Professor X (2 page)

This push for universal college enrollment, which at first glance seems emblematic of American opportunity and class mobility, is in fact hurting those whom it is meant to help. Students are leaving two- and four-year colleges with enormous amounts of debt. The latest figures, from 2007–08, put the percentage of four-year graduates leaving college with debt at 66 percent. The top 10 percent of those owe $44,500 or more; 50 percent owe at least $20,000.
¹
Lower-income students at least have part of their tab picked up by the taxpayer through such programs as the federal Pell Grant, but for those of my students who want to become state troopers or firemen, the unnecessary cost and the inefficiency of the whole process is staggering.

Community colleges are the cheaper alternative to four-year schools, but can they really be called cheaper when so many students do not graduate? Fully 50 percent of community college students drop out before their second year and only 25 percent manage to finish the two-year program in three years.
²

As my students drift into the classroom each evening, I find myself feeling sorry for them. Many are in over their heads. This whole college thing often turns out to be a bust. College is difficult even for highly motivated students who know how to write papers and study for exams. My students have no such abilities. They lack rudimentary study skills; in some cases, they are not even functionally literate. Many of them are so dispossessed of context that every bit of new information simply raises more questions. Some are not ready for high school, much less college. For many, college is a negative experience. The classes are more difficult than they could have dreamed, and there is simply no time to complete all the work.

As an adjunct, I am paid a flat fee for each class that I teach. I receive no benefits, and I am never going to get tenure. Adjunct instruction is a relatively recent innovation, dating, on a significant scale, from about the mid-1980s. It is a growing field. From 1987 to 1999, use of adjuncts grew by 30 percent at four-year institutions.
³

The increased use of adjunct instructors is a direct result of the explosion in college enrollments, which have expanded dramatically since 1980. In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in the United States. Twenty years later the figure had doubled, to 2.9 million.
⁴
In 1980, there were more than 12 million students enrolled in college, and by 2004, we were up to nearly 17.5 million. Census projections for 2016 hover around 21 million.
⁵
Everybody goes to college now, though not everybody graduates.

Somebody has to teach these twenty-or-so-million students, and hiring adjuncts is the most economical way to do it.

As an adjunct, I am faced with the unenviable job of teaching college classes to students who are quite unprepared for higher education. A number of societal forces have coalesced into a tsunami of difficulty: the happy-talk mantra that anyone can do anything if he or she works hard enough; the sense of college as a universal right and need; the new mania for credentials; financial necessity on the part of both colleges and students. Colleges wish to maintain strict academic standards while admitting everyone who wants to get in, a pool that includes a great many questionable learners. The result is a system rife with contradiction. The conflict between open admissions and basic standards can never be reconciled. Something has got to give.

Sometimes my students piss me off. I could scream when they hand in assignments that don't make any sense. But I can't stay mad at them. They're doing their best. The colleges must bear some responsibility; they, after all, are benefiting from a situation that is, to use current jargon, not sustainable. There seems to be a great gulf between the realm of hype and hard reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, while more widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor must ink an F on that first writing assignment. The zeitgeist of eternal academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards, our peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, our dresses with collars that look almost clerical, but we are nothing less than academic hit men. We are paid by the college to perform the dirty work that no one else wants to do, the wrenching, draining, sorrowful business of teaching and failing the unprepared who often don't even know they are unprepared. We are faceless soldiers culled from the dregs of academe. We operate under cover of darkness. We are not characters out of great academic novels such as
Pnin
or
Lucky Jim.
We have more in common with Anton Chigurh from
No Country for Old Men.
I am John Travolta in
Pulp Fiction
but in a corduroy jacket and bow tie. I feel evil and soiled. I wander the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.” But what can I do?

On a snowy Wednesday night in January, I stand before a class of twenty. I have come directly from work. So have the students. Some wear rayon suits and cruel-looking high heels. A few sport medical scrubs in bright purple and aquamarine. Some are very young and some are in their forties or fifties; most are in that awkward middle ground, late twenties to early thirties, when the impulses of youth find themselves crowded out by the vast pressures of adulthood. As I lecture, a few students on tight schedules eat chicken and rice off Styrofoam trays. I feel like Robert Goulet doing dinner theater. We read “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens.

 

 

The verse gets difficult, and the class grows impatient. Each allusion, each wooly metaphor, seems to lead us astray from the direct path of interpretation.
Why doesn't he just say what he means?
My students put up with poetry, barely. Most are in school to get a better job. They've got no time or inclination to start opening Wallace Stevens's nested boxes of meaning. They need to get where they are going.

Snow is falling. It taps at the classroom windows. My students grow uneasy and restless. They look at their cell phones. Some have long drives home in unreliable vehicles, but unless a daytime blizzard shutters the school completely, there are no mechanisms for canceling or even shortening a night class. Stevens falls flat. Matthew Arnold fares just the smallest bit better. I point out the violence in “Dover Beach,” the clashing ignorant armies, the fragments of shale hurled randomly by the waves up the shore, nature molding life into form through acts of apparent chaos. In college, I wrote a paper on “Dover Beach,” failing to notice that the whole thing was about Darwin's theory of natural selection, and received a C. My professor's stern marginal comments have traveled down the ages, and now make up the central point of my little lecture.

The final poem of the night comes from the back of the textbook, the section of contemporary poetry. Sometimes I teach poetry in strict chronological order, because I feel that to understand any art you have to understand what came before. Then I get fed up with the rigidity of that approach. I also sense the students paying less attention to the poems themselves than to the dates of composition. They watch the years creep forward. Soon it will be over! I can feel their excitement when we get to modernism.
This must be the end! What is there going to be—something after modernism? There couldn't possibly be postmodernism, could there?
So then I try teaching the poems randomly, scattershot, letting one work lead to another, trying to foster in the students something approaching the joy of discovery. The textbooks don't have a clear idea how to handle this; some years the texts we use (the department mandates them) follow chronology, and other years theme.

We read “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds. In this poem, the speaker examines photographs of her mother and father at school. They are innocent college kids, she writes; “they would never hurt anybody.” The speaker marvels at her knowledge of what the future holds. She addresses the old images directly: “you are going to do things / you cannot imagine you would ever do.” She chronicles her parents' mistakes and suffering—“you are going to want to die”—but, naturally desiring her own existence, wouldn't change history to keep them apart. “Do what you are going to do,” she writes with resignation, “and I will tell about it.”

Snow drums with force on the windows. Other classes seem to be calling it a night. We hear the hubbub and nervous laughter of groups filing past the classroom door. I tell my class that they can leave. The speed with which they jump out of their seats is unseemly. Some of the younger students are packed and gone in twenty seconds.

I put away the desktop podium and spend a few minutes sitting amid my books and papers. The Sharon Olds poem blindsided me. I can't get it out of my mind. My wife and I—we were as innocent as those college kids in the photos. Our marriage was a placid one. We seldom argued. And now look at us!

The house we bought, out entrance ticket into the American suburban dream, has soured our life together. We fight bitterly now, in an unfamiliar way, until we are hoarse and spent. Today it was about grout. The bathroom grout. The craziest thing: whether or not all the bathroom grout would need to be replaced. Our quarrels have taken on a weird geometry. A single word (grout, chimney, foundation) or a single small event that under different circumstances might escape notice (the rain pattering on the roof in a new and more vivid way, an unexplainable delay in the arrival of heat in the morning) can spark an oddly bitter argument, one of those great shaking fights that seems to reverberate with a life of its own. Our dirty grout and chimneys in need of repointing start to seem inexorably linked to our massive personality flaws. Afterward we are exhausted and tearful. We move in a hangover of gloom.

The classroom building is very quiet. I don't hear the distant droning of any other adjunct. Everyone must be gone. I find myself reading the Sharon Olds poem over again. There is my life, flapping like laundry strung from the poem's long, taut, artless-seeming lines. My students digested the poem and thought of nothing but the snow and the balding tires on their cars. I want literature to resonate for them, but perhaps the prerequisite for that is the sort of pain I wouldn't wish on anyone.

At the poem's end the speaker achieves a measure of resignation. She would not alter reality, if she could, and stop her parents from coming together. She wants to live, of course; she realizes that the essence of life is suffering, and she might as well be around as the artist documenting their pain. “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it,” she writes.

I've been sitting at the desk for a long time. The classroom motion detector senses no life, and the lights wink out. It's time to go home.

I
ATTENDED COLLEGE in the 1970s. Midsemester of my freshman year I found myself chatting with the girl who sat across from me in a history class. She told me she was studying to be a nurse. She was a sweet girl, with a friendly, square-jawed face and twin plastic bows holding the sides of her hair in place; no doubt she went on to make someone a solid and dependable wife. She asked me what college I was in.

“What college?” I said mockingly. “Silly girl.
This
college. What do you think, I commute to UCLA?”

She gave me the fisheye. She introduced me to the concept that a College of Nursing existed on campus, but that intelligence didn't spur me on to figure out which particular college I was in. I went to class, studied a little, read the campus newspaper's accounts of research labs and internships and sometimes wondered: how in the world do you get involved with something like that? It was another classmate who finally clarified everything for me. Harry, twenty-five years old, was a chronic pot smoker and indolent film major. His checkered academic career had left him highly sensitive to the nuances of school enrollment and academic placement. He'd been cashiered from other colleges; he knew the ins and outs. He ticked off the colleges at our own institution for me. There were colleges of nursing and business and education and performing arts.