Three years ago the Atlantic Monthly published an article under the byline “Professor X,” in which the pseudonymous author lamented the widespread assumption that every American should aspire to a college education. He (the pronoun used on the dust jacket) taught and still teaches adult night classes in writing and literature at a community college and a small private college. He argued that most of the students under his tutelage were there not out of a genuine desire to learn at a college level but because some degree of “higher” education is often required of people seeking jobs — highway patrolman, nurse, fireman — for which a liberal arts college education is unnecessary.
The article provoked a modest amount of controversy, much of it stirred by readers who felt that the author was either an intellectual elitist or an incompetent teacher, or both. It also prompted Viking to sign him on for a book-length expansion of his story, which is before us now. As one who is sympathetic to the author’s argument that there are many entirely honorable and important lines of work for which college education is not merely unnecessary but expensive and time-consuming, I only wish he had made a better book out of it. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is little more than proof that not all magazine articles make good books, or for that matter that not all magazine articles need to be longer than they already are.
‘In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic’ by Professor X (Viking. 258 pp. $25.95)
Professor X — the pseudonym is not without irony, given that he tells his students he is an instructor, not a full professor — describes himself as a middle-aged government worker, married with children, who dug himself into a financial hole with the purchase of a house he could not afford. In order to help pay the freight, he got work as an instructor, first at “a small private college, which I will call Pembrook College,” and then at “a two-year community college, which I will call Huron State.” The location of these institutions is disguised, but their situation, and the author’s, will be all too familiar to anyone familiar with the current state of American higher education:
“Both were desperate for adjuncts, the low-cost part-timers who work without benefits and make up a growing percentage of many college faculties. Never had I imagined that this would be my destiny, to put in a full eight-hour workday and then drive wearily to teach night classes at a bottom-tier institution. While a large part of the world watches ‘American Idol,’ I rattle on about Kafka and Joyce and Gwendolyn Brooks to a classroom of reluctant students. Some are wide-eyed and fidgety with fatigue. I teach expository writing, trying to wring college-level prose from students whose skills may just graze the lower reaches of high school. We assemble and disassemble paragraphs. We hack out useless words — a painful step, that one, for we sometimes find ourselves left with nothing.”
As that passage suggests, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is an indictment of American education at two levels: the high schools, for processing students who too often leave, diplomas in hand, with little better than ninth-grade educations, and the colleges, for the institutional greed that inspires them to matriculate ever more marginally qualified students while educating them on the cheap with part-time instructors of wildly varying competence. When Professor X signed on with Pembrook College, he became a member “of what academic theorists call the ‘instructorate,’ as opposed to the ‘professoriate,’ which enjoys health care and retirement benefits and where anybody with any sense would rather be,” the former being a group, in the words of a former adjunct, “widely regarded as the great academic unwashed, the grunts, pieceworkers subject to — and even produced by — the crass economic pressures of the academic marketplace. To most of higher education’s regular citizens, part-time instructors are an embarrassment.”
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