In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

Being an adjunct isn't all bad. That's one of the conclusions drawn by the "accidental academic" who wrote In the Basement of the Ivory Tower about his own experiences doing what I have done for the past 27 years, trying to teach first-year college students to write and to enjoy some of the fiction and essays that are put into Introduction to Literature anthologies.

I found the book completely unsurprising, a little discouragingly so, since it seems that things are tough all over, and in pretty much the same way. Nowhere does anyone really know what an adjunct does in the classroom.  Nowhere is an adjunct able to turn to a colleague for advice, and infrequent workshops on things like "Learner-Centered Assessment" are little help.  Everywhere adjuncts get exactly the same kinds of comments on course evaluations:  "before I would of never voluntarily read a book" and the teacher is "enthusiastic...which helps make the three hours go by quicker."

This book was written after the June 2008 article in The Atlantic made such waves, spurring criticism of the anonymity of "Professor X" and much caviling (mostly from the tenured) about the observations he makes about the classes no one else wants to teach or even knows very much about.

What he says about the isolation in which he works rings true to me:  "I have worked as an adjunct instructor now for a decade. I have been observed twice, once by each school."  I myself have worked as a teaching assistant and then an adjunct instructor for four different colleges over the past 27 years.  As a TA, I was observed once, the semester I began teaching.  As an adjunct, I was observed for the length of one 50-minute class by two of the three colleges I worked for during the first semester I worked there.  (At the other one, I received a phone call from the hospital bed where I had landed after an emergency to verify that I wouldn't be teaching that week, so the personnel department could "adjust" my pay).  As Professor X observes, "no one sees what goes on except the students, and their judgments are fallible."

My favorite part of the adjunct discussion is always the obligatory point at which a tenured faculty member declares passionately that the college is "taking advantage" of the adjuncts and not paying them enough, which, as "Professor X" points out, strikes the adjunct as "not honest but smug."

My least favorite part, the part this book explains very well, is the despair that writing teachers witness and perpetuate.  "Unsuccessful students grow up thinking not just that their work has no value, but that it never can have any value, and thus they cannot put in the wholehearted effort that college demands."  So what they write, as he says, is full of the "commonplace...and the lack of ideas makes for a prose that churns in place. The reading assignments are attempts to "make up, with a small clutch of baby steps, for a lifetime of not reading."  Many of the students hand in work that is "just an assignment, with no relevance to the real world. For the indifferent student, all work is busy work, empty effort to occupy time and, hopefully, garner some credit in the end."  The attempt to grade these assignments "rankles and depresses" Professor X, who knows that "when I give a failing grade to a student, I am not just passing judgment on some abstract intellectual exercise. I am impeding that student's progress, thwarting his ambition, keeping him down, committing the universal crime of messing with his livelihood--not to mention forcing him to pay the tuition charge all over again....any poor grade I issue may mean disastrous economic consequences."

And as he says, "we're not talking nuance here. My students who fail do so with an intensity that is operatic."  He talks about giving quizzes on whether characters are alive or dead at the end of the work.  I didn't know this was universal but am not surprised; I have a quiz in my files entitled "Othello killer quiz" on which there are three questions:  Who kills Desdemona? Who kills Emilia? and the last one, the sort-of-trick question: Who kills Othello?

The parts of this book I like best are when he talks about the details of teaching writing, how it's easy to spend "40 minutes on the first paragraph" and how "writing is thinking."  It's hard work, teaching writing.  It can be immensely satisfying, but it's exhausting, walking others through all those turns and twists of logic and suggesting ways to find evidence for it.  Writing teachers, who are like computing experts and medical doctors in being continually asked by friends and loved ones for a little help on the side, are always having to balance their exhaustion with their fondness for the petitioner.

The parts of the book I find least convincing include his conclusion about who should be in college and who shouldn't. Oddly enough, in a book fighting against all sorts of elitist ideas, I found his views a bit elitist.  It's true that for some of the students we adjuncts see "the classes are more difficult than they could have dreamed, and there is simply no time to complete all the work," but I disagree that this means those students might not belong in college at all. If it means anything to me (as a person who's gotten out of the game rather than try to reform it), it means that 15-week semesters are too short for writing classes...and I speak as someone who tried to do that kind of work with students during a 10-week quarter.

There are several other things I don't agree with Professor X about.  He tries to teach students to write the "composition," something "built, crafted, worked on, composed."  I favor teaching the essay--a piece of writing that is a trial or attempt from a personal point of view--because I'm more interested in teaching critical thinking than in teaching the craft of writing.

I don't necessarily think that using Aristotle's various invention techniques, so often featured in composition textbooks as assignments in themselves (narrative, description, compare/contrast, analysis, cause and effect) is the best way to teach writing in college.  I find it curious that Professor X doesn't even question the set-up of what I like to call the course in "writing without content," even when he cogently describes the complications inherent in helping students come up with a topic for a research paper.  However interested he may be in the topic of the research, it's still a paper for which the research doesn't really matter. It's what he talks about elsewhere, a paper in which the content is not important, but proving that the student can follow the steps is the whole point of the exercise.  I think that this kind of assignment is one of the problems with the way we teach writing in college today. Who wants to write for a grader?  College students, like other humans, want to write something that will be read.  There are ways to balance the requirement that writing be graded with the necessity of finding ways to read some of it, but Professor X doesn't seem to have discovered any of these yet.

Professor X confesses that his acquaintance with the guidelines for teaching writing put out by Writing Program Administrators and his reading of some of the experts in the field of rhetoric and composition is quite recent (since the Atlantic article came out), but he tries to draw conclusions from it anyway, as if anyone who actually goes to graduate school to learn this stuff is wasting their time, even admitting that he "was looking for some magic, for a tool kit."  A writing teacher should know that there are no shortcuts.

I don't agree that "women are more empathetic than men" as adjuncts (and wonder why someone who presumably teaches the avoidance of generalization in writing would include one like that in his own writing).

And finally, I wonder why he includes the story of one plagiarizing student only to illustrate the danger he feels alone with such students at night in the "basement," rather than to discuss any of the issues a writer might find interesting about the wide range of options for paper-writing by hire available on the internet today.

I admire Professor X for starting this discussion, and hope that it doesn't end with this one book. There's a lot more to say about this topic, and I applaud his bravery in caring enough to stand up and tell it like it is for one of the people who other Professors don't usually notice except to say what a shame it is that so much of our higher education system depends on his hard work, conscientiousness, and enthusiasm for his subject matter.