An adjunct English teacher at a community college and an unselective private college — “colleges of last resort” — Professor X is an “academic hit man,” he writes in a new book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. “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.”
X challenges the idea that everyone must earn a college degree or face a life of Dickensian misery, notes Dwight Garner in a New York Times review.
. . . why is it so important to Barack Obama (a champion of community colleges) and those doing America’s hiring, he asks, that “our bank tellers be college educated, and our medical billing techs, our county tax clerks”? College — even community college — drives many young people into debt. Many others lack rudimentary study skills or any scholarly inclination. They want to get on with their lives, not be forced to analyze the meter in “King Lear” in night school in order to become a cop or a nurse’s aide.
“No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality,” Professor X says, “of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”
The book is “the work of a compassionate man who longs for academia to be crueler to be kinder,” writes Garner.
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at 12:44 pm
Thanks for calling my attention to this new book. Looks like an interesting (and funny) read. I am finishing up my first academic year of working at a community college; it has been an enlightening experience. It does seem, to me at least, to be an important question: d0es higher education really have value for ALL?
at 7:46 am
[...] riding the subway, Wood is reading In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by Professor X, an adjunct English instructor who teaches at a liberal-arts college and a community [...]