Professor X

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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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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T
HIS 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.

M
Y 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 against 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.