By CALEB CRAIN
Published: April 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower-by-professor-x.html?ref=books&pagewanted=all
In June 2008, The Atlantic published an essay by an adjunct instructor
of English, identified only as "Professor X," whose job filled him
with despair. Although the courses he taught were introductory,
success was beyond many of his students, who, he wrote, were "in some
cases barely literate." X found giving F's to be excruciating — "I am
the man who has to lower the hammer," he lamented — in part because he
identified with his older students, who seemed to have lost their way
in their careers much as X himself had.
"Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we
all have screwed up," he wrote. "I'm working a second job; they're
trying desperately to get to a place where they don't have to. . . .
We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time
jobs. . . . We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the
food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna
oil."
In his book, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," X now reports that
his candor was promptly punished. Letters to the editor called him "a
white-collar criminal" and accused him of incompetence and anti-
working-class bias. One blogger was furious that X hadn't eased his
students into learning somehow — by playing Mad Libs, for example. A
second suggested he was an "unhappy soul" who had succumbed to the
temptation "to impersonate the kind of punitive, absolute authority
that renders grades to its helpless students as if they really were
blessings and curses." A third blamed X for failing to engage his
students with "sophisticated intellectual material."
X replies to the silly and the merely personal attacks with the prose
equivalent of a raised eyebrow. ("A white-collar criminal?" he
writes.) He accuses his more substantive critics, however, of not
wanting to hear what he is saying: namely, that many of his students
are unable to learn what he has been hired to teach. "I do not teach
remedial or developmental classes," he explains, "and cannot transform
my bona fide honest-to-God fully accredited college class into one."
He admits that he fudges nonetheless, sneaking in a great deal of
"hidden remediation." But 15 weeks is not enough time to bring many of
his students up to speed, and he wonders about remediation generally,
citing a study of Ohio community colleges that came to the tellingly
modest conclusion that "remediation does not appear to have a negative
effect." Competent writing, X insists, requires a solid grounding in
grammar and a long history of reading. Even in positive evaluations of
X's courses, though, his students offer revelations like: "Before this
I would of never voluntarily read a book. But now I almost have a
desire to pick one up and read." From their personal essays, X learns
the sometimes heartbreaking details of his students' lives. "This may
or not be my best work," one writes, on a final exam. "I got laid off
this morning and had a brutal day." Giving a bad grade to a student
implicates X in "the universal crime of messing with his livelihood."
But X's function, in the ecology of the colleges where he teaches, is
gatekeeper — most students who fail his classes will drop out — and he
articulates the ethical challenge before him this way: "What grade
does one give a college student who progresses from a 6th- to a 10th-
grade level of achievement?" X gives F's. Once, he gave as many as
nine to a class of 15. His employers have never complained. In fact, a
supervisor once recommended he grade a little more harshly. (To excuse
his mercy, he notes that "failing all those in a class who deserve to
is like trying to keep 23 helium balloons at ground level with your
hands.")
X and his wife got snookered in the housing bubble, and he wonders if
the misery in his classroom might result from a similar education
bubble. In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in America;
in 2006, there were 20.5 million. In X's opinion, a glut of degrees
has led to a spurious inflation of the credentials required for many
jobs. Tuitions are rising, and two-thirds of college graduates now
leave school with debt, owing on average about $24,000. A four-year
degree is said to increase wages about $450,000 over the course of a
lifetime, but X doubts the real value of degrees further down on the
hierarchy of prestige. To him, the human cost is more conspicuous. A
recent study of about 3,000 graduates of Boston public high schools
found that although two-thirds went on to college, only 675 had earned
a degree of any kind, including a one-year certificate, seven years
later. Upon learning of the study, The Boston Globe called for a
campaign against student attrition. X, by contrast, worries about the
waste of effort and the emotional toll of mass discouragement.
Professor X can be caustic about the euphemism and somewhat willed
optimism that sometimes befog discussion of how to teach unprepared
students. To relieve his and his students' unhappiness, he proposes
that employers stop demanding unnecessary degrees: a laudable
suggestion, unlikely to be realized until the degree glut has dried
up. From X's descriptions of his teaching — rallying his students'
spirits, charming them into discarding low expectations of themselves,
editing drafts for hours with the group — I began to suspect that his
work was more valuable than his repeated self-deprecations suggested,
even if none of his students ever hand in an A paper, a standard he
likens to "an essay by David Foster Wallace." Indeed, by the end of
the book I found myself wondering whether education reform was X's
real subject at all.
Teaching, after all, is not the only impossible profession. Policing
never ends crime; nursing has value even in a hospice. No doubt it's
easier to learn to write in elementary school, but if society wants to
give adults a second chance at learning, failure and frustration are
probably necessary costs.
Maybe X has actually written a book about shame. To teach a rising
tide of students, colleges have increasingly turned to adjuncts,
holders of advanced degrees who are lured in by the prestige of
college teaching, hired on a piecework basis, paid low wages and shut
out of academic decision-making. They're cheaper, they don't expect
offices of their own and it's easy to get rid of them if enrollment
drops. Outsiders and students often don't know the difference between
adjuncts and tenure-track professors, but the adjuncts and the
professors sure do. "In the world of college, I was a screwball, a
loser, a pretender, a scoundrel and a scab," X writes. When he happens
to visit campus by day, he feels like an intruder. "Who the hell am I?
What's a 50-year-old man in a necktie doing skulking about?" The
honest representation of his feeling "evil and soiled," as X puts it,
may be his great contribution here. Adjuncts are supposed to keep such
feelings to themselves. As the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote with
bitter irony in 1963: "The stigmatized individual should not feel
bitter, resentful or self-pitying. A cheerful, outgoing manner should
be cultivated." If the schools where X teaches treated him with
respect, his job would still be difficult, but perhaps he would
understand its challenges differently.
In 2009, only 24.4 percent of American faculty members were tenured or
tenure-track. A vast majority of people teaching in higher education,
in other words, are in X's shoes. A friend laughingly tells X that
he'd never dream of working as an adjunct, because "adjuncts work for
the pleasure of feeling important and being called professor." Zing.
But isn't teaching important? What kind of educational institution
would take advantage of people who thought it was? X's account of his
induction into adjuncting, by a department chairwoman who makes a show
of being too embarrassed to admit how little she's going to pay him,
should be required reading for anyone considering an M.F.A. or a Ph.D.
Many of them will someday face a similar dance of the veils, which
they too will have to pretend not to be able to see through.
Caleb Crain's essay on plutocrats appeared last year in "The Cambridge
Companion to the Literature of New York."
A version of this review appeared in print on May 1, 2011, on page
BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lost in the
Meritocracy.
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