So, from Prof X's point of view at the bottom of the heap, the only thing to do, if we're to be honest about it, is to let a lot of potential students know that college is not for them, but, hey, we've got a nice practical vocational program available here that will let them become welders, or dental assistants, or sheriff's clerks. Professor X's Basement is mercifully free of high falutin' theorizing about education and society. But maybe it's a bit too estranged from the bigger picture. Drum-roll and a very small amount of bigger picture theorizing to follow:

What are universities for?

First, I'd ask a practical question. Just what percentage of students are we wringing our hands about here? Prof X is talking about students who are clearly failing or about to go under for the third time. I've been teaching first and second year university students for many years (admittedly, as a full-time faculty member teaching mostly in daylight) and I haven't met a lot of the kind of students who constitute the majority of Prof X's classes. Maybe 5 per cent of my students fit Professor X's description. My students may not be geniuses, but they're able to write average-to-good essays a lot of the time, and university seems to be the right place at the right time for most of them. I don't want to overdo this contrast-and-compare between Prof X's students and mine, but the difference is real, so the bigger picture may not be as grim as it appears from his sub-basement. That's the sliver of good news.

Prof X doesn't have a lot of time, given his situation, to muse about what colleges and universities are for, and who should be in them. So, I'm not blaming him for offering no more than a passing glance at other possibilities. I'm blaming the people who have turned post-secondary institutions into mere job-training factories in the last 30 years. They've been so successful in promoting colleges as purely high-class vocational schools (with lots of rhetoric about Information Technology, "excellence," and "knowledge-based" societies) that they've almost made the citizenry forget that schools could be something other than factories.

It's possible to imagine and want a society that helps create active citizens, fosters the development of cultured people and encourages critical thinking. Colleges and university should be among the institutions that have such a mission at their core, and not solely a jobs training purpose. Given the cultural context in which we live (a baffling array of shiny ramped-up tech devices and dumbed-down content that most people access on those gadgets), we've almost forgotten that full-fledged citizens, cultured human beings, and critical thinkers are even desirable figures in our picture of democratic societies. I won't ramble on about this "bigger picture" because it's such a long story that it's better to make it short, given today's truncated attention spans.

Math class

A second practical question, even if we aspire to universities for citizens, culture and thought (as well as professional training for occupations), is, "What percentage of the population in a democratic society do we want educated?" The right-wing college-is-not-for-everyone crowd loudly bemoans the wildly increasing numbers of students at the gates. It's true that there has been educational democratization since the end of World War II. When I went to university in British Columbia in the '60s, only seven per cent of 18-24-year-olds attended post secondary institutions. A half-century later, the figure is about 25 per cent (although if you add in various training and vocational post-sec programs, the number moves up to 35-40 per cent). The point is, however, that only one out of four 18-to-24-year-olds is in university and three out of four are not. The defenders of educational elitism in democratic societies need not fear that the educated class will be much more than an elite anytime in the near future.

Further, given that arts and science students are less than 10 per cent of the student body these days (the largest group of students is in business training) that means that among the 25 per cent in university, only a small minority of that number is obtaining a general education that resembles the picture of citizens and cultured adults I've sketched. Thus, I'm less enthused than some others about telling young people that college isn't for them.

I'm probably as gloomy about the big picture as Prof X is about his lonely evening classes. It's true that serious book reading is in decline, or as Prof X puts it, "For my students, reading is just another thing that they happen not to be into, the way some people aren't into scrapbooking or Pilates or watching Lost." It's also true that fewer young people than 25 years ago are aware of being citizens or interested in culture, and that little in present capitalist entertainment encourages them to think otherwise. Although I fear we're losing the battle, the college classroom remains one of the redoubts of resistance to ignorance and social amnesia. Once the teaching season got underway this year, I was among the happy few ready to take the field. As for Professor X, our underground man, his engaging Basement book gets better than a passing grade, and its sales are no doubt helping to pay off his burdensome mortgage.

[See more Tyee education coverage.]