• In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
• Professor X
• Viking (2011)

Every year at this time, around the beginning of the "teaching season" (which more or less coincides with the opening of the football and hockey seasons), I sit down and read the current buzz-generating book about education. OK, sometimes the book isn't generating much buzz and is written in pedestrian academic prose, but I read it anyway. It's my way of annually re-thinking what I think about education before I walk into a classroom right after Labour Day and start teaching. This year's book is the pseudonymous Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, a lively if despairing account of teaching and learning in the Gorkyan lower depths of the North American post-secondary education system. Its prose is neither sluggish nor obscure, and the book is definitely generating some buzz because it challenges a prominent shibboleth of the American Dream, namely, that "college is for everyone."

Although the author maintains his anonymity (mainly, he says, because he doesn't want to get fired from his part-time teaching job), we learn quite a bit about Professor X in the course of his tale. He's middle-aged (early 50s), lives in the exurbs somewhere on the U.S. East Coast, married with kids, has a full-time not very exciting day job somewhere in government and, on top of all that, teaches English composition and literature a couple of nights a week as a part-time "adjunct" college instructor. Prof X, who once aspired to a literary career, accidentally fell into teaching as a result of a disastrous home ownership decision he made early in the previous decade that left him with more mortgage than money to pay for it. He may resemble the description he offers of the stereotypical part-time instructor: "mild mannered, we adjunct professors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards."

Portrait of the adjunct prof as a middle-aged drudge apart, he sees his cog-like function in the post-secondary education system as carrying out "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." I'll come back to those "unprepared" students in a moment.

Ruminative, and fun

The first thing to say about Prof X's book, which grew out of a hot-button-pushing essay in Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago, is that despite its grim news, it's a thoroughly fun read. Anyone who's ever worked even briefly inside a classroom will recognize the accuracy of Prof X's vignettes of teaching, his encounters with students, and his pondering of the mysteries of reading and writing. Those who haven't taught will learn something interesting about contemporary education in this frontline report from the ivory tower, or at least its basement. On its journey from magazine article to book, as critic Dwight Garner notes, "It's morphed into something new. The author hasn't greatly expanded his argument, but he's turned the book into more of a memoir. It's a sad, haunted tale that zeroes in on all the things that send people into therapy (or memoir writing): money, class, failure and real estate." (Dwight Garner, "An Academic Hit Man Brings More Bad News," New York Times, Apr. 5, 2011.)

I like the book better than the headline-grabbing original essay. The book version is ruminative, and provides a deeper and more humane picture of both the melancholy narrator and the classrooms he inhabits. Despite his laments about his thwarted literary ambitions and failed novels, Prof X writes pretty good prose. I prefer the nuts and bolts chapters -- those where he tries to explain to students what writing is about, or imagines the lonely blue glow of a night time classroom window seen from the highway, or wrestles with the temptations of "grade inflation" in a culture that is reluctant to admit that one student may be better than another -- to the passages where he's making his case. The "sad, haunted tale" rings truer than the argument about what to do with college education.

Still, much of the book's polemics are also accurate. Prof X's theme about the plight of adjunct part-time teachers is right on the mark. The practice of using adjuncts is now widespread in American education. The adjuncts are woefully underpaid, have almost no benefits, and tend to be isolated from their teaching peers. The situation is not only grossly unfair to them, but also to their students who should be instructed by teachers who have a clear contractual commitment to the institution. At the university where I teach, a strong faculty union successfully argued for the prompt "regularization" of teachers once they get beyond the initial "probationary" stage, and adjunct teaching has been kept to a minimum. Avoiding a situation where lots of adjuncts are doing all the donkey work clearly makes for a more cohesive institution, as well as improving team morale.

Dash those dreams

Prof X is also largely right about the plight of the students. Too many of them end up with enormous educational debts that they're going to have difficulty paying off, and the situation has only gotten worse in the last decade, as universities and colleges jacked up tuition fees while cash-strapped state governments in the U.S. reduced college funding. Fees currently run from $10,000 a year-and-rising at state universities to more than $50,000 annually at the "prestige" schools. (They're slightly lower in Canada, but only slightly.) It's also the case that significant percentages of entering college students -- who have bought into the drumbeat message that everyone must go to college -- don't complete a degree or certificate. In some ways, they're the victims of false advertising, but the problem of who should be in university and for what purposes runs much deeper than that.

At this point Prof X turns to the argument that not everybody belongs in college. The components of the case for shrinking university and college enrollments include the claim that a) many students are in various ways "unprepared" to do university level work, and b) in any case, given the jobs they're trying to get, they don't need to learn the things Prof X and his colleagues are trying to teach them. Finally, c) the suggestion is that these students would be better off with simple, straightforward vocational training. Usually this line of thinking is associated with various right-wing thinkers and publicists (in Canada, for example, this is the argument made by conservative Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente).

But Prof X isn't, as far as I can tell, a right-winger, nor is he an ideologue of the Margaret Wente type. Rather, he's simply a beleagured guy who, it turns out, loves teaching, and is facing a bewildering situation. If the colleges where he teaches follow his advice and bar the door to unprepared and unlikely-to-ever-be-prepared students, he'll be out of a job. If they keep admitting warm bodies for a variety of bad (and occasional good) reasons, Prof X is doomed to a Sisyphus-like eternity where he's forever reading student essays in which "the more complex skills, the synthesis of arguments and the development of a thesis, are simply beyond some of my students at this stage of their academic development. Some are poor readers. Some cannot read a journal article -- or even a People article -- and summarize the author's stance. An alarming number of my students have trouble Finding the Main Idea." What's more, as Prof X notes in a chapter about "remediation," or teaching students what they should have learned years ago, not all the ivory tower's teachers or all its PowerPoint presentations can bring such students back up to speed.