The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  This guy above, this guy is a cheater. That’s for sure. But he’s also a net loser in the broken system. It’s globalization, baby! The world is getting smaller. We’re erasing the imaginary borders that separate nations, cultures, and peoples. And that’s awesome if you’re Walmart, McDonald’s, or Lockheed Martin. They can afford translators, cultural-sensitivity training, and… well, they can afford to not give a shit if a bunch of non–English speakers are struggling in their factories and customer service call centers.

  We’ve opened our doors to all the ambitious young men and women of the world. And that’s a good thing. But we’ve done nothing to prepare them for the realities facing them. Even if we want to bandy about the old and fading notion that America is the land of opportunity, we must admit that the new arrivals are struggling to seize it.

  Ultimately, it makes the product that our schools are manufacturing a lesser one. Cultural diversity should be a boon to our society and our shared body of knowledge. Too many educators treat diversity as an obstacle to be ignored, or perhaps even overcome.

  Here’s a typical revision request from a student who hasn’t been given the tools to adapt to globalized education. He’s also kind of a jerk.

  I dont like the paper, can yiy do it over again, because my subject is Diversity in Criminal Justice. I want the paper to base on CORRECTION/INCARCERATION/PAROLE/PROBATION.” in simple english

  “not Big grammar.

  Not Big grammar.

  Indeed. This guy here, this guy is going to struggle. He will never achieve a level of proficiency in English sufficient to create a passable résumé, compose a usable cover letter, reach out to a public official, or write to request a refund for his defective blender. And even if he does, he still may not have developed the cultural etiquette to say please, thank you, and so on and so forth. In short, people will treat him like he’s stupid even if he’s not, and people will assume he’s a jerk even if he’s not. Not that I’m discounting either possibility. But according to a study produced by Princeton University in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, as of 2006, half of all surveyed foreign-born adults aged twenty-five or older lacked proficiency in English. One consequence, the study notes, is that as of 2005, the median income of U.S. immigrants was 25 percent lower than that of native-born workers.

  Of all the people who we push through our schools, perhaps immigrants are pushed with the least care. And when one considers the portion of the student population comprised by immigrants, this is no marginal oversight. According to a table in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract titled “Students Who Are Foreign Born or Who Have Foreign-Born Parents,” as of 2009, 9.6 percent of college students and 17 percent of graduate students were foreign born. The census also reports that 22.6 percent of college students and 28.5 percent of graduate students, had at least one foreign-born parent.1 A study published in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2010 reports that because of the dearth of effective support mechanisms for immigrant students’ transition into the American education system, the cultural barriers and language barriers that they face are compounded by the inherent challenges of American formal education and by the relatively limited ability of their parents to assist them in navigating the system. The study authors argue that this produces an “inferior educational experience” for the immigrant student. To support this claim, they report on a five-year longitudinal study examining academic trends among immigrant “newcomers.” The study found that “two-thirds of the participants demonstrated a decline in their academic performance over the 5-year study period.”2

  I suspect this describes some of my clients: no longer newcomers but now part of a loud multilingual buzz of unmet expectations. Maybe they’re just trying to finish school and retreat to a country where an American degree is far more valuable.

  According to a 2011 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a fast-growing trend among immigrant students toward using the diversity quotas in our universities as a means of literally transferring knowledge out of the American economy. The Chronicle reports that the average age of Indian immigrants returning from the United States to their home country is thirty. For Chinese immigrants, the age is thirty-three. The article adds that in a Facebook survey conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek, less than 10 percent of Chinese students and 6 percent of Indian students planned to remain in the United States permanently following the completion of their studies.

  America is facing a brain drain as the best and brightest immigrant students return home to frame their American degrees and build their developing economies; meanwhile, the lowest-performing and most desperate of them take up residence in our urban slums and attempt simply to read the words on their American degrees.

  Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to game the system.

  These people, every bit as much as my friends, were my constant companions, my daily relations, the prism through which I saw the world.

  And the more time I spent trying to work my way through this one typography paper, the angrier I got. I guess I felt I’d been duped. This was just supposed to be an edit. But in twenty-five pages, I couldn’t find a single sentence that would actually qualify as a sentence.

  “Motherfucker,” I said out loud.

  “Is that a tell?” Jackie asked.

  “Huh? Oh. No. I didn’t even realize I had cards in front of me.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s your turn,” said Gordon.

  “Right.” I looked at the two cards in front of me. Seven-two off-suit all night long. “I fold.”

  “Dude, you haven’t played a hand in forty-five minutes,” Dweezil observed.

  “Yeah… well, I forgot I was even here. My brain hurts. This paper is making me dumber.”

  “What’s so bad about it?” asked Barney.

  “OK. Ready? Here’s the paragraph I’m editing right now: ‘Paper is usually square. When designer die cut the paper, it might not be the square. But we assume that paper is the square, which is a flat square.’”

  Disturbed commentary ensued.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Gordon asked.

  “What paper is square? Is this an essay about napkins?” said Jackie.

  “That’s fucked-up, man,” said Dweezil. “How did that kid get into college?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “He’s not in college. According to his order form, this paper is for a master’s.”

  Shit. As I said it, I realized, this kid was well on his way to having more academic credentials than I did.

  12

  Death and Taxes

  There was a point, many years into this profession, when I had become fairly convinced that I would die in front of my computer: that as a young man, I would feel that bolt of numbness in my fingertips, I would clutch my chest and gnash my teeth, and they would find me mashed facedown into my keyboard, my last recorded words on earth something like “asdklihujjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd.”

  But as my aspiration to be done with the profession grew stronger, so too did my work ethic and my resolve to make it pay. I do not exaggerate in the least when I tell you that I was reaching a breaking point and verging on a moment of physical collapse. I really and truly thought I might stroke out and go all droopy on my desk.

  But I was past burning out. I had outgrown it. Bree would glance into my office worriedly. She had known me forever, but she was only now coming to understand how constantly I felt I had to work for survival. And now I actually had a motive for survival, which was a new feeling.

  There was only one way to make this job work, though. When it came time for finals, I was prepared to descend the seven circles of hell without flinching. In the springtime, fresh assignments crowded each other out for attention on the writers’ board, leaving the more complex and time-consuming works twisting in the wind. I gobbled up assignments about the U.S. Constitution, the French Revolution, the Cold War, abortion, nursing leader
ship, global warming, affirmative action, business ethics, and The Great Gatsby. On any one of those subjects, I pretty much wrote the same paper twenty or thirty times a year with modest variations and recycled sources. Now was when I really got cranking.

  An abortion paper of about eight pages in length would pay between $96 and $120 during seasons of heavy demand. That may not sound like a lot, but I could turn this assignment out in two hours flat. And I could do that all day long, and well into the evening hours, too. And it wasn’t that difficult.

  But natural market demands always had a different plan. Let’s say that a customer needed a twenty-page comparative essay on public equity investment in China versus India and that it was due in six days. And let’s say the paper was posted on the writers’ board at a rate of $220. Nobody would touch it for days. Particularly if the three pages of directions requesting the use of specific sources, outlining a format, and calling for the delineation of numerous international trade agreements suggested that this assignment would take something like seven or eight hours. At $220, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole during busy season. Remember, I could make that writing two abortion papers over the course of four hours.

  The assignment would continue to hang out on the board while papers about Freud and Faulkner flew off the racks. Then suddenly, desperation would set in, and the customer would contact our service department.

  “Why isn’t anybody taking my paper?” he would ask.

  “This is a very busy time of year, and most of our writers carry extremely full schedules. Perhaps if you raised your offer, one of our writers would be in a better position to take on your work,” the customer service rep would say.

  Bingo, bango, $300 for the paper about equity in India and China. I’d be all in. I would grab up the paper, and it would go on top of the huge, miserable pile of shit that I had to shovel through. Looking at my schedule now, with this twenty-page bastard stuffed right in the middle, I wouldn’t see a day when I could sleep for more than three hours coming for at least a week. As soon as I finished one paper, I started another. As soon as I submitted an assignment, I went to the writers’ board and picked up another one to take its place. This was standard operating procedure. In the midst of such stretches, even the sleep that I did get was riddled with tension. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Always on the clock. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick…

  During finals, I would have two recurring dreams, sometimes interwoven with each other. In one, I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike and struggling to keep my eyes open. Then I couldn’t fight the sensation any longer, and I was sleeping behind the wheel. I would wake up suddenly, expecting my bed to veer off into a guardrail.

  In the other dream, I could see myself in bed sleeping through a deadline. I could see the clock flashing nine a.m. even though it was still pitch-dark outside. I could feel those jerky little e-mails from the customer: “I’m wating.” “What happens to my papper. It was suppose to be for today.” “Hurry with the paper please. I’m running out of tim.”

  Shit. This job was making me dream in developmental delay.

  And I was getting night sweats. I would get up in the middle of the night and get a towel to sleep on. I would soak through that. I was constantly awake, even when I was sleeping, fully aware of myself, my restlessness, and the deadlines on my head. I was drowning in pools of perspiration, the sheets were getting drenched, and Bree was having dreams about fishing and water parks.

  It was the early spring of 2009, and I was at both the height of my exhaustion and the peak of my powers, when I took on my biggest assignment ever, a 160-page paper about international financial reporting standards. Posted to the board at an initial rate of sixteen hundred dollars, it went untouched. Eventually, the motivated buyer called customer service in desperation. The paper got bumped to two thousand bucks. Say what you want about the rate and the obvious horribleness of the assignment. It would be the biggest commission I’d ever had. The assignment was due in two months, and knowing myself as I did, I suspected that if I accepted it, I wouldn’t even think about starting it until the week of the deadline.

  My schedule was full but manageable in early March. By the paper’s May deadline, I would envy the dead their rest. My finger hovered over the “Write It” button for a good two minutes while I tried to talk myself out of this thing. This paper will be the end of you, I told me.

  Nuts to that, I figured. I had to know if I could pull it off. At this point in my career, I was working aggressively to find my own limits. Where was the line of exhaustion past which I could not go? What was the threshold of boredom beyond which my attention span could not be even partially sustained?

  Somehow, these questions were more compelling to me than the fact that the bags under my eyes looked like silver dollars or the fact that I might forget to consume anything but coffee or weed until six p.m. on any given day. The only way to stay on top of a lifetime of deadlines is to be utterly compulsive and neurotic.

  But not about time management. As I think we’ve established, I suck quite a bit at that. And not about work-flow organization. Organization has never been my strong suit. But one must be utterly compulsive and neurotic about one’s isolation, one’s focus, and one’s stamina. Work must not be interrupted by more than a bathroom break or a hot shower, which I substituted for sleep and exercise.

  Initially, I put the gigantic paper aside and sort of secretly feared it as I worked on other stuff. As the deadline approached, I stopped taking on new assignments. I began clearing my schedule, putting aside just enough time to write a shitty book in less than seven days. Technically, I only left myself four days before the deadline. But I figured I could allow myself the cushion of an extra day based on the assumption that the client didn’t plan on handing in this monstrosity the day he received it.

  When the week of the beast began, I got myself a good night’s sleep, woke up at nine a.m., and dove in headfirst.

  It’s always slow going at the start of something big. The best thing you can do with something this terrifying is break it up into a whole bunch of little pieces. I referred to the customer’s instructions:

  This is a doctoral level presentation. Since I have no official dissertation proposal apart from the above heading, and I am not fully aware of the exact structure and required elements of such paper, I have briefly derived unsystematically what I think should be covered by my Doctoral Dissertation, based on talks with my professor…

  Not a lot of help there. I shit you not, this customer paid four thousand bucks (two grand to me, two grand to my employers) for a doctoral dissertation and provided me with one page of instructions. It was like buying a used car based on the specifications that it had four wheels and was blue. The customer never followed up on his order with source specifications, never checked in to find out what the primary argument of his dissertation would be, and never suggested that he had any particularly strong opinions about the work upon which his doctoral degree would be based. Don’t ask me how this is possible. It’s not my job to know.

  In any event, once I took on the assignment, I was pretty much on my own.

  So how I wrote 160 pages in five days is a story of intense, soul-crushing solitude; a haze of facts and fabrications; a foot-dragging trudge to a blurry light at the end of a long, dark chunnel. As Laotzu tells, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This describes every beast I’ve ever written. As I write the first sentence on a blank page, I remind myself that I have often been at the beginning and I have always made it to the end. This beast would be no different.

  Still, it takes some effort to become ensconced in something that will own you for the next several days. And I have about as much personal interest in international accounting standards as I have in being shot in the face. So I started googling and reading. The paper called for fifty sources, so I really couldn’t get too caught up in reading any one thing.

  You do get caught up in the subject matter from time to
time. I once had to write a paper debunking the Bush administration’s version of events leading up to and following 9/11. The information was so readily available, disturbing, and fascinating that I spent all day reading. It took me twelve hours to write a ten-page paper. Another time I had to write a paper on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and it hit me that I hadn’t read the great American novel, what with it having been banned in my high school.

  So I began reading. After an hour had passed, I realized that my deadline was approaching and I hadn’t written a word. I put the book down and flashed out a three-pager about American culture and the romanticizing of individual freedoms. This took me about thirty minutes, made me thirty bucks, and allowed me to get back to the book. I spent the rest of the day reading instead of working.

  I didn’t have this sort of distraction when reading about international financial reporting standards. I would generally read a source long enough to discover a sentence or paragraph that I understood. I’m a pretty perceptive reader, but this was a complex, esoteric subject, and you couldn’t just learn it in an afternoon of roughshod skimming. I knew I had to be efficient, smart, and productive—160 pages in five days.

  Day 1

  I developed a thesis posing an argument that global convergence to international standards would bring greater accountability for some nations but would impose great economic hardship on developing nations already struggling to adapt to the inherent inequalities in the global economy. I didn’t know if this was true, in the dictionary sense of the word. It sounded true. Based on many of the sources that I had located, it seemed like a plausible argument. Whatever it was, I was going to write a gajillion words on why it was so fucking true that I had to write a whole dissertation on it. Every sentence that I pulled from every source would be placed in quotes and given an overly long, overly wordy explanation clarifying why the thing I had just written above was true and really important.