Nor did they seem to understand that I knew what they’d successfully concealed from a multitude of people: the awesome, stunning, horrendous condition of most young Americans who had been, up to the point where I met them, poorly educated, miseducated and / or programmed not to know very much about themselves, their nation or the world. The plan seemed to be to keep them precisely that way. There were two massive barriers—most of the teachers and the teaching, and the thorough and wayward preconditioning of the students.
Of course, most of the students had never studied with a black teacher and therefore, despite the sparkling ambience that indicated it was quite all right to do so, were, at least for the time being, suspicious.
(Who’s that turkey? Who’s that nigger? Hey! What’s the name of this game? Professor Who? Dude don’t look heavy to me. Ain’t this sho nuff some shit? A brother! What, goddamn it, can a black man teach me? My, my, my, this teacher shouldn’t be so tough; after all …)
They didn’t trust Open Admissions any more than they’d trusted anything else in their battered lives, but they wished to, yes; within each of them there existed that pinhole of hope that there were still lyrical possibilities they might experience. So they congealed in the classrooms like a multicolored swamp, or flowed like an unnamed South American river, thick and turgid, through the hallways, now bright, now heaving and menacing.
These Afro-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Ecuadorians; these East Indians and West Indians and Haitians; these Italo-Americans and Middle Europeans and Chinese and Japanese and Arabs and half-generation Greeks; these last of the shanty Irish, Jews and Portuguese—they all wished. Not infrequently, the students could have been the parents of the teachers, for we were also splintered by age. Old men and old women tottered through the halls, their faces bright with expectation and self-adulation. This branch of the university was like the last train to the Dream, the Mirage, the Illusion, and everyone was climbing aboard; no one wanted to be left behind, not even the policemen, firemen and sanitation men who were wringing out the last of their G.I. Bill benefits for service from the Korean War through Vietnam.
It all looked good; the administration’s statistics must have sparkled and brought tears to the eyes of the old-line liberals who had not yet deserted the frigate. But the men’s rooms’ walls (and for that matter, I assumed, the ladies’) concealed from the not very inquisitive eyes of the administration and the Board of Upper Education a very old condition:
Down with niggers! Lynch niggers! The KKK is cuming for all niggers at this colege. Jews eat shit! Suck my dick! (Love to!) Kikes! Porto Rikans eat coconut-flavored monkey shit! So’s yer Mama! Piss in your hat, Greek! Ginny fuckers! You all eat shit! West Indians stink! Chinese eat crossways pussy! (Love to!) America for whites! You can have the motherfucker, honky! Down with niggerdom! And up your ass! Call Richie: 935–3344—anything goes! Yeah, but where? Down with Open Admissions! Hitler was right! Not right enough! Here I sit, broken hearted …
It had been discovered that about two of every ten students could write the English language well enough to be understood, which was the primary reason for launching that vast vessel, Remediation, down the ways. It was also decided that creative writing, telling stories—their own, someone else’s—or just creating them, would help unlock the great door to writing expression and comprehension. Since there had been a heavy emphasis during the Rebellions on the strength and durability of the oral tradition, most students, whatever their background, approached any kind of writing with distinctive reluctance, if not open hostility. There are ages that demand great speakers and those that demand great writers. We were in the latter, still dribbling down from New England, “a culture so exclusively one of books that it had grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression.” And this at a time when few books were read. Visions must have lingered in the heads of students of the Great Rappers: Jesus, Mohammed, El Cid, Martí, Lenin; of stump and pulpit oratory, of griots and walking repositories of dirty limericks, of George Patton, Churchill and Hitler, of Darrow and La Follette, of King.
We insisted that they learn to write and to comprehend what was written.
I worried about them; I worried about reaching and touching them. They’d been hurt so much and so often that I could see the anticipation of hurt once again etched in secret lines on their faces. I carried them home with me and they warred for my time with my family and my real work, and when the battle became too much, too hot (I could smell the wires burning), I decided to keep notes so that later I could write a book about them and the university—which my colleagues believed I was doing anyway.
I’d explained this to Allis, and she too thought I should keep notes until I had the time to write about it. In the days following her return when I fretted over her and we beat our way back to each other, I started to catch up on the notes. They were there, right at the top of my skull:
The new main building, rebuilt around the shell of an old factory, is all yellow, red and white inside, filled with the bright sunlight that floods through the skylight on the roof of the main corridor. Outside, the building is a smooth, brown structure. There are no windows. It resembles, almost, a prison. It is curious these days, how many buildings are constructed to reject, rather than embrace, nature. I can understand why the most modern buildings in photographs from Israel look like fortresses. But who is the enemy here?
It is the final day of September, the starting day of classes for the new school year.
We have already had some faculty meetings at which the president and the dean of faculty spoke. As usual, there is a shortage of money; both officials address themselves to that situation. They are relying on grants; we’re supposed to think up gigs that will bring in the bread. They also talk about standards. Increased enrollment. “Our” students. The teachers ask their usual questions, foremost among them how they can handle student evaluations of their teaching. Students, of course, can state on official forms whether they rated their teachers good, bad or indifferent. Teachers do worry about the evaluations because the university administrators can use them to deny tenure, promotion or reappointment. It makes no real difference what the forms say: interpretation and by whom is at the crux of all.
A couple of low-level administrators have been moved up to deanships. It is said that we once had so many deans that even the student paper finally complained. A year or so later, a purge of deans occurred. It was a matter of the budget.
After the branch-wide meeting, there are a series of Professional Development workshops. I have never figured out the worth of such meetings. But I go to a couple. One is about videotaping a teacher in the classroom. She says that, on replaying the tape, she was able to see why she was not reaching certain students. She says this with great flair and sincerity. It is bullshit, Doublespeak, but the administrators are all smiles. The second workshop is even more of a tap dance. I don’t stay there long, either.
The English department is meeting this afternoon. I check to make sure that I have a desk, typewriter, chair, file and bookcase. You have to double-check everything. Budgets make things vanish. And people.
With holidays and the exam period, classes will run here something just short of ten crowded, intense, gut-churning weeks. We are on the quarterly system. During this time, students who have learned little or nothing during twelve or fifteen years of previous schooling, will be expected to become (but not really) proficient in writing and comprehending the English language. Some will have the Fundamental English requirement waived and will thus escape twenty weeks’ study. They will have to take Basic English for one quarter, ten weeks; but clearly, we simply cannot undo in ten, twenty or thirty weeks what has been done over a span of fifteen years. Our mandate, however, is to try.
Both the public and many of the students believe that the branch population is composed mainly of the various colored peoples. The university has done nothing to dispel such thought. The ethnic population, however, is 44 percent w
hite, 32 percent black, n percent Puerto Rican, 4 percent Oriental and 9 percent “other.” Sixty-seven percent of the students are female, 33 percent male. Fifteen percent are not U.S. citizens, and 68 percent come from families earning under $10,000 a year.
The heat and air conditioning are controlled automatically through a central system that, on this extremely warm September day, is overheating. It is a brand-new system; taxpayers have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. It does not work.
Everything is chaos: rosters, room assignments, departmental guidelines (which are changed every year), phone hookups, secretaries, book orders—all these undone tasks and missing people and equipment fail to daunt anyone’s spirit. On the first day, all things are possible, all things. Even the question of parking, at $55 per quarter, elicits no grumbling. For three quarters of the year, it will cost the faculty 165 smackers.
I don’t know what the administration does with the parking money. I park on the street. There were no such charges at the private branch of the university.
I warn my students that, though they may have taken rinky-dink courses with rinky-dink teachers, I and what I teach will definitely be different. I pass out the class outlines. You must establish your class regs early on; perimeters must be fixed. You tell them what pages to read, the number of papers due, your office hours—the usual. (One teacher, who is taking his case to court, was fired because he did not affix to his office door, or pass out, his office hours. I think they just wanted to fire him.)
I have loaded the students with paper. The university generates a lot of paper. If other universities generate half as much as we do, there won’t be a tree left standing in the United States in another century. I would be a very rich man if I sold paper to this institution. It snows paper in this place.
Mike Z. is clever; he wears a backpack to put his student papers in.
Did I say it snowed paper? No. What we really have is an avalanche.
I admire most of the authors who have undertaken to write textbooks that purport to show people how to write and understand their language. There must be at least fifty on the market. And I envy the publishers that have made millions producing such books. If I could paste together such crap, think of it: Allis and I would be stinking rich!
Perhaps all these fine textbooks on how to teach basic skills are invaluable elsewhere, in other colleges. But we are limited by time and the structure of the branch programs to weeks—not months or years—so these books do not work. Those students who do manage to get through the remedial courses do so only when compared with their peers—who have done worse—not with the great, demanding outside world. Very few of the students have had good secondary educations and so the task set for college-level teachers all over the nation is all but unachievable. One must ask what all those secondary teachers—many of those secondary teachers—have been doing for so long to have produced these generations who often cannot work at their grade and age levels.
One of the answers, I am beginning to believe, is bureaucracy. Forms. Filling out papers. Meetings. School boards. Going through channels, which are wide, deep and treacherous. Things must be done by the book. One must make copies of memos and letters in order to prove that a thing was done. It’s the old army game: CYA—cover your ass. Generate paper.
Teaching may once have been a career. Today it’s just a job, and within certain systems the salaries and fringe benefits are unequaled. Who would wish to lose these? Who in a tight teacher’s market would protest the system that is more involved with politics and bureaucracy than with education, when one has a family, a mortgage and maybe even a track on tenure?
My colleagues in the English department are mostly Ph.D.’s, and those who are not are always being urged to complete their work for the degree or to publish or both. The Ph.D.’s are of course specialists—but nearly all of them teach remedial writing, and they do it on the whole without too much complaining. They know that no one without a Ph.D. will be hired, and they also know that there aren’t too many colleges around the country with vacancies in English departments. The kids seem to have caught on to the bullshit, and enrollments in English departments are dropping like frozen eagle turds. But there must exist a basic tension between these doctors of philosophy and their students. The teachers must once have dreamed of teaching wholly or nearly literate students on campuses wide with green lawns and proud Gothic towers, all overseen by benign administrators eager to shower prestige upon them. And why not such dreams? They studied long and hard at great expense in time, money and stress. Now, here they are, some “retrenched” at other colleges and then “detrenched” here. If they are happy, it is only because they can now feed their families, but at the end of a difficult week, bent with exhaustion, their nerves shattered by the deluge of papers, student and administrative demands, it is easy to see by the look in their eyes that just having this job is but a small part of being happy.
I have an ex-con in one of my classes. This is not the first time; the branch is involved in a prison program. This guy is in his thirties, does not attend regularly, does not do his work, but still manages to exude a sense that he is being injured. He does, however, make all the student dances and is considered to be a student leader. The students seem to forget that he is a grown man. He mentions, as many cons do, “taking a fall.” This is really to intimidate students and faculty alike. He blames his problems on personal troubles, and I suggest that he see his counselor. We have lots of counselors but perhaps only one out of every ten of the six thousand students knows who his or her counselor is.
Speaking of con, the students have plenty of it, allowing their parents to die each and every quarter to explain absences.
Mabel is not one of these. She is in my Creative Writing class. Mabel is a young married, with two kids. She is vivacious and she teases. She gives me lingering looks and sits too close to me when we discuss her poetry, which, if not all that great (she is still learning to maintain metaphor, build on it, and to tighten her lines and focus imagery, and to know things), is radiant with soul and an often irritatingly buoyant view of life, trillingly broadcast over the campus, through the halls. I have given her to read Tolson, Hughes, Hayden and Brooks, and I have given her tapes to listen to. If I had not had the experience with Raffy, I would have an experience with Mabel.
I envy her husband and fear for him. Mabel is so hungry to know and to write. She will not be subservient; she will know and she will write, whether she is ever published or not.
My black students worry and puzzle me. With but a few exceptions they have all been singed, seared or severely burned. They have cooled their bop; they have muted the con, and when they have to, they buckle down.
Most students, at least after the first year, approach their studies with the airs of players in a game. They aren’t remotely serious, but then most students are not serious people and college is a game. White students do better at it because they’ve more innate, subconscious practice. They know what the game’s about. Black students know a game’s being played, but prefer to disbelieve the Ashanti proverb It is the fool who proclaims the insults are not meant for me but for my colleagues. They don’t even work hard in Black Studies courses, perhaps because they have absorbed white reservations about their validity.
To see them is to understand (how bleak is the view!) how effectively—God, how very effectively—racism in all its relentless, insidious forms, education foremost among them, has hacked and stabbed and butchered their psyches. They enter the game and know they will not win. What’s to win? How can they win? They pierce the bullshit and tread water, waiting, hurling tired old sixties’ phrases hither and yon in the classrooms. They wait in the corners of time like spiders, Anansis, hanging from slender threads sent swinging back and forth in any kind of wind.
White teachers seem to be giving even the most ineffectual black students A’s and B’s. If the teachers are not throwing around A’s, some of them seem to go to the other extreme: a nonwhite
student could not possibly earn more than a C in a course. Yes. But these black students who are sliding on shit depress me. I see them a few years down the line, having smacked the wall, backing away, murmuring, “I be goin’ to figure this out.” It will be stress time again and the level of frustration and anger will have to be a thousand times higher than it was in the sixties. (“But right now,” Glenn had said, “with equal opportunity and affirmative action and this and that, you can’t walk anywhere downtown without the head hunters from the big corporations boiling out of their company cars to put the arm on any black cat who looks good in a three-piece suit and has been anywhere near a college. They don’t care if he can’t talk or write. Just stick him near a door so people can see him, and trot him out for the company pictures in the advertising.” Glenn, though his book isn’t yet finished, sold it just before graduating. We celebrated with lots of champagne and then he and I drank up and down and across the Village, where he has moved. He doesn’t seem so much like a son now, but another man of whom I am very fond.)
I was asked today why I kept all the books publishers send to college teachers, and I said that I just liked having books the way some people liked having money. My colleagues advised me to put all the books in a shopping bag and carry them down to Barnes & Noble and sell them.
I mentioned to a colleague that I think the dean of faculty uses a hidden tape recorder, like a President who was all over the news not so long ago. The dean takes no notes when you talk to him. He seems to listen intently (though nothing ever comes from the meetings). The next time I go in to see him, he takes notes on a yellow pad.
There was a shoot-out in the cafeteria today. No one seems to have complete details. One student was shot in the leg and he limped away. The security is beefed up. The guards wear guns. Guns? In a college?
!Click Song Page 34