by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1 - The Adjunct
Chapter 2 - Writing Hell
Chapter 3 - Revelation
Chapter 4 - Compare and Contrast
Chapter 5 - The Four Stages of a Plot
Chapter 6 - Community College
Chapter 7 - Remediation
Chapter 8 - The Good Stuff
Chapter 9 - The Pain
Chapter 10 - College as Eden
Chapter 11 - Grade Inflation Temptation
Chapter 12 - The Textbooks
Chapter 13 - An Introduction to the Research Paper
Chapter 14 - Life Editing
Chapter 15 - Resonance
Chapter 16 - The Writing Workshop
Chapter 17 - Do Your Job, Professor!
Chapter 18 - Grading the Teacher
Chapter 19 - On Borrowing Liberally from Other People’s Work
Chapter 20 - The College Bubble
Chapter 21 - Nobody Move
Notes
VIKING
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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Professor X, 2011
All rights reserved
Portions of this book appeared in “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” The Atlantic, June 2008.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:
“This Is Just to Say” from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939 by William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Excerpt from “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry Ohio” from The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright. © 1963 by James Wright.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Professor X.
In the basement of the ivory tower : confessions of an accidental academic / Professor X. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47620-8
1. College teachers, Part-time—United States—Social conditions. 2. College teachers, Part-time—United States—Anecdotes. 3. English teachers—United States—Anecdotes. I. Title.
LB2331.72.P76 2011
378.1’2—dc22 2010035383
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To my wife, my friend.
Author’s Note
THIS BOOK is what we teachers call a quest narrative, touching on the perils of real estate and higher education. It is inhabited not by archetypes or composites but by people, though I have taken great pains to disguise them when necessary to protect their privacy. I have also changed the names of the colleges where I teach, freely added bell towers, parking lots, and quadrangles, and moved lecture halls and gymnasiums around like an architecture student running amok with his models. I write anonymously because I have no desire to single out my institutions; I believe the issues I raise to be universal. I love teaching and I love my colleges. I hope they will continue to have me.
Preface
MY WIFE AND I MARKED the turn of the millennium by buying a home that we really couldn’t afford. We dreamed of living in an old clapboard house dripping with character, of cheerfully raking our leaves and tending a vegetable garden, of walking hand in hand to the center of town, where we could shop in the markets, or loaf with a newspaper in the library, or sit on the village green and bask in the solemn presence of the churches. We wanted our children to grow up knowing everyone in town.
We got all that, but the cost to our bank accounts and mental health was incalculable. Not long after we closed on the house, we both realized that one of us would have to work a second job in order for us to maintain a middle-class existence. I am the proud possessor of the most useless advanced degree there is—a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, which qualifies me to do very little other than teach introductory-level college English courses. And so I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and found myself transformed into a part-time instructor of college English.
I spend many of my evenings now away from my family. I finish my job (I labor in a rather dreary corner of the government) and stop home for a quick bite. I don’t want the children to realize how much I am away from them, and this time together creates the illusion, I think, that all is normal. I eat a sandwich and we discuss their school day before I push off to ply my nighttime trade.
For a number of years now I have been teaching classes at two schools: a small private college, which I will call Pembrook College, and a two-year community college, which I will call Huron State. Both were desperate for adjuncts, the low-cost part-timers who work without benefits and make up a growing percentage of many college faculties. Never had I imagined that this would be my destiny, to put in a full eight-hour workday and then drive wearily to teach night classes at a bottom-tier institution. While a large part of the world watches American Idol, I rattle on about Kafka and Joyce and Gwendolyn Brooks to a classroom of reluctant students. Some are wide-eyed and fidgety with fatigue. I teach expository writing, trying to wring college-level prose from students whose skills may just graze the lower reaches of high school. We assemble and disassemble paragraphs. We hack out useless words—a painful step, that one, for we sometimes find ourselves left with nothing.
On the first night, I ask a few questions. How many of you took this class because of an abiding love of literature? No hands go up, ever—they are honest, I will give them that. How many of you are taking this class only because you have to? Now all hands shoot up, to the accompaniment of some self-conscious laughter. How many of you hate studying literature, and have hated it for as long as you can remember? Many hands, most hands, sometimes all hands go up. Again we laugh. The ice has been broken. How many of you read for pleasure? One hand goes up, sometimes two.
In this simple opening-night meet-and-greet session we come smack a
gainst the crux of college life in what I think of as the basement of the ivory tower. College enrollment has expanded wildly over the last thirty years, and more than ever before includes many students who are unprepared for the rigorous demands of higher education. Many of my students have no business being there, and a great many will not graduate. As they freely admit, they are not in my classes because they want to be. The colleges require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass English 101 (Introduction to College Writing) and English 102 (Introduction to College Literature). Some of my students don’t even want to be in college in the first place, but what choice do they have? For a licensed practical nurse to become a registered nurse requires an associate’s degree (awarded after approximately two years in college) in applied science—68 college credits divided equally between nursing and general education. To become a state trooper requires two years of college, and please note that in some states military and/or law enforcement experience does not substitute for the required degree.
A quick look at the classifieds reveals the large number of jobs that either require or discreetly suggest that the applicant have at least some college under his or her belt. A tabloid newspaper is looking for someone to sell legal advertising. Qualifications: high school diploma or equivalent, some college preferred. A wholesaler needs to hire an accounts receivable clerk. Qualifications include a familiarity with Microsoft Office and the ability to assemble billing statements and send them out on a monthly basis, to call past-due accounts, and to process payments; a two-year college accounting degree is also required. Retail giantess Ann Taylor prefers that her district managers have a bachelor’s degree. Interested in testing water? High school required, college preferred.
College preferred. What sort of job applicant in the midst of a recession disappoints the supervisor from the start by not satisfying his or her preference?
We are used to getting what we want in the United States, and we have a vague feeling that the world would run more smoothly, more efficiently, more professionally if every worker had some college under his or her belt. But who stops to think of the cost of this worthy aspiration to the taxpayers and to the weary souls who are being sent back to school, often at great expense, for no real reason? There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and our medical billing techs, our county tax clerks, our child welfare agents, our court officers and sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. We want that officer to have read King Lear, to understand Gloucester’s literal blindness as a signpost toward Lear’s figurative blindness, and to be aware that the Fool and Cordelia, the two great truthtellers, never appear onstage together, and were probably doubled by one actor. I suppose that would be nice. Perhaps having read Invisible Man or A Raisin in the Sun will render a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling. I wonder. Will an acquaintance with Steinbeck make the highway patrolman more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he will at least understand the lives of those who simply cannot get it together to get their taillights repaired? Will it benefit the correctional officer to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the case manager at Child Protective Services read Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”?
America is an idealistic place, and we seem wary of the vocational education track. We won’t do anything that might impede the freedom to pursue happiness. Telling someone that college is not right for him seems harsh and classist, vaguely Dickensian, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. Telling individuals that they’re not “college material” is like telling them that they can’t afford the house of their dreams with the two-car garage and the big spread of land—that their fate is to stay in the cramped apartment with the running toilet and the knocking radiators and the bass-playing neighbor.
This push for universal college enrollment, which at first glance seems emblematic of American opportunity and class mobility, is in fact hurting those whom it is meant to help. Students are leaving two- and four-year colleges with enormous amounts of debt. The latest figures, from 2007–08, put the percentage of four-year graduates leaving college with debt at 66 percent. The top 10 percent of those owe $44,500 or more; 50 percent owe at least $20,000.1 Lower-income students at least have part of their tab picked up by the taxpayer through such programs as the federal Pell Grant, but for those of my students who want to become state troopers or firemen, the unnecessary cost and the inefficiency of the whole process is staggering.
Community colleges are the cheaper alternative to four-year schools, but can they really be called cheaper when so many students do not graduate? Fully 50 percent of community college students drop out before their second year and only 25 percent manage to finish the two-year program in three years.2
As my students drift into the classroom each evening, I find myself feeling sorry for them. Many are in over their heads. This whole college thing often turns out to be a bust. College is difficult even for highly motivated students who know how to write papers and study for exams. My students have no such abilities. They lack rudimentary study skills; in some cases, they are not even functionally literate. Many of them are so dispossessed of context that every bit of new information simply raises more questions. Some are not ready for high school, much less college. For many, college is a negative experience. The classes are more difficult than they could have dreamed, and there is simply no time to complete all the work.
As an adjunct, I am paid a flat fee for each class that I teach. I receive no benefits, and I am never going to get tenure. Adjunct instruction is a relatively recent innovation, dating, on a significant scale, from about the mid-1980s. It is a growing field. From 1987 to 1999, use of adjuncts grew by 30 percent at four-year institutions.3
The increased use of adjunct instructors is a direct result of the explosion in college enrollments, which have expanded dramatically since 1980. In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in the United States. Twenty years later the figure had doubled, to 2.9 million.4 In 1980, there were more than 12 million students enrolled in college, and by 2004, we were up to nearly 17.5 million. Census projections for 2016 hover around 21 million.5 Everybody goes to college now, though not everybody graduates.
Somebody has to teach these twenty-or-so-million students, and hiring adjuncts is the most economical way to do it.
As an adjunct, I am faced with the unenviable job of teaching college classes to students who are quite unprepared for higher education. A number of societal forces have coalesced into a tsunami of difficulty: the happy-talk mantra that anyone can do anything if he or she works hard enough; the sense of college as a universal right and need; the new mania for credentials; financial necessity on the part of both colleges and students. Colleges wish to maintain strict academic standards while admitting everyone who wants to get in, a pool that includes a great many questionable learners. The result is a system rife with contradiction. The conflict between open admissions and basic standards can never be reconciled. Something has got to give.
Sometimes my students piss me off. I could scream when they hand in assignments that don’t make any sense. But I can’t stay mad at them. They’re doing their best. The colleges must bear some responsibility; they, after all, are benefiting from a situation that is, to use current jargon, not sustainable. There seems to be a great gulf between the realm of hype and hard reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, while more widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor must ink an F on that first writing assignment. The zeitgeist of eternal academic possibil
ity is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
I am the man who has to lower the hammer.
We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards, our peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, our dresses with collars that look almost clerical, but we are nothing less than academic hit men. We are paid by the college to perform the dirty work that no one else wants to do, the wrenching, draining, sorrowful business of teaching and failing the unprepared who often don’t even know they are unprepared. We are faceless soldiers culled from the dregs of academe. We operate under cover of darkness. We are not characters out of great academic novels such as Pnin or Lucky Jim. We have more in common with Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. I am John Travolta in Pulp Fiction but in a corduroy jacket and bow tie. I feel evil and soiled. I wander the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.” But what can I do?
On a snowy Wednesday night in January, I stand before a class of twenty. I have come directly from work. So have the students. Some wear rayon suits and cruel-looking high heels. A few sport medical scrubs in bright purple and aquamarine. Some are very young and some are in their forties or fifties; most are in that awkward middle ground, late twenties to early thirties, when the impulses of youth find themselves crowded out by the vast pressures of adulthood. As I lecture, a few students on tight schedules eat chicken and rice off Styrofoam trays. I feel like Robert Goulet doing dinner theater. We read “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens.