors entitled to the payments include entities linked to HSG, formerly known as Sequoia China, Boyu Capital, Tiger Global, General Atlantic, Thrive Capital and others.
“What the IPO really does here is resolve the capital-structure overhang,” Li said. “It gives investors liquidity, terminates those preferred-share rights and cleans up obligations created when Shein raised money at much higher valuations.”
Shein could have kicked the can down the road by renegotiating terms with its investors, he said: “Shein is not taking the cheapest way out of its old financing obligations. It is taking the cleaner way out.”
