I am not going to go into too much detail about the specifics of the situation, partly because it would take an awful lot of explanation for people who don’t know anything about the place where I work and partly because so many things are still in flux that I–someone who is not authorized to speak officially for the faculty–don’t want to cause problems for the people working on those issues. One detail that I can talk about, however, is the fact that, at the end of the spring semester, the president fired all 66 full-time faculty who were working on temporary contracts, nearly 10% of our full-timers. A temporary contract is the one you get, at my college anyway, before you are switched to a tenure track line and the president is within his rights to dismiss anyone on a temporary contract without cause. Nonetheless–and I am going to skip over a whole lot of local politics involved with what this president did because it involves details of our contract, the nature of faculty governance at my institution and what the history of faculty-administration relations have been–nonetheless, it is worth taking a close look at the implications and consequences of what he did, even if he was within his right to do it.

To start, consider that 66 faculty represent, at a minimum, 6,000 classroom seats that will not have instructors for the Fall. Those seats will need to be taught by someone, which means that the college will have to hire more adjuncts and/or–but it is most likely “and”–increase class size across the campus, and even then I don’t know if the college will be able to adjust in order to make sure those seats have instructors. If we can’t, that means there will be a significant chunk of students that we will not be able to serve; if we end up with class-size increases–of which we have already had one in order to address budget issues–teaching and learning will suffer, and they will suffer in ways that are perhaps particular to community colleges, where we do not have the huge lectures that exist at four year schools and where professors do not have graduate students to help with grading and other classroom tasks, including, sometimes, the teaching itself. There is, in other words, a lot to be concerned about in terms of the effect laying all these people off will have on the college’s ability to serve the community it is our mission to serve.

As disturbing to me, though in a different way and on a different scale, is the way in which these layoffs will require us to become more dependent on adjunct instructors than we have been. This is disturbing to me not because I think adjuncts are not good teachers; they are as good or as bad as any other group of teachers. More, I have tremendous respect for their dedication to both the profession of teaching and their field of study, because an adjunct’s life is much harder than mine. They are, as a whole, perhaps the most exploited workers in all of academia, and the fact that they nonetheless choose to cobble together a living from teaching part time at (usually) two or three (or sometimes more) different colleges and to keep up with their field of study is really quite amazing. Yet the fact that they are so fully (and, frankly, easily) exploited makes the ways in which colleges and universities are, nationwide, coming to rely on them more and more unconscionable, and it disturbs me to know that my college might be headed in that direction.

I am aware that arguing for less reliance on adjuncts means, at least implicitly, arguing for less work for adjuncts; and I am aware that this is problematic for a whole host of reasons, some of them connected to the individual livelihoods of the people who are adjunct instructors and some of them connected to the nature of the academic job market, in which many people often get the experience they need to be hired full time by working as an adjunct. To agree that the “adjunct problem,” as it were, needs to be comprehensively and systematically addressed, however, should not be to deny that there are serious problems when colleges reduce the numbers of full time faculty and replace them with adjuncts, as if teaching is the only thing that full time faculty do.

At my school, it is the full time faculty who hire and fire; it is the full time faculty who do the work of curriculum development; of handling grievances; of student advisement; of advising student clubs; of most of the mentoring that gets done; of establishing, in other words, maintaining and growing the educational and extra-curricular infrastructure of the college itself. And while I know that we have a degree of faculty governance that many other schools do not, the fact is that full time faculty at other colleges perform a similar function. It is the full time faculty who put the community in community college, not because adjuncts are less able or less qualified or even less committed, but because adjuncts–given the structure of their lives–almost never have enough time. More, there is no reason for adjuncts to have the commitment that full-timers do to the institutions where they teach. Adjunct positions are enrollment-dependent; they get no tenure, no benefits; and they inevitably have to split their attention (and their loyalty) between and among the different institutions where they teach. They may be motivated to sit on the committees in which full timers get the work of running the college done, but adjuncts have no incentive to do so. Committee work does not get them a raise, does not get them promoted. I would agree that a system should be worked out where adjuncts do have incentive to sit on committees, but it doesn’t exist now, and I can guarantee you that my college president is not thinking about instituting one, not when he is hoping to use adjuncts to cut costs.

A college–just like a high school, just like an elementary school–is, or at least I am convinced it ought to (continue to) be, more than a collection of classrooms in which teaching is delivered; it is, or should be, a community of people learning to become, among other things, engaged and employable citizens, and that kind of learning requires faculty who can make commitments to students and to the institution where they work beyond the teaching they do in the classroom. There is, in other words, a good deal in my college president’s decision to fire nearly 10% of the full time faculty, not least of which is the way in which his decision essentially guts the next 20–30 years of the kind of work I have been describing that would have been performed by those fired faculty members.

As you can tell, I am angry about this, and I am aware that I have probably reduced the complexity of the issue because I am angry; but I do think that people should be very concerned about a system of higher education that is becoming increasingly reliant on contingent faculty. It is not something we ought to let happen simply because it costs less than what we have now. It’s important to remember: You really do get what you pay for.

Nor is this only a problem in New York State. According to Thomas R. Bailey, who directs the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, close to two thirds of community college students nationwide require some kind of remedial education, with problems in math outnumbering problems in reading by a margin of two-to-one. The success and retention rates for the students who have to take remedial courses is also disturbing. Fewer than half of the students who take remedial courses complete them.

One problem with Foderaro’s article is that she connects the problem of students in remedial classes not finishing with community college graduation rates, which are not high, about 25% of full time students at CUNY and 35% nationwide. One problem with making this association is that the studies these numbers come from do not track what happens to students who transfer from a community college to a four year school–and I know that at my school a significant proportion of students do not plan to earn an AA; rather they plan to take courses they need to take at the significantly lower cost the community college offers them and then transfer.

Foderaro highlights in her article some of the successful steps community colleges are taking to address this issue, and she also mentions the fact that to the degree community colleges become remediation centers, they have less time and money to spend on the students who enroll who are prepared. Those students, after all, who often come to a community college because they can’t afford to go to a four year school, are also deserving of the college’s attention and resources.

As I read the article, though, I couldn’t help but remember a conversation I had some years ago with someone who teachers in my school’s physical education department. She’d been a high school teacher for many years, and we were on a committee that was supposed to make some kind of recommendation, or prepare a panel for a conference, concerning student preparedness (I don’t remember which). Anyway, she said that when she was working in the high schools she’d been a big supporter of social promotion, the idea that passing students even when they were not academically proficient in a subject would, by shielding them from the lowered self-esteem that would result from failing, ultimately help them succeed. Now, however, as a teacher in college, that she had to deal with students who couldn’t read or write adequately, or think their way through a basic math problem, she had to admit that social promotion as a policy was a mistake from the start.

Yet it would be too easy to blame students’ lack of preparedness solely on the schools, or on the educational experts who concocted social promotion and sold it to the school system. The quality of students’ academic performance is a result not only of the work they do in school; it is also a result of the quality of the lives they lead outside of school. If so many students are graduating from high school unprepared for college or career, in other words, it’s not just our pedagogical approach or the structure of our educational system that needs to be fixed. We need to do some real soul searching about what it means to be a kid in this culture, socio-economically, psychologically, emotionally and politically.

A woman in my evening class, which meets from 9:25 to 10:45 at night–and so you know the students who are taking it are dedicated to doing what they need to do–told me this week that the reason she hasn’t been coming to class is that her boyfriend, with whom she lives, is deeply and profoundly abusive. (This is the second time in as many semesters that a woman in my class has told me a story about this.) She’s been with him for seven years, since she was 13, and I am not going to go into any of the details she told me to explain her situation, since the specifics of domestic violence are not my concern here. As I read through Foderaro’s article, however, I found myself thinking about this student, who has already missed enough classes that I could fail her–but, of course, how can I fail her for that given what I now know about why she was absent; but then I wonder how is she ever going to be able to perform in my class to the best of her ability? And of course that doesn’t mean I will give her a grade she doesn’t deserve, but if I want to talk about the problem of student performance in my classes, how can I not be aware that every student has a life outside of class and that for far too many of those students, their lives impinge on their ability to do school work, not perhaps as extremely as domestic violence does, but it is an impingement nonetheless.

Neither schools nor schooling is going to solve the social problems that students bring with them into the classroom; nor should we expect them to. I guess, though, that I would like for a change–and this is not a criticism of Foderaros’ article or of anyone who says that schools need to do a better job of educating students–to hear people address the fact that schools and teachers do not operate in a vacuum that is created when the school or classroom door shuts so that students are, for the time they are in class, completely divorced from whatever their reality is outside the school building.

Not that publishing Arabic translations of literature written in Hebrew is without difficulty. Snaije refers to a Ha’aretz article about a Tunisian publisher who is “in negotiations with Palestinian Israeli translator Tayeb Ghanayem for his translations of Israeli works into Arabic” and who refused to be named because of concerns about his personal safety; and she also mentions a Lebanese publisher who will be bringing out in Arabic translations the work of Palestinian Israeli Sayed Kashua (who writes in Hebrew) but who (the publisher) declined to be quoted for the article.

Politics gets in the way of translating from Arabic into Hebrew as well. When Yael Lerer, founder of Andalus, an Israeli publishing house focusing on translation and named for the often romanticized historical period of the same name, went looking for titles to translate, most of the Egyptian authors she approached refused on principle to give her the rights to translate their work because it would represent “normalizing” relations with “the enemy.” (Other Arab authors granted her translation rights free of charge.) At the same time, the Egyptian writer Nael Eltoukhy (sorry, the site is in Arabic, but this is the one Snaije links to) translates Israeli books from Hebrew into Arabic, often without permission.

“Translating Israeli literature and writings in itself is not a taboo. The taboo is any dealing with Israeli publishing houses, since this is considered “normalization with the enemy”. But you always have your options. One of them is illegal translation, which is the best of a bad solution. I am sorry for this but I (and others), don’t have any other options.” Said Eltoukhy.

Illegal translation, too, happens on both sides of the divide. The Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information, for example, published an online Hebrew translation of Alaa al Aswany’s book The Yacoubian Building; but the fact, dictated by regional politics more than anything else, that people sometimes have to resort to what is essentially intellectual piracy in order to get works from one language translated into the other paled for me next to the fact that Andalus had to stop pubilshing because it was not selling enough books to stay afloat. Lerner says there is simply a “lack of interest” on the part of Israeli readers, which to me sounds more like the complacent arrogance–or is it the arrogant complacency?–of the powerful.

Israelis are not interested, I would wager, because they don’t think they need to be interested, because the lens through which they are given to view the Arab world around them–be it a lens of the right, left or center–is enough for them to feel engaged with that world. Of course I have no proof of this, but the phrase “lack of interest” recalls for me the reactions of many of the students from the introduction to literature classes I have taught over the years when they found out they would be reading works in translation from the MIddle East. “Why do I need to read this?” they would ask. “What does it have to with me?”

Inevitably, some of the students would come away from the semester feeling they had learned something worthwhile, but getting students to look past their resistance to what they perceived as “too foreign” was always a struggle. I’d try to make a game out of it, teaching them, for example, to pronounce the names of characters that contained sounds we don’t have in English. We’d all laugh at how hard it was, which would lead to a discussion about language and the body and how we become so conditioned, physically, culturally and psychologically, to making the sounds of our own language that making the sounds of another can feel like a kind of trespass. So, for example, people who speak English who have never had to make the guttural kh sound (which in English is usually transliterated as the Ch in Chanuka) will almost always talk about how it feels like they are hawking up phlegm in order to spit it out; the sound, in US culture, is just so damned impolite.

That discussion would often lead to a consideration of how different languages deal with different kinds of subjects–obscenities provide a really fun and useful example here, but so do things like levels of formality (tu vs. Usted in Spanish, or panmal and chondenmal in Korean)–and that would often become a conversation about how literature can be a window into another culture. Almost always, however, the majority of my students would react to these conversations with something that amounted to, “Gee, that’s nice and interesting and all, but what does it have to do with me?”

Now, my students are, most of them, not much older that 20 or 21 and so some of their self-centeredness may just be their youth speaking, but it’s hard not to see their lack of interest reflected in the fact, as I said above, that less than 3% of the books published in the United States are translations from another culture. By contrast, in some South American countries, by way of contrast, and in some Western European nations, the percentage is closer to 30–40%. If enough people in the US felt it was important enough to read books translated from other languages, publishers would respond by producing such books. If publishers believed they could make money by cultivating an interest in the literatures of other languages, they would find a way to create the market for those books. No matter which way you look at it, it’s hard not to see a serious case of cultural myopia at work here.

So I decided I would do something I have been thinking about for a long time: building an intro to literature course around actual books, not just anthologized poems and short stories. Given my time frame–I was assigned the course so close to the start of classes that I had to teach the first few meetings without a syllabus, schedule of readings or writing assignments–I decided to use books I’ve already read and so, to kill two birds with one stone, I chose two books of poetry from my 2001 collection and two novels. The first of these books of poetry is Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination, published by G. P. Putnam. Brutal Imagination contains two sequences, “Brutal Imagination,” which is a series of poems spoken in the voice of the Black carjacker invented by Susan Smith in 1994 to explain the disappearance of her two children, whom she in fact had murdered by running the car in which they were sleeping into a lake so they would drown, and “Running Man,” which also deals with race in America.

I chose Brutal Imagination because I liked the idea of reading with my students poetry that was written explicitly for the purpose of making sense of issues that they themselves deal with–and, of course, that I deal with too–if not on a daily basis, then certainly at various times throughout our lives, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how well my choice has worked out. The class I am talking about meets from 9:25–10:45 PM, which means that most of the people taking it are a little older and a little more mature than the students I have in my day classes. The group is racially mixed, though mostly white, and there are more men than women. The first thing I did was assign the Time magazine article I linked to above, so that we would all have the same set of facts in our heads as we discussed what Susan Smith had done. Conversation focused at first, of course, on how a mother could bring herself to murder her own children, but I moved us very quickly to a discussion of how she’d tried to cover up what she’d done–accusing an imaginary Black man of carjacking her and driving off with her kids–and what it might say about the cultural imagination of the United States not just that people were willing to believe her so easily, but that the entire nation, it seemed, mobilized in the effort to comfort her and help her get her kids back.

I expected this discussion to be full of tension. Indeed, I am sure that if I’d tried to teach this book, say, seven years ago, there would have been a great deal of tension: defensiveness on the part of at least some white students who felt themselves accused by the nature of the topic; anger on the part of those Black students who saw in the white students’ position a dismissal or trivialization of what they, as Black men and women, had lived through. What took place instead, however, was one of the most honest and respectful discussions about race and racism in the United States that I have ever witnessed in a college classroom. Granted, the students in this class may be an exceptional bunch, but I couldn’t help thinking as I went home that night that something has changed.

In terms of teaching, I am going to start this unit the way I always start talking about poetry, by getting students to grapple with the fact that poems have speakers and that these speakers, even when they speak in the first person, are fictional characters. (My hope is that this will set us up to discuss characterization more fully when we start reading the novels I’ve chosen.) Eady’s speaker, to whom I will refer from now on as The Black Man, poses some interesting challenges in this regard. Right in the very first poem, for example, he switches without comment but with a good deal of irony from the first to the third person:

How I Got Born

Though it’s common belief
That Susan Smith willed me alive
At the moment
Her babies sank into the lake

When called, I come.
My job is to get things done.
I am piecemeal.
I make my living by taking things.

So now a mother needs my clothed
In hand-me-downs
And a knit cap.

Whatever.
We arrive, bereaved
On a  stranger’s step.
Baby, they weep,
Poor child.

The first part of the poem is, if not familiar, at least straightforward. The Black Man describes himself as the man that white people summon–even if, like Susan Smith, only in our imaginations–to do certain kinds of dirty work. Suddenly, though, in the last stanza, a “we” enters the poem, in lines referring to the moment when Susan Smith knocks on someone’s door to report the supposed carjacking. Because he is a product of her imagination, therefore, he is there with her; and so, in a deeply ironic twist, the sympathy the stranger expresses is sympathy for The Black Man as well. After all, the way in which Smith hijacked his image is analogous, at least in a metaphorical sense, to the carjacking she has both used him to create and created him to commit. Indeed, not a few of the poems that follow take as their plot line this carjacking that never happened; and Eady weaves The Black Man’s consciousness of his dual nature–he is who he is as the image of the Black man in America, but he is also part of Susan Smith–throughout.

In “Who Am I?”, for example, he has the boys recognize “something familiar” in him:

Though my skin and sex are different, maybe
It’s the way I drive
Or occasionally glance back
With concern

In “The Lake,” Eady has The Black Man switch back and forth between first and third person:

When called,  I come.
My job
Is to get things
Done.

Our hands grip the wheel
As I steer toward
The lake.

The children and I
Have been driving
For days.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Brutal Imagination, but for now I am focused on this question of the speaker’s voice and how it illuminates the ways in which the image of The Black Man that Susan Smith conjured is an image we all have in us; and I am very curious to find out what my students make of it. We begin dealing with it tonight.

To start with, here’s how the Times describes the law the Mexican-American Studies program has been cited as violating:

The Arizona law warns school districts that they stand to lose 10 percent of their state education funds if their ethnic-studies programs are found not to comply with new state standards. Programs that promote the overthrow of the United States government are explicitly banned, and that includes the suggestion that portions of the Southwest that were once part of Mexico should be returned to that country.

Also prohibited is any promotion of resentment toward a race. Programs that are primarily for one race or that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of individuality are also outlawed.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that an educational program, especially one funded by taxpayers, which openly advocated for the overthrow of the United States would be problematic at best, and, mostly because I am ignorant of the history of the southwest United States and Mexico, I am open to hearing arguments about why suggesting that those portions of the US that once belonged to Mexico ought to be returned threatens the United States in its entirety–though I also wonder if the Arizona legislators responsible for passing this law have a similar stance towards talk about land reparations in other parts of the world, where territory has been acquired by one nation through military action and returning that land, or at least part of that land, is understood to be the just thing to do. More, I am specifically not using the example of how the US took land unjustly from the Native Americans because I know that even the suggestion that true justice would require returning that land, even while acknowledging that such a thing is not really possible, would be considered by some tantamount to admitting that the US was founded largely by expropriating, often by force, the land of others.

What really disturbs me about this description of the Arizona law, and what I think should frighten anyone, regardless of their political stance, is contained in the second paragraph. A course which has as one of its learning objectives the understanding that white people are evil would of course be objectionable and should of course be taken off the books immediately, but how does one teach about racism in the United States without teaching that the lion’s share of racial hatred and discrimination has been in one direction, from white people (and overwhelmingly white Christians at that) towards people of color? And how does one teach that without engendering some anger and, yes, resentment on the part of people of color towards white people and the institutions of white supremacy? But what really frightens me about this component of the law is that it makes the educator/educational institution responsible for the emotional effect a class will have on the students who take it. If teaching students about the injustices of history, especially injustices perpetrated against them and their people, is not supposed to make them angry, what other emotions might the government want to manage in the classroom? What other topics might come under a similar kind of scrutiny?

And what the hell does it mean that a program should not advocate for ethnic solidarity? Or, rather, that it ought to advocate for individuality as opposed to ethnic solidarity–as if those two things were mutually exclusive? When I taught a class in Asian American literature, there was no way, of course, that I could stand in front of the class and include myself in the Asian American experience that literature articulates, but was I teaching about an ethnic American historical experience that the Asian American students in my class had in common? Yes. Does the fact of that experience suggest that those students are part of a particular history and that there might indeed be an ethnic identity–which implies solidarities of all kinds–that emerges from this history to which these students can lay claim? Yes. Does that claim obviate any sense that these students are still individuals within that identity? No. Does that identity somehow deprive students, by definition, of the individualism that is such an important part of United States culture? No.

Interestingly, of course, similar programs for Black, Asian and Native American students have not been found to violate this law, and I would be willing to bet that at least one of the texts found to be problematic in the Mexican-American Studies Program, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, is taught in some of those other programs as well. (The other book cited in the article as having been found problematic is Occupied America, by Rodolfo F. Acuna.) Indeed, reading the article, it’s hard not to conclude that this law is more about the hurt feelings of Tom Horne, Arizona’s newly elected attorney general and formerly that state’s superintendent of public instruction. As the Times puts it:

Mr. Horne’s battle with Tucson over ethnic studies dates to 2007, when Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, told high school students there in a speech that Republicans hated Latinos. Mr. Horne, a Republican, sent a top aide, Margaret Garcia Dugan, to the school to present a different perspective. He was infuriated when some students turned their backs and raised their fists in the air.

At the same time, it’s also hard not to see Arizona’s law as part of a trend towards sanitizing the racial history of the United States and removing from the classroom–and therefore, potentially, from the public discourse that emerges as the people taught in that classroom become the leaders of our society–any sense of controversy or conflict over that history. Regardless of Alan Gribben’s intentions, for example, this will be one of the results of his Bowdlerized version of Huckleberry Finn, and it’s hard not to see a sanitizing motive in the Republicans’ decision to leave out of their reading of the US Constitution those passages that refer to slaves as “three fifths of all other persons” or to things like prohibition; just as its hard not to see this motive in at least some of the changes the Texas school board has de facto imposed on the educational institutions of our nation through the changes it adopted to its social studies curriculum.

So much that is good about this country has come about because people were willing to teach and to learn the difficult parts of our history and to struggle for rights and inclusion because they were angry and resentful over the injustices they and those like them suffered. We do ourselves a disservice by trying to pretend those struggles never happened or that they did not happen they way they did or by watering down how we teach them so that the stakes do not appear to be as high as they were.

I had conferences scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday of last week too–today is Monday, and it’s about 1 PM where I am–and out of three freshman comp classes, of about 20 students each, exactly 6 showed up. I could, I realize, require students to sign up for these conferences, but at this point in the semester, frankly, I am tired and I don’t have that much energy to invest in trying to get people who don’t care enough to come on their own to care about the paper they are trying to write. (I realize this is a little unfair; that there may be people who care but are sincerely busy enough that they won’t schedule the time unless they have an appointment, but those are not the majority of my students.) In fact, here is a student come to talk to me right now. Back in a minute.

///

I’m back, and it makes me happy to be able to say that the student who left my office is a real success story this semester. She is not likely to get better than a C+, but considering that she started out failing almost every assignment I gave, that she was convinced she just did not have it in her to write a competent essay, that C+ will represent more learning than most students accomplish. If I could give her a grade based purely on the amount of progress she has made and the effort she has clearly put into the draft we just reviewed, I would give her an A, or at least a B+.

Ironically, though, this student’s success illustrates very nicely what I wanted to write about when I started this post, except that when I started I wanted to use the students who haven’t been showing up as my starting point.

When I applied for promotion to full professor last year, one of the things I had to do was write a brief statement of my teaching philosophy. This was my favorite part of putting my promotion proposal together because, while I have been teaching for nearly 25 years and of course have had a philosophy (or philosophies) during all that time, this was the first time I’d ever had to articulate what matters most to me about the teaching of writing, understood both as the process and the product of what I do in the classroom. This, in part, is what I wrote:

To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect seriously. As a teacher, primarily of writing but also of literature, I measure my success not in how many A’s or B’s I give out—since grades reflect the surface of learning, not necessarily its quality—but in whether my students have begun to take on the responsibility not simply of having ideas, but of having the audacity, because we lie to our students if we do not acknowledge that it takes courage, to attempt to communicate those ideas in words compelling enough to command a reader’s attention above and beyond the fact that they were written in response to a classroom assignment.… As writers, we exercise this responsibility—we hold ourselves accountable—most obviously through the process of revision. In order for revision to be meaningful, however, in order for revision even to be possible, a writer must have a sufficient stake in what she or he is attempting to revise that the work of seeing it anew feels both worthwhile and necessary.

I originally wanted to write about how frustrating and debilitating it is to have so many students who, no matter how hard I try to craft their assignments so that they can pick topics in which they have a stake, apparently do not take this responsibility at all seriously; it is a pleasure to have written instead about one who clearly does.

I really do understand the value of having a schools chancellor with a strong business management background. I do think, however, that anyone chosen to be schools chancellor who has no experience in education should be required, if he or she wants the job, to spend a year in the classroom first. The school system might be an organization that can be run like a business in many ways; the classroom, however, is not–if only because learning is not a business transaction–and the outgoing chancellor, Joel Klein, it seems to me, very clearly did not understand that. My wife, who teaches in one of the toughest school districts in New York City, tells me that she and her colleagues are demoralized by this appointment because they feel like, yet again, they will be led by someone who doesn’t really understand not simply the nature of education, but the actual work of being a teacher.

In higher education, at least at the community college level where I teach, this tendency to treat the process of education as a business transaction finds expression in an increasingly common metaphor that frames students in the classroom as customers and teachers as customer service representatives. The wrongheadedness of this way of thinking astounds me, not because I think I should not be accountable to both my students and the people who employ me for the quality of the work I do as a teacher, and not because I think there is anything wrong with measuring that accountability in ways that are as formal and rigorous as those used to measure a business’ success–though that does not mean I think the same methods are appropriate to both situations–but because if I have to think of my students as my customers, if I have to think of myself as a customer service representative, then, frankly, the incentive I have is to make sure they are happy and satisfied with the results they receive, which is not the same thing as making sure they have learned something.

Several years ago, though, I started introducing the research and documentation by giving students a sample documented essay, something that I originally wrote as part of the introduction for an encyclopedia on marriage I was developing with a book packager that, slightly edited, fit almost precisely the model of the documented essay freshman composition students at my college are required to write. The one significant way in which my essay, “A Short, Personal History of Courtship in the United States,” differs from the documented essay as my students were taught it in previous writing classes they have taken is that I introduce the essay with a personal story and use the first-person pronoun throughout, two things that writing teachers traditionally–or maybe I mean traditional writing teachers–insist are completely taboo. (The thesis statement also doesn’t show up until the middle of the conclusion, but that is not a difference that is relevant to this post.)

The pedagogical value in using something I have written, something personal that was originally intended for publication in a book and that breaks some of the rules, lies of course in making the notion of research “real” for students in a way that other kinds of sample essays might not, providing them with an example of how research works in a real-world writing situation, as opposed to the inescapably artificial situation of the classroom. What I want to write about, though, has less to do with pedagogy than with the reaction my students had to the story I use as an introduction. Here it is:

Shortly before we broke up for good, Beth asked for her letters back. At first, I didn’t want to give them up. I knew if our relationship ended while she still had them—and I knew our relationship would be ending soon—I’d probably never see them again. But when she told me that she needed them, that she wanted to read them next to my letters to try and understand how she had come to be as angry at me as she was, I found it impossible to refuse. Part of me hoped she was looking for a way to patch things up. Still, it took me a long time to seal the letters into the envelope that would carry them back to her. I picked out pages at random, read passages aloud and was surprised over and over again by how immediately they conjured for me the time and place where I first held them in my hands; and also how, even reading them nearly seven years after she’d first written them, I still imagined I could feel her breath on my cheek as she spoke her words into my ear.

When Beth and I met, we were working at a summer camp in Cold Spring, New York—she was nineteen; I was twenty—and she was involved with two other men, the one she planned to marry and the one she was seeing to make sure that the one she planned to marry really was the one. I had no interest in turning that triangle into a square, but I liked Beth immediately, and she liked me, and we soon were spending as much time together as our work schedules and her other relationships allowed. We never thought of ourselves as a couple, but our friendship soon eclipsed Beth’s connection to the guy she was seeing to confirm her desire to marry the other man in her life. At the end of the summer we exchanged addresses, promising to write as soon as we were able.

I don’t remember whose letter started our correspondence, but over time, the letters we exchanged grew more and more intimate, becoming a deeply personal conversation of the sort few people ever have face-to-face. Through the mail, we could talk openly about our friendship and ourselves, about who we wanted to be for each other and our hopes and fears for the lives we wanted to lead. We wrote about love and identity (I was Jewish; she was Catholic), commitment and fidelity (she was still involved with the potential husband; I didn’t have a girlfriend on campus), and through what we wrote I felt with an intensity I had never felt before. The honesty we shared in our letters was as complete as I’d known, and it was both exhilarating and frightening. On the one hand, our relationship felt more real to me than the ones I saw my friends on campus slipping in and out of, almost like they were trying on and discarding new clothes. On the other hand, the people in those relationships could see and touch each other whenever they wanted, as Beth and I could not, and I was afraid that if she got married, our letter-writing would stop and I’d be left with nothing.

My friends thought I was crazy giving up the chance to be with women on campus to sit in my room and write letters to a woman I never saw, but I was hooked, and so was Beth, and eventually, as we told and retold on paper the story of what was happening between us, the story itself became more compelling to her than the life she saw herself having with her near-fiancé, and she broke up with him to be with me. Our relationship lasted nearly seven years.

We couldn’t have known it at the time, but our relationship was the result of a perfectly conventional nineteenth-century middle-class courtship, even the fact that Beth asked for her letters back when she was ready to break up with me. For the letters represented a commitment she no longer felt and so she felt it was inappropriate for me to have them, just as Mary Pearson in 1808 did not want Ephraim Abbott to keep her letters if he thought it was time for them to marry. “[F]orming a connexion [sic] for life,” she wrote when she asked for them back, required “great deliberation,”¹ and she was concerned he would find in her words unwarranted evidence that her reservations were not as great as they were.

In fact, nearly everything I experienced in my correspondence with Beth is attested to in the letters written by the middle-class lovers of a hundred and two hundred years ago. For Eldred Simkins, to take one example, reading a letter from his beloved was an experience of her physical presence not so different from mine when I read Beth’s. It was, he wrote, “as if we were talking together and that you were…sitting by me….”² Indeed, for the men and women of the 1800s, letters served not as substitutes for, but rather as extensions of, their lovers’ physical presence. Courtship was a process of revealing mind and body through words on the page, for while the lovers of the time certainly expressed their feelings for each other physically, it was in their letters that what they expressed became transformed into love and commitment. Or in which they discovered that love and commitment sufficient for marriage did not exist between them.

“Wait. You wrote letters?” one of my students asked. “How could you wait that long for a response?”

“Damn!” another one chimed in. “You two must really have had focus.”

“No, seriously,” still another one couldn’t help but ask, “you spent all that time at your desk writing her? Why couldn’t you just pick up a phone?”

I explained that all I had was a rotary phone on the wall in my dorm and so it was not like today when you can pick up your cell phone and walk outside to get some privacy. That explanation my students understood, but some of them–maybe more than some; it was hard to judge how many were agreeing with those who spoke up–just could not imagine sending a message to someone that you knew was not going to get there before a couple of days had passed and to which you knew you would not get a response until maybe a week later at best.

“But so much will have happened between the time the letter was sent and the time it was read. How did you remember what you wrote about?” Discussion ensued about the value of being able to send a quick text message and get a quick response. Some students pointed out that you really can’t communicate in a text message with quite the same depth that you can in a letter, or even in a long email, but most said that was what phone calls and face-to-face conversations were for.

I am not a Luddite; I value digital technology as much as anyone, I suppose, but this discussion made more aware than I have ever been not only of the age difference between myself and my students, but also of the cultural differences that have arisen as a result of digital technology.

1. Quoted in Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America, by Ellen K. Rothman, 18
2. Quoted in Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America, by Karen Lystra, 21

I don’t remember at all what I said or how I reacted in response, though I can still see his finger pointing to the picture and I can hear the matter-of-fact tone of his voice, and I know I was standing next to him at his desk and I have a vague sense of understanding that he was showing me something he did not want the rest of the class to know he was showing me; but I did not feel threatened or frightened or in any way uneasy. Indeed, for decades afterwards, whenever I remembered this incident, I thought of it as an indication of how mature Mr. Abernathy thought I was–and I was mature for my age, maybe too mature; my mother tells the story of how I decided to leave the reproductive system out of a fifth grade oral presentation I did on the human body because I didn’t think my classmates would be able to “handle it”–and I took pleasure in the thought that Mr. Abernathy had made a point of giving me a little bit of extra attention. Recently, however, it occured to me to wonder why Mr. Abernathy’s sharing with me that image of a microscopic penis is the only moment of extra attention I can remember.

I was listening to the radio, probably NPR News, and something someone said–I have no recollection of what–brought back to me a moment from Mr. Abernathy’s class in which he was telling us a little bit about his family. As all students do, I think, when teachers talk about themselves, especially teachers that they like, I was listening very closely, enjoying the chance he was giving me to know a bit about who he was outside of the classroom; but then he started talking about his daughter, and I believe he said she was around our age, maybe older or younger by a year, but certainly around the age when she would soon be entering puberty, if she had not entered it already. I wish I could remember more of what he said or the order in which he said it, but I do remember very clearly that he was telling us that he would walk into the bathroom when she was taking a shower, or even when she was using the toilet in order to do whatever business he had to do there. He acknowledged that she was embarrassed by this, but he said he was trying to teach her that, within families, there did not need to be the kinds of boundaries that existed between strangers, that our bodies were nothing to be ashamed of and that she certainly had no reason to hide her body from him, her father.

The inappropriateness of this kind of revelation by a teacher in a sixth grade class, I hope, is obvious, as are the questions about what was going on in his household that the revelation raises, but since I have no facts on which to base any further discussion of either of those issues, I am going to leave them there, as obvious implications. I can, however, discuss the fact that these are the only two concrete, conscious memories I have of the time I spent in Mr. Abernathy’s class. Moreover, there is no way to escape the further fact that placing the first memory in the context of the second raises disturbing questions about Mr. Abernathy himself. I would, of course, prefer not to think about those questions, not least because there is, now, no way to answer them; but I also cannot unask them. I just think it’s sad that it doesn’t matter whether the questions arise more because I am thinking about these memories in the context of our current hyperawareness of child sexual abuse than because there was indeed something dicey that my sixth grade gut picked up about Mr. Abernathy that I am only now allowing myself consciously to recognize. I will never be able to remember sixth grade or the man who had been one of my favorite teachers without the taint those questions leave.