A Professor Remembers. Thoughts on the College Enrollment Crash

 A Professor Remembers

 Thoughts on the college enrollment crash

 

The campus sprawls over hundreds of acres and includes a quaint waterfall, a hike into bear territory, and Manhattan skyline views. When she is going for a walk, university lawns, bridges, and ponds intrude into her route. 

 

After Professor Josephine K. lost her teaching job, she would avert her eyes when skirting the campus' ragged border. She feared memories burning like a thorn in her heart. Instead something else happened. Rather than a pang, new awarenesses rose to the surface like the ugly head of long-suppressed boil.

 

A year after she lost her job, she stopped averting her eyes. Her eyes raked the parking lots mercilessly.

 

At first, the emails arrived at the end of the semester. Then they arrived throughout the semester.

 

"Dear Colleague, as we consider final grades, we must remember that our university relies on student tuition to keep the lights on. Work with students. Do what you can to contribute to their success and to our continuation as an institution."

 

"Work with students"? The college president was using up bandwidth to adjure her to "work with students"? She was a teacher. Of course she "worked with students." The department asked for her office hours. She laughed. Her office hours were whenever students would agree to come, from first thing in the morning, after they got off the night shift, to late in the day, after they'd waited for everyone else to leave. She lured students with promises of higher grades, with snacks, tarot card readings, soft music; she paid their bus fare so they could come when broke. Of course the university never compensated her for doing this. She loved doing this. 

 

The emails become less cozy and more end-of-the-world. Professors who assigned F grades were threatening the institution's very existence. Keep the student in the school, no matter what his performance, professors were told.

 

Prof. K. woke from her false sense of security. She searched online. "College enrollment decline" turned up many scary links. There were fewer Americans of college age. COVID shutdowns lowered numbers. Doubts about the value of college dropped the numbers even lower. "Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week," according to an April, 2024 Hechinger Report headline.

 

And then the inevitable. An email informing Prof. K. that she would be offered no classes for the next semester. Prof. K. suspected that she was being let go because she was, as she was repeatedly informed, too "white," too "right wing" and simply "too old." Her suspicion that her firing had something to do with ideology faltered when even tenured professors, even the ideologically desirable Marxists, were dismissed to retreat to their second homes in low-tax states.

 

And then the entire department collapsed. An academic discipline established over hundreds of years by world-famous scholars and rigorous research was tossed in the dumpster. The department would now devote itself to social justice, to BLM and CRT, to pronoun policing. Even if they wanted her back, she would not grasp the knob of the door they'd slammed in her face. She couldn't participate in prostituting the university into a hostage to mob hysteria, into credentialed certification of in an internet social contagion, into an arm of the thought police, into a joke.

 

Prof. K. was bereft. Others were not sympathetic. "Every campus in this country should burn to the ground. They are Marxist gulags." "Fewer students enrolling? Just what this country needs!" "We don't need all these artsy fartsy courses! We need more HVAC technicians!"

 

Prof. K. walked away, alone, a world-obliterating blizzard howling in her ears, an Ice Age winter in her heart.

 

These incendiaries raged at flammable books full of words, questions, problems, theories, none of which the philistines could apply to staunch a dripping faucet or make a million bucks and retire by forty. The philistines were sneering at the very concept of the university. And these were comfortable people, served by electronic gadgets, enjoying next-day delivery from Amazon of their every whim.

 

In Europe, in 1088 AD, the average life expectancy at birth was thirty. People ate gruel. Fewer than two in ten could read and write. There was constant warfare involving Muslims, Vikings, Byzantines, Pagans, and Christians; there was leprosy, plague, and smallpox; there was no central heating, no electric lights, no flush toilets. And there was a university. The University of Bologna was founded amidst the hardships and uncertainty of the Middle Ages. People who dined on gruel and for whom illumination by which to read was a luxury decided that a university was a necessity. Who would need poetry more than people beset by filth, war, and disease?

 

Prof. K. had taught her students poetry.

 

Prof. K., a lover mourning the death of her beloved, allowed herself a taboo stroll down memory lane.

 

Class had spent a good hour on this one poem alone, W. H. Auden's "Shield of Achilles." At first, to the students, "Shield" was just four hundred and seventeen blots on a page. Though they all claimed English as a first language, they didn't understand, not just the entire gist of the poem; they didn't understand many of the poem's individual words. Ironically, they had no idea what the word "unintelligible" meant. "Forge," "arbitrary," "urchin": foreign to them.

 

Not only did they not understand these words, they were not aware that they did not understand these words. They lacked the fundamental gifts of mental focus: the ability to look at a problem and isolate its most challenging features, to prioritize solving those problems, and to figure out how to solve them. That technical skill, the ability to solve problems, could transfer from the analysis of a poem to the analysis of a stalled engine.

 

Many of them had never looked up a word in a dictionary. Requiring this was condemned as "colonizing" them, as communicating to them that some dusty, dead-white-male outside themselves was authoritative, while they were lacking something. The student was a customer and the customer was always right.

 

"Students, are there any words in the poem that you don't understand?"

 

Prof. K. scanned the class. No raised hands. Their strategy in class, their strategy during an election, their strategy when discussing love or death with a friend or relative, was to lay low, hide their complete incomprehension, and sneak glances at the addictive phone in their laps. Eventually they would write down whatever the person in charge inevitably, after the usual blah-blah-blah, would tell them what to write down, what to think, what would appear on the final exam.

 

Prof. K., through a calm demeanor, placed an ice pack on the students' panic. Things can be hard; we can do hard things. She walked them through understanding, one step at a time. Prof. K. knew they were lying, to themselves and to her. Her first job was to bring that lie to their conscious awareness.

 

"Jamal, what does 'forge' mean?" And slowly, realizing he couldn't give an answer. Jamal realized he didn't know the word "forge." He had just gotten used to hearing, seeing, speaking, and writing words and having no idea what the words actually meant.

 

Jamal's blind embrace of his own ignorance would serve well anyone trying to sell anything to Jamal. Were it not for this class, this class that taught him something so apparently useless as poetry, this class that forced him to feel uncomfortable for not knowing that he did not know the definition of the word "forge," Jamal would never look up words like "capital gains," or "misdemeanor," or "stage four," or the history of phrases like "peace in our time."

 

Prof. K. defined the word "forge." She drew a forge on the blackboard; the illustration was intentionally inept. She bragged about her artistic skills. Students laughed at her braggadocio and at her forge. Good. She asked, "Jamal, what's a forge?" He repeated the definition she had given. Again good.

 

Back to the poem.

 

"How many people are interacting here?" Figuring out that much took quite a while. Slowly but surely, students recognized, in the mess of words, "he" and "she."

 

"Who is he? Who is she?" Students made wild guesses. They didn't find the answer till the very last stanza. "He" was Hephaestos, the "thin-lipped armorer." "She" was "Thetis of the shining breasts," mother of Achilles. They'd heard of Achilles. Something in this mess of words was beginning to make sense. This was all somehow related to Ancient Greece, to Brad Pitt, and a YouTube video that's been viewed ten million times.

 

"What is happening here?"

 

"Rape!" Amir asserted.

 

"Yes, the poem refers to rape. Is that the main idea? Does every stanza refer to rape?"

 

Amir was louder this time. "Rape is mentioned right here." He pointed to the line.

 

"Amir, is rape referenced in the first stanza?"

 

Amir was looking everywhere in class except at the poem.

 

"Amir?"

 

Amir was angry. He had provided an answer, and for some reason this woman was not accepting what a man said. She was humiliating him in front of the class. For Amir, the key activity was not finding truth. It was establishing appropriate dominance of male over female.

 

"Is rape referenced in the last stanza? Amir the answer isn't written on the hallway door. Look at the poem."

 

Amir dropped his head. He would not speak again. She could hope that Amir realized that merely being fast, loud, and intransigent was not the same as being accurate, and that you can't make a document say what you want it to say without actually citing evidence from the document itself, rather than from your hunger to feel right. A lesson that might benefit SCOTUS justices interpreting the Constitution. Amir, though, would, once again, report to the Dean that he was a battered victim of Islamophobia.

 

Prof. K. struggled to remain focused.

 

"Students, look again at the title, at the first stanza, at the last stanza."

 

And suddenly someone got it that Hephaestos was making a shield for Thetis to give to her son Achilles. Achilles was an A-list warrior. Proud mom Thetis was foolishly confident that her son would return from battle as immaculately beautiful as he was before he left. She commissioned Hephaestos to engrave on her son's shield pretty pictures of happy life. Hephaestos, defying Thetis' wishes, conjured designs of ugliness and death. To know why Hephaestos did this, they needed to study up on the bio of this ancient deity. Prof. K. displayed portraits of Hephaestos: classical marble, a Baroque oil painting, contemporary comic book renditions. In each image, thousands of years apart, Hephaestos was a muscular blacksmith wielding a hammer over a fiery forge.

 

Hephaestos was unique among the gods. He was ugly, he was crippled, and he worked for a living. Zeus could gad about, turn himself into an noble eagle or an elegant swan, and rape the pretty boy Ganymede and also Leda, a princess. Hephaestos had to punch a clock. He didn't make art. He made weapons of death. Zeus forced Aphrodite to marry Hephaestos. Since Hephaestos was so ugly, he was the best fit; other gods would be less jealous of the ugly guy who got the prettiest girl at the prom. The best laid plans of men – and the best laid plans of gods as well – often go awry. Aphrodite cheated on Hephaestos, including with one of his clients, Ares, the god of war. The handsome god of war.

 

Hephaestos knew that pretty was impermanent. Other perfect young specimens commissioned shields from him, and came back, yes, with their shields, not on them, but also with permanent scars, internal and external.

 

Whoa, the students realized. This back story totally explained why Hephaestos went full goth. Gaining fluency in this one little episode of Western Civilization opened up the poem to them, and opened up their empathy and understanding of life. But, wait there's more. Students had to apply more patience, more curiosity.

 

"'A million boots in line,'" Prof. K. quoted the poem. "Ancient Greek warriors wore sandals, not boots. And they never had an army of a million men. What's going on in that line?"

 

Some students were getting bored. Too much thinking that lead to more thinking, rather than to an immediate payoff. Prof. K. knew it would always be like this. Some students had the stamina and the training to delay gratification; others were twitching messes of impatience, abandoned by bad parents, manipulated by bad TV, dehumanized by internet masterminds.

 

There was always a calculation. How to keep the largest possible percentage of the class engaged. At times, only one student was aware. It was always tempting to make eye contact with that one student, who'd be mesmerized by the professor's exclusive attention, and shut out the rest of the class. But that was not her job; the rest of the class was. She was constantly trying to perform the next stunt to spread awareness like light spreading through clouds at dawn. She wanted the light to diffuse as far and as fast as possible, but she wasn't willing to compromise with darkness to hasten that process.

 

She wrote "anachronism" on the board. "This word comes from Ancient Greece. Do you see any word parts that are familiar to you? How about 'chron' as in 'chronology,' 'synchronize,' 'chronometer,' 'chronic'?"

 

"Time" a student called out. One student. The rest had no idea.

 

"Yup. So, students, every time you use one of those words, 'CHRONic,' or 'synCHRONize you are participating in an unbroken chain of human conversation that the Ancient Greeks began over three thousand years ago. Greek has been called 'the world's oldest living recorded language.' You are participating in a conversation that includes Euclid's geometry, Antigone's sacrifice, Aesop's fables, the Hippocratic oath, and the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae."

 

Some students seemed impressed, but you never know. They could have been thinking about a bad date, or sucking up to the teacher, or suppressing a fart.

 

The teacher continued. "Greeks made words antonyms by putting an 'a' or 'an' in front of them. 'Ahistorical' means 'not historical.' 'Anonymous' means no name. An 'apolitical' person has no interest in politics. 'Anachronistic' means that something doesn't fit in the time around it. Do you find any other anachronistic elements in this poem?"

 

"Barbed wire."

 

"Yup. Barbed wire was invented in the nineteenth century."

 

There is silence. The students have run out of ideas.

 

"Students, there's an allusion – " she breaks to explain the word "allusion." "There's an allusion to a big, big historical event in this poem." She looks at them; her look is a challenge.

 

Silence. Confusion. Pleading. Butts squirming.

 

"You don't see it? You can't find it?"

 

They couldn't.

 

She pointed to the lines. "Three pale figures were led forth and bound / to three posts driven upright in the ground." She paused. No recognition. She despaired. It's one thing that the kids didn't know Ancient Greek deities. They also didn't recognize an allusion to the God whose story had dominated their civilization for over a thousand years.

 

Prof. K. drew a schematic hill on the blackboard. She drew one cross on the left, one cross at the crest of the hill, and one cross on the right.

 

"To what does this picture allude?" she asked.

 

"Jesus," Valentina said. She was a religious Latina.

 

"Yes," K. said to Valentina. "Explain."

 

Explaining was also hard for students. They were most comfortable in worlds where no one explained anything to anyone. No one had to explain when it was time to cheer at a football game. A mother would not explain recipes. She'd rip a spoon out of her daughter's hands and demonstrate, and then, hand the spoon back and expect a perfect performance. No one in Hispanic or Muslim families explained why the daughter had to lose study time to family chores, while the son was allowed all the time and funds he required to get that pharmacy degree. Explaining a pain to a doctor or an unexpected grind to a mechanic, or, as Prof. K. knew from working other jobs, explaining how the phone system worked to a new hire, was an insurmountable challenge. A class in poetry might make the next new hire's first day on the job run more smoothly.

 

"Valentina, how do we know that these lines refer to Jesus' crucifixion?"

 

Valentina shrugged. "They just do."

 

"Okay, Valentina, let's break it down. Auden, the poet, tells us that three men are lead away. Why does it matter that there are three men?"

 

"Cuz that's how Jesus was crucified. Between two thieves."

 

"Yes. Great. Auden doesn't use the word crucifixion. What does he say? Find the line. Tell me it says."

 

Valentina was lost, without the familiar word "crucifixion," she couldn't speak.

 

Someone else could. Jeff, looking bored, raised his skinny arm sleeved in a denim shirt, "Three posts driven upright in the ground." This was all obvious to Jeff. He was here because he was kicked out of a better school. He offered this answer just to get the torture over with quicker.

 

"Thanks, Jeff," Prof. K. said, avoiding the temptation to wink at him, to seal what both knew, that they were spontaneously seeing what those around them needed to be invited to see. Jeff had dropped in on office hours and shown her his own poetry. She encouraged him to publish.

 

"Students, we don't know if the Trojan War was historical or ahistorical. But if it did happen, it occurred more than three thousand years ago. When did Jesus live?"

 

Not even Jeff knew. They didn't know why the current year, the year when they were – temporarily – alive, indicated the number of years since Jesus' birth. They didn't know that "BC" meant "before Christ." Who stole their history from them, and why?

 

"Okay. Well. Jesus lived two thousand years ago. Achilles, if he was a real person, lived three thousand years ago. Why, in a poem about Achilles, does the poet mention Jesus? Jesus wouldn't be born for another thousand years."

 

The students stared at the professor. A few looked at Jeff. Well, at least they were intrigued enough to want an answer.

 

"Why do writers use anachronisms?"

 

Nothing.

 

"What's the main idea of this poem?"

 

Nothing.

 

"What is Hephaestos thinking and feeling?"

 

"That life sucks," they said.

 

"Yeah, I agree. Hephaestos feels that life sucks. In engraving these ugly scenes, is Hephaestos commenting just on Achilles? Just on the Trojan war?"

 

No, they said. All war.

 

"Did people just do bad things in the past, or do we, people, do bad things every day?"

 

Every day.

 

"Are people ever going to be perfect? Are we ever going to stop being cruel to each other?"

 

No.

 

"Can anything perfect humanity? If we elect a new president, or take a new medicine, or if we all meditate, will we ever escape our dark side?"

 

No.

 

"So tell me now why Auden uses anachronism."

 

They could. A poem that was mere blots on a page to them an hour ago, was suddenly a gate, and they were passing through that gate, with their minds, and the world was a wider place, and they were stronger and equipped with more skills.

 

And then class ended and Prof. K.'s students were released. They could go back to lives where the prettiest girl and the strongest boy were always the best person, where you can just stick your fingers in your ears and chant "La, la, la" when someone says something you don't like or don't understand, where appetites are to be satisfied as quickly as possible with no thought to long-term consequences, where the pain of people remote from oneself is to be ignored or laughed at. Where no one has time to suspend judgment, no time to float in air between loving or hating, between joining up or striking out, and, no time, thus suspended, simply to devote time to working to understand.

 

But for fifteen weeks, for a hundred and fifty minutes each week, they were in her class. And they would think and they would feel and they would try and they would succeed.

 

"Every campus in this country should burn to the ground!"

 

Prof. K. walked away from such conversations, a world-obliterating blizzard howling in her ears, an Ice Age winter in her heart.

 

We don't need doctors who know how to winkle information out of taciturn patients. We don't need patients who know how to recognize and discover the meanings of words that they don't know. We don't need consumers who know how to plow through mumbo jumbo. We don't need men and women who can speak to each other of their love and be heard and understood. We don't need, as a society, to remember from whence we came, and what happened along the way.

 

Oh, yes we do.

 

But she was no longer a teacher. So she avoided the campus. Until that day when she girded her loins – "to gird one's loins" a four-hundred year old phrase from the King James Bible – until that day when she girded her loins and turned her head and looked at the campus, specifically, at the parking lots. When she had begun teaching there, the parking lots were always full. Late students always complained that they couldn't park. "I don't have a car," she would say. "I walk here. In any case, if I can get to class on time, so can you."

 

The parking lots now offered many empty slots, very near campus buildings, throughout the day. Such easy parking would have been unheard of a decade before. Would this university, too, go under?

 

When she finally, more than a year after she lost her job, girded her loins and turned her wide-open eyes to the parking lots, and saw all those empty slots, she feared she would ache for the teaching she was no longer doing. But instead of sadness, a long suppressed boil rose to the surface of her skin.

 

Universities were not dying just because of the philistines outside the walls. Universities were parasitized from the inside. Termites saw an almost thousand-year old structure. Rather than cherishing its transcendent service to humanity, all they saw was the skeleton of wooden scaffolding, wood on which they could batten, a structure that they could transform into their own droppings.

 

Her first year at the university, her superior waved bait under her nose. Free food. "There is a professor training workshop. Come. There will be free food."

 

Celebrity professors like gender theorist Judith Butler earn almost $300,000 annually. They enjoy perks like paid sabbaticals and full salaries for teaching a couple of courses with four or five of the best students.

 

By some estimates, seventy-five percent of faculty are not tenure-track. Adjuncts teach large classes of often unruly, less motivated underclassmen. Most adjuncts make less than minimum wage for hours worked. They lack job security, benefits, and pensions. 

 

Margaret Mary Vojtko was, like Prof. K., a devout Catholic. Margaret Mary's father was a Pennsylvania steel worker; K.'s father was a Pennsylvania coal miner. Like K., Margaret Mary had four older brothers. She spoke Slovak in her childhood home. She eventually learned five languages. Like K., Margaret Mary taught "artsy fartsy" courses: French and medieval literature. Her religion, her ethnicity, and her blue collar background are despised by university elites.

 

Even so, Margaret Mary taught at Duquesne for twenty-five years. She earned about $10,000 annually, without health benefits or a pension, so she continued teaching till she was 83. Medical bills for cancer treatment overwhelmed her. Unable to heat her home, she slept in a campus office. Campus police removed her. She died "destitute and nearly homeless."

 

Why did Margaret Mary do it? Why did K.? When they could earn more as a cashier in a dollar store? For the same reason that scholars in Bologna said leprosy and the plague can take care of themselves. As long as we are here – temporarily – we are going to live the life of the mind. "Teaching is a devotion, a dedication. Too many people look upon it as a job, a source of income." So said Margaret Mary Vojtko.

 

Prof. Josephine K. learned from childhood poverty how to wring the most out of everything. She bought in bulk and she bought the best quality she could afford. Good olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and the right cheese could elevate three boiled Yukon gold potatoes into a satisfying dinner. But when her superior promised "free food" at a "professor training workshop," she thought: "Chicken! Sandwiches! Lettuce! Mayonnaise!" and she went.

 

It was easy to differentiate tenure-track faculty and adjuncts. The adjuncts' clothes were more threadbare. Adjunct eyes darted about. What was it safe to do, to say; what chair was safe to sit in? Tenure-track swaggered in, often late, sat wherever they damn well pleased, and threw their arms across the chair next to them.

 

Tenure-track had great teeth. They graduated from the Ivy League and studied trendy fields. Adjuncts tended to be the "last-name-ends-in-a-vowel" demographic. Lots of Italians and Slavs who got their degrees in old-fashioned disciplines like "English" at state schools.

 

First session. "Describe a time in your life when you were a victim of racism, when you realized racism existed, or when you yourself were racist." Next: switch out "sexism" for "racism."

 

A young and beautiful black woman spoke. She was in grade school. Everyone was going to the cool girl's birthday party, except she wasn't invited. This was because of white supremacy.

 

Prof. K. did not believe the story. Prof. K. knew that racism existed. She just didn't believe this particular story from this particular teller. Like Amir, she obsessed on one factoid and refused to consider any other interpretation. Every kid who wasn't the captain of the football team or the cheerleading squad has at least one story about not being invited to a party that everybody else was going to. And everybody interpreted that story as proof of their own obsession. "No one liked me because I was fat / had pimples / stuttered / was new to the school / peed my pants on the class trip."  

 

For the sexism episode, the facilitator got everyone in the proper mood of righteous indignation by showing clips from a documentary meant to expose sexism in media.

 

K. raised her hand. "I grew up Catholic." At first, some nodded, as if to say, "Tell it, sister! I too escaped from the church's evil clutches!"

 

K. continued. "And I was taught modesty. So the video you showed about how media encourage girls to wear minimal clothing and twerk and buy lots of false eyelashes and tolerate obscene language and give random boys blowjobs on demand at parties – all of that stuff – I just don't go there. Modesty hasn't been bulletproof, but it's better armor than nothing at all. If your worldview is just one of 'if it feels good, do it,' with what ideology do you protect girls? Because sex does feel good in the moment. Teasing guys feels like power. It's only later that you have regrets. My Catholic tradition protected me. How do you protect girls?"

 

A rage-filled word salad emerged, but the question was never answered.

 

K. continued to attend the workshops, year after year. Chicken. Mayonnaise. In addition, themes emerged.

 

Any professor's failure to teach students was attributed to universal student stupidity. And that the students had been brainwashed by capitalism, Christianity, and Republicans. At the same time, professors insisted that they allowed students to come late, or not at all, to skip exams, to surf their phones in class; these students still passed. "They are adults. Their money. Their choices." Shrugs.

 

K. protested, "Our students are not mentally retarded," she blurted out. "We can teach them. We just have to up our game. Improve our teaching." They glared at her.

 

Mocking Christian students was a reliable laugh getter and bond enhancer. One workshop leader said – this is an exact quote, "We should be glad that there are so few Christian students at this school because Christians cause trouble." There was a consensus that Christianity causes stupidity and is a roadblock to learning. A professor who identified culturally, though not religiously, as Jewish, shared her technique for "brainwashing students out of Christianity." She pored over the Bible seeking out quotes that are translated differently in different translations. She then asked students how they could possibly believe such flawed nonsense. "I rescue them from Christianity," she said, to approval.

 

One workshop leader described how she used to help students who were victims of Islamic gender apartheid. K. had more than a few students who confided in her that they feared that their family was planning to kill them – because they refused to marry assigned spouses, because they socialized with non-Muslims, because they were gay, because they stopped believing in Allah.

 

"I realized, though," said the workshop leader, "that I was colonizing my Muslim students. I was imposing my own Western values. So I stopped." That segued into a lesson on Islamophobia. Mention of gender apartheid or jihad or 9-11 were taboo, because Islamophobic.

 

Prof. K. mentioned that she had heard African American and Muslim students from Paterson say astoundingly uninformed and antisemitic things, for example, that "The Jews" carried out 9-11, and that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers on that day.

 

The workshop leader nodded enthusiastically. Antisemitism is a problem, and that's why we need to address Christianity and white supremacy.

 

K. was astounded that a comment about blacks and Muslims in Paterson was used as a springboard to yet another condemnation of the evils of white Christians. She focused on chicken.

 

As all these workshops ended, and all the free food was eaten up or discarded, mountains of plastic entered landfills. Prof. K. pointed out that the university catered these events. The university could easily use China plates and glass for drinks, rather than plastic and Styrofoam.

 

A workshop leader upbraided her. "We cannot do everything at once. We must address one injustice at a time. When black lives truly matter, we can work on environmental issues … But I hear you. Environmental degradation disproportionately affects black and brown people."

 

"You know," K. said, almost just to see if anything she said would be heard, "Black Oak Ridge Road, four miles from here, there's forty feet of thorium-contaminated soil. That runs through a mostly white suburb. Ringwood, twenty miles from here, is mostly white. Ford dumped toxic waste there for years. My hometown, mostly white, has outrageous cancer rates. There was a DuPont explosion there, felt in four states. Men, including my brother, used to come home from work covered in silver dust. A lot of those guys, mostly white, died young." Four members of K.'s immediate family died of cancer, three prematurely. She had cancer twice.

 

Prof. K. was talking to herself. The workshop leader just turned away.

 

Professors were advised to use every class, including math and science classes, to encourage the students to regard capitalism as an enemy.

 

"If you talk to some of the black students, the white students working multiple jobs to get through a semester," K. said, "you find out that they aren't very leftwing in their worldview at all. They believe in the American Dream. They are working for it and I believe with their scrappy attitude and our help they will achieve it."

 

A black female professor, an untouchable number of levels above her in status, turned on her with naked fury. "You are not there to reflect their views! You are there to guide them to the correct views!"

 

There was a long-term adjunct who taught for the fun of it. She had a husband and a home. "Guiding students to the correct point of view" was her Marxist contribution, even though she lived in a rich, white suburb. This old-timer liked to mentor newcomers on the ins and outs of the campus. "The Driscoll Bridge," she liked to say, a self-satisfied smile on her face, "is New Jersey's Mason-Dixon line. The students you'll get from South Jersey are all racist and sexist rednecks. You will really need to step on them."

 

"Clean up in aisle three," another professor, a man who identified as a woman, called out.

 

Everyone laughed. The students were waste that needed to be "cleaned up."

 

Professors produced a lot of interesting one-liners. A professor from India insisted that "The very phrase 'Western Civilization' is white supremacist.' We must not use it." K. used it. That same professor had a plaque in his office. "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich." And then there was the professor, a child escapee from revolutionary Cuba, who responded to America's rescue of her wealthy family with "Goddamn America."

 

Prof. K. was dyslexic. She worked hard at spelling. For many of these workshops, over the years, signs and whiteboard displays included misspelled words. One year the misspelled words were "judgment" and "courtesy." These misspelled words remained on the whiteboard – a whiteboard is easily corrected – for the entire two-day workshop.

 

The boil burst. That was what Prof. K. realized when, a year after she lost her job, she finally turned her eyes toward the emptying parking lots. She didn't feel that expected warm glow for her love of teaching. She felt rage at termites. She would feel that warm glow, though. She would feel it someplace else than a university campus.

 

He could have been a member of the Ten Lost Tribes. He could have been an Assyrian conqueror, scattering the Ten Lost Tribes. He could have been a pharaoh. He could have been Moses in a little boat made of reeds, mewling baby sounds till Bithiah rescued him. He was adorned with plentiful black hair. No photo, no verbal description, could ever do justice to his nose. No, only a monumental sculpture could truly capture that nose. His thick, olive skin, and prominent lips – all of this – made his Middle Eastern ancestry undeniable. He was a Christian. He had told her stories of the persecution of his people back home. He knew who the bad guys were. He had seen them in action; his family had escaped them. The family came to America, and he went to college, and, years ago, he was her student.

 

As she shopped in the grocery store, he recognized her, approached, and pulled her aside. He was working here, in the grocery store, full time. But he wanted her to know. "That class you taught us, the questions we asked. You taught me things that I think about, to this day. I talk to other people about it, to this day. That class. I liked that class. Thank you."

 

They needed universities in 1088. An immigrant who escaped jihad and ended up working full time in a grocery store needed a university. Someday, America must defeat both the philistines without, and the termites within.

 

Prof. Josephine K. dedicates this essay to David Horowitz. After the university dropped her, he picked her up and gave her work to do, work that would allow her to, once again, spend some time with Auden, at the movies, and with libraries full of books.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery