"Professor X" is not a professor, as he reminds his students. He
is, by day, a government employee with an MFA and, by night, an adjunct
instructor at both a four-year and a community college. After X bought
more house than he could afford, he started adjuncting, teaching composition
and literature for mortgage money. When his students submitted their first set
of papers, X was shocked! The students' writing was, he claims, barely
high-school level. This college, he was stunned to discover, was nothing
like the one he attended.
Reading In The Basement
of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of An Accidental Academic, one
is tempted to write "please focus" in the margins. X covers teaching
students who struggle to write academic essays, the misguided idea that all
Americans should attend college, middle-class troubles with homeownership,
ruminations on some famous writers, what the critics said about his article in The
Atlantic that lead to this book, and, finally (because the book is, as X
tells us in the Author's Note, a "quest narrative"), how he stopped
fighting and learned to love being a middle-aged, suburban father with a day
job and a chance to talk about Great Literature at night.
X is engaging and
likeable. But this book is an act of bad faith. Written anonymously ("because
I love teaching and I love my colleges"), these "confessions"
only glance at scholarship on effective writing pedagogy. The author complains
students are underprepared for college—yet never comments on his lack of
teacher training. I doubt he would have given one of his students a high
grade for unsigned, unfocused, shoddily researched work.
Anne
Trubek is Chair of Rhetoric and Composition at Oberlin College and the author
of A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses.
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