My reaction is slightly different. Professor X sucks as a human being.

I like the idea that police officers are trained to read and write English, and if this assclown can't get them interested in, say, "Crime and Punishment", "The Hound of the Baskervilles", and "Darkness at Noon", then let him go pump gas and turn his job over to someone who can. I'm not surprised, although I am disappointed, that he devalues his own students; some of them probably are 20-something drifters looking to pass the time. What is unforgivable is that he devalues his own work.

On reflection, X's problem is that he believes he is enthusiastic. I think that means he lectures in a loud voice. So what? Nowhere in his article does he sound the least bit inspiring.

Nope. More offended by Obama's "bitter" comment.

Partially. It does hit on the triple of high school doing a poor job of preparing people, college courses being viewed as a gateway/escape, and the overall failure of institutions to properly prepare people for what they're going to face.

My reaction is split between 'maybe you suck', and 'the vast majority of these people likely have not read more than a dozen books in the past decade - maybe there needs to be an English 99, and combine it with Critical Thinking 99.'

Out of curiosity - has anyone else taught for a subject they love, in a course people have paid money for, and had to fail them? It changes your perspective a bit.

AL, I read that article as well, and I disagree with you that Professor X devalues the students' efforts. He is largely silent on that matter, and if anything, his example of Mrs. L shows that he recognizes that some students try very hard and still fail. (I think that was her pseudonym; the magazine isn't in front of me at the moment.)

That happens. As Professor X correctly asserts, some people--I would say a great many--aren't cut out for college-level academics. At least college-level academics as it should be. Academic work isn't about effort. It's about results, just like the real world of which it is a part. Once those students are out in the work force, "But I tried really hard!" isn't a valid excuse if their work is inadequate. Failing them in college is probably an act of mercy. Passing them on effort alone, and then handing them a degree in a field for which they are not truly prepared or capable is arguably an immoral thing to do, and is unquestionably a disservice to the individual concerned.

See here for an example of what happens when an institution is more concerned with shaping the school to fit the students than in holding students to a standard.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/14/aird

I mainly agree with BD. If people are going to achieve advancement by getting a college degree then part of Mr. Anon's job is to reject those who can't do the work.
It is not a fun assignment to distribute the "E" or "F" grades to someone who is trying to advance himself/herself but what's the alternative?

I don't see what he wrote as a put-down of those who don't have academic skills. It's just a sad story of people who are being nudged toward a degree by a job market that (perhaps mistakenly) rewards degree holders.

Kind of half and half. There's some of the 'some people can't possibly handle this and shouldn't be here' to it. But more of it was more along the lines of 'these people are prepared for it'.

Which is so true. First off, those really shouldn't be college classes in the first place, that's high school material. What he's really trying to do is cram 4 years of high school into one or two semesters.

The interesting thing is not that some fail to make the rapid jump, but that so many do handle it and advance. How bad are the high schools sucking that colleges, even bottom of the line colleges, can cram all of high school into one or two semesters?

One observation he made that really caught my eye was this bit:

I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture.

Here is what I peg as the great failing of modern liberal arts education. Once upon a time, when two educated people met, they knew each would share a certain common catalog of readings and terminology. You could always feel free to quote off of or draw allusions to the common set, comfortable that your conversational partner would know what you are talking about. A shared symbological shorthand that greatly aided communication by preventing the endless need to define every term to a T and explain every reference and allusion.

You only needed to explain and define your terms when you wandered out of the shared set.

Now though you can run into someone else, very well educated from a different program and have little or no overlap.

In its zest to expand the common culture beyond the dead white male genre, they ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and replaced the common literary education with sheer chaos, destroying a large chunk of the utility of liberal arts, particularly the general education utility for non-liberal arts majors.

AL:

I've corrected a lot of writing assignments, and I can empathize with the fellow's sense of frustration... but I agree that Strunk and White would be a much better fall back position. A lot of things have changed since S&W (for instance, the period before the quotation mark is related to the way printing was done 100 years ago, and no longer really applies) but I'm sure they've updated things.

BTW, what happened to sentence diagramming? How do you understand how to construct a sentence if you don't have that pattern in mind? The basic issue is that teachers confronted with this sort of problem really need to be able to fall back to fundamentals... and if all they can manage is to teach kids where to place a period, then sobeit. Teaching kids to write research papers is not necessarily a valuable skill.

I subscribe to the Paedia Thesis (Mortimer Adler) that's based on the Great Books. The conventional orientation is that education status is divided into those who get the cream, those who get milk, and those who get dirty water. That's a rough definition of the distinction between elite universities, run-of-the-mill state colleges, and community colleges. It would be far more advantageous if we established an education system that dispensed cream to everyone, albeit in different quantities depending on what they can absorb, and then also paid attention to their lives. If elementary and secondary systems are "deficient" to the degree implied (which I think is probably the case) then there may simply be a lot of folks who can't be salvaged. Suck it up. Expand the welfare system to take care of indigents, and start over.

The thesis of Prof X, and folks like Christine Roselle, is that people whose livelihoods will be determined by ability in a trade should exclusively receive trade eduction. At some minimal level of preparation that probably makes sense, but it seems to me that you can adjust their input of cream to make way for more trade instruction, then fine. But you'd better not neglect the minimum threshold for citizenship unless you want to end up with a brownshirt rebellion. Recently feudal societies like Germany and Japan had "gymnasium" systems based on the cream, milk, dirty water paradigm... and we have seen the consequences. We ought to be able to produce citizens, and if we can't the Devil will take his due.

While the author struck me at being just a little bit elitist, nevertheless the issue he raises is a good one. College is not for everyone.

This immediately raises social dilemmas, as touched upon by some commentors above. If we stratify society by educational level then of course saying someone is not good enough for college immediately places them at a lower level, likely for the rest of their lives.

I suspect though that the issue will resolve itself over the coming years, due to budget crises. My suspicion is that academia will not be able to keep up with inflation (arising from several sources) and that state governments just will not be able to increase community college and state college budgets enough, and the end result will be less people attending.

For $2400 a semester course, y'all want Professor X to be inspiring? There's a whole subculture of Professor X's -- peripatetic adjuncts, piecing together a living from whatever courses they can hustle at one, two, three, or even four local colleges, who pay for piecework and are stingy with benefits. They have limited (if any) voice in choosing the textbook, readings, or syllabus; limited time outside of class to spend with students; and no office to meet them in. They'd attend short courses to improve their instructional techniques, but they're not funded by the colleges; those courses are reserved for full-time salaried employees. They see the least prepared and most unmotivated of the student body, because the full-time, mainly tenured, faculty took first dibs on the courses that fill up with the bright, successful kids. Right now, after grading all the final projects, Professor X is probably wondering whether he should teach those three sections of "developmental" (spelled r-e-m-e-d-i-a-l) writing this summer, or bail out for a job in telemarketing. Too bad that teaching is all he knows; that's all college prepared him for.

How would you compare Professor X with Professor Aird, who has been fired from Norfolk State University in Virginia for culling too much chaff?

"Something is wrong when you cannot impart your knowledge onto students. We are a university of opportunity, so we take students who are underprepared, but we have a history of whipping them into shape. That’s our niche," says NSU.

"Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone," says Aird.

Prof. X said:

I’d be a sexist, ageist, intellectual snob.

I've got news for him, he is. Elitist, too. English teachers were those in the College of Arts & Sciences who COULD DO NOTHING ELSE. And were a colossal pain in the ass. They pretended that basic English was a be-all-end-all pursuit rather than the tool of the other trades. And I agree with Treefrog that what he is teaching as college material is properly taught in High School.

But what is really behind this dumbing down is not that everyone MUST have a college education but that the protest classes who did not have the cojones to be in the real world 40 years ago, hid in academia. The deferment children avoided national service by being professional students. They spent enough time there to collect advanced degrees from the think-alike Marxists that were also hiding out there to avoid real work. What we have today is an elitist, left wing bastion of permanently stunted teenagers that call themselves educators. THAT is the modern educational establishment.

What is the solution? Hope that enough time passes, they don't breed too much and we can get rid of them eventually. Maybe then we can get back to educating our youth properly. But for now, the higher education system is the hideout of the failed socialists and Marxist tools who do not have the good sense to know they have been had by the remnants of the international party. They are supposedly smart people who have been royally had and are too stupid to see it.

I could launch into a rant, and I don't disagree with most of the comments, but one of the things I can't quite grasp is why an empirical research paper is automatically more important than the capacity for moral reasoning? Why would X's sine qua non be something like a grant proposal or an impact assessment? Precious few people will ever need to write one, least of all people in professions like nursing or police work, and when they do they can hire someone like this prof to do it for them. Seems to me it's far more important that they're able to "think through by writing" the kinds of moral dilemmas they'll be compelled to deal with in the real world, on a day to day basis.

Or have I missed something?

No AL, my reaction doesn't mirror yours at all. Prof X's frustrations reminded me of Tom Sharpe's novel Wilt and so it made me smile.

If I understand correctly, your annoyance springs from the fact that what Prof X has to say isn't what you would like him to say. Maybe it is true that "the current US higher-education system is dysfunctional, and that it is at some level a Ponzi scheme" but Prof X isn't going to make that case for you. His testimony, for whatever it is worth, points to failings in secondary education rather than third-level.

What frustrates me about Prof. X is his obvious disrespect for his students, his unwillingness to understand that his success should me measured in engaging and inspiring them to succeed, rather than smugly setting himself as the filter between those who will and won't.

I taught all during grad school, and dealt with undergrad Berkeley students who didn't just struggle with the concepts of our classes, but with basic research papers. So I ran a 'boot camp' on paper writing, and by the end of it, I think one or two students couldn't make those happen. And as a bonus, we'd introduced them to the core concepts of the classes.

So sorry, this guy - whose sole job is to teach kids to read and write - can't be bothered to teach. I'd say he needs a new job.

A.L.

AL, I agree that this guy has written way too much about "me" and how his students infringe upong "him". He should have gotten rid of himself completely, and talk about his students inadequecies. Still, as a grad student AL, you also had a fundamentally different clientele than community college or adjunct adult education courses. Community Colleges, as a rule, are much better at dealing with these students than night classes at 4-year schools.

Most 4-years hire adjuncts for students with no plan as how to deal with students below the bar. Community Colleges have remedial courses (or tutoring) to raise students to the minimums needed for success. I know, because I've been involved in all these groups.

And those requisite classes are horrible. Students can't read and write. Can't do math. Don't know how to think critically. Actively REFUSE to think critically. For example:

Will this problem be on the test?
No, not this problem. But this type of problem.
Well, how am I supppossed to study for that? That's not fair.

I teach a chemistry class, so that scares away the worst. Still I have students who turn in assignments IN ALL CAPS, with printing at a 5th grade level (no, I'm not exagerating). I have students who try to read the newspaper (or their monthly MAXIM) while I'm speaking. I have students who need algebra explained to them EVERY week, even though it's a prerequisite for the course. Some of these students try really hard. Meet me outside of class, review basic math & skills etc. However, if they don't understand, they don't pass. It really, really sucks sometimes (both for me and my students).

Demosophist: Here's my thinking on writing. Writing and speaking are directly related. If you don't know how to write correctly, you can't speak correctly (and vice versa). Every job in the world is based on communication. Even a ditch digger needs to tell his boss if he's hit a pipe, what that pipe looks like and what the boss should know. (yes, critical thinking is a necessary tool here as well). But even if he's done the thinking, if he can't explain the idea out loud, it's utterly worthless.

So, I've given an overexagerated example. Still, if you're a cop writing a report, I damn well want a clear and concise explanation of what happened. If two witnesses have a conflicting view of events, I want those conflicts explained, and his evaluation clearly defined, so that the prosecution gets the best possible understanding. If you can't do that, do you really deserve the responsibility of a badge?

alchemist: why isn't the requisite writing skill obtained at the secondary level?

I disagree with the movement towards making "some college" a prerequisite to jobs that really don't need it. State troopers don't need to diagram a sentence in the small blanks on a ticket. Child care workers are not better for taking algebra.

"Some college" strikes me as a social marker -- that the individual is a person of some suitable background to employ. Its unnecessary gatekeeping that encourages inequality.

Look, from my POV there are two options; don't let them in, or if you're going to let them in, you need a plan to deal with the challenged ones and a way to recoverable the recoverable ones.

The fact that Professor X thinks this is beneath him means he's working in the wrong place.

A.L.

PD shaw: It should be. Unfortunately, students are so far behind that they don't spend enough time on it highschool. Seriously, we should be failing more high school students. I think the whole way we set up highschool should be changed to more accurately reflect personal studying habits. Because right now most students don't understand that, and they get to college with a complete misnomer of what "studying" is.

Maybe I'm biased, but I think everyone who has a college degree should have algebra. If you plan a budget, file taxes, balance a bank account, all require a basic understanding of algebra, if not in direct application, the understanding of how math works.

Now, the next question is: should a childcare worker require a college degree? And that's alot tougher, and not a question that should be answered inside colleges themselves, but outside in the workforce. Many times that's answered with an Associates degree instead of a bachelors. But a college education should not be modified to suit those farther behind. (The american system is slow enough, it shouldn't get even slower).

Look, from my POV there are two options; don't let them in, or if you're going to let them in, you need a plan to deal with the challenged ones and a way to recoverable the recoverable ones.

Oh, AL I completely agree. However, they are paying this guy a minimum salary to teach people how to write at the college level. His job IS NOT how to teach people to write at the high school level. They are paying him by the hour, every hour he spends teaching pre-requisite material, his doing it on his own dime.

Let's try it this way instead: You bring a plumber to your house to fix a rusty pipe to the hotwater heater. When he gets there, he realizes that the whole heater is rusted out and needs replacement. You can't fix the pipe until you fix the heater. Do you think he's willingly going to fix the heater outside of his hourly salary? Not bloody likely. He'll charge you for both.

Adjuncts don't have the ability to charge for both, so they only do what they're paid for. Those of us who do have a salary position are expected to go the extra mile. He is not.

This is an administrative problem, where they'll do anything to get cash, including letting a failing student enroll forever as long as the check is on time. There should be a failsafe for those students who fall through the cracks, but if nobody calls the administration on it, nothing changes.

Clarification: Minimum by academic standards is about 20-30$ per class hour. If you add in prep time, grading time, etc, it works out to about $15 an hour with no benefits.

Robohobo #11,
I take exception to your characterization of English teachers. I was one for quite a while. I could do other things, and because of the job situation in acedeme and my own theoretical and political incorrectness, I am doing other things (things that pay much better than the English professorship I would still trade my job for in a New York minute). I simply passionately love reading, studying, teaching and writing about literature and philosophy.

However, I agree with your main point. Most English departments are bastions of leftist group-think and last refuges for discredited ideas (Marx, Freud, Derrida, etc). But that's not going to change over time, or if it does it will be over multiple decades, perhaps more than a century. The reason is because the postmodern academic left that controls those departments is absolutely self-perpetuating.

Those graduate students who do not toe the line do not get degrees. Or if, like I was, they are lucky enough to find enough old-school professors to serve on their committees to get a degree, they don't get published (at least not in the journals that count). If they manage to publish, they do not get job interviews. If they manage to get an interview, they don't get hired. And if, by some miracle they get hired, they don't get tenure.

English departments are very Stalinist and do not hesitate in the least to enforce political and theoretical conformity. So someone who actually passionately loves literature and wants to be an English professor has two choices: fight the system and lose, or give in and play the game. That's why most of them end up like those folks described in #9.

To address the topic, though, I've been where Professor X is, and I have a great deal of sympathy for him. It is frustrating to be relegated to teaching service courses to students who passionately loathe those courses. It's very easy to develop a negative attitude toward the students. Having said that, I agree that if Professor X has reached that point, he should consider doing what I did and moving on.

A.L.: I don't think Prof. X thinks teaching is beneath him. He says "I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point. When I am at my best, and the students are in an attentive mood—generally, early in the semester—the room crackles with positive energy."

He's teaching people at the bottom levels of ability, who even with improvements, don't succeed. And I imagine Prof. X is probably at the bottom levels of accademia himself. I imagine if he quits or is fired, Berkely Professors won't be lining up to take his place.

Out of curiosity - has anyone else taught for a subject they love, in a course people have paid money for, and had to fail them?

Yes.

It changes your perspective a bit.

How so? I don't recall it affecting my perspective at all (but then these failures were the exception, I certainly didn't have some in every single class.)

Probably one of the reasons the piece did not bother me as much is that Tyler Cowen had implied its thesis last week. "Anyone who has taught such a class [Introduction to Composition] -- or for that matter talked to anyone who has -- will have some inkling why more people are not going to college."

Look, from my POV there are two options; don't let them in, or if you're going to let them in, you need a plan to deal with the challenged ones and a way to recoverable the recoverable ones.

The fact that Professor X thinks this is beneath him means he's working in the wrong place.

I think that's the core of the disagreement here. You're right about those two options, but both of those decisions are actually way above his pay grade, not below. He's teaching an intro class to students who belong in remediation; he can neither force them into a remedial class, nor can he turn a core class into remedial one. Instead, he's left with the impossible task of teaching 12 years of schooling in 12 weeks; you seem to be faulting him for not being able to do just that.

This is more an indictment of primary/secondary education than it is about the arrogance of elites.

When I think about academic necessity, two things come to mind:

1) Not everyone should go to college. If it doesn't interest you, you probably shouldn't go. If it doesn't teach you more about your desired job, maybe you shouldn't go.

2) on the other hand, we are falling so far behind out international peers in science, medicine and engineering that we will soon be unable to lead the modern world.

As I've said before, our nation has no large-scale admiration for academic, scientific or industrial accomplishments. We are, in general, more interested with sports heroes, actors and reality stars than with any notable academic, political or social issue. As such, we don't understand evolution. We don't understand physics. We don't even understand basic grammar.

This has a pretty sizable affect on our youth, many of whom see little or no reason to succeed in either of these areas. They see these things as "dorky", or in some cases "acting white". Most of these kids go through school because they think they have to, not because they want to.

While this suggests a dramatic failure of an academic system, it is also the failure of a society that claims to want academic (& thereby industrial/engineering) success, but doesn't feel the need to value those who succeed.

Note: Is there any way you can tell us what's being blacklisted, I spent an hour rephrasing that post in order to get it through the sensors. Hopefully it hasn't lost anything in the process...

I too find the censors ... censorious.

Prof. X's problem is that he IS elitist. There are ways to reach these students.

All of them I bet watch scripted TV. Guess, what, it's WRITTEN. Often copying classic literature. His problem is going straight to the classics, instead of dealing with shorter attention spans, lesser skills, and desire for immediate feedback.

I'd have EVER student sign up for a fan-fic group for their FAVORITE tv show. There's tons of fan-fic groups out there. Have each student discuss in class fan-fics they liked, why they liked it, read aloud parts they liked.

Next, start writing it themselves. Short pieces, to build skills. They'll like it because for most of them, it's fun.

Finally, connect the fan-fic with analogous classic literature, explain how the TV show borrows elements of classic literature. Say, Gray's Anatomy to some elements of Jane Austen.

I'll bet those bored troopers watch "the Shield." Have them discuss and episode and then tie in to say, "Julius Caesar." Corruption, power, revenge, all that stuff never changes.

This is literature. Stories that are supposed to move people. The fundamental building blocks of every TV show on the air.

X puts a divide between his student's lives and what they watch on TV at home, and the great literature. When it's matters of degree. Not everyone can be Gordon Ramsay. But everyone can learn how to cook a soft-boiled egg. That's all he's being asked to do ... teach people how to do the basics.

AL, as a grad student you taught students who'd managed to get into Cal Berkeley. It's a whole 'nuther world at the community college and local liberal arts (and possibly hitorically minority) school level.

Community colleges in many places MAY NOT REFUSE TO ADMIT any local resident who has been given a high school diploma.

MAY NOT refuse to admit them. That policy was put in place in many jurisdictions specifically as a left wing / equal rights political move. And community colleges are not the only 'open enrollment' places giving out putative bachelor's degrees. Whether that was well meant or not, it has had disastrous results as Prof. X is pointing out.

Not everyone can be Gordon Ramsay. But everyone can learn how to cook a soft-boiled egg. That's all he's being asked to do ... teach people how to do the basics.

That is most definitely not what he's being asked to do; if it were, this wouldn't be a problem. He's being asked to teach a class where the basics are an unofficial, unmet pre-requisite. The sensible thing to do is, as you and AL say, to teach those students the basics and prepare them for the 101 class they need for a degree. Unfortunately, that class doesn't exist, and it seems unfair to fault him for not turning his 101 class into the remediation class that the students should have been placed into in the first place.