Professor X

by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

  Teaching is a mysterious profession. I have worked in offices, warrens of cubicles, and have always been able to judge the status of my colleagues—who’s up and who’s down—from their body language. I could always tell who worked diligently and who didn’t, who was on a roll and who couldn’t even get started because every new task seemed to be going so badly. I cannot judge the performance of my fellow teachers with anything like the same certainty. At Pembrook College, I work with the same crew of adjuncts year after year: the business teacher who favors pastel suits and matching high heels, the ex-priest who talks like a tough guy and teaches religion and philosophy, the retired executive who specializes in the history of the Middle East and the history of Islam. We teach in the same classrooms leading off the same hallway semester after semester, but it would be the height of absurdity for me to make the smallest inference about how competently they are conducting their classes.

  Every school has its coterie of “great teachers,” but of course few have ever actually witnessed them doing any teaching. Their performances are the stuff of legend, like those of Laurette Taylor, the tragic, alcoholic actress who first played Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Taylor died in 1946 and left behind virtually no filmed work: a couple of silent films and a brief screen test. Few who actually saw her in Menagerie are still alive to talk about it, yet her name continues to be spoken with hushed reverence. Some in the know persist in calling her America’s greatest actress on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. I suppose there is something comforting about such romantic legend making. The problems of education are knotty and thorny—impossibly complex—involving students’ background and home life and motivation. How comforting is the myth of the great teacher! If only we had a few more of those, we’d be in good shape.

  But I’m not so sure. No one sees what goes on except the students, and their judgments are fallible. It’s difficult even to know if perfect competence as a teacher inspires perfect learning. Is the teacher who explains things thoroughly, completely, and clearly actually necessarily better for the students than one who doesn’t? Could the teacher who forces the students to complete the job on their own actually be better for some learners? Absolutely. Could the instructor who spells everything out; who covers every possible circumstance, exception, and quirk of a subject; whose approach seems in short a model of clarity, actually foster a more haphazard approach in some students? Absolutely.

  There are many ways to get results. The magic of teaching is vastly overstated, mostly by teachers, and by those who staff programs that have an economic interest in teaching prospective teachers how to teach. In the general dumbing-down of second-tier-college academics—the transformation of college into years five, six, seven, and eight of high school—a wafting, smoky presence has come to obscure the atmosphere in college classrooms. College instructors never used to worry about their teaching; expertise was enough, and the assumption was that a college student would be able to extract meaning from any course, no matter how uninspired the professor—the professor becomes, sometimes, beside the point. The fog of pedagogy, once the province solely of schools of education, has settled on the college campus. I call it a fog, but in truth it sometimes grows as thick as a stew: a stew of jargon, gobbledygook, and theorizing. It has been brewed of necessity. Rather than facing squarely the painful issue of whether unqualified students are being admitted to college programs, administrators have obscured the question with the fog that comes between the expert at the front of the room and the end-users in the desks.

  The act of teaching has become separate and distinct from subject-matter expertise. If the students cannot satisfy the requirements of the college curriculum, it is not necessary to assume that they do not possess the requisite skills. Let us instead say that the teacher’s pedagogy was faulty, that he did not teach well enough.

  I think I know about writing and literature. I have been writing all my life, wrestling and tinkering with prose, beating it like bread dough, sometimes in delight and often in utter frustration. I have been reading and analyzing literature all my life. I can spot foreshadowing at fifty paces. You want a theme? An epiphany, perhaps? I’ve got a million of them. Analyzing literature has never paid me very well, and has never seemed all that useful a skill. A rather dull party trick, really. But I know how to do it, and motivated students locked in with me for 15 weeks will take baby steps toward knowing how to do it as well.

  My department chair was dead wrong. I didn’t do a good job teaching Business Communication, because I didn’t know the subject. It wouldn’t have mattered what sort of gyrations I did in there. I could have pulled a Jaime Escalante and taught in the helmet of a bicycle messenger. I still wouldn’t have known what I was doing, and you don’t have to be in the classroom with me, indeed even anywhere near the classroom with me, to recognize this as a recipe for disaster.

  19

  On Borrowing Liberally from Other People’s Work

  AT ABOUT 10:30 ONE NIGHT I sat with a student in a classroom in the Pembrook Arts and Sciences building. Class was over for the night. We were alone. Between us, on my desk, like something neither one of us wanted to touch, was the research paper he had handed in.

  “This seems to be plagiarized,” I said.

  I’ve seen plagiarism before, usually about once per class. Cowering at the thought of having to do the research paper, some students leave it until the last minute, and, thoroughly overwhelmed and in a panic, copy out stuff from some corner of the Web. The plagiarists don’t even use the research databases. They don’t copy from legitimate academic journals. They just take the first thing that Google belches up. I’ve seen large chunks of papers plagiarized from course outlines and syllabi from other colleges. Two students over the years have plagiarized from the same Wicca / Magic / Herbalism / Tarot Card Web site that glancingly mentions one of the assigned poems and turns up near the top of the search results in Google’s magical algorithm. One student lifted a large swath of his paper on conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria—and I mean three or four pages—directly from the transcript of a segment from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

  Plagiarism is always simple to spot. My students’ writing skills are so rudimentary that the bits lifted from other writers gleam like gold nuggets in a prospector’s pan. Obviously, I grow suspicious when I read, from a student who can’t even identify first-person narration, the rather smug observation that such-and-such a work remains one of the poet’s most anthologized works, but that its dominative romanticism gives little hint of the more practiced verse to come. One writer talks about Death of a Salesman in the most childish manner imaginable, and then opines that the play offers a postwar American reading of personal tragedy. Oh, does it? The writer also notes, in another casually piercing insight, that the play romanticizes the rural-agrarian dream but keeps it, tantalizingly, just out of Willy’s grasp.

  Another writer, analyzing a poem about a marriage ceremony, writes about those who are observing the wedding. She says that the poet ascribes to the gathering feelings of tenderness for the newlywed pair. The overwhelming majority of my students are not capable, on their own, of using “ascribes,” “tenderness,” or even “newlywed.”

  When I lecture on Hamlet, I sometimes tell the students how editors must decide among the different approaches of the First Folio, the First Quarto, and the Second Quarto, and how scholars have gone so far as to identify different typesetters because of the characteristic errors they have made. All of this seems highly irrelevant to most of my students, but I am involved in much the same sort of detective work when I read their papers.

  The research paper before us was, however, unlike anything I had encountered. Next to it on the desk I placed a paper I had downloaded off the Internet. The papers were identical, down to the eccentric line spacing and typos, and the quirk of thinking that Flannery O’Connor was a man.

  “I found this on Cheathouse.com,” I said.

  He studied the t
wo papers. He was in his thirties, my student, angular and lean, with a hard body and a large head. He wore old-fashioned black horn-rimmed glasses—the sort you see in 1950s high school yearbooks.

  The building was deathly quiet. Classes had dismissed for the night. No stray custodian passed by. No security guard. Downstairs, I knew, the ice cream vending machines were doing that weird thing they do when it gets late, filling with steam as they defrosted their coils for the night. There is no other time to meet with students. Adjuncts don’t have offices or office hours, and meetings before class aren’t practical for anyone. Some students can barely get to the start of class on time; some know that they can’t but take the class anyway.

  My student licked his lips. “So what are you saying?”

  “This paper is not your work.”

  “So there’s no credit for it?”

  “Well, no,” I said, a bit irked by the question. “There’s a bit more to it than that. I have to report you. The administration could conceivably toss you out for academic dishonesty. If the charges are sustained, of course.”

  His expression darkened. A small feeling of cold dread swept over me. Again, I listened for footsteps in the stairwells. I sipped the dregs of my cold, dead coffee, the one that had been sitting untouched on my desk since early that evening.

  My student was a criminal. A small-time criminal, yes, but a criminal nonetheless. His eyeglasses, which seemed designed to impart a look of seriousness, started to look sinister. He told me that he worked—for a school, in fact, as some sort of classroom aide—but who knew whether that was even true? A teacher would be on a faculty list somewhere, and could be Googled, but not an aide. And he didn’t even carry a backpack, the way most students did; he carried three loose textbooks, like teenagers on Leave It to Beaver.

  He rose from his chair and started pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom. His jaw was set and his eyes unfocused. He was clearly enraged. I asked him to sit down. “I have to keep moving,” he said. “If I don’t keep moving I’ll throw something.” A chair, I thought? His instructor? I really wanted to call security, but had made no provisions to do so. There was no telephone in the classroom. I do not carry a cell phone, which at that moment seemed the apogee of folly. I didn’t know security’s number anyway.

  We were alone, and I had leveled my damning accusation, one that could get him booted out of the school. Why had I chosen this moment? Hadn’t I seen this situation countless times in movies and mysteries? Wasn’t the hero always confronting the villain alone—stupidly, I thought—as the story built to a climax?

  “I’m very disappointed,” he said. “Very disappointed.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m going to be truthful with you,” he said.

  The villain always comes clean in the end.

  “I bought that paper,” he said. “I admit it. I bought it off a friend of mine. I paid him to write it for me. But I didn’t pay for some old piece of junk that was out there, floating around on the Internet.”

  Suddenly everything about him, his tale, his situation, his ineptitude, seemed sad. I felt sorry for him. He nodded at me, picked up his paper, and shuffled away. I listened to his footsteps fading down the stairwell.

  When I got home that night, I checked my life insurance policies. The old cliché about the workingman was true: I was worth a lot more dead than alive. The thought empowered me.

  All fear of death vanished. I have not a trace of it to this day. I walk around weirdly cocky for a middle-aged man. Maybe all middle-aged men feel this way. I feel pumped up and energetic, as though I’ve been eating well and working out. I walk the streets practically looking for violent street crime in which I can intervene.

  Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.

  The life insurance is a good start, but my wife would need more.

  I asked her, “Do you know where I was tonight?”

  “Teaching, of course.”

  “No. Where? Which school?”

  I’ve often got classes going on in both schools at once. My wife has her own busy life and can’t always keep my schedule straight. “Huron State?”

  “No, Pembrook,” I said. “It’s crucial for you to know where I am on any given night, because when some dissatisfied student kills me, I want you to sue the right place. I don’t want any Perry Mason endings with some registrar revealing that I wasn’t even teaching at his college on the night in question.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “But don’t worry,” I said. “If anyone kills me, you can be sure I’ll take them with me.”

  The whole enterprise of teaching in college sometimes looks dark to me. My students and I are in an impossible situation. Some of them move across campus as though in a fog: confused, always a little frightened, sometimes despairing, never sure at any moment what the next development will be, hoping against hope that they will pass.

  My students and I are trapped in a tense and unnatural relationship. To do poorly in a course can really throw a monkey wrench into their life plans. If I have to lower the hammer, my students resent it mightily. Why wouldn’t they? And when I leave campus for the night, my footsteps echoing as I pass the closed bookstore and shuttered coffee stands, I often question myself. Wouldn’t it be easier if I gave them all A’s? What would it matter? Who would know? Who would care?

  Late at night, in an empty, soiled classroom, with seemingly not another living soul on campus, grade disputes start to seem very personal. The administration isn’t around; the students can’t go vent to a dean or ask an academic adviser for intervention. Late at night, it’s as though the administration doesn’t exist. Lack of academic success seems my doing, and my doing alone.

  Do I really think that a disgruntled student might pull out a gun and shoot me? I don’t live in fear of it, but neither do I rule out the possibility. I am informed by the lessons of Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech and the University of Arkansas. Remember that one?

  FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS—A graduate student shot to death a professor of English and himself on the first day of fall classes at the University of Arkansas yesterday, police and campus officials said.

  Associate professor John R. Locke, 67, died around noon in his second floor office in Kimpel Hall, which houses the English, journalism, and foreign language departments.

  University chancellor John A. White identified the graduate student as James Easton Kelly of Marianna, Ark., who had been a doctoral degree candidate at the school for 10 years and was dismissed last week from the Ph.D. program in comparative literature.

  Locke was Kelly’s faculty advisor, White said last night.1

  The participants in a student-teacher conference at 10:00 P.M. have both put in a full workday, about twelve hours’ worth. Tempers will grow short. There are no metal detectors on these campuses. No full-body scanners. Who knows who’s packing heat? Much of my clientele consists of people who are, in one way or another, up against it. I wonder if it is only a matter of time before one of them crosses a line with me.

  I love my life in the classroom. I love the three hours discussing ideas. But I have few illusions about the daunting nature of our task, and sometimes there seems to me a somewhat grimmer reality just beneath the surface.

  20

  The College Bubble

  FOR ALL OF MY BELIEF THAT reading good literature leads to spaciousness of mind, largeness of spirit, and generosity, I sometimes seem to myself a most small-minded and spiritually bereft person. Christ, I seem at times so awfully cramped.

  For a long time, I wasn’t completely happy. I was less and less comfortable in my home and my village. I indulged in a new fondness for pornography. Not sexual pornography. Apartment pornography. I gazed longingly at the seedy rental condos on the outskirts of my village, at the base of the hills, the same rental condos at which I once sneered, despairing of their effect on my property values. Now they seemed
a nice place to set up shop. I liked the little terraces. I watched reruns of Seinfeld, and noted that Jerry had a very nice apartment. It looked cozy and well heated. I started reading Paul Auster novels. His protagonists always lived in snug apartments on the edges of New York City. The life seemed attractive, especially since Auster never mentioned cockroaches or bedbugs.

  Mine is a prosperous little village of picket fences and tidy flowerbeds. The French bakery serves lovely, bracing coffee. There is a warm and homey little diner for bacon and eggs, a drugstore with a pressed-tin ceiling, and a barbershop. I walk around my village on a Saturday morning, feeling too strapped to spring for a plate of bacon and eggs—though I will have a coffee! I must! Is life worth living without coffee from a French press? I see lots of people whom I know: neighbors, parents of my children’s school friends, Little League coaches, an attractively pregnant bank teller. An attorney parks his Mercedes outside the diner. I purchase caulk from the hardware store. The youngest volunteer in the firehouse hoses down the hook and ladder. The rawboned woman who homeschools her brood cycles by.

  I thought I was spiritually generous, but it turns out that I am not. Such is the smallness of my spirit that I rank my position in the universe against everyone I encounter. I never used to do this; now it is a tic that I cannot stop. Mostly I rank us all monetarily: income, assets, newness of vehicle, home equity, size of 401(k), and the like. Many in the village seem to have me beat. Their clothes are newer, their cars newer and bigger, their appliances (I’ve been inside some of their houses) shinier, their kitchen stoves all slick and flat-topped and digital. Nothing about them seems shabby.

  The pink-cheeked, gentle old woman with the nimbus of cottony white hair and green garden clogs—she has me slammed to the floor, her clog on my throat. I triumph over only a few. I think I’ve got the bank teller beat. I don’t think she wants to be on her feet this Saturday morning; the strain shows around her eyes. I’m also ahead of the barista who French-presses my coffee, and the barbers who speak no English.