Professor X (17 page)

The implication is that his personal assistant merely forgot to ensure that I received them. “Well, all of them.”

“Could you just tell me what they are again?”

I make a great show of opening my grade book, even though I know that every box next to his name is blank. He writes down what I say. “The Hawthorne essay, the Flannery O'Connor essay, the first poetry comparison, the second poetry comparison. Everything we've done.”

“Got it,” he says. “I appreciate it.”

The young are stone deaf to good advice, I know, but I can't resist trying. “The best advice I can give you is just do something,” I say. “You've got to do something. Anything. Don't think of the assignments as a group. Do one at a time. You're enrolled in this course. It's only sensible to do the work.”

Our interview over, he flees.

What I have said will make little impression. He will attend class faithfully; he will not hand in any assignments. On the evening of the final exam, he will be the first one finished and out of the room. And when the grades are posted, he will log on to the Web site and, in the moments of suspense after he has typed in his college ID and password and hit SU BMIT—the system is primitive and slow—he may think that perhaps he has achieved a C.
I hope it's a C it's probably a C I think I did good enough for a C.
And then the F will unfurl before him.
Ah shit. Oh well.
What a world of emotion lives in the moment between those two brief sentences! He will try again next semester. He bears no one ill will. His optimism is really rather extraordinary; I hope he never loses it. We meet on campus in a few weeks and he is as friendly as can be, as though he still feels a hangover glow of fulfillment from our wonderful time together.

“What are you taking?” I ask.

“102. You know. I think this time I'll do okay.”

“Are you up to date with assignments?”

He flashes an evil smile. “Pretty much.”

That's the story of many of my students: they are young, they are a little lazy, the future is opaque to them. Other students have had a harder time of it. I read essays about divorce and substance abuse, unexpected pregnancy, emotional cruelty both delivered and received, and past brushes with suicide. I read about exhaustion and desperation and, more often than you might think, about how impossibly difficult they find college work. The sheer shock of college is a recurring theme in my students' papers, and inspires some of their most heartfelt writing. Even with their limited academic gifts, many have managed to cruise their way through high school. American public education has not served these students very well, and now, as they enter college so vastly unprepared, there is a real poignancy to their growing recognition of this astringent truth.

How can I stay angry at them? They want me to show them what literature is all about; they know, dimly, that those who matter in the world are versed in its mysteries. They call me “professor.” It stabs me when they do. I used to tell them not to; I told them I was an instructor, and not entitled to the honorific. They called me “professor” anyway. They did it without thinking. I stopped making a fuss about it. Why should I rain on their parade? In my mind, I was a government worker masquerading as an academic. Why should I let my feelings of fraudulence interfere with their college experience?

I drive home that night in my old car. Is the radiator leaking? I seem to be leaving small green puddles whenever I park. I have one headlamp out, but if I keep my brights on, both work. I pull up to a quiet traffic light near the college. A car waits across the intersection from me. My brights are shining right in his eyes. He flashes his own lights a few times to get my attention, but I ignore him. I don't feel I can click mine down. He just thinks I'm an inconsiderate asshole. I burn to tell him: That's not me! There's more to me than that!

T
HE COLLEGE CAMPUS is a marvelous place. The sun glints off the buildings, bathing the sidewalks in light and warmth; you can't help but feel nourished and optimistic. Knots of students grab books and buzz off toward class. Most times that I'm not sitting grading assignments, I feel the pleasure of the place. Nowhere are employees friendlier. The staffers could not be more accommodating to students who have lost their way in the forests of financial aid or class schedules; they will stop whatever they are doing to go with a student to find a lost calculator or binder.

One night before class I sat in the office with one of the secretaries. She had just returned from a vacation in Florida, visiting her son and her grandchildren. We were looking at pictures when a frazzled, sleepy-looking student approached the desk.

“What can I do for you, sweetheart?” said the secretary.

The girl had on a green sweatshirt. She wore what looked like a religious medal, and ran the short chain between her teeth nervously. “I need to leave a message for my teacher. I won't be in class tonight.”

The secretary reached for her memo pad. “What's the name?”

“Roslyn.”

The secretary noted it down. “And what's the name of your teacher?”

The student froze in mid-chain-suck. There was an awkward pause.

“I don't know,” she said.

We were about midway through the 15-week semester. I expected the secretary to glance in my direction, but she didn't. Pointedly, she did not look at me. Instead, she picked up her iced coffee and took a sip. “Can't think of it?”

“No.”

“I hate when that happens. Subject?”

“Math.”

“Male or female?”

Again, a moment of uncertainty. But Roslyn conquered it. “Female.”

“Great. We have a bunch teaching tonight. Is she tall or short?”

Roslyn shook her head. “Regular.”

“Blond or brunette? Light hair, dark hair?”

“She has dreads.”

The secretary nodded. She looked up the name of the course on the schedule. Roslyn nodded with joy. The secretary finished writing out the note.

“I'll put this in her box,” she said, “and you're good to go.”

Roslyn grinned and thanked her and departed. My secretary friend watched her as she left. Never took her eyes off her. She sighed and picked up her iced coffee. She did a bit of housekeeping with it, adjusting the two little straws, nestling them together, and took a long thoughtful sip. She would not compromise Roslyn's dignity, even in her absence.

“Florida's beautiful,” she announced to me. “But the weather takes some strategy. You've got to be smart about it.”

It seems to me that those who work for the colleges walk around with half-suppressed smiles, as though they were privy to a delightful secret. The administrators, the lunch ladies, the cooks, the security guards, the little birdlike postmistress who runs the campus mail room—they seem almost giddy with satisfaction. (Okay, maybe one or two of the lunch ladies have an occasional dark moment.) Yes, there are irritations: the copiers jam and the salaries aren't enough and some of the students will break your heart. But who else earns their bread in a place of such opportunity? Truly they can say, problems notwithstanding, that in their work they do no harm.

Colleges are nice places. It's hardly a surprise that every day, stories in the news demonstrate the way we worship at the foot of the ivory tower. The stories are so ubiquitous we don't even notice them.

In Martinsville, Virginia, Major Ray Ferguson returns to his home county to bring “his message about the importance of college and making the right choices to eighth-graders at Fieldale-Collinsville and Laurel Park middle schools, as well as JROTC cadets at Bassett and Magna Vista high schools.” Because of work and family responsibilities, Ferguson took thirteen years to complete his four-year degree in logistics from Georgia Southern University. He tells his audience how “it opened up a tremendous amount of doors. . . . [College] took me down a whole different path.” Now he's deploying to Afghanistan, but he will continue studying; he hopes to earn a doctorate in homeland security.
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Major Ferguson's story is one of triumph, and I can't think of a reason he shouldn't delight in passing on how well things have turned out for him. The problem is that we in America forget that stories of triumph are by definition the exception rather than the rule. If everyone could triumph, it wouldn't be any kind of triumph at all.

For a student to succeed in college, he requires, at times, superhuman drive and energy and resourcefulness. A thirst for knowledge is good, too; familiarity with a daily newspaper, a magazine or two, and a book here and there is helpful; toss in a sprinkling of God-given smarts and, please, some writing skills. Never would I want to cheapen the accomplishments of those who really have conquered college, who were perhaps able to get past the shortcomings of their previous schooling and climb onto the honor roll. That is truly something.

But why should college be for everyone? The recruitment drive is relentless. In Chappaqua, New York, home of Bill and Hillary Clinton, 20 Bronx high school students live for a month with local host families. The Chappaqua Summer Scholarship Program, which has been around since the late 1960s, gives the teens “the chance to live in the burbs while getting a hit of Shakespeare, computer science, writing, filmmaking, tennis and swimming. . . . Worked into the mix is a strong message of the importance of college, and the kids are taken to local college campuses and tutored for the SATs.”
²

In Detroit, Tigers slugger Magglio Ordóñez founded the Ordóñez Family Scholarship, “which will provide $2,500 a year for full-time study at any college or university in the United States.” At the formal announcement ceremony, Ordóñez “encouraged the young people in their love of baseball, and spoke to them about the importance of college.”
³

For Americans, college looms as a great metaphor. Michelle Obama tells
Time
magazine:

It's never too early to get started. In Phoenix, 50 kindergartners from the Acclaim Academy spend a day at Estrella Mountain Community College. They had originally just wanted a campus tour, but the director of early outreach at the college sees a great opportunity, and plans “a morning's worth of activities to introduce the students to college life.”
⁵

The State of Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board reports that a record number of parents with newborns have already enrolled in the state's prepaid college tuition plan. House Higher Education Committee chair Deb Wallace (D-Vancouver) says that parents “should feel good knowing that this is the best investment they can make in their child's future.” Senate Higher Education Committee chair Paul Shin (D-Edmonds) agrees. “When parents and grandparents set aside money for college when children are little, they send a powerful message about the importance of a college education,” he says.
⁶

Not surprisingly, the colleges themselves are in favor of more college enrollment. It would be a bit weird, I suppose, to see highly placed representatives of any other industry stumping so shamelessly for their products and services. But when the subject is education, we don't even notice, for we as a nation are, above all, woefully insecure about our own learning. When we see such a headline as “Texas State University President Talks about Importance of College to Memorial High Students,” the incongruity barely registers.
⁷
Americans venerate education, perhaps unduly. It is, I think, one of our more charming national traits. We think of educators as something close to saints, and schools as impervious to bottom-line concerns. Yet with every increase in enrollments comes a positive tick on someone's performance evaluation, another measurable achievement for someone's curriculum vitae. And with every increase in tuition revenue comes more incentive to grow. New stadiums and state-of-the-art student centers and green dormitories have appeared on campuses across the country, often accompanied by oversize tuition hikes. As most Americans' salaries have remained flat or vanished altogether, the cost of attending college has been rising exponentially year after year. The tuition increases have vastly outpaced inflation. From one corner of the country to another, at community colleges and state schools and the Ivies, the story is the same. Check the headlines: “Suffolk County College is Raising Tuition,” says the
New York Times
—that's Suffolk County Community College, and its price is going up by 7.7 percent.
⁸
“MCC Eyes 11.7% Hike in Tuition”—that's Mott Community College, in Flint, Michigan.
⁹
“Why Is College Tuition So High?” asks the
Charleston Post and Courier
. “In South Carolina, Costs Have Nearly Tripled in a Decade,” the headline continues. The College of Charleston has increased tuition this year, recession be damned, to in-state residents by 14.8 percent.
¹⁰
An article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
trumpets the arrival of “The $50K Club: 58 Private Colleges Pass a Pricing Milestone.” The writer notes that for “the nation's private elite colleges, $50,000 is fast becoming the new normal.”
¹¹