Many readers of this blog, and much of the Following Christ 08 community, are students in doctoral programs hoping to go on to teach in universities and colleges here and abroad.
As grad students you’re already a significant part of the fabric of the university (as an
institution and community) and that will continue (and only heighten) when you get your first position as an assistant professor or instructor. As part of the university, it’s important to ask critical questions about the institution and about higher education in the United States, in general. In fact, InterVarsity is a university movement so we’re interested in asking the same questions too.
The latest edition (June 2008) of The Atlantic features an interesting and provocative article by an anonymous writer.
Professor X is an adjunct instructor of English at two institutions: a small private college and a community college. These institutions are “colleges of last resort.” In fact, they’re colleges for people who never really wanted to go to college in the first place. There are new high school graduates aiming for the police force who need some college credit to get into the academy. Some students are women who have returned to education after a twenty-year hiatus as raising the kids. Suffice it to say, there are no “organization kids”.
At first glance this might seem positive. Education is generally agreed to be a good thing that opens opportunities for those who pursue it. However, the reality, at least in this one classroom, is that these students are not making it. They are failing English 101 and 102, if not once, multiple times. Writes X, “…some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.” They are in an educational system that is, in some ways, taking advantage of them.
This reality prompts Professor X to question the purpose of post-secondary education as it exists today. Routinely failing nine out of fifteen students in his classes, X wonders when he will be confronted by his department chair. It never comes.
“They don’t mention all those students and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as if often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces–social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students–that have coalesced into a tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct professor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.”
Non-traditional education is one of the ways colleges increase their income. Evening classes maximize the use of college facilities and adjunct professors/instructors are cheap labor. In economic terms it seems like a slam dunk for the university. However, just because something is economically efficient doesn’t make it right or make it tend toward the flourishing of those members of the community involved.
In short, Professor X has started to question the ideal of a B.A. or B.S. for everyone. What about a vocational track? Why send everyone to college? It might sound, “harsh and classist and British,” but since when does everyone need a college education? And doesn’t the fact that everyone gets one necessarily dilute its meaning? How many people go into professions with solely an undergraduate degree anymore?
Most of us probably don’t think about this a whole lot. After all, we study or work in elite universities. However, when yours is the red pen that causes the American dream to crash and burn, you might.
