by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
There are several inhabitants of the village who seem right at my economic level, and so I perform a series of secondary calculations in my mind to evaluate our positions. How attractive is the wife? How much vacation time does he get? Does his health care coverage carry into retirement? I think about some of the local wealthy childless couples. I assume that they are tortured and miserable. I have to assume that for my own sanity. I feel like one of the townspeople in “The Lottery,” one of the locals who looks at the wealthy and powerful Mr. Summers and “is sorry for him, because he had no children and his wife was a scold.”
Walking my town is an exhausting endeavor. I cannot stop my mental gymnastics. Too bad I can’t seem to exercise my body as vigorously as I do my mind—I’d be a lot thinner.
Some years ago, notices of foreclosure began to be put up in the post office, which became suddenly a lot more interesting a place to visit, a place not just of mail and stamps and Christmas parcels and stacks of tax forms but of the official record of shattered lives. Our post office is dark and cool, seemingly unchanged from the days of the New Deal. Above the parcel post window a cast-iron American eagle watches over all. On the wall hang display sheets of commemorative stamps and plaques honoring local dead in foreign wars. Week after week, the sheaf of foreclosure postings on the clipboard grows thicker. I don’t know many of the names. Most of the houses are in the new developments outside the village, off in the hills, as I think of them. I recognize one woman’s name. I believe that she works in the kitchen of a nursing home. Her 3,200-square-foot house, built in 2006, is in foreclosure. She seems like a very nice person. She lived in a mansion. I used to wonder, occasionally, how she and her husband did it.
It turns out they didn’t.
They, too, are the victims of the postmodern impulse. It seemed the right thing to do to improve their narrative, to install them in a mansion that they couldn’t really afford. “The development of lax lending standards, both by banks and by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” according to Thomas Sowell, resulted from a series of government policies “directed toward the politically popular goal of more ‘home ownership’ through ‘affordable housing,’ especially for low-income home buyers. These lax lending standards were the foundation for a house of cards that was ready to collapse with a relatively small nudge.”1
President George W. Bush said it back in 2002, back when I was buying my house. “We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.”2 Encourage them—as though it were something that had slipped their mind, or that they hadn’t gotten around to.
I took a shallow breath. I still walked a tightrope. Money was always tight, but things no longer seemed desperate. I hoped that enrollments at my schools would stay up. Teach my usual load of classes every year, and I’d be all right. And then, wonder of wonders, as the recession deepened, I heard for the first time Barack Obama saying words I never thought I would hear him say. Community college, he said. What? Yes, that was where his hope was. Community college. He had a notion to give $12 billion to community colleges over the next decade. I went to the White House Web site and read the description of the American Graduation Initiative:
In an increasingly competitive world economy, America’s economic strength depends upon the education and skills of its workers. In the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as those requiring no college experience. To meet this economic imperative, President Barack Obama asks every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education… .3
The sound of the thing was familiar. President Obama desired, by administrative fiat, to redefine exactly who among the populace qualifies as a college student. The good news is that everyone qualifies. Everyone is a winner! Now where have we heard that before? Perhaps from the lips of the Bush administration, which had similar ideas about broadening the base of homeownership.
Just because we call someone a college student, just because we enroll him or her and sit them down at a desk, doesn’t make it all on the up and up. Granting a mortgage to someone doesn’t confer the status of a solvent homeowner, either.
My adjuncting work has been crucial to keeping me financially sound for all these years. I persevere in my middle-class status. I am not in any danger of foreclosure, but I don’t blame the poor souls who are. We all overspent for these damn houses.
The surface of a housing bubble is opaque, and when you’re trapped inside, seeing outside to the real world is impossible. Our impulses were not bad, not greedy, not evil. We were naïve, yes, and credulous, and the argument could be made that we were, in rather a poignant sense, patriotic. All we wanted, for ourselves and for our children—mostly for our children—was a sliver of the American promise of prosperity. We believed that diving into as much real estate as we could was the bedrock foundation of that prosperity. We believed because we saw it. We saw who lived in the old, spacious houses in town, the ones with the turrets and the hammocks and gliders on their wraparound porches, the ones that every spring had their gardens overhauled with fresh applications of sod that was tall but airy, like sponge cake. Just like my writing students, we in the housing market got cause and effect a little mixed up: the houses are an integral part of the wealth, but they don’t exactly cause it. Buying a house in 1930 was a good move; buying the same house in 2002, not so much. The market was mature and then, when the bubble burst, beyond mature, and perhaps beyond repair.
When everyone owns a house, the economic benefits of homeownership diminish. The college market is equally mature. My students sit before me in their desks because they understand that college is the path to a better life, which they want for themselves but, even more, for their children. College is the crucial first step—some sort of college credit is nonnegotiable in the job market—but no one has mentioned one salient detail: there are no guarantees. Unprepared college students and unprepared homebuyers are both very much at risk. Markets tumble, houses enter foreclosure, students fail.
I have been teaching as many courses as I can—for the money, yes, but at some point I discovered how happy I was walking the quads and arranging the desks in my classroom. To paraphrase the song from A Chorus Line, everything was beautiful at the college. I had grown to be a respected figure, a veteran teacher, a Mr. Chips-like venerable old institution—if you forgot that I was an adjunct, and could disappear tomorrow, leaving no trace, no memory save, perhaps, that of my long coat. Only occasionally would I be reminded of my second class status. I once attended a plagiarism hearing for a student who had turned in a paper larded with stuff off the Internet. Like cops called to a domestic dispute in a slum, the full-time English professors on the panel treated both the student and me with thinly veiled distaste. The whole affair struck them as sordid, I know, and I could almost read their thoughts: Can’t you crazy losers work this stuff out yourselves?
There are times when the campus can be a wonderful place of escape. I have lost myself in the stacks in the subbasement of the college library. I’ve watched baseball games, and basketball games. I’ve wandered the aisles of the campus bookstore as the new semester began, and admired the shelves of pens and racks of school hoodies and stacks of textbooks with not-yet-cracked spines and felt that old sense, dormant in many of us, of the endless possibilities of the school year. I’ve gone to staged readings of new plays by English department faculty. I’ve taken my English 102 students to hear visiting authors speak. I’ve come out of the classroom, after a great night, as satisfied as I have ever been in my life, filled with the uncommon bliss of a sense of true purpose. I may not be the best teacher in the world, but I’m probably not the worst. Teaching these classes is what I was put here to do, I think. The road of life seems torturous and twisting, and we can’t make sense of it, but it is all for some purpose. Our ends are shaped, roughhew them how we will. I have attended the faculty
barbecues, and been invited to join a chorus of professors as they gathered around a piano and sang the rousing college song. The college song! I didn’t know the college song, of course, which was a little bit of a bummer, but I hoisted my stein of beer and joined in as best I could.
But as the years pass, and the stack of archived grade books and attendance sheets grows taller in my attic, the colleges have lost their power to distract me. I can’t get it out of my mind: the same societal urges that lowered the bar for homeownership have lowered the bar for higher education, and the similarity haunts me. I am at the nexus of it all, for I, who fell victim to the original pyramid scheme of real estate, the constant expansion of the base of buyers to keep demand and prices up, have used the educational pyramid scheme, the redefining of who college students are, for my own salvation.
Last week, I visited the campus library. I found I could hardly work because of the noise. I was tempted to go out and write in my car. Some of the students were working hard, but most weren’t. Most were just bullshitting. We sat in an area next to a sign: MODIFIED QUIET STUDY AREA: QUIET CONVERSATIONS ONLY. I really don’t know what that means. What is modified quiet? Is it possible really to have quiet if there are any sorts of conversations going on, even quiet ones? Why can’t the library just be unambiguously quiet? I thought back to my own college days. Were the libraries quiet? The MODIFIED QUIET STUDY AREA: QUIET CONVERSATIONS ONLY sign started to depress me. It seemed to indicate, in rather a cynical fashion, a surrender of institutional will. The library administration has called for a sort-of quiet study area—no one can say that it hasn’t—but the rule has no teeth, no one enforces the regulation, no one cares. The students don’t care to be quiet and the librarians don’t care to compel them to be. Even the library, that sanctuary I love, seemed at that moment rather a cynical place.
My household finances have improved. They would have anyway, without all the adjuncting, but I continue to teach as many courses as I can. It’s a part of who I am. So long as there are potential firemen required to learn the MLA format for the research paper, I will have work. Teaching has helped me to stay afloat. My old cracked wallpaper is up. My boiler seems peeved at having to work past its retirement age. I’ve got loose sconces and a driveway in need of resealing, lawns in need of reseeding, a kitchen in need of updating. But what I don’t have is the old terror. Adjuncting helped rescue me. My mortgage is still annoyingly large each month, but the balance does dip, slowly, slowly.
In the course of time, something like peace returned to our home and our marriage. The one thing throwing our life off-kilter, the box in which we resided, faded in our minds as the rest of life expanded, mostly as the children grew and blossomed and their lives, so rich with possibility, seemed to fill the space. Our fears diminished. The house began to recede in our consciousness, becoming more like the ideal expressed by Le Corbusier: a machine for living in. We took less notice of its demands. More and more, my wife and I found ourselves inhabiting our old world. Worries gradually lifted—most worries, anyway, on most days. The general cloud of concern that dimmed our vision and made our eyes teary finally seemed to disperse. After a while, the house still seemed an error, but perhaps not a fatal one.
The writer composes a draft, puts it away in a drawer for a week, and upon reexamining it, discovers its flaws to be shockingly apparent. All the defects, the gaps in logic, the ideas not fully thought out and certainly not fully explained, stand out in brilliant high relief, as though someone else had written the thing—which, in a way, is the case. The prose has captured the writer’s essence at the moment of composition; the writer, now older and more experienced by just a single week, nonetheless is a different person. Time passing creates critical distance. That fellow from ten years ago, the one who bought the house in the village, who gave up on literature and craved leaded glass windows—he’s just a rather slipshod draft of myself. His errors stand out in their own brilliant high relief. I live with the havoc he has wrought, but at least it doesn’t frighten and mystify and debilitate me anymore. His mistakes seem, after all this time, rather comic. I feel well able to cope with his screwups.
My wife and I remain attuned to the fragility of our existence together. We are careful. I hope we are careful enough. I have great faith in both of us—more in her than me.
Fall has arrived, but we won’t take the air conditioner out of the boys’ window. A family of sparrows has built a nest beneath it. I don’t want to evict or upset them. Let them have their shelter as long as they need it. If it’s a little colder in the room, we’ll just crank up the heat a bit. Let the birds enjoy our house and our village. There are many worse places to be.
21
Nobody Move
I HOLD A GUN ON YOU. You hold a gun on me. Who will surrender first? Who will even flinch? We are trapped in that narrative trope so beloved by America’s high priest of violent movies, Quentin Tarantino. We are locked in a Mexican standoff.
Five groups point weapons at one another: the adjunct instructors, the colleges, the students, industry, and the American people in the person of the new sheriff in town, Barack Obama. Guns drawn, we are frozen. Nobody can move. How long can this go on? Our arms are getting pretty tired.
The adjunct instructors. We are hired to teach college to the unprepared. We are expected to maintain standards. We fail a good many students, and we pass some, and we wonder, as we place the C-minus or D-plus on the transcript, exactly what such a bad grade is worth to anyone: to the student, to an employer, to another college. At times, the whole process seems a terrible waste of time. Some of these students will never pass. They are not, to use the quaint and politically incorrect phrase, college material. But the question remains: do they need to be? Does the registered nurse who tends to me in the emergency room need to understand the ebb and flow of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? But then I can’t help thinking: maybe the better nurse, the one who will make better clinical decisions, is the one who can appreciate Molly’s cry of affirmation. Your heart is going like mad yes but you’re not having a heart attack don’t worry yes you’re only hyperventilating yes I will take care of you yes I said yes I will Yes.
Better students would be less harrowing. Better students would eliminate fundamental inconsistencies, but better students would also eliminate the need for adjunct instructors, who are really only necessary so long as we keep expanding the parameters of what jobs require college and who exactly needs to go. So we instructors in search of a paycheck persevere with the students we have. We enjoy what we do and we like the students and we provide a valuable service to college and students both. But we look at those stacks of essays that need to be graded and realize, over and over, the challenges that we face.
The colleges. We think of them as institutions with goodness in their hearts, and they may very well be that, but in the end they are businesses, and like all businesses, they are happiest while expanding. Stasis, even a happy and fulfilling stasis, can never be a permanent state. College presidents love to put on mortarboards and attend commencement exercises, but what they love even more is slapping on a hardhat and grabbing a shovel for a groundbreaking ceremony. They want to serve as many students as possible, for reasons of mission and philosophy and the bottom line.
The big schools have big dreams. The University of Delaware announced in 2009 that it was planning the largest expansion of its campus in the school’s history.1 Yale is building two new residential colleges that are planned to open by 2013, which will enable it to expand its undergraduate enrollment from about 5,250 to 6,000, an increase of approximately 15 percent.2 In New York City, both Fordham University and New York University are in the early stages of large-scale 25-year expansions. Fordham has spent $900,000 since 2006 in lobbying fees to try to get the project approved.3 NYU is doing battle with preservationists, who oppose the building of a new 40-story tower in Greenwich Village, and community groups, who hand out flyers bearing the slogan “Overbuild, Oversaturate, Overwhelm.”4 Columbia
University is expanding, too, north into West Harlem, at a cost of more than $6 billion. The university’s Web site sounds a bit defensive as it justifies the plan in tortured prose not worthy of the Ivy League: “As new fields of knowledge emerge, the nation’s universities are growing to pursue the expanding missions of teaching, research, public service, and patient care. With only a fraction of the space enjoyed by our leading peers across the country, Columbia has had to face an especially critical need for space in a dense urban environment.”5
The community colleges are right there with their more upscale brothers, launching expansion projects both grand and modest. Work has begun on a $31 million expansion of Community College of Philadelphia; a pet project of Senator Arlen Specter, the new Northeast Regional Center is billed as the first certified “green” facility in the area.6 In Texas, Austin Community College is preparing to open its eighth and largest campus in the fall of 2010.7 In Michigan, Kalamazoo Valley Community College has begun taking bids for its $12 million expansion.8 On April 8, 2010, ribbon was cut at a new facility at Bucks County Community College, a $15 million 28,000-square-foot facility—“green,” of course—housing a library, café, student commons, classrooms, and outdoor amphitheater. 9 Ivy Tech Community College plans to expand into downtown Muncie, Indiana, taking over the former offices of the Muncie Star Press.10
Some of the cannier institutions are using the recession to their own advantage, picking up real estate on the cheap. The aforementioned University of Delaware has centered its expansion plans on the acquisition of a closed-down Chrysler automobile plant. Arizona State University wants to acquire a couple of office buildings and vacant computerchip plants that became available when the manufacturing moved overseas. The University of Pennsylvania is looking at picking up a real bargain, a “stillborn condominium development.” 11 St. Louis Community College–Florissant Valley wants to expand into the vacant Circuit City building next door.12
