Professor X

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

  I lay in bed at night and pondered what to do. There was so much to be done I didn’t know where to begin. I lay with the lights on and studied the beautiful old wallpaper in the bedroom. It was a lovely pattern, bunches of pink and green and yellow stems on a somber ocher background. It was beautiful but it was very old, peeling and cracked in places. It would really have to be removed, and yet I had bought the house partly because of the beautiful old wallpaper, which I think sums up rather neatly the unfocused and contradictory quality of the decision.

  In buying the house, we did find Norman Rockwell. But we had been overambitious. I had wanted hardwood floors and a foyer and an attic, and I got them, and all the expense that went along with them. I had needed life to fill my books; now I was in the grip of more life than I could possibly handle. For the first time in my life I worried about money. When I heard a strange gurgling in a pipe, I worried. When the refrigerator appeared to stop working, I opened the door fifteen times in an hour and felt the food, and I worried. I sat down and tried to write my way out of my worry and the pen hung poised above the page. I couldn’t focus on anything. The milk in my coffee tasted a little sour. I worried, and I denied my worry to my wife because I didn’t want her to worry. She tried to persuade me to be as worried as I actually was, and then we fought and both worried even more.

  “If you’re choosing between taking vacations and having a nice house, buy the house, because having a great house is like being on perpetual vacation.” I was in yet a third situation, a place the adage failed to mention: I certainly wouldn’t be taking any vacations, and neither would I be in the house very much, because it was soon obvious that I would have to crank up my second income. Whatever the state of the wallpaper, it would stay up. The time had come to kick my second career as an adjunct professor of English into high gear.

  Denouement. I define it for my literature classes as the untying of the knot. Conflicts are resolved, the various plot strands untangle, the characters resume something akin to normal life, and the reader experiences catharsis, a release of tension and anxiety. I have a little trouble teaching this one because I’m not at all sure denouement actually exists.

  6

  Community College

  ANY RESENTMENT I MIGHT HAVE HAD about having to work a second job melted away. I couldn’t worry about the toll it might take on my happiness or my closeness with my family or my aging body. I couldn’t worry about not seeing the children. I needed to adjunct up a storm. Pembrook College had been after me for a while to take on more classes; I called them up and told them airily that my schedule had “cleared up.” They took care of me. But I needed more. My new goal was to teach classes fifty-two weeks a year.

  Late that summer, I approached Huron State, a community college within reasonable commuting distance. They were interested. My experience at Pembrook made me an appealing candidate. I was interviewed by the chairman of the English department and a second teacher, two women who reminded me, in both round shape and apparel, of a pair of nuns who had just gotten the directive not to wear the habit anymore. The interview went well, except for a moment right near the end. It sounded like I had a pretty full schedule at Pembrook; why, they asked with just a trace of suspicion, did I want to teach even more?

  You know how it is in job interviews: you can’t admit to needing the salary, much less to having made a cataclysmic financial decision threatening to push you over the edge. I thought fast. Adjuncts, I had come to understand, lived on the fringes. These two gals would assume I was a nut; the idea was to present as the right sort of nut.

  “I’m trying to save for the kids’ college,” I said evenly, madly simplifying. “Trying to avoid loans.”

  I had conveyed what I wanted. I was concerned with education. I was a hard worker, a beast of burden. I had perhaps a bit of the right-wing survivalist in me, a man who would prefer to pay college tuition, if not in gold coins, at least in cash. Strictly speaking, what I told them wasn’t entirely untrue. I did have college tuition looming, and I did have an aversion to debt. There was no need to tell them how I got that aversion.

  They hired me on the spot. And, since they always needed good English adjuncts, they’d appreciate, if I knew anybody… .

  I walked out of the interview feeling not exactly buoyed but somewhat relieved. I strolled pensively around the lovely, peaceful campus. Several of the buildings were quite old, but most, according to their cornerstones, were built in the 1950s, of a dusty yellow brick that conveyed a businesslike feeling of solidity. Several wiry and hawklike old women, who I later learned belonged to a local garden club, tended the impressive flower beds. The sun shone beautifully off the ladies’ white hair. They seemed so happy, their lives so well lived. The campus bookstore was open, and several clerks unpacked textbooks from cartons. I had a real sense of new beginnings. Of course, I remained a man in his forties, and this was no time for a new beginning. Our buying of the house coincided almost to the moment, unfortunately, with our first glimpses of retirement. I had never thought about retiring from my day job; my work life stretched before me, I thought, infinitely. But all of a sudden I was getting service pins and being treated as an elder statesman. Conversations with colleagues started to move down the same detour: “So when can you pack it in?” they would ask. Did I really look that old? I didn’t tell them what I was feeling: that I had made quite sure that I would never be able to retire, thank you very much. I would not be living in a condo on a golf course. I would not be joining a garden club and tending the black-eyed Susans at the local college. No, I wasn’t going to take the usual path. My current plan was to drop dead at my desk.

  Huron State put me in an English 101 class. The class was larger than any I’d had at Pembrook, and the students were younger. Of my twenty-five enrollees, no more than two or three were classic middle-aged returning students. They, of course, sat in the front seats. Their books were stacked neatly before them; they hung on my every utterance. Everyone else was young, but as the class progressed I realized they weren’t as young as I had initially thought. They were in their twenties, and already beaten down. They had not gone directly from high school to college. Their essays revealed that they had spent some time in the world, time enough for unexpected pregnancies and broken marriages and parental estrangement and substance abuse difficulties and, always, thrumming along in the background, the relentless pulse of the stifling dead-end job. One girl mentioned in her first essay that she worked in a local café and had sold me the cup of aged Sumatran I had bought before that first night’s class.

  I hadn’t thought at all about the philosophy behind community colleges. I knew their tuition was low; I knew they would take anybody. I could rattle off the press release: that the mission of the community college was to make college available to those who might otherwise be shut out, and I supposed that to be a noble goal. I did not know that their advocates possessed the zeal of missionaries.

  In 1998, the American Association of Community Colleges noted the following about its constituent schools:

  The network of community, technical, and junior colleges in America is unique and extraordinarily successful. It is, perhaps, the only sector of higher education that truly can be called a “movement,” one in which the members are bound together and inspired by common goals. From the very first, these institutions, often called “the people’s colleges,” have stirred an egalitarian zeal among their members. The open door policy has been pursued with an intensity and dedication comparable to the populist, civil rights, and feminist crusades. While more elitist institutions may define excellence as exclusion, community colleges have sought excellence in service to the many.1

  It is all, in theory, wonderful: American egalitarianism at its best. We are happy believing that we can and should send everyone under the sun to college. This seems a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it, and some companies even assist with tuition costs. Government is all for it; there are lots of opp
ortunities, for the truly needy, for financial aid. The media cheerleads for it: Oprah, The View, National Public Radio—try to imagine someone coming out against the idea of everyone in America going to college. To be opposed to such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. And now that we find ourselves stumbling through the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, the thinking is that community colleges are even more vital to the survival of our nation. “Community colleges are going to be an absolute catalyst to help people get back on their feet,” says United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a roundtable organized by Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming.2 Bill Cosby tapes public-service announcements in Detroit in support of the Wayne County Community College District.3 And Barack Obama pledges to spend $12 billion over the next decade on the American Graduation Initiative, which would, as the president said in a speech delivered at Macomb Community College in Michigan,

  reform and strengthen community colleges like this one from coast to coast so they get the resources that students and schools need—and the results workers and businesses demand. Through this plan, we seek to help an additional 5 million Americans earn degrees and certificates in the next decade—5 million.4

  The American Graduation Initiative was removed from the 2009 Obama health care bill at the last moment, so for the moment it is a dead issue, but defeated or not, the language of the bill, the ringing optimism coupled with blind faith in the power of education, is striking. The American zeitgeist of limitless possibility is a beautiful thing to behold. I, too, want desperately to believe in it. But some of the students I encounter in the community college world test my belief in the ultimate workability, the sustainability (to use the fashionable term) of what we have set up.

  Recent changes in American higher education, which represent a substantial departure from previous practice, have extended college access to unprecedented numbers of minority, disadvantaged, and nontraditional (age 25 and over) students who are often less academically prepared than their peers… .5

  The general preparation of my Huron State students turned out to be quite poor. I would have to figure out a way, and I wasn’t at all sure I could, of reconciling the remedial work we were doing with a standard college curriculum. If you do ninth-grade work in a college classroom, does it automatically become college work? This is, I suppose, the ultimate question.

  The writing of my new students was even worse than what I had encountered at Pembrook. Almost none were at college level. I did not attend anything resembling an Ivy League school, and Pembrook had tempered my expectations. But some of my community college students were not even at high school level. Remember “I” spent some time in the dreaded junior high classroom, and some of those students were miles ahead of my new college class.

  I’ve taught in community college for nearly ten years now, and the writing hasn’t gotten any better. How often is the first person singular, the letter “I,” uncapitalized? Too frequently to count. I know, I know—I’m a grouch with a stick up his ass. Language is all casual, e-mail and texting have altered styles dramatically. Everybody’s e.e. cummings. Who am I to deny the transformative vibrancy of language? What’s the big goddamn deal anyway? Unfortunately, for me and I think for many others, fair or not, the lowercase “i” is a marker of shoddy thinking. I tell the students in no uncertain terms: do this, and the arguments in your paper, whatever the merit, will not even be considered, because no one will want to read what you say. I know this is true, because when I see “i” for “I,” it is only the contract I sign as an adjunct instructor that keeps me reading.

  Misspellings, of course, abound. “Tight nit” for tight-knit; a hero as a “knight in shinny armor”; “ludacris” for ludicrous (shame on you, rapper, for what you have wrought!); theirs, there’s, and they’res chasing one another around in a fugal counterpoint of inaccuracy—what’s the big deal here, Ms. Grundy? English spelling is difficult, and that’s why the spell checker was invented.

  Like it or not, college is not merely an extension of high school, another four years of bells, study halls, lunch, gym, and extracurriculars. Without heaping too much solemnity upon it, college is something that one must ascend to. No one would expect to pass a calculus class if he had not yet mastered basic arithmetic. Why, then, are most attempts to adhere to basic standards in the use of the English language in college courses heaped with scorn?

  John Rouse, a rhetoric and composition theoretician, writes of a student struggling to begin an essay. In his abortive attempts, the student takes opposite sides of an issue, struggling to see which one he is able to write about. Now, I admire this student’s practicality—I tell my classes that an important, if overlooked, factor when selecting a topic is that it must give you sufficient material to write about—and, as a writer, I sympathize. Often I have jumped full-tilt into a piece only to discover, as the prose came slowly and crankily, that I didn’t quite believe in the position I had taken, and I would be better served approaching the writing from a different angle. But Rouse doesn’t cotton to that sort of thing:

  Notice how in his desperation this student is willing to take any position, to agree or disagree or both at once—any position that will supply the needed words and satisfy the demand of authority. Here with this first writing assignment begins a training in that amorality so useful to authority everywhere.6

  Rouse objects vehemently to the teaching of grammatical structures as just one more way to keep the beleaguered student in his place. He sees grammar as inherently sinister:

  Of course the inadequacy of traditional grammar as a description of the language is well-known in the profession, but no matter—it still retains a useful disciplinary value. It helps train young people to be concerned with the rules laid down by authority, even when those rules do not fit the situation. Language training is always behavior training.

  The problem with Rouse and his ilk is that they presuppose a level of student difficulty with the structures of English that still allows instructors to understand their papers. I do not care if my students get “who” and “whom” wrong; the distinctions between “shall” and “will,” or “which” and “that” are stumpers to me, and I wouldn’t expect the students to be able or willing to negotiate them. But I do believe in teaching basic grammar and usage, even if the lessons are invariably rushed and ad hoc. College writing, the manipulating of ideas in a sophisticated fashion, requires a sturdy latticework of form; doing the thinking about sentences, which should have happened in high school, trains the mind to approach ideas with rigor. The birth of subtext, like the nurturing of a fragile Asiatic lily, requires proper fertilization: nouns and verbs, sentences that parse, that we can understand. Writing teachers don’t go off in search of error. We don’t shudder with a surreptitious thrill when we find it; we don’t read as “policemen” or “examiners,” in the words of David Bartholomae, who seems to think that an inability to understand poor student writing is the teacher’s fault anyway.

  The teacher who is unable to make sense out of a seemingly bizarre piece of student writing is often the same teacher who can give an elaborate explanation of the “meaning” of a story by Donald Barthelme or a poem by e.e. cummings.7

  It goes without saying that we’re not teaching creative writing here. We don’t approach the spatterings of a first-grade art student in the same way we do a Jackson Pollock. What I encounter regularly in my students’ writing are yawning canyons of illogic and error. Certainly the students don’t read back to themselves what they write, but also, while they are writing, they appear to work with but the thinnest sliver of their consciousness engaged. They don’t seem to remember that sentences need verbs; they deal freely in a currency of disconnected phrases and sentence fragments. It is difficult to know how to proceed with college instruction when this is the place at which we begin.

  A woman writes in her research paper about America in the late 1940s and gets many details about World War II, details which are common knowledge, wrong. He
r storehouse of knowledge about the world is inadequate to the task. In a paper on government wiretapping, a student seems to think that the American Civil Liberties Union is indeed a union. In an essay on acid rain, a student writes that water molecules in the sky absorb toxins and send them back to earth—because they have nothing else to do. A literature student, analyzing Flannery O’Connor’s story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”—in which a mother and son ride a city bus to her exercise class at the YMCA—writes with confidence that it is set during the Civil War.

  In no other age but our own—idealistic, inclusive, unwilling to limit anyone’s possibilities for self-determination—would some of my students be considered ready for college. They have been abducted into college, sold a bill of goods. Despite having performed indifferently in high school, they were told that they have no choice but to attend college. Barack Obama speaks at Hudson Valley Community College, and says:

  We’re here because this is a place where anyone with the desire to take their career to a new level or start a new career altogether has the opportunity to pursue that dream. This is a place where people of all ages and backgrounds—even in the face of obstacles, even in the face of very difficult personal challenges—can take a chance on a brighter future for themselves and for their family.8

  The president is a cheerleader for community colleges. Were I looking at it from the outside, I might be right there with him. His words might make me experience the tug and swelling of inspiration in my chest. I might feel the endless possibilities of America. But I am in the classroom, struggling to teach unprepared students, and I can’t stop thinking about the very real obstacles and difficult personal challenges his oratory glides quickly over—obstacles and challenges that sometimes cannot be overcome. President Obama goes on in the speech to detail his outline for the since-abandoned American Graduation Initiative, much of which was to be paid for by the American taxpayer. Increased funding for Pell Grants. New tax credits for college tuition. Funding to the states to close budget shortfalls for public universities and community colleges. President Obama talks about helping five million Americans earn degrees from community colleges in the next decade. How many new enrollments will that mean? A great many of my community college students are already on the path to crushing defeat. I’m not sure we know what to do with the students we already have.