Lords of Serendipity: An Interview with Randy Boyagoda

Acclaimed author and English professor Randy Boyagoda’s latest novel, Lords of Serendipity, is set between Sri Lanka and the United States, and follows two ambitious young women whose dreams of elite higher education expose a much larger world of parental sacrifice, global inequality, institutional gatekeeping, and the complicated moral economy surrounding modern universities. Both sharply satirical and deeply humane, Lords of Serendipity examines what education promises, what it actually delivers, and what people are willing to risk in pursuit of opportunity. In this conversation with novelist Su Chang, Boyagoda reflects on the campus novel as both literary form and institutional X-ray, discussing satire, civil discourse, compromised moral choices, and the fragile ideals that still draw people to universities. He also considers his own position as novelist, professor, and administrator, and why fiction can hold competing truths about higher education without resolving them too neatly. This interview was conducted on Zoom and edited for clarity and flow.

Su Chang: Randy, thank you so much for joining me today and congratulations on publishing this fantastic novel. It is a truly dazzling campus novel: timely and serious, and at the same time, very funny and genuinely entertaining. You are writing from inside a university, and in fact from very high up inside one. As the former Vice-Dean, Undergraduate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science, you saw the machinery behind undergraduate life. How much of this novel is based on what you saw on the ground? And more generally, what are the inspirations behind this project?

Randy Boyagoda: Thank you for having me. I would say that my life as a university person informs, thoroughly, the storylines and the elements of Lords of Serendipity. I went to university when I was nineteen and I have never left. I have experienced universities as an undergraduate, as a graduate student, postdoc, professor, university administrator, and now as a parent of two university-age daughters. My father went to the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka in the mid-1950s, and I grew up in an immigrant household in 1980s Oshawa where what I heard over and over again was that the most significant decision and experience my father had was not immigrating from Sri Lanka to Canada. It was going to university.

So my entire life, I’ve had a sense that universities can have these transformative effects on individuals and on their families. I wanted to write a novel about the state of universities that reveals the fuller systems at play in what we otherwise assume are self-enclosed campuses. Normally, campus novels give you an isolated place where professors and students are in the middle of mishaps and misadventures. It tends to be funny and dark and endearing. But there is not nearly enough of a sense, I think, of the systems well beyond those campuses that make those campuses possible. I wanted to write a global campus novel. I wanted to show the interconnections between a Sri Lankan village girl named Devi and her father, who cleans toilets in a five-star hotel in Colombo to pay for her tuition; ordinary middle-class North Americans for whom going to university is a given and the only issue is how to pay for it; and the most elite professors at the top universities in the world, for whom all that matters is getting more research grants and teaching fewer classes. We think of these things as separated, but I wanted to reveal how much they depend upon each other in the various ways universities affect people’s lives.

The very specific inspirations were two. The first was that, while serving as a vice-dean at the University of Toronto, I heard an urban legend about a TA in a statistics course who was selling grades and guaranteeing students grades. This was never substantiated, but the writer in me, not the administrator, started wondering about the human stories behind a situation like that. Why would someone need to purchase a guaranteed grade? Why would someone be able to sell a guaranteed grade? Why would a university create the conditions for something like that to happen?

A little later, I was visiting the Department of Statistics and wanted to say hello to the then-chair, because I had met him many times over Teams and Zoom during the pandemic but never in person. I went into his office, and on his bookshelf was a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce. I was amazed. He shrugged and said he read it at lunch. As a writer, I make a major distinction between types and full characters; the latter better reflect and enact the fullness of the human person. A statistics professor who reads statistics journals isn’t particularly interesting; that keeps to type. A statistics professor who reads Ulysses opens something up. English professors don’t read Ulysses at lunch. Where did this come from? And then the idea of a character began to take shape.

Normally, nine out of ten times, the main character in a campus novel is an English professor or a creative writing professor who bears some resemblance to the author. My own novel, Original Prin, from 2018 is structured very much along those lines. But right now I think it is more imaginatively interesting, and intellectually and politically significant, to think about a system novel where one of the main characters is a statistics professor with an interest in the life of the mind, in art and culture, while at the same time he’s part of this larger system where you have a TA selling grades to a student, and that student is paying his tuition by pretending to be an Oxford tutor for a Sri Lankan village girl, and she needs her father to clean toilets in a five-star hotel to pay for her dream of going to Harvard. If you see a system emerging in these connections, this is what Lords of Serendipity is doing.

SC: Indeed, one thing that amazed me when I was reading this novel was how many threads and how large a cast the novel has, and yet you tie them all together. You also seem to be making a conscious correction to the campus novel genre. There is a tradition in this genre of male professors behaving very, very badly, usually English professors. In your novel, there are still male professors behaving badly, but you seem to shift attention toward the larger structures they are situated in. Am I reading this right – was that a conscious shift and correction to the genre itself?

RB: That’s an excellent reading, and I’m grateful for your sense that the novel is itself exposing what we normally take for granted when it comes to the settings and arrangements of characters in a campus novel. I would make a distinction between the two male professors in the novel: Jack, the statistics professor, and Martin, the astronomy professor. Jack teaches unpopular courses at a mediocre mid-Atlantic urban university, Arcadia Tech, where his colleagues compare him to the department photocopier: everyone knows he’s there, but no one really understands why he’s still there. Martin teaches at an Ivy League school just outside Boston, meaning Harvard, although that is never made explicit. Martin is an alpha male researcher with grants galore, holds a named research chair, and more or less seems to be sailing through life as a well-funded, well-feted academic.

For both characters, situations happen at their universities that are beyond their control but confront them with decisions whose outcomes are morally and professionally compromising, no matter what they choose to do. I would make the case that Jack is trying to make the right decision but finds himself conflicted, because he is ultimately motivated by his commitments as a father. His daughter Katrina is a privileged, middle-class American girl whose whole life has been designed to get her into Haven College, a liberal arts paradise where everyone has climate anxiety and a personal trainer. Everything Jack does with his personal and professional life is ordered to the principle of paying for Katrina to be at Haven, which is extraordinarily expensive. Yet while teaching extra courses to make extra money, he uncovers evidence of massive cheating and even corruption. He tries to bring justice to the situation, only to realize that the larger system at the university seems set against justice. The university is more invested in stability, in protecting its reputation, and in ensuring that international students keep coming to the school with their tuition dollars. Jack then has to decide where to go with his own moral compass, in terms of his splitting-apart personal and professional commitments.

While writing this book, I was thinking a lot about Graham Greene. The main and often most memorable, most appealing characters in Graham Greene novels are morally compromised. They are almost always trying to find the least bad way to do good with their lives. Jack is, in many ways, a Graham Greene character. He is compromised any which way he goes. So what is the least bad way to try to do something good in a fallen and compromised world?

Not Martin. Martin strikes me as an egotistical, presumptuous academic for whom everything is and should be arranged to reflect his brilliance and his capacities. When conflicts beyond his interest and control bring together his elite university and geopolitics, ensuing protests and controversies have an impact on him, or more specifically on his research chair. He’s outraged, not because he cares about the question of Israel and Palestine. He’s upset because his research has been disrupted. That is where you see how self-involved and egotistical he is. This is the parallel with Jack, who is doing whatever he can to keep paying for his daughter to go to school. Martin is doing whatever he can, to keep his research going, which soon involves a friendly offer from an entity associated with the Chinese government.

SC: Isn’t it ironic? Martin, the star researcher, is ultimately the biggest fraud as well, whereas Jack is at least an honest teacher. There is that tragic line where Jack is living a pretend life as a researcher so that he can pay for his daughter’s genuine life at Haven.

RB: Indeed, and that line also connects Jack to Devi’s father. Two fathers, both fully committed to doing whatever they can for their daughters, and they both go to extremes in how they do this.

The other connection is that, when Martin is a fraud, the world of the novel seems to accept this, because no one benefits if anyone pursues his fraudulent ways. Likewise, no one benefits if anyone pursues the cheating scandal at Arcadia Tech. And we cannot say that this mediocre university dependent on international students is corrupt, while the elite places are perfect. No. It goes all the way through the system.

SC: Let’s go to the two teenage girls: Devi in Sri Lanka and Katrina in the United States. Their dreams around higher education have a strange sameness, but their conditions are radically different. You have also said that, if you had to pick one villain in the novel, you would pick Katrina. Can you tell us why and talk about the contrast between the two girls?

RB: As I’ve briefly mentioned already, Devi is a village girl living in Sri Lanka, and from a young age she began dreaming of someday going to one of the world’s great universities. This becomes the great motivation of her life. She receives the lookbooks, the admissions booklets, and keeps them under her bed. She shares a room with her grandmother, really part of a hallway closed off with a drape. The grandmother has magazines of the royal family, and Devi has magazines of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on. They are both dreaming of impossible places. The grandmother is never going to be a member of the royal family. But maybe Devi can get into one of these universities. For Devi, the binary is dramatic. If she gets into one of the world’s great universities, her life will change decisively, and so too, the lives of her family members. If she doesn’t get in, she is going to be married off or sent to Dubai to work as an indentured servant. I think this binary accounts for her relentless drive, and it also explains some of the morally compromised decisions she makes as she pursues her dream.

Katrina offers a very strong contrast. Her whole life has been designed for her to get into Haven College, not just because it is elite but also because her late mother went there. Jack thinks it is his life’s mission for Katrina to go to Haven. Katrina has done the fencing lessons, the summer camps, the soup kitchen volunteering, all the right experiences to position her for elite college success. But she takes all of this for granted. She doesn’t really have a stake in her own life.

But when she gets to university, she starts asking: Is this really what I want to do with my life? Why have I taken things for granted? She has never been formed to ask those questions, so she doesn’t ask them very well and she doesn’t come up with very good answers. Underlying everything for her is the assumption that everything will work out and people will always take care of her. And that is why I think this upper-middle-class American college student just may be the novel’s villain. Her assumption that everything is always going to work out for her exposes and contributes to so much injustice in the world of the novel, because she is right. Everything is built around making sure Katrina is okay. There are many Katrinas, and the whole system depends on Katrina feeling okay and happy and supported.

Near the end of the novel, when the characters all come together in Sri Lanka, Devi finds herself in a situation where, if she can’t get through an actual closed door, her life will change for the worse: She may be sent to Dubai or married off. Katrina interrupts Devi’s life crisis to ask if she has the password for the Wi-Fi, because Katrina can’t get on Wi-Fi. And of course everything stops to make sure Katrina has Wi-Fi.

SC: That seems to lead directly to the vulnerability of international students. To me, that feels like the moral core of this book. What, in your opinion, do North American universities fail to understand about the financial and emotional stakes for international students and their families? Or do they understand but cannot afford to care, given their own precarious financial position?

RB: I appreciate that pointed question, and I will try to soften the point but also join you in thrusting with it. The best version of universities, for centuries, has been that these are places where young and promising people from around the world can come together, learn, exchange ideas and views with each other, and develop personally, intellectually, morally, and professionally. The only setting anywhere in the world where I have always felt not self-conscious about being a brown person is a university campus. It is the place where I feel I belong, no matter what the campus is. The best version of universities has this capacity, this desire, to bring in students and scholars from all over the world.

That having been said, contemporary universities in the Anglosphere depend significantly on international student tuition as a major component of budgets. This is undeniable. The tension in higher education is that those two purposes are at odds with each other. It would be wrong to focus on only one. You are too romantic if you only think about universities as wonderful global villages full of brilliant and promising people making themselves and the world better. But you are too cynical if you forget that universities do have the capacity to change lives all over the world. So the answer to the institutional question, Su, is both.

Let me speak to the family question through an experience I had while working on the novel. I went to Sri Lanka about three years ago for research, and it happened that there was an international university fair in the hotel where I was staying. It was packed. The schools were primarily from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, with a few from Canada and the United States. I had not heard of a single university being advertised there, but there were digital images, maybe photo-shopped, so that many had the look of what we associate with a Western university: old stone, vines growing on stone, happy, healthy young people standing around, caught up in enthusiastic conversation. The universities all had grand-sounding names, names that seemed to echo the names of schools people have actually heard of. What this revealed to me was the global imaginary about higher education, and how these universities were depending on that shared imaginary. Because the cynic in me thought: there’s no stone, no ivy, at any of these places. They’re all strip-mall storefronts.

SC: They are debt traps.

RB: Yes. But part of what my novel suggests is that these questionable places are part of the same system that established and elite places are part of. They form a continuum; there is a mutual dependency there. But at the same time, I don’t want to assign all ill motive to the people running these schools. The families in that hall were there because this was a scheme to get a child out of Sri Lanka, maybe with immigration opportunities for the entire family. This is an anchoring opportunity for them. Those families want to get their children into a better spot, and they believe this will help the whole family.

SC: That connects to birth lottery, doesn’t it? And the nation states, our obsessions with borders, etc. People are born into certain countries, through no merit or shortcoming of their own, and many have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps just to escape the conditions they were born into.

RB: Birth lottery is a great way to think about it. Katrina and Devi are certainly very different people in the birth lottery sweepstakes.

SC: We talked about Katrina, her very coddled life and confused ideals as an American teen. You also served as a special advisor on civil discourse at the university. Did that work change how you wrote the scenes of disagreement, protest, performance, and ideological conflict? And how do you write about student protests satirically without dismissing young people’s moral seriousness?

RB: That’s an excellent question, and my hope is that tacit in your question is the answer. If I did this well, I demonstrated my imaginative capacity to reveal the moral seriousness of young people, while also revealing their inevitable flaws of understanding and application when they try to change the world. As a satirist, what I like to do is demonstrate how virtues, lived out wrongly, become vices. Katrina becomes involved in a prank at Haven College. The prank is directed at fellow students planning a protest performance of a play, and that performance is related to encampment protests. I hope I gave a full rendering of the moral seriousness inspiring these students, while also showing that they are eighteen- to twenty-year-olds motivated by conflicting interpersonal desires, conflicts, and anxieties. The protest and the prank become a big mess, with parents watching and screaming at the kids to cover their faces so no one sees they were involved in a campus protest.

I served as the University of Toronto’s advisor on civil discourse from January 2024 to the end of June 2026. The novel goes back ten years. I had an encampment in the novel before 2019, in various versions. But my civil discourse work revealed to me a crisis of trust among students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents, especially directed towards institutional leadership. Everybody seems convinced that the institution does not have their best interests in mind. I’d say we don’t trust each other nearly enough, nearly as much we used to, or as we should.

In the novel I also tried to reveal the haplessness and passivity of institutions in dealing with conflicts because of the understandable need to maintain reputation and avoid risk at all costs. When the protest prank becomes a mess, I probably enjoyed, more than I should have, imagining how a risk-avoidant and reputation-minded administration deals with the students involved. I make this claim not about any of my colleagues; there is absolutely self-implication there, as a university administrator myself. In that case, I made the novelist’s decision not to humanize the institution. I went with a more faceless institutional response, and I add that as a civil discourse advisor, my experience has been that this is how many people experience the university as an institution, especially when they disagree with a decision. And so, wanting the novel to reveal or reflect back experiences both inside and of institutions of higher education, I made this decision.

SC: Yes, when I was reading the novel, I kept thinking – are universities still the place for genuine dialogues?

RB: Again, I am implicating myself here to some degree. My hope comes late in the novel, when Katrina and her roommate Cham participate in an undergraduate research fair. It is a moment where they realize that the promise of a university and the reality can be one. They enjoy talking about something they have learned, something they have discovered, something they want to argue, and people around them respond positively. With Katrina, when she presents on migrant women in Rome after a study abroad experience, that felt real to me. I wanted at least a couple of moments where Katrina has an experience of learning, developing, and being excited by ideas.

By comparison, let’s not pretend Devi is entirely innocent. At one point, Martin asks Devi what she wants to study at Harvard, and her answer is: I want to go to Harvard. It doesn’t matter what she studies. What matters is going.

SC: Right. I think that’s why this novel is exceedingly rich, because every character is morally gray and every incident in the novel has its moral complexity and ambiguity. Even in the symposium you just mentioned, the young people are having a genuine learning moment, and yet, Martin, a mentor for one of them, is only doing this so he can write on his annual activity report that he has mentored a BIPOC student. You’ve got the cynical lens and earnest lens probing the same event.

RB: Yes, and that’s also how universities work, isn’t it? A student can have meaningful, transformative experiences, and at the same time a faculty member might be mentoring this same BIPOC student to check an EDI-related box on their annual activities report. Both things can be true. As writers, we want both things to be true, because that creates the rich tension of a human life on the page.

SC: Very true. I’d also like to talk about one final side plot, which involves the impact of Chinese money, and the novel suggests a new form of colonialism because strings are attached. As a writer and administrator, how worried are you about influence from rising powers like China? And in the context of Trump’s xenophobic policies and restrictions put on Chinese scholars and universities, how would you balance this fear of new colonialism with a potential new manifestation of McCarthyism?

RB: I think we go back to the situation where both things can be true. In the novel, China has called in part of Sri Lanka’s debt related to funding Sri Lankan infrastructure, and it does so by taking over a local Sri Lankan university and transforming it: dramatic new construction, sleek contemporary buildings, excellent amenities, state-of-the-art labs. In turn, through an arm’s-length institute ultimately associated with the Chinese government, efforts are made to attract major Western scholars to this newly-created or recreated university in Sri Lanka. The idea is that this is a way for well-known American academics, like Martin for instance, to secure research funding without going directly to or through China, which would be flagged and prevented by the U.S. government. Now, when it comes to pressure or outside influence, I don’t know if I would put it exactly that way, because all around the world nation-states explicitly have investments in universities and higher education. Universities have national purpose. We needn’t deny this. Sometimes it feels especially politically pointed, as in the United States over the last couple of years. In Canada, too, there has been lots of talk about federal investment in universities in relation to Canadian sovereignty and defense.

In this particular case, in terms of what Martin decides to do when he’s approached, this exposes more about his moral compass than it does about the Chinese government’s decision to underwrite the creation of a beautiful new university in Sri Lanka.

But the pressure and influence are absolutely there in the novel’s imagining of contemporary higher education, especially of its geopolitics. We know there are Sri Lankan students, not just Devi, whose lives will genuinely benefit from the funding of this university. For me as a novelist, what interests me is the juxtaposition of large entities — nation-states underwriting universities, universities themselves — having effects that feel at best amoral and sometimes immoral, while there are individual persons who derive undeniably positive benefits from that amoral or immoral presence. That is the world as it is, and as a writer, this is imaginatively and intellectually rich to explore and tell stories about.

SC: Well said. As a reader, I found it really interesting how a university in Sri Lanka becomes a proxy battleground of geopolitics between the major powers of the world.

RB: That’s an excellent reading. At the same time, it would have been too easy to let individual characters become stand-ins for countries. Instead, each character has a mixed set of motives, even when they know they are in the middle of a proxy battle. Ultimately, it is about the human person we can create on the page and put in orbit and circulation with others. That is the beauty of what we get to do with novels.

SC: Indeed. There’s so much more I want to ask you, but given the time limit, here’s my final question. The novel presents higher education as an ecosystem of desperation, for almost all its stakeholders. After writing this book for ten years, how do you think higher education can fix itself? Does it need help from outside the ivory tower? What big ideas came out of writing this novel?

RB: That’s a big question. I think one of the distinguishing features of universities is our long-standing investment in self-governance, in autonomy and the academic freedom associated with being autonomous. One of the major debates we have these days in higher education and about higher education is whether universities can reform themselves in support of their mission to advance knowledge through teaching and research, or whether they require outside intervention.

Outside intervention immediately becomes complicated and compromised. Does it come from government? From donors? What are the expectations involved? My hope would be that, because universities have been around longer than the nation-states and their governments, universities can find ways to reform themselves to better live out their primary mission: to advance knowledge through teaching and research.

I believe we have a problem where too many people have ideals about university that lead them to be frustrated, disappointed, outraged, and alienated by the realities of university. What we need are ideas about university. Ideas are open to argument, revision, evolution.  I hope that our conversations about higher education become more driven by competing and conflicting ideas about what a university is and what it should be for, rather than by the interplay of ideal and frustrating reality.

SC: Fantastic. On that note, I think we have so much to think about after this conversation. I strongly recommend our readers pick up a copy of Lords of Serendipity. There is so much to be learned and admired from this epic campus novel. Thank you, Randy, for your wisdom and candidness. It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you.

RB: Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions.

Su Chang

Su Chang is a Shanghai-born Chinese-Canadian writer. She is the author of a debut novel, The Immortal Woman (House of Anansi, March 2025), which is a CBC Best Fiction of 2025, a Toronto Book Award nominee, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist, a Rakuten Kobo Best Fiction of the Month, and won the 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award, among other accolades. CBC named her a "Writer to Watch" in 2025. Her fiction stories have been nominated for the Journey Prize and the National Magazine Award, won awards or been shortlisted by the Montreal Fiction Prize, Tennessee Williams/SASFest Fiction Contest, Prairie Fire Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors' Association National Contest, ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, Disquiet International Fiction Prize, among others. She lives with her partner and two young children. More at https://www.suchangauthor.com/

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