In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

by Professor X.

A caustic expose of the deeply state of our colleges-America's most expensive Ponzi scheme.

What drives a former English major with a creative writing degree, several unpublished novels, three kids, and a straining marriage to take a job as a night teacher at a second-rate college? An unaffordable mortgage.

As his house starts falling apart in every imaginable way, Professor X grabs first one, then two jobs teaching English 101 and 102-composition and literature-at a small private college and a local community college. He finds himself on the front lines of America's academic crisis. It's quite an education.

This is the story of what he learns about his struggling pupils, about the college system-a business more bent on its own financial targets than the wellbeing of its students-about the classics he rediscovers, and about himself. Funny, wry, self-deprecating, and a provocative indictment of our failing schools, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is both a brilliant academic satire and a poignant account of one teacher's seismic frustration-and unlikely salvation-as his real estate woes catapult him into a subprime crisis of an altogether more human nature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Memoir, Academia, Teaching, Biography, Sociology

258 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2011

Reviews

[Kathrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spend a lot of my time thinking about my education; thinking about how smart I am (or not), how educated I am (or not), in relation to others and in relation to my own expectations. I have a bachelor's degree from a fairly well-respected university, I've dabbled in graduate courses, alternate bachelor programs, both at the same university and it's little brother community college. My parents were well-educated, and I was raised to expect a college career. I sell books for a living. At a chain. A nation-wide leader in book sales, but a store in the mall, after all. I read what I sell, I love what I sell, but I'm just selling it, not teaching it, not editing it, and not writing it. And my paycheck comes, whether or not I sell it exceptionally well or just well enough. Although it happens fairly rarely, I love answering the question "What have you read and loved lately?" Unfortunately, I am more often asked "Where is your non-fiction section?", and this by seemingly mature, well-educated patrons whom one would assume had a fair acquaintance with the varieties of non-fiction and the basic layout of any bookstore. Even more disheartening is the frequent puzzlement in the face of the customer unfamiliar with the definition of "non-fiction." "But it's a history of dragons. It's research!" Of course I cannot claim to be an expert in every field for which I sell a book. If you require a medical text or the latest research on peak oils, I am happy to use the database before me along with any details you can supply, and I will defer to your judgment of the best title available. But, unlike selling shoes or novelty beer steins, I am daily confronted with products of knowledge, a vast array of the world's information set down on paper for the ages, from what we as a people feel is innovative, worthy of remembering, entertaining, elucidating, smart, or funny. From fixing your plumbing to elevating your soul (be it Dante or Bombeck), I am selling it. Thinking about how much I know is something I do every day.

And here comes Professor X. Neither is he at the top of the educated elite, not a tenured professor, nor even on the tenured track. He has not published the novels he expected he would, has not lived the academic achievements he had once envisioned for himself. And yet he's spent his career teaching his passion, although he's done it in community college basements and dark high school classrooms after hours, and usually to students unwilling to be there. He posits that the majority of his students, enrolled because they need the artificially inflated certificate to pursue their career, have no business in a college writing course; they did not meet high school writing standards when they graduated, and they will not need college writing standards to become nursing aids, police officers, and mechanics. Their money, time, and energy are wasted on skills they do not need and do not have the academic background to accomplish. This critique, at first, seems harsh and oh so un-American. Obama himself is preaching the need for higher education available to everyone. But Professor X, through persuasive comparison, observation, cited statistics and a bit of personal memoir, convinced me that his job as adjunct is a filler for the huge gap between optimistic American opportunity and the too-true fact that not everyone is college material. But everyone can easily acquire massive amounts of student loan debt, whether they graduate or not, and, in community college, most do not. Professor X compares this education "bubble" with the housing crisis of the last decade, as the Bush administration pushed the middle-class towards home ownership -- affordable housing for all, heedless to the fact that one shouldn't own a home one can't afford. It's so obvious, but we refused to see! But if feels so good to offer a beautiful home to a well-intentioned family, as it feels good to offer previously inaccessible educations to well-meaning, aspiring young people.
At times, Professor X's writing got a bit circular, as he covered the same laments from a dozen different angles. His tone ranges from empathetic to cocky to whiny. But his thesis is persuasive, and I feel his pain. As long as the Mexican standoff continues between colleges vs industry vs under-prepared students vs American idealism, at least Professor X has job security, where most of us don't, even with certificates and diplomas in hand. I've got my share of certificates, but I keep going back for more, as this retail gig looks a bit tenuous these days. We'll keep selling copies of Catcher in the Rye to nursing students, Don Quixote to forensic aid students, and, now and then, a copy to someone who wants to read it.
And now I'm working towards a graduate degree in library science. After 11 years in bookselling, I'm wondering how much the degree will make me a better book-person, teach me information I couldn't learn on the job, but in this job market, I can't even get an interview in this college town without a degree. I chose an English degree back in the early 90's, when earning a useless degree didn't much matter, as long as you earned something. Nobody asked me, "Just what do you think you'll do with an English degree?" Reading books seemed a cozy way to get through the 4+ years I was expected to endure. I was able to pay my tuition with only a handful of aid, paying term to term, with part-time work, in a way that is unfathomable today. A senior in high school today better know just exactly where they're going before those bills start coming in. There's no time for lazy English majors now. So what do I expect for my kids? I can't expect them to pay for it term to term; I won't be able to do it, either. Will a bachelor's degree be worth the price paid? Will it make their lives easier or more burdened? Can I practice what I preach and allow my sons to put off college (perhaps forever) until they know what they want, like I wished I had done? Non-traditional, middle-aged students are becoming more common than ever, as jobs require more certifications, companies downsize, adults switch careers in the middle of their lives, excessive debt requires promotable skills or second jobs. Professor X makes some surprising conclusions, perhaps some that are controversial or inconsistent, but he's raising some issues we all need to think about, as students, as parents, as optimistic Americans who may have an unrealistic view of what we are capable and what we desire.

[Stela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The elitism of learning

When I left Romania, about eleven years ago, I decided to give up on teaching as well. After sixteen years of doing only this, it was not an easy decision to make, but I was so fed up with the corrupt system I was leaving behind that I had lost all faith in the generosity of my profession.

Of course, once a teacher always a teacher and although I’ve generally stuck to my decision and now I’m working full time in an office (finding my work interesting and challenging enough even after a decade or so) I couldn’t sever all the ties, so not only I have been teaching part time in various private language schools, but I’ve also shared my knowledge with my friends and my friends’ children whenever they needed to improve their French, English or even Italian skills. And, as a funny parenthesis, even today I say sometimes that I’m going to school instead of the office and now and then I dream I’m in front of a class again. Moreover, I asked for and obtained my teaching permit six years ago (I don’t know whether as a sort of back-up or simply because I am still a teacher at heart) and in order to renew it I followed five courses (3 credits each) last year, which made me better acquainted with the educational system here in Québec – and this is where I wanted to get, really, in order to discuss Professor X’s book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.

I have to say that although my knowledge about the American schooling is somehow empirical, I’m aware of some affinities with Quebec educational system, especially concerning the pedagogic approaches, such as the wish to eliminate the effort of learning to make school accessible to everybody and the intention to replace the magister-teacher with the coach-teacher on the idea that learning is not, or should not be, one-directional, but reciprocal. And these are the two matters I focused on while reading the essay – not only because I am not very familiar with the other ones Professor X raises, but also because I felt for some of his observations and I share some of his opinions.

Professor X is the penname of a teacher that for more than ten years has taught as an adjunct English 101 (Introduction to College Writing) and English 102 (Introduction to College Literature), both classes considered being in “the basement of the ivory tower”, since they are mandatory for any student who enrolls in college. The author confesses that he started doing this in order to supplement his income after buying a house his family couldn’t really afford and that he was soon confronted with a reality of the educational system he had known nothing about. He first wrote an article (with the same title) that provoked some violent reaction, so the author was led to a more thorough study – this one. However, the book is more than an analysis of American colleges realities, for it candidly also reveals the narrator’s efforts to better himself either professionally (he has always wanted to become a writer) and socially (he is keen to strengthen his place among middleclass people), therefore mixing personal and professional information.

I do not intend to discuss the literary skills of this essay that came to my attention for other reasons anyway, although I cannot help not to mention in passing that Michael S. Roth, in his review text published in LA Times is a little harsh and unfair when he speaks about the “embarrassing amount of rhetorical padding” and the “excruciating number of repetitions” he finds the study guilty with. The author can indeed be suspected of a certain pathetic manner of speaking as well as of a bit of redundancy, but not enough to become unreadable or annoying.

Anyway, leaving aside the form to focus on the content, the main issues raised by the book concern the increasing number of students in colleges that unfortunately leads to a decreasing in quality of the human material, with the immediate consequence of a certain debasement of the professor image. Although the role and precarious position of the adjuncts is only marginally discussed, the author manages to outline a veridical and pathetic figure of these underpaid professors exploited by the same colleges, that seem to share the opinion that they “work for the pleasure of feeling important, and being called professor”.

However, is there an importance of being teacher anymore, or the title has become slightly ironic? Together with Professor X, I’m inclined to believe in truth of the latter. As I was saying somewhere above, the contemporary pedagogical theories tend to replace the magisterial figure of the teacher with a more informal one, in a commendable effort to relax the classroom relations, it is true, but with an inevitable and unfortunate secondary effect: the undermining of the teacher’s authority:

Obviously, if professor and student are learning together, the professor’s position as an authority figure is at risk. When I grade a student’s work as acceptable or unacceptable, I am asserting my expert’s narrative as having ultimate primacy, and that transaction, so unbalanced, so rooted in inequality, does not sit well in our contemporary minds.

And the lack of respect towards the instructor leads inexorably to a lack of respect towards school and all that school has always been standing for – the opening of the mind, the education of the soul, the discovery of the self and of the universe. Thus, learning has lost his intellectual function for a social one, becoming only a means to get a better job, a better salary and it has lost almost all value per se. And this is because nowadays school encourages mediocrity and proudly divorces performance, while shrewdly leveling at the base:

Our society, for all its blathering about embracing diversity and difference, really has no stomach for diversity and difference when it constitutes disparity. We don’t like to admit that one student may be smarter, sharper, harder working, better prepared, more energetic, more painstaking – simply a better student – than another. So we level the playing field. Slow readers get extra time on tests. Safe harbor laws protect substance abusers. Students who miss class for religious reasons (…) may be absent without incurring a penalty.

The idea that school should be accessible to everyone is theoretically a generous one. Practically however, is as utopic as the communist ideals – not only because of the big differences in intellect, but also because of the big differences in various people’s appetence to learn. Many of the students who enroll in colleges are sold dreams of a better life directly proportional with a better degree, dreams that will be proved wrong every time one of them fails to graduate. Meanwhile, they force teachers to do remediation instead of the subject-matter classes, downgrading the exigencies, for more and more the teachers are severely made aware that when a student fails is mainly because of faulty teaching, not of deficient learning.

Maybe I am an old-fashioned teacher myself, for I cannot but agree with Professor X and remain true to grammar (exiled from most schools as irrelevant) and to coherence (absent nowadays from most students’ papers) and to a certain elitism of learning:

Art can’t wobble. Writing can’t wobble. We expect our houses to be plumb, our tables solid – why not our paragraphs?

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book both surprised and profoundly disappointed me. As an extended discussion of the writer's experiences surrounding a decade long adjunct teaching career, it effectively details a lot of the problems of academia. I strongly agree that the current university system merits heavy critique, but I also feel that the problems in the university system are symptoms of several larger social problems. The reliance on adjuncts is unethical and exploitative. Much like the growing gap between the working class and wealthy (the disappearance of the middle class, if you will), the chasm between adjunct work and tenured professors (who often teach the SAME COURSES) grows.

I also feel that our K-12 system succeeds at indoctrinating students, but fails to provide opportunities to actually learn. The writer of this book observes that employers look for some college in employees for jobs that don't actually require college experience, it is just a way to winnow through applicants. American culture also fails to value the kinds of work that don't require a university education, and that is reprehensible. It isn't so much that college isn't for everyone as it is that we have confused what one is "supposed" to get out of college. Universities rely on adjuncts to function as social gatekeepers and pay them a pittance with no benefits, no health insurance and no job security to do so. That is exploitation.

However.

The writer seems to miss the ways that ideologies he seeks to critique inform many of the perspectives he champions. His reliance and verbose support of out dated and ineffective pedagogy models is insistent (one wonders if he is aware of their inefficacy which leads him to protest so much) and offensive at times. In chapter 4 he actually discusses comments his original article to the Atlantic Monthly garnered from cutting edge professionals in the field of composition. The writer uses the book here as space for a personal tirade on how insipid he finds the suggestions of Mike Rose and Alex Reid that his students' work is not "garbage" or "trash" or "illiterate" (all of which he uses to describe his students' writing), but that academic writing has particular expectations and is one context among many for which people write.

Additionally, research suggests that students are able to transfer very little of the "skills" they "learn" in first year composition courses to other places. The field is currently looking for ways to address this problem, which this Professor X (and please, do we really think this is not a self indulgent reference to the X-men hero?) has no interest in engaging.

Amidst many invectives about how awful his students' writing is, and discussions of how ethereal and transcendent "good" writing is, and how there is only "good" and "bad" writing and nothing in between, our author completely fails to communicate what criteria constitute these categories. Resisting the insight of people who are also concerned with the academic system and its many injustices (which include cultural homogenization) is both short sighted and ineffective.

The writer is also blatantly sexist. He says outright that he doesn't think a female home inspector can do the job. In describing his fellow adjuncts, we get information about an older, seasoned adjunct who seems experienced at teaching his accounting course. But about the instructor's female colleague, we get a critique of her clothing choices (mustard colored tights that are piling) and that she wears no ring on her left hand. What exactly is it that we are supposed to infer from this? That she is unmarried with no prospects and forced to wear ugly clothing and take bad adjuncting jobs? She is described as the "typical adjuncting type." Perhaps she and her partner choose not to participate in patriarchal practices, or not to wear their rings, or maybe they couldn't get married legally. There are a lot of possibilities here that our writer shuts down in favor of sexist cliches that are both trite and offensive.

When faced with the statistic that 49.2 percent of college teachers are women, our intrepid author suggests that their presence, "coupled with our discovery of the postmodern narrative," has feminized the college environment. This is responsible for grade inflation, and the learner centered teaching model that encourages students to make sense of the texts for themselves rather than regurgitating instructor's lectures on THE CORRECT interpretation for a text. He bemoans how difficult it is to grade fairly after a full paragraph about how women are more empathetic, more compassionate, and therefore unable to grade "fairly." Not that he manages to explain what he means by "fair."

I don't care that "Professor X" felt his masculinity was compromised because he couldn't participate in 9-11. He seems to have this gender identity crisis throughout, actually. And while I do believe that certain gender scripts are outdated and that masculinity is being revised, our author fails to see his own sexism as part of this process. He endorses using essays in class that comically compare "fat people" and "skinny people," referring to them as ephemera that nevertheless are mildly amusing. I'm so glad that he finds participating in indoctrination and ideological hegemony a good time. The lack of self awareness is disturbing, particularly in the face of his draconian pedagogy that serves only to further entrench the systems with which he claims to take issue.

In all, this book was written to shed light on the ugly underside of academia; I wish more attention had actually been paid to that purpose and that less space had been granted to arrogant and sexist self indulgence that bemoans how unfashionable megalomaniacal pedagogy has become.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think there are some points here with merit, although ultimately the main argument is shaky. What really makes me roll my eyes, however, is this guy's RIDICULOUS sexism! He blames his real estate woes on an inexperienced female inspector, when he would have preferred a nice old man. He blames grade inflation on the rising number of female college professors, and thus the "feminizing" of grades. In an unintentionally hilarious anecdote about a pair of dating students in his class, he blames the girl, who gets Bs, for the boyfriend's bad grades, stating that she holds his hand when he should be taking notes. Like the students' papers he describes, he loses all credibility by not taking his audience into consideration.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some real problems here -- the strained analogies between his university teaching and his mortgage, the sexism he seems totally unaware that he possesses, the back-and-forth between trenchant criticism of universities and the more personal stories -- but the overall critique of the mainstreaming of college makes a lot of sense. If nothing else it was truly refreshing to hear Professor X give voice to what many college instructors (of the adjunct level or not) already know: many of their students should not be in college. This doesn't make them bad people or unworthy of a good job, but not only are many of them ill-prepared for college courses, they clearly don't want to be in college to begin with. So the problems, as he also identifies them, are not just that we have a bad K-12 system, but that employers have insisted that employees need college degrees for jobs that don't really need them. Which makes people make the perfectly rational choice to go to college, even when they aren't prepared to be there. Colleges are thrilled, because they have more students and thus more money, even if 50% of community college students (for instance) drop out before their sophomore year. And almost everyone graduates with insane amounts of debt, debt that many are not going to earn enough to repay in any reasonable length of time. It's something of a vicious cycle, and one that seems quintessentially American in its insistent optimism about the powers of education and the possibility of economic advancement.

Bottom line: the book reads as if it was written quickly, just because it is often disorganized, but there are a whole lot of really important points contained within it. Definitely worth reading.

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much. Professor X is brave and honest. He skewers the great web of lies, self deception, political correctness, and self interest that surrounds the massive failure to give people the skills they need to get good jobs, while promoting higher education for people who don't need it and can't possibly keep up. President Obama could not be more wrong!

[Chuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tenured faculty are a vanishing breed as colleges and universities strive to save money by hiring part-time faculty like "Professor X" instead. These "adjuncts" not only receive considerably lower salaries; they also live without job security and often without any benefits. They are frequently marginalized by "regular" faculty, crammed into shared office space, excluded from department meetings, and denied faculty voting privileges. Because student evaluations play a major role in determining whether adjuncts are re-hired, there can be a significant temptation -- even if unconscious -- to award inflated grades (although Professor X denies that he succumbs to any such pressure).

In short, adjunct faculty have plenty to complain about, and Professor X does his share of that. Surprisingly, however, the bulk of his complaints are less concerned with his own inferior status than they are with his inferior students. As a part-time English instructor at two lower-tier institutions (one 4-year and one 2-year), he laments the large number of students who are woefully unprepared and often, it appears, irremediable. They can't construct a coherent sentence; they can't spell; they can't think critically; they have no prior acquaintance with good literature; they don't have a clue about traditional scholarship or the procedure for writing a research paper. Even so, Professor X evinces a certain amount of empathy for these unwashed masses -- folks who are often going to school part-time and struggling to make ends meet. The larger problem, he argues, is that colleges are expanding their enrollments at an unconscionable rate, and consequently, a college education has become a prerequisite for many jobs that have no business requiring one. Of course, the expansion of colleges is a boon to adjuncts like X, since someone has to teach the burgeoning numbers of students (many of whom never make it to graduation).

Denizens of upper-tier institutions are doubtless worlds apart from the woeful scenarios that Professor X lays out. I suspect that no Ivy League faculty member -- tenured or temporary -- will ever encounter a student like the one who inhabited an introductory course that I taught some years ago at a rather non-selective university. This student confidently pronounced that Socrates and the Wright Brothers were contemporaries, and when asked to investigate the matter further using the library (this was pre-Internet), he reported that he could find no materials relevant to the topic. In "for-profit" colleges, such an experience would probably be routine. Some of those awful places are actually now under Federal investigation, and while they clearly benefit from swelling enrollments, it's not clear that anyone else does. Meanwhile, the escalating cost of college tuition everywhere results in substantial student debt -- debt that is all the more difficult to discharge from a low-wage job that may represent the end of the rainbow for someone foolish enough in the 21st century to have majored in English or history or philosophy.

Despite Professor X's argument that many jobs have undergone unnecessary credential creep, there's a case to be made that this complaint embodies an unduly narrow view of vocational preparation. Computer programmers whose technical studies are supplemented by humanities courses will be better equipped to consider the ethical and social consequences of the code that they write. Military personnel who possess some understanding of archaeology and art history could be expected to take a greater interest in protecting the contents of museums from wanton looting. Employees in service sectors would surely benefit from a background in psychology when they seek to sooth angry clients. And so on. Finally, despite what one might gather from the current political climate, education isn't just about jobs. Given that a viable democracy presupposes an electorate that is capable of evaluating arguments and validating sources of information, colleges and universities are not simply cranking out future employees; they are also inculcating skills that are needed for effective citizenship.

Professor X's provocative book is long on identifying problems and short on offering solutions, and he ostentatiously burnishes his observations with literary references that are apparently designed to show how deeply literature is integrated into his own life. Maybe he's counting on his book to serve as an application essay for a better academic appointment. Whether or not it succeeds in that regard, it does offer an insider's view of what contemporary higher education often looks like once one descends below the ranks of the elite, even stopping well short of the "basement".

[Danielle · Rating 1 out of 5]

One major problem I have with this book is his insistence that the college English classroom remains rigid and old-fashioned. He clearly champions the works of dead white men and goes through great lengths to dismiss many female authors and all authors of color on the grounds that they, 1: Make him feel too uncomfortable to teach the subject matter, 2: Are outdated and not relevant to his students, 3: Are somehow too quaint, sentimental, or otherwise not agreeable examples of the types of literature he wants to teach to students.

Speaking of sentiment he also takes a paragraph to mention that the percentage of female college instructors has risen in the past several decades and that that likely accounts for the feminizing of the college classroom and an attitude where we as a nation are caring too much about our students.

His resistance to more contemporary composition and rhetoric theory is evident in his dismissal of student-centered learning besides his reluctance to give up or at least expand the canon for some non-traditional pieces. His concern for his manhood is brought up several times throughout the novel as he mentions the pressure on him to provide for his family, other moments where he talks about masculinity and what masculinity should entail, and that his authority as Professor in the classroom should not be lessened by giving the students say their own educational processes.

His thinly veiled sexism comes out when he talks about the fact that he didn't trust his female property inspector (specifically because she was not a man), the description of his female colleagues' attire and body shape (what the F is a naïve shoe?).

He also seems to have little regard for his students' writing which is confusing because half the time he seems to champion them and seem sympathetic to their life situations and then at the same time he says the most demeaning, leveling things about their writing.

Structurally the book is flimsy. He repeats a lot of ideas and it's hard to get a grasp on the overall thesis of his book. Is that this about the plight of the adjunct? Is this about the plight of the American education system? Is this about the plight of the community college student? Do we really need the background on his ridiculous property purchase right before the real estate bubble popped in the 2000's? Do we really need his long diatribe on the state of academic text books? Do you need his dismissal for every critic, many of whom have excellent reputations in composition, every time he mentions the blowback he got from his Atlantic article? This is someone who has an MFA, a government job, and threw himself into teaching admitting that he never had any training to teach and specifically to teach writing. He dismisses people who have made composition and teaching composition their life's work. I really hated reading the last 150 pages of this book but I did so because I wanted to see what other foolishness he spotted. I really cannot recommend this book to anyone. His lack of empathy for student writing his rigidity and old and tired methods, and his sexism should be enough to be away from this book.

[Wanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly readable for the most part. I think that I liked this book so well because it reflected my own experience as a professor -- and I am a full tenured professor and not an adjunct. Students' lack of basic skills and their inability to construct a coherent sentence, never mind an argument, is nothing short of astounding.
The author's thesis is that there are many students who are in community colleges who are ill prepared for college and have little chance of success because they lack the foundation to be a college student. He takes to task the notion that with enough remediation anyone can overcome (in a scant 15 weeks) years of inattention to the basics of reading and writing. I agree and I think that the fatuous ultra left radical elite who clobbered him in his article published in the Atlantic are full of blank blank blank. I say this and I am a tried and true liberal of the left persuasion.
Sorry guys, but reading politically charged prose in (great works) literature classes at the expense of learning LITERATURE and structure does no one any favors. It simply fosters victimhood. And, passing along students because they are who they are is just as obnoxious as the blue blood's gentleman's C. There. I'm glad I said it.
Professor X takes on a lot of issues. First the false notion that everyone is college material, the avant-garde notion that grammar (sentence structure, diagramming, parts of speech, etc.) does not matter, the issue of students being encouraged to enroll in college and spend thousands of dollars that they can ill afford on their education when they have a snow-ball's chance in hell of finishing, plagiarism, remediation. For anyone who wants to know what it's like to teach college students in the second millenium, this is the book for you: the frustration, the guilt at having to fail students, the knowledge that no matter how well one teaches, one has only the options of passing them along or failing most of them. It's all there.
What I would add to what Professor X says, however, that there are those of us in the professoriate who have actually taught graduate students like this. How about that for a scary thought? AND many have been pressured to change grades or to ratchet down standards by administrators who are more interested in the bottom line, and enrollment, than quality. I too have had students who plagiarized and then lied about it despite the faculty member having the evidence in front of the. I too have had students IN GRADUATE school who write incoherently and do not know what a verb or a subject entails. I too have had students who cannot follow simple directions about a research paper or formatting. The fact that Profesoor X has as an adjunct, is one thing. The fact that I have is quite something else.
This is a wake up call about the perpetuation of a great fraud on students both by way of elementary and high schools and colleges. Everyone has failed here when students are admitted to programs and are unable to write a clear sentence. After all writing is thinking made manifest.
The downsides of this book are the author's meanderings into creative literature and the narrative concerning his mortgage and his house. Both were tangential to the real issue here - the failures of American edication.

[Michael Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is a book about education. More specifically, it is a book about the failures of the education system, from the point of view of a replacement (adjunct) educator for mostly late-evening classes.

In sometimes wordy, mostly funny prose, Professor X describes and decries the mores of today's college-level education: the pressure to inflate grades (the boss may drop the innocent "but, John, good grades also improve their chance for a good job"), the fallacy of remediation (asking from students without the necessary skills to start on a topic to catch up by taking remediation classes in parallel with the actual course), the tendency to avoid thorny topics in sloppy textbooks, the problems related to plagiarism, the issue with large classes, etc.
The author presents his hands-on experience with students that are called plainly "hopeless", as they exhibit a lack of prerequisite skills---even basic knowledge about the subject that is now attended at college level, for example difficulties in writing correctly even the simplest sentences in an academic writing course---, inability to summarize, inability to analyze, inability to argue, etc.

The author also identifies several sources for the problems described, among them the push of the US Govt. (and, albeit not said in this book, of many other governments) for everyone to obtain a college degree, regardless of prior skills and personal intellectual ability. In an approach that reminds me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's second book about The Gulag Archipelago, Professor X turns on detractors of this books, discussing negative and derisive comments to earlier publication of excerpts in the Chronicles of Higher Education.

Overall, an interesting read about the problems of modern academia and education system.

[Rozzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a three-star book, to which I added a star out of sympathy for the author.

Make no mistake. Most of this book is NOT "the truth about college." Most of this book is a memoir, not about college but just about American middle class life in the period 1990-2010. Poor Professor X. He got his B.A. in English and even took an M.F.A. in writing. And then waited on tables while writing a book, which was rejected. After which he got a government job and together with his wife raised his family in a succession of houses which he describes in detail. Ultimately, to keep the pot boiling, he got a second job teaching a required writing course to first year students at a community college. Writing 101. And his students, class after class, were just terrible.

The article on which this book is based discussed the realities of written language for first year students at two-year schools, which aren't pretty. The article got a lot of press, and Professor X decided to turn it into a book, the book! His first published book! Well, apparently he didn't want to do a research paper and scour the landscape for material relevant to what had been his article in order to properly inflate his article into a book. No. He used the opportunity to wax eloquent about his own life and struggles. You can't blame him. The poor bastard had idolized books and writing all his life, just like a large percentage of us right here on GR. So he turned the article into a memoir.

Various readers on Amazon and similar places have complained about this. They're miffed that the book isn't entirely about teaching today's college students. But what do you expect from a (terribly) frustrated would-be author? It's sad, really. Not the fact that he decided to pad out his article into a memoir. Not the fact that he at last got an opportunity to do "creative writing" and see it in print. But the fact that after having done so he was revealed publicly in his book, to himself and to his readers, as a not very interesting person, the same kind of everyman that most of us are. That smarts.

[Merrikay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Professor X is an adjunct instructor at both a small private college and a community college.  He writes about his experiences teaching when his poor financial decisions make a second job necessary.  It turns out after years of this work that he comes to love it, despite it being the low man position at colleges and poorly paid, with no benefits.  Adjuncts are often the stepchildren, given little support from the administration and little office space, if any.  That is common knowledge.  For the record, I have worked with colleges that make excellent use of adjuncts and treat them very well.

The main focus of this author is examining whether college is indeed for everyone.  He works with students who are extremely ill-prepared for college and live with great financial difficulty and time constraints, making good college level work extremely difficult.  He also discusses other options such as more focus on technical and vocational schools.  He wonders if nurses indeed need to study history and literature.  He wonders if it is even possible for him to teach these students to write in one or even two semesters, and realizes it is not.  He cannot make up for a lifetime of poor learning and the effects of poverty in a year.  When you have to begin by teaching that each sentence needs a subject and a verb, you're in trouble.

Professor X makes many valid points.  This is not new information and these are not new arguments.  My objection to his thesis is that I think he is asking the wrong questions.  Rather than asking if these many students who can't write and do not have the knowledge base necessary to succeed in college should BE in college, I think we should be asking why do we have high school graduates who cannot write and have no knowledge base.  This problem begins long  before they get to college or even high school.  In my ten years of teaching college students with these problems, I believe we are mostly looking at the results of poverty.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Professor X challenges the American notion that everyone should go to college, and that everyone who can sign a loan application is college material. It's a very thought-provoking thesis, and one that's hard to argue against. The college degree is losing its value partially because it's so frequently misused as a minimum qualification for jobs that probably don't need it. Police officers, video store managers, nurses, car salesman... these jobs cover a wide spectrum of specialized skills and knowledge, yet all now require at least a two year degree. But no one seems to be asking why.

Professor X is an adjunct instructor of English 101 and 102 at two local colleges. He tells you about the assigned papers he receives. The grammar and spelling is atrocious. Obviously there are a lot of people with high school degrees that were passed year after year without a basic understanding of the material. But that's really not the point of the book. The point is, why are these students being forced to take his class? And what is Professor X's responsibility in this? Most in the class deserve F's, because there is no way he can make up for years of neglect in the span of 13 weeks. Yet, he is torn with failing students that are trying to do the right thing by going back to college to earn a degree to make a better life for their families.

More importantly though, why do we require our local police officers to have written a paper on Faulkner, or to write a poem in the style of e.e. cummings? Does that really make them better police officers? Also consider the amount of debt many of these students are taking on. Many of them will be left with huge loan repayments which will be more than their new college degree required job pays.

It's a challenging but good read.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

kind of interesting observations from a decade of adjunct-teaching of intro level english classes, at night, at two colleges (one a community college). Apparently grew from a magazine article against which there was some backlash. May have been preferable to leave it at an article. This may be a function of my being a college teacher, but I didn't need quite so many anecdotes to convince me that....

(a) many new college students are poor writers
(b) many students enrolled in required courses are uninterested in the subject matter and put forth less than a Herculean effort
(c) many students enter college unprepared, get lured into unwise loans to cover ever-escalating tuition, and end up not graduating
(d) credential inflation has led to our requiring college degrees for a lot of jobs whose performance does not really entail having sat through the sort of instruction that prevails in arts & sciences classes at most colleges.

All worthy issues, just very well-known (I think).

I gather that some of the flak he got was to the effect that he's a lousy teacher, more so than someone afflicted with lousy students. Don't know about that -- he does seem overly wedded to the slow process of revising someone's writing line-by-line in front of the whole class, and he's obsessed with trivia such as MLA citation style for references, but on the whole I take him at his word that teaching English 101 to people who don't want to be there and didn't learn a lot in high school is a tough slog.

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

“College isn’t for everyone” seems to be the moral of this book, based on a widely read Atlantic article. The anonymous author is an adjunct at a small-town college and a community college who teaches basic English at night. Most of his students are terrible writers and few read non-assigned books, but all have to take his course in order to jump through the hoop of some sort of degree. Prof X thinks it is a waste of these nurses, policemen, and technical workers’ time and, often, his. The book, however, vacillates between being a hilarious—but sympathetic—look at the state of these adult “Sweathogs”, a fair meditation on the crafts of writing and teaching writing, and the author’s own bland assessments of Higher Ed. The barely literate students he describes are truly shocking, the dregs of the lower half of the graduating classes of high school. Though often insightful, his conclusions on college are misguided; in five years of teaching only maybe 2% of my students were so talentless.

[matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book can be problematic for a number of reasons:
a) it ignores the incongruity between rising tuition costs and decline of tenure track professors (replacing them instead with luxurious dorms and student activity centers)
b) makes an ill-advised connection between the author's irresponsible mortgage and his numskull students
c) Professor X glosses over the global disconnect between the increasing demand for advanced degrees while knowledge attainment--be it professional or (gasp!) for it's own sake--is not seen as intrinsically valuable in contemporary society.

However, as an adjunct myself, much of what he says rings true even if you have to wade through a little muck to get there.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. I like the idea of this book, and the author is a good writer, but in general it was pretty smugly certain it held at least most of the answers to "why is academia broken?" When, in fact, it really is one scholar's experience in a specific situation (adjunct, evenings-only professor in two community college settings.) I think the author has many valid points and certainly has hit the proverbial nail on the head concerning why his students don't seem to be very good writers, but overall I don't think you can sum up academia as a failed experiment that solely seeks to squeeze as much money as possible out of American citizens. While there are many problems with higher education,cynical, pessimistic "realism" isn't the answer, either...

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Encounters with unlucky Americans and the system that thieves money and part of their lives. The human cost of credential inflation and hegemonic education.

our society views college not as a consumer product at all, but as both a surefire, can’t-lose financial investment and, even more crucial than that, a moral imperative.

45% of the 20 million annual enrolments do not finish the course. A lot of this is due to ability deficit (measured by remedial class enrollment), besides obvious financial constraints. Because of the sheepskin effect - part of a degree is not worth much to the job market - and the low social return on completed education, this means billions of dollars, and millions of years of life wasted. Not to mention the unnecessary stress and humiliation of pushing people into it.

This book is just a minor autobiographical expansion of this essay; you should read Caplan instead.

One thing I got from the expanded version: I'd forgotten the grinding quietism that a lot of arts people have.

I’m not willing to say that my intellectual pursuits have done me the smallest bit of good; in truth, they may have done little more than fill me with unrealistic ambition, impoverish me, and needlessly clutter my thinking.

This is another unfair advantage of STEM: it is hard for depressive people there to think that they've only learned illusory or useless things. Knowledge, especially the creation or sintering-together of new knowledge, is the most stable coin of meaning.

3/5. [Original essay 4/5.]

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book suffers from an identity crisis. At times, it's a well-researched piece on the plague of underprepared students in institutions of higher learning: the community college students in need of remediation, the demand placed on the middle class to get degrees for jobs that don't necessarily or logically require them, and the academic-industrial complex that feeds on the tuition dollars of the aforementioned. This is where the book is at its strongest. However, the author also lapses into a personal memoir of the mortgage crisis (detailing how he wound up as an adjunct professor), and at times indulges himself with lengthy prose revealing the unsuccessful novelist behind it all. The lack of focus detracts from the books primary point, which is an important one. As a society, we continue to encourage most students to continue from high school to college, and that simply isn't the best option for all. To paraphrase one of the author's pithier points, when everyone owns a home, the economic benefits of home ownership are limited; the same is true for college attendance.

[Pegi Eyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an overview on the requirements for a basic understanding of literacy in the world today, I found this book incredibly useful. Long overdue, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" is also an excellent critique on the academic system in the Americas as a profit-driven enterprise serving the needs of techno-capitalism. My only disagreement with the author's POV is that racism and white supremacy DO need to be exposed in the literary canon, wherever and whenever they appear. It is, after all, the literature of coloniality and the western mind that have been traditionally studied, and held up as the "classics" in modern academic English courses. This hegemony has been normalized - and yet, finally, in present-day 2025 - diverse voices are now part of the multicultural mix in academia, especially here in Canada.

[Mary Davidsaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me this was two books in one. The first book looked at the problems open college enrollment has caused for under-prepared students from the bottom ranks of school systems that had let them advance without acquiring the necessary skills for true college success. The author posited the need for the some college degrees at all and made his case in several ways.

However, I feel this book truly succeeded when it became the best in-depth, how-to course on writing and editing I've come across outside of Stephen King's "On Writing." This is what will stay with me for a long time.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book effectively shares a singular experience. The conclusions drawn at the end are somewhat predictable and predictably difficult to execute. Certainly worth documenting as it depicts a unique era of American education where the student must bankrupt themselves prior to becoming "made". Hopefully future generations look back and shake their heads at the impasse. Not sure much has changed in the 11 years since its publication though.

[Zoe · Rating 2 out of 5]

This isn't caustic writing. It's just rude and poorly considered, full of cheap shots at those Professor X deems academically unworthy. It's not a well written text, especially considering the pious tone the author strikes about his own writing prowess.
As many others have said, perhaps Professor X should take time to contemplate his contribution to academia with humility, as his described teaching processes appear to have significant room for improvement.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can give two stars for the insights gained on the life of an adjunct professor, but have to dock three for the insufferable navel gazing and willful dismissal of how issues of race and class impact student learning (especially at a community college!). Two thirds of the way through he reveals that he hasn't bothered to study HOW to teach. Skip this one.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

A realistically frightening look at the dark underbelly of higher education. I found myself nodding and agreeing aloud with the writer’s illustration of the difference between what we expect in academia, and what we find.

[Nadia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Middle-aged white male makes poor life choices, becomes adjunct, is sexist, ends book on weird note that both villifies and appreciates higher education

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really thought-provoking book.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I sit at a remove from Professor X's students. It was assumed from a very young age that I would attend college at a top tier school (or at least, as top-tier as my parents' could afford); I went to a state school, graduated with no debt in four years because 1) I was driven and 2) my parents could pay for the tuition out of pocket. When medical school applications didn't pan out (after three attempts) I earned a Master's in epidemiology (while working full-time) which led to my current job and (decently) comfortable paycheck. I plan to go back to school for advanced coursework in English literature. I never had to take a basic College Writing or College Literature class because I took AP English Lit and passed the exam with a "3" - when I did take an English course in undergrad (for fun) I opted for a semester of Shakespeare. I have a lot of education because I'm smart and I had the right skill-set for college (knowing my study skills were poor, I actually read books on how to improve my study skills - I'm not kidding). In the Basement of the Ivory Tower speaks to the murky underbelly of the college system, those students who will mostly likely not go on to be doctors, CEOs, or professors and the adjuncts who teach them.

This book is hazy with anonymity; we can't compare Professor X's students with other schools' studentds because he won't tell us for fear of recrimination. I wish that Professor X could have written this book without the anonymity, although I do agree, based on the criticism he received from the initial magazine article, that it is necessary. There seems to be a lot of heads-in-sand about his stance: commenters imply that he is maligning his students by failing them, that he's not actually teaching or helping them adequately, that he doesn't care.

Newsflash: if Professor X didn't care about his students, he wouldn't have bothered to write In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. If anyone is in doubt as to the poor learning skills of Professor X's students and his almost paralyzing decision to pass or fail them, I back him 100%. In my persona as a moderator of an online bookclub I am swimming in poorly written prose - both original compositions posted in the writing room and posts as part of book discussions. God forbid I should actually tell someone that his or her post is unintelligible and makes no sense (an issue completely divorced from the issue of atrocious grammar and spelling); it is apparently "mean" to criticize. There are some who probably view Professor X as "mean" because he does attempt to hew to the standards of college-level work; he doesn't just pass them because he wants to be "nice".

Standards are at the core of the book, that students who barely function at a level appropriate to high school, or lower, grade-levels are pushed to attend college with no thought as to the actual preparation of the students. These students need remedial course work, but receive no credit for it in their degree paths so therefore don't bother nor does the college enforce this, and the connection between their career path and the college writing/literature work is tenuous at best. Adjuncts are not paid for office hours, have no place to meet with students, and often don't have time allotted by the school to give the level of personal instruction that academically disadvantaged students need. Professor X worries, how are students with rudimentary communication skills being served by this drive to send everyone and their neighbors' dog to college? It's a valid worry.

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower raises many issues and we, as a country, should seriously take a look at student debt and college requirements for job placement, at the educational system as a whole from preschool through college. Where I think this book falls down is in a lack of proposed solutions, beyond revamping the American notion of success-through-college-is-the-only-way-to-go, and in the tone of the author. What is Professor X's solution for underprepared students, beyond not forcing them to take college English? I really was not interested in Professor X's anxiety about his house or his fights with his wife; those chapters detracted from his arguments about the college system. I also felt that the quibbling over grading - do students get the "F" that is deserved under the college standards or do they get bumped up to a "D" or "C" because of improvement/situation - could have done without the tone of smarmy self-assurance implied in the many chapters. There are issues barely touched on - such as the rise of blantant plagiarism and students' seeming indifference to getting caught or the out-of-touch anthologies he is required to use as textbooks - that need more expansion. Faults aside, this book is a "whistleblower"; we need more whistleblowers and fewer heads-in-the-sand.

[brian dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave it four stars because I see great relevance with my own teaching position. Otherwise, the discussion about his life choices and family problems - though well-written - didn't appeal to me and took a little away from the book.

I was also disappointed in his overly florid prose, brimming with metaphor and allusions to literary classics. Perhaps he was working to defend employment; a sort of "Look at me! I know books! I really am a good teacher."

I do think he is a good teacher and I intend to try a few of the techniques he described in my classes.

I can do that because the whole adjunct professor - community college- education inflation thing he describes is a pretty good description of my own work as an ESL teacher at a university in Korea. The parallels might not be perfect, but they are clear.

Professor X has written an excellent expose on the problems of an artificial demand for education requiring an artificial supply of professors.

There are several types of jobs out there that don't require a university education. Although getting an education is not normally a bad thing, getting hugely in debt to find a job that doesn't really require that training is.

X didn't mention it, but I think this artificial need for a university degree could be compared to the artificial requirements for police jobs that limited the number of females that could apply. Eventually, feminists pointed out that most police work doesn't require as much masculine physicality as claimed and more women were hired.

Anyway, more jobs either claim to require a degree or have so many degree holders applying that not having one is an immediate negative.

President Obama and general opinion in the wider world hold that everyone should get as much education as they can. Universities now see a lot of students who don't have the basic skills necessary so they need to offer classes in remedial studies.

The tenured profs are busy so adjuncts are hired. They are not treated so well by the university they work for. Prof X had no complaints about his superiors individually but did point out that he received no benefits nor was there a system for advancement. He often felt closer to his students, arriving almost by stealth at night, spending a few hours and going home, than he did to the 'real' professors who had perks like desks and such.

The students, however, had never planned on a university education and now were trying to catch up on years of neglect in order to attend real university. A quote from a student's evaluation of X: "Before this I would of never voluntarily read a book. But now I almost have a desire to pick one up and read."

It's too late to choose a pseudonym for myself, so let me describe working conditions at X University in South Korea. The decision was made years ago to require six semesters of ESL for every student. A large number of native speakers were hired and described as "Visiting Professors" in English but as "Instructors" in Korean. Many of their students could use English capability in looking for work or in other ways to expand their horizons but few really needed it. The ESL department was a PR exercise to attract, I don't know - Parents(?) to think about the university. Luckily for the students, the profe..sorry, instructors were expected to follow a bell curve by first filling in the A quota, then the B quota then the rest. It was a required class but luckily it was an easy one to get high grades in.

Man, after reading a book about students with weak reading and writing skills, I feel I should edit this a few times before 'handing it in'. Nah, Goodreads is not nearly as formal as that, and I don't want it to be.
---------------

Salon has two articles on the book.
There is an excerpt :http://www.salon.com/life/feature/201...

and a criticism: http://www.salon.com/life/feature/201...

I'm interested.

About a third of the way into the book and today I just blogged about relevant articles:
http://surprisesaplenty.wordpress.com...

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few years ago I tutored high school kids for one of those high-priced college-prep learning centers you see advertised on billboards. For $175 a session, each kid received a highly-personalized battery of one-on-one tutoring from folks like me. Most of the kids I tutored needed serious help in one or more areas but over time showed definite improvement; a handful weren't far off at all but needed some tweaking here and there; one was already getting better SAT scores than I would ever get no matter how many advanced degrees I piled up, but was after a perfect score. Now and then, though, I came across kids who were -- and there's no other way to say it -- hopeless cases. They were so deficient on such basic levels that I felt inadequate to the task.

One student in particular sticks in memory. It was almost the end of the school year, and my boss asked me into her office. She introduced me to the student, a jocular, all-around Good Guy, and told me that rather than the months-long, specialized program most kids were on (all the better to bilk their yuppie parents out of their money), this one was going on the fast track; we were going to condense 5 months of programming into about 3 weeks. Okay, I said, let's give this a shot.

Within 10 minutes I knew bringing this kid to competence would be a Herculean task. The sample essay he had written during the diagnostic exam could only vaguely be called English, and his expression as he endured these 3-hour sessions never budged from its already-defeated, utterly-bored grimace. I said the word 'pronoun' and he looked at me as if I'd conjured it up. As we dug in and tried to move through the material swiftly, a series of thoughts sprung to mind: Why does he want to go to college next year? (Sub-question: Why are his parents making him go to college next year?) Shouldn't he take a year or two and build himself up remedially? No matter which college he goes to, he will be asked eventually to write a paper, and he can't write on a sentence level, let alone a paper level, and it's going to take more than 3 weeks to get him there. Why would he want to go to college only to struggle and fail out after a year?

Then I thought even more selfishly: What if he doesn't fail out? What if he actually gets a degree with this caliber of writing? What is my degree worth if all you need to get one these days is show up?

It is with this in mind that I approached Professor X's book about his travails as an adjunct professor for a community college. The students he runs up against are just like the student I tried valiantly to help during the twilight of his senior year, except he has to take actual college time to go over stuff that he rightly expected them to learn in high school. The issues he raises are timely and important (and not going away): Does everyone have a right to higher education in this country? What are the consequences of expecting everyone to obtain degrees for jobs that wouldn't seem to require them to do the jobs well?

My own feeling is that this is the little-talked-about underbelly of the American Dream: We have a collective allergy to anything that reeks of elitism, and who's going to be the one to tell someone else he doesn't have what it takes for a college degree? And in a time when many of our blue-collar jobs are going by the wayside, what other options does a job-seeker have BUT shell out the cash, sit mindlessly through classes that hold no interest for them, and wait for a school to pump out a degree?

The book loses steam in the second half, which seems like SOP for books that have been expanded from magazine articles, but at least in its first half, it provides ample food for thought.