[The Montana Professor 22.1, Fall 2011 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Professor X
New York: Viking Press, 2011
258 pp., $25.95 hc
Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech
Hgonshak@mtech.edu
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower began as an article in The Atlantic Monthly that inspired enormous discussion, much of it vitriolic attacks on the author's main arguments. Publishing under a pseudonym, Professor X is an adjunct instructor who, for over a decade, has taught introductory English classes at both a community college and a small private college, which supplement his day job as a government bureaucrat. In the initial article version, the conclusion he drew which elicited such ire from many readers was that a large percentage of his students were simply unteachable—no matter how hard he worked or what inventive pedagogical methods he employed—because they lacked the basic ability, motivation, and background to enable them to do college-level work. Professor X questioned an assumption that he claimed reigns supreme in American society, ranging across the social and political spectrum: namely, that nearly everyone should go to college. He argued that the consequence of pressuring illiterate, apathetic students to attend college was a shockingly high drop-out rate, which left these students without a degree and with mountains of debt. The article concluded by wondering if many of those now attending college would actually be better off enrolling in vocational education that provided them—relatively quickly and for fairly little money—with purely job-related skills.
In the letters-to-the-editor column of the next issue of The Atlantic, an incensed horde, many of them instructors of the kinds of courses Professor X offers, such as Freshman Composition and Introduction to Literature, begged to differ: "Professor X is a white-collar criminal who couldn't qualify for the ivory tower and make it as a scholar, so he is employed to serve a screening function at the bottom of the system"; "Instead of demonstrating his students' inability to succeed in academia, Professor X's jeremiad provides convincing evidence of his own weakness as an educator. While his gloomy blend of fatalism, guilt, cowardice, and low self-esteem is perhaps not unique, it should not be seen as representative of the mind-set of those who toil in the less prestigious strata of higher education. The image of the red-pen-wielding 'button man' wringing his hands while handing out F's is as inaccurate as it is unfortunate" (200-202). Along with including a sampling of these letters, the book expands Professor X's analysis and personal story but does not revise his basic contention that too many current college students are unprepared to be there.
The barely concealed rage that suffuses many of the responses to Professor X's claims is fascinating. Why would the professorate get so irate at a thesis that questioned student motivation and aptitude—an almost universal complaint among teachers? My sense is that what so riled his professorial readership was Professor X's contention that the situation was hopeless, that these students could not truly learn, no matter what their teachers did—at least not in the amount of time (one semester) the college allotted. Such an assertion implies that what we teachers are doing is, bluntly put, a complete waste of time. Still, having taught freshman writing and literature courses for almost thirty years, my rather unsettling intuition is that Professor X is onto something. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower (both article and book) has flaws (including, for example, a failure to devote much space to analyzing the letters he received), but the central questions raised—are a sizeable percentage of our students simply unteachable, do too many people go to college?—deserve thoughtful consideration, not knee-jerk denunciation.
Nonetheless, I dislike that both book and article were published pseudonymously. In an "Author's Note" at the start of the book, Professor X explains his decision: "I write anonymously because I have no desire to single out my institutions; I believe the issues I raise to be universal." This is disingenuous. Many professorial authors have written books about education in which they both discuss their own experiences in class and draw larger conclusions about education in general without feeling the need to hide behind a pseudonym. One wonders if Professor X's real motivation is a nervous wish to avoid upsetting his employers with his less-than-flattering assessments of their institutions. After all, as Professor X acknowledges elsewhere in the book, adjunct instructors possess few of the job protections enjoyed by tenured professors.
A major problem with the book version of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is that, like a lot of articles expanded into books, the longer work seems padded, filled with questionably relevant material that appears inserted to stretch the book to the required length. Whole chapters are devoted to Professor X's life outside the classroom: his ill-advised decision to purchase an expensive new home just as the American housing bubble burst; his marital woes, many of which seem connected to the stress induced by this real estate debacle; the picturesque, upscale suburban neighborhood in which he resides. Professor X's home-buying fiasco has at least some relation to his teaching, since, in places, the author suggests that it was his exorbitant mortgage which compelled him to seek a second job. But one wonders why, if his only concern was financial, he picked such a notoriously unremunerative profession as adjunct teaching. Indeed, when Professor X turns up for his job interview with the department head, the woman is so ashamed at the wage the job offers that she cannot bring herself even to mention the exact amount. Elsewhere Professor X implies, in an apparent contradiction, that it was his love of teaching, rather than financial pressures, which impelled him into the classroom. As for Professor X's marital difficulties, because his wife is so sketchily described, it is impossible for the reader to feel much empathy about the collapse of the marriage. Moreover, the whole subject seems tangential to his main story. All in all, given that the book recycles all the main arguments of the article without presenting many new ones, busy readers may want to read the article and skip the book.
Much more fully and movingly depicted than Professor X's familial woes is his discussion of the plight of the average adjunct instructor, which goes far deeper than those slave-labor wages. Professor X claims that, as an adjunct, he never really feels a part of college life. He teaches at night on a deserted campus while most of the full-time faculty and student body are resting comfortably in their homes. He lacks an office where he can meet with students or prepare for class. Most importantly, Professor X believes that adjuncts enjoy no prestige, that they are treated as second-class by administrators and full-time faculty. Professor X notes that as august a body as the Modern Language Association has declared that the fewer adjuncts a college hires, the better an education it provides its students: "Part-time faculty members...have tenuous institutional standing and little chance to advance professionally. An institution's use of a critical mass of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members therefore provides a measure for judging the quality of undergraduate education" (9). (Clearly, the MLA, like the American Association of University Professors, is concerned about the exploitation of underpaid adjunct labor. Professor X recognizes that the discernable anxiety underlying the MLA's assertion is driven by the fact that, in our recessionary economy, universities have increasingly turned to adjuncts, rather than tenure-track faculty, as a cost-saving measure.) Given their lowly status, it is predictable, as Professor X points out, that adjuncts, no matter how long they have toiled at an institution, are rarely hired by that institution for tenure-track jobs; the author cites "a recent survey of colleges in the Midwest [that] revealed that only three of sixty department chairs said they would be willing to consider adjuncts, even long-term adjuncts, for full-time jobs" (10). One might counter that few adjuncts possess the doctorates almost universally required for tenure-track positions. But should not long years of service count for something (which is one reason the AAUP continues to press for extended terms of employment for adjuncts)?
Much of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower analyzes the equally vexing travails suffered by the typical college writing instructor, especially at the freshman level. Professor X realizes that writing teachers (unlike, say, most math or science instructors) often get to know their students intimately, in part because the personal narrative papers students commonly write for class often inspires a confessional impulse in many. The knowledge Professor X gleans from such intimacy leads him to paint a picture of the average college student (especially the part-time, often non-traditional students who turn up in his night classes) that is profoundly dispiriting. "This is the conclusion I have come to," he writes. "My students are suffering from some manner of despair. Unsuccessful students grow up thinking not just that their work has no value, but that it never can have any value, and thus they cannot put in the wholehearted effort that college demands" [emphasis in original] (171). Professor X's students tend to be overwhelmed by college, finding it infinitely more demanding than high school, where it was possible to get by with minimal effort. Many of Professor X's non-trads are working full-time jobs (which they must do in order to pay ever-increasing tuition), often while simultaneously raising families, giving them little time and energy to devote to their schoolwork.
As if all this were not bad enough, Professor X finds that the writing skills of his students are generally abysmal, at best borderline literate. Reviewing his first set of student essays, he reflects, "The essays were terrible, but the word 'terrible' doesn't begin to convey the state these things were in. My God. Out of about fifteen students, at least ten seemed to have no familiarity with the English language. It seemed they had never been asked in school to turn in any sort of writing assignment" (27). A conscientious instructor, Professor X scribbles voluminous margin notes all over his student papers—correcting grammatical errors, noting points that require clarification or development—only to discover that the students' second batch of papers is even worse. He concludes that the frequent lack of improvement in student writing is one of the most discouraging aspects of teaching composition. Here Professor X has uncovered an enormous problem. In my own writing classes, I always diligently note every mechanical error on my students' papers, using my grammar handbook's table of revision symbols and then have my students correct their errors as a homework assignment. While most students do the assignment, almost invariably their next papers are littered with the exact same grammatical errors.
Professor X recognizes that simple laziness in part explains the sloppiness of much student writing, observing that "scattered liberally through the poor writing was much evidence of lack of care: crazy misspellings of grammar-school words, misspellings that the spell checker would catch but for which it could offer no alternative; words repeated, like the pounding of a sledge hammer, nine or ten times in a paragraph; crucial words omitted; batches of words pressed together in the hope of forming a sentence, like old slivers of soap jammed together for one last shower" (44). (As an aside, what a wonderful concluding simile! Given his caustic denunciation of student writing, it is fortunate that Professor X himself writes so well.)
But the author strongly suspects that his students' literacy problems go much deeper than mere carelessness in composition. An equally important explanation is the fact that almost all Professor X's students do not read outside class, and hence are entirely lacking in a basic familiarity with the written word. In this vein, he quotes Michael Holden, an assistant professor of English at Delaware State University: "In the last 4 years, I have read 25,000 pages of student journals, which are an integral part of my writing courses.... Not one journal in four years and all those pages has dealt with a book that the student was reading outside of a required class assignment!" (104). This absence of outside reading creates in students what Holden terms an "information void"; simply put, students do not know enough about most things to write about them. Under the circumstances, it is no surprise that writing instructors often have students compose personal narratives, since at least students are informed about their own lives.
What, then, is a teacher to do when forced by the system to put a grade on illiterate college writing? Professor X's solution is to flunk large numbers of his students. In one class, he fails nine out of the fifteen students enrolled. When reported in his article, this failure rate drew the ire of many of Professor X's detractors, who insisted that if he was doing a better job more of his students would pass. But given the prevalence of student illiteracy, how many college writing instructors, if we judged student work by purely objective standards, would flunk a large percentage? But few teachers possessing normal human feelings want to go around flunking students incessantly, especially since failing a class can cause a student to lose scholarship money, or even drop out of school. Thus, the predictable result of professorial humanity is grade inflation, passing students who really deserve to fail. In my own experience, Professor X is right that pressure to inflate grades rarely comes from college administrators. When the author flunked over half his class, for instance, he did not hear a peep of protest from his superiors. Instead, as suggested, grade inflation is usually driven by a disinclination on the part of instructors to play the role of professorial executioner.
In a controversial assertion that will surely raise some hackles, Professor X goes on to claim that grade inflation has been exacerbated by the "feminizing" of academia—that is, by the fact that an ever-increasing number of instructors are female, especially in the humanities. "Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone's underdog status," he insists. "Women may not be quite as inclined to sigh and...half-angry and half-miserable, possessed by the fatalism of someone throwing the first punch in a bar fight, mark an F in the grade book" (153). However, Professor X's assertion seems both sexist and highly debatable. I have not made a scientific study of the subject, but my own impression is that just as female political leaders tend to be every bit as tough as men, so (contrary to Professor X's claim) the vast majority of women who have scaled the ivory tower are just as professional as their male counterparts, with gender almost never inclining a female professor to coddle her poorer students. At Montana Tech, for example, the head of our writing program, a woman, has sternly warned us composition instructors not to pass underperforming students out of a misguided sense of compassion.
When Professor X documented his students' illiteracy in The Atlantic article, a common criticism raised by readers who were writing instructors was that the author was unversed in the latest scholarship on composition theory, which supposedly provided answers to his students' writing woes. In the book, Professor X admits that these criticisms concerned him and that in an attempt to address them he immersed himself in "theories and practices" (202). In particular, he studied Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, claiming that the author "is one of the goddesses of writing instruction" (204). "Her work," Professor X writes, "has been embraced by some educators who seem to feel that the belief that writing should be error-free is fascistic" (205). Shaughnessy does have some sympathy for this position, noting, as quoted by Professor X, that "when one considers the damage that has been done to students in the name of correct writing, this effort to redefine error so as to exclude most of the forms that give students trouble in school and to assert the legitimacy of other kinds of English is understandable" (206). Nonetheless, Shaughnessy ultimately rejects this approach: "To try to persuade a student who makes these errors that the problems with his writing are all on the outside...may well be to perpetuate his confusion" (206). Instead, Shaughnessy insists that "when the intent is to spot and correct errors, grammar...provides a useful way of looking at sentences" (207). Professor X is underwhelmed: "I was looking for...a tool kit—to use a currently hot educational term—for showing novice writers how to repair their prose. And what did I get? Essentially, a recommendation that poor writers need a grounding in grammar" (209). In other words, Professor X questions the claims of some of his critics that cutting-edge composition theory offers any radical new solution to the problem of student illiteracy. Of course, a share of Professor X's critics will counter that his examination of current composition theory is superficial, but there is a limit to how much ground he can cover in a single work that addresses many other issues.
As suggested earlier, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower controversially claims that the deeply rooted American idea that everyone should attend college is a myth ripe for interrogation. Professor X questions the common assumption that a college degree necessarily leads to a higher-paying job, quoting from Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller Jr.'s The Meritocracy Myth: "With so many Americans receiving college degrees...the over-all return on the investment has declined. To put it simply, the labor force is being flooded with new college graduates. There are fewer 'college level' jobs being produced by the economy than there are new college graduates" (124).
In any event, lucrative post-graduate employment is certainly unavailable for students who drop out. According to Professor X, the soaring college dropout rate is the unacknowledged elephant in the room in most discussions about higher education. The author cites a 2008 study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University which found that of 2,964 Boston area high school graduates who went on to college (64.2 percent of the high school senior class), after seven years only 675 students, 35.5 percent, had earned a bachelor's degree, an associate's degree, or even a one-year certificate. Students in the study who attended community colleges could muster only a 12 percent graduation rate.
When The Boston Globe published these findings, it concluded that "the colleges, and especially the community colleges, need to step up with some big ideas on how to turn entering students into graduates" (127-128). Aware of the problem, both federal and state education officials have sought "big ideas." On the federal level, the Obama administration has embraced the goal of the Lumina Foundation to increase "the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% by the year 2025." On the state level, the Montana Board of Regents has declared that one of its priorities is to address both the number of drop-outs from the Montana University System, and the length of time it takes students to graduate. (Students regularly take six years or more to complete an ostensibly four-year degree.) Whether these efforts will succeed remains to be seen. As for colleges and universities who have confronted these dismal realities, the common response has been to mount various Herculean efforts to try to ensure that their students earn a degree and do so in a reasonable amount of time. At Montana Tech, to cite one small example, professors are now required to post midterm grades only a few weeks into the semester, and then post a second set of grades just a couple of weeks later. Students who are flunking are then supposed to be contacted by their advisors, who are told to somehow convince their charges to do passing work, which creates added labor for hard-pressed instructors. Despite the college's best efforts, it is not uncommon for me to have between a quarter and a third of my Freshmen Composition students simply vanish from my classes by semester's end without having submitted the assigned work, thus flunking the course.
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower addresses the college dropout problem from a completely different perspective. Is it possible, the author asks, that students are dropping out in such record numbers because they have no business being in college in the first place? Would such students be better off enrolling in strictly vocational education? Is it true that many vocationally-oriented majors that now require four-year degrees could be severely streamlined, allowing students to graduate more quickly and with far less post-collegiate debt?
To answer these questions, Professor X cites as an example the nursing degree—an increasingly popular major. Prior to World War II, most nurses were trained in hospitals; nurses with baccalaureate degrees never composed more than 15 percent of new nurses each year. However, after the war, when the country faced a severe shortage of nurses, it was proposed that nurses be trained in colleges, which led to the associate's degree in Nursing, originally a two-year program, which has now expanded to three years. There are currently proposals to raise the degree requirement to four years, which has led Kim Tinsley, from the National Organization for Associate Degree Nursing's Board of Directors, to complain, "The average age of our students is 27. The majority of our students are either married with a family or a single parent. They cannot afford the time nor resources to attend a four-year program" (242). Is it not possible that nurses could be trained in the skills they need to perform effectively on the job in a much shorter period of time?
Professor X's argument would have been greatly enhanced if he had compared the American system with the European one. The only time the subject of European higher education is raised is in a quote by Daniel Yankelovich, which compares the two systems: "Most advanced industrial democracies distinguish more sharply than we do between higher education in the sense of a four-year college education and apprenticeship training. Theirs is a test-based meritocratic system. Our system of four-year and two-year colleges is more flexible, allowing greater opportunity for highly motivated students" (243). Yankelovich obviously favors the American system, but surely a strong argument exists that it makes sense to funnel low-performing students, perhaps through standardized testing, into vocational education, reserving four-year degrees, focused on the liberal arts, for an intellectual elite. Does every would-be accountant or computer programmer really need to take a Shakespeare class? Would not many humanities professors welcome the chance to be spared students who have not the slightest interest in the subject?
Professor X is well aware that his proposals are unlikely to be adopted by American higher education any time soon. How many current business and engineering professors are going to accept the demotion in status entailed in becoming purely vocational instructors? And what is the possibility that academia as a whole is going to embrace a system that means it will enroll fewer students? On the contrary, as Professor X recognizes, the whole thrust of our academic system is toward relentless expansion. At Montana Tech, for example, the administration crows every year about our rising enrollment numbers, and the college has constructed three new buildings during my tenure. Professor X should have noted that these ceaseless recruitment efforts are partly driven by dwindling state support for public universities; as state support drops, tuition dollars become ever more important. But how many high school students now being frenetically courted by college recruiters will have their diplomas in four or even six years? Like Madison Avenue, are colleges selling many students a product they do not really need?
[The Montana Professor 22.1, Fall 2011 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]