Professor X

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

  Sometimes, when I have to give bad grades, I feel like a beacon of morality, an unyielding standard, an ever-fixed mark, like the silver meter stick stored in the French vault from which all other meter sticks once derived. Sometimes, on the other hand, I feel like nothing more than a hardass.

  I just came inside from a session of raking leaves. What a handy metaphor! Just as I am never sure what system to use to grade my classes each semester, so I waver each fall on how to go about doing the leaves. Do I rake them into piles and then onto the blanket, or do I skip the piles and rake them directly onto the blanket? Each method seems sometimes like less work, sometimes like more, depending on the time of day, my mood, whether I am feeling precise or slapdash, and the ache in my back. Do I grade on improvement and/or effort and/or sincerity? Raking is invigorating, but it gets tiresome, and I grow weary of theorizing about it. Have I mentioned that my property consists of a lot-and-a-half: not enough to subdivide or sell, just enough to rake. And mow. And weed. And rake again. As I rake and sweep up the leaves I come upon sheets like papier-mâché of leaves from last year, or several years ago, that I missed. I have the feeling that I’m just getting behind with everything in my life. I would flatter myself and say the metaphor is reminiscent of one by Robert Frost, but I know that he was much better in the yard than I am, always picking apples and patching his wall and such.

  Rarely do I venture onto my college campuses during the day. One afternoon I come in to pick up a new teacher’s edition of my writing textbook. I wander the corridors. Classes are in session; doors are shut. A few students meander through the halls. The place looks, in the bright light of day, like a real college. There are ads and notices on the bulletin boards lining the corridors: ads for screenings of Halloween, information about the tutoring program, stuff for sale: cut-rate textbooks, a DJ setup with a pair of turntables. One item catches my eye: an ad for a Web site, Simplified Nursing, “where you can learn about and purchase easy-to-read books written to help nurses and nursing students… .”:

  How many times have you struggled to learn something? It can happen in a classroom, with a textbook, on the job, in a seminar, or even in your home when you want to reset the clock on the VCR. Then, suddenly you get it! You slap yourself on the forehead and then think, “Well why didn’t they just tell me that in the first place? Why do they always make this stuff so complicated!”

  The ad interests me. I read further. The books use illustrations to convey their points. The book Drug Calculations for Nurses Who Hate Numbers, for example, shows a drawing of a 150-milligram pill broken into thirds—each segment drawn as a little character, with a smiling face—to explain how much to give if the dose is 50 milligrams or 100 milligrams.

  I don’t immediately realize that classes have ended. Classroom doors open and students pour forth. I am in an awkward spot, blocking traffic. Professors pack their satchels and chat at their desks with stragglers. These professors don’t look like the adjuncts I am used to seeing. These are regular-looking professors, prosperous-seeming chaps, tall and weedy fellows in long oxford shirts, women with hair cut in tidy wedges. One guy is fat, bearded, benign—the spirit of Robertson Davies himself! The place smells of tenure and, emanating from a faculty office near the stairs, freshly brewed Starbucks coffee. In the office, two professors in lab coats hold their mugs in anticipation as the brewing cycle finishes; one affectionately strokes the pate of a skeleton mounted on a stand.

  These are the full-timers. They leave their classrooms, satchels in hand, and eye me with apparent suspicion. What am I doing there? They know all the daytime faculty, at least by sight. Who the hell am I? What’s a fifty-year-old man in a necktie doing skulking about?

  Daytime at the campus has a carefree quality I never see. The sun is shining. Moods seem brighter. The students, not having arrived from an eight-hour job, shuffle languidly in flip-flops and T-shirts. Department secretaries lace up their sneakers and pair off for midday walks and lunch. The professors are relaxed. They have paid sabbaticals and great parking spaces and guaranteed employment. For them, the recession is a rumor. Cheerfully haughty, they remind me of the professors I had so many years ago. Their students will head off in many different directions, toward many different types of employment, but each class day’s unspoken lesson is that being a tenured college professor just may be the sweetest gig there is.

  My students and I are of a piece. I could not be haughty, even if I wanted to be. Our presence in these evening classes is evidence that something in our lives has gone awry. In one way or another, we have all screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to work a second job. All any of us want is a free evening. We are all saddled with children or mortgages or sputtering careers, sometimes all three. I often think, at the beginning of the class, that a five-minute snooze, a sanctioned nap period, would do us all good. We carry knapsacks and briefcases spilling over with the contents of our hectic lives. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The daytime students are fed by the college food service, which understands its mandate to be at least marginally nutritious. My people eat cakes and chips out of machines—when there’s anything left in the machines.

  The poignancy of my students can be overwhelming. I see them trying to keep all the balls in the air: job, school, family, marriage. Of course it isn’t easy. On our class breaks, they scatter like frightened mice to various corners and niches of the building, whip out their cell phones, andtry to maintain a home life at a distance. Burdened with their own homework assignments, they gamely try to stay on top of their children’s. (Which problems do you have to do? … All right, then, just the odd numbers. That’s good, right? One, three, five, seven, nine and you’re done. Don’t think of it as five problems. Just do them one at a time. Finish that and then do the spelling. Now put Daddy on.) I hear husbands and wives trying to conduct a whole domestic life within the boundaries of a tenminute phone call, talk of parent-teacher conferences and appointments with plumbers that often disintegrates into argument. “What do you want me to do?” I have heard it said many times by trapped people standing in empty classrooms. “What do you want me to do?” I think sometimes that we’d all be better off without cell phones. After the breaks, it’s difficult to reconnect with some of the students. I can tell they are replaying the last phone call in their minds, frustrated and helpless as they sit trapped in the classroom while the world outside, they imagine, goes to hell.

  As a writing instructor, I have a unique perspective. A botched calculus or biology exam reveals only the student’s ignorance of the material being tested, but a piece of bad writing lays bare all intellectual deficits. And because essay topics are often rooted in the personal, as they have to be to get any decent writing out of the students, I am far more likely than a math or biology instructor to hear my students’ tangled backstories.

  Now, some of my students are merely young and silly and disinclined to do the required work for the class. They know they’re goofing off, and they sort of care, but pretty early on they throw up their hands. All of life stretches out before them, all possibility, and it is impossible to take people like me seriously. Consider Jason. Jason is a cheery sort, with a fringe of dark curly hair visible under his omnipresent baseball cap. He has a pert sort of nose and little bow lips; I can see the cute child he once was. He comes to class faithfully, mostly I think to ogle the girls. Jason has thus far, this semester, handed nothing in, not a single assignment.

  I meet with him after class to discuss the situation. “I love having you in the class,” I say, “and I wouldn’t for the world suggest that you stop coming. But you’ve got to know that there are issues we need to talk about. Where are the assignments?”

  This is the approach I have cultivated over the years. I chide him gently because the situation is so absurd: why would someone come so dutifully to class yet not hand in a single assignment? I am careful not to suggest, even faintly, that his time would be better
spent elsewhere. I don’t tell him that he’s going to fail and there’s really no point in his continuing. To suggest that he shouldn’t come anymore, to be discouraging, or mean, or uncaring—it’s simply not done, even though in college our goal is to get the students to evaluate data, to make good inferences, to think, above all else, critically. I cannot state, and I cannot elucidate from him, the obvious conclusion that the mathematics are working against him: he would have to do brilliant work at the Harold Bloom level to overcome all the lateness penalties.

  “I’ve got a lot going on,” he says, vaguely abstracted, as though I was taking time from his other important work. He opens a binder full of fresh, blank paper. “Could you tell me which ones I’ve missed?”

  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!

  10

  College as Eden

  THE 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 demonst
rate 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.1

  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