This book began its life as a fizzy essay, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2008, that contained at its core, like a radioactive pellet, a seemingly uncontroversial argument: Not every American kid is cut out for college.
The author, a poorly paid adjunct professor, a man who teaches nighttime literature classes in both a small private college and in a community college, wrote under the pseudonym Professor X. This made him seem intrepid and swashbuckling, as if he might secretly be Julian Assange or Banksy.
He is a bit wicked, this Professor X. His book-length expansion of the article, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” is rippled with mellow sarcasm. Reading one student’s terrible paper about Sylvia Plath, he says: “I pictured her writing it in a bar, or while driving to class or skydiving. Maybe she composed it as one long text message to herself.”
Watching his working-class students eat chicken and rice out of plastic foam containers while he’s lecturing, he deadpans: “I feel like Robert Goulet doing dinner theater.”
The tone of his essay, and of this impertinent book, however, is as plaintive as it is lemony. The author is delivering unhappy news, and he knows it. It’s as if he’s proposing to paste an asterisk on the American dream. “Telling someone that college is not right for him seems harsh and classist, vaguely Dickensian,” Professor X writes, “as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines.”
Yet 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.”
In marshaling his persuasive arguments, Professor X draws on the work of scholars and sociologists and demographers, and clearly he’s picking up on sentiments floating in the air. Matthew B. Crawford’s best-selling book “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” published in 2009, was an ode to vocational training and dignified blue-collar work.
Yet many reacted angrily to Professor X’s article (he prints some of the nastier letters he received here) as if he were proposing — to paraphrase Paul Fussell in his book “Class” — the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.
Professor X is unruffled. One thing adjunct professors are good at, he notes, is delivering bad news.
“We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct professors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards,” he declares, in his calmly invigorating style, “but we are nothing less than academic hit men. 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.