PART 19: "PROFESSING" ENGLISH LITERATURE

On April 10th, 1967, I was awarded my doctorate. I had completed the program in six years, about three years faster than most people, though of course, that average is inflated by sad cases like Mr. Corrington, my high-school English teacher who, for all I know, is still there. I skipped graduation, out of my life-long resentment against Columbia, just as I had skipped my graduation party at Edgewood and my Cornell commencement.  I was big not showing up in those days.

Now I had to put my degree to use: I started looking for a full-time tenure-bearing teaching job. My first interview was at Columbia, and because I was on good terms with a couple of the interviewers, it went much better than my bizarre experience with the chairman years before; no one asked me what it meant to profess English literature. The one jarring touch was Professor Steven Marcus strolling in fifteen minutes late, ostentatiously reading a book. We all waited in silence while he scanned the a page; then he turned to a second and kept reading. Finally, he looked around in pretend surprise, and said, “Sorry, am I late?” This little piece of theater was a good example of the pettiness I hated at Columbia.

I didn’t get the job, which was a blessing, because if I had, I’d have come up for tenure five years later, by which time the academic job market had frozen solid, and no one was getting tenure at Columbia in the early 70s. Not particularly disheartened (I really wanted to be free of the place), I applied to all of the four-year colleges of the City University of New York, was offered a job by three of them, and chose Brooklyn College, mainly on the basis I had chosen girlfriends: for its looks.

If you watch television, you’ve seen Brooklyn College; they shoot commercials that feature collegiate settings there, because it looks the way people think a college should look. Why go to New England or upstate to get that bucolic image when it’s only an hour from Manhattan? Amazingly, construction of the campus was begun in 1935, in the darkest days of the Depression, and it wasn’t done on the cheap: the result is still  considered one of the finest examples of Georgian revival architecture in the city, a symmetrical group of brick buildings with slate roofs arranged around a grassy quadrangle, headed by a library with a clock tower that chimed every fifteen minutes – just like Cornell’s.

Arguably, it’s the nicest campus in the Metropolitan area. Hunter College and the Baruch School are office buildings; Columbia has a real campus but it’s unwelcoming – a rambling collection of stone and brick buildings without any discernible center or much in the way of green space. NYU has no campus at all, just disconnected buildings scattered around Washington Square and leaking down into the East Village, with only purple flags to identify them. And BC, despite its miniscule budget, has done a good job of keeping itself in good shape, at least its exterior. True, when all those roofs of the original buildings on the East Quad had to be replaced a couple of decades back, the stone gave way to asphalt shingles. I remember being sickened by the site of those chunks of slate crashing down during the renovation, but I understood the necessity of it. The City University’s budget is, paradoxically, set by New York State, which has its own university system (SUNY). You can imagine where the perks end up.

Inside BC’s buildings there isn’t much to like. The corridor floors are linoleum, the paint on the walls is cracked and peeling, half the bathrooms are closed or in various states of disrepair, and the blackboards in the classrooms are so washed out with age that they’re almost the same color as the chalk, which you have to remember to bring with you because there’s never a piece in the tray The heat stayed on throughout the year, because if the custodial staff didn’t see to it that the entire allotment of fuel was used up, it would be reduced the following year. I don’t remember the windows being washed during the whole time I was there. But at least almost all the classrooms have windows; at NYU, where I finished my career, you taught most of your classes by artificial light in a sealed space. The oddity about BC is that there were no large rooms available to the English Department, and as a result, there were no lecture courses, 35 being the maximum number of students allowed by Fire Department regulations in any of our classrooms. This is, in a way, a blessing; I’m not a big fan of the course model in which 300 students listen to someone droning on without asking questions or making comments. In most universities today, large numbers of students sit with their laptops in front of them, ostensibly taking notes but in actuality, who knows? Texting, watching porn, streaming movies?

On my way to the interview I happened on a little sanctuary, tucked in behind the science building, and I sat there for a few minutes, basking in an unfamiliar feeling of well-being.

Then I found the department office, where I was interviewed for the instructorship that had been advertised (at $8600 per annum). I was offered the job and accepted on the spot, without reflecting on the fact that I was saddling myself with a serious commute, from the northwestern part of Manhattan to Midwood, much deeper into Brooklyn than Brooklyn Heights or Prospect Park. From my apartment on West 77th, I had to walk two long uphill blocks to Broadway and two more to the subway station on 79th; then I took the 6 local down to Grand Central and changed to the 2 for the long haul. I had to budget an hour and a half for the trip, because there were often delays or late trains, but I could grade papers as we crept along and at last arrived at the last stop – Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College.

But transportation issues apart, I had made a rational decision. BC had a well-deserved academic reputation; Money ranked it 43rd among all institutions of higher learning in the country, calling it “the poor man’s Harvard.”  That it definitely was not, but the faculty, for the most part, was solid, and – more important – so were the students, at least for a few years, until the era of protests changed everything. Bernie Sanders had graduated from BC three years before I got there – before the era of sit-ins and demonstrations, unfortunately for him. When the Protest Movement gained traction, many of us younger faculty members, all of us opposed to the war in Viet Nam, were surprised to find ourselves the target. To many radicalized college students throughout the country, all institutions – not just the federal government but the administrations of colleges and universities – were by their very nature corrupt, unjust, and discriminatory; they were The System, and faculty were part of it. One day the students locked us all in the auditorium where a faculty meeting was in progress, chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” as if we were giving aid and comfort to a President all of us opposed. It pissed us off to be put in that position, so a bunch of us younger guys charged one of the doors and swept the protesters aside before the cops could be called, freeing our colleagues.

But the ideology of social justice practically destroyed CUNY, which, to demonstrate its concern for civil rights, replaced its selective admission standards with a policy of Open Admissions: any graduate of any New York City high school was free to attend whichever branch of the City University he or she chose. The impulse behind that idea was a noble one: to end the de facto discrimination that had kept New York’s culturally and racially disadvantaged students from a quality college education.  But like all systems, Open Admissions could be gamed, and it was. Only residents of New York City were entitled to entry and free tuition – that, after all, was the mission of the CUNY. But almost immediately, bogus credentials began to be presented and accepted, and soon any high-school diploma – from North Dakota, from Croatia, maybe even from counterfeiters – somehow sufficed. And within a couple of years, BC had apparently stopped demanding proof of graduation from high school; I had students who I knew had dropped out, flunked out or been expelled. An expensive program of remediation had to be instituted; English 1 was now accompanied by English 0.1 – Remedial Composition – and an entrance exam placed about half of the incoming freshmen in that course, which didn’t do much for faculty morale: everyone in the English Department, from full professors on down, found themselves teaching half their programs at something like grade school level.

During the thirty years I spent at BC, the cultural, religious and ethnic composition of the student body dissolved and reformed several times. When I started, the predominant group was Orthodox Jews, fresh from the Yeshiva, who were there because their parents couldn’t afford the Ivy League or, in some cases, wanted to keep them at home, insulated from the goyische world surrounding them. (A joke that was going around when I got there was that the College held a Barbra Streisand look-alike contest, and 2000 girls tied for first place.) These kids were very smart and very docile, their classroom manners impeccable. In the 1970s, they were joined by other minorities, African-American and Latino, and in the 1980s, the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived, speaking Mandarin but not much English. They came from families that were as insular as the Hasidim, not eager to see their children lured from the old ways by the blandishments of America. These kids, as one would expect, had no difficulties with the math and computer courses they had come to major in, but passing English 1, or even 0.1, was a huge task for them, and the only thing that saved them was their impressive Asian work ethic.  I was still teaching at Brooklyn when that first generation’s children, who had been born in this country, arrived –native speakers of English, of course, still hard-working, and very bright; they breezed through English 1 and I never saw them again.

They were at last succeeded by the Russians, who had colonized the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, and who as students came across as clever but also sly. Some of them had gone to high school in the old country, and occasionally they were willing to chat Gogol and Pushkin, whom they’d read in their secondary schools in Minsk or Omsk. But most of them had no intention of matriculating; they had enrolled at BC in order to learn English, because language schools like Berlitz charged money and BC did not. At that time (this was the 1990s), you could take the comp courses as often as you liked; If you failed, you received a grade of NC – no credit – which didn’t drag your grade point average down, and you could repeat the course as necessary. Many of the Russians failed purposely, so that they could keep taking the course until they had achieved fluency. Occasionally, though, they would miscalculate, and do passing work, and I’d be treated to the bizarre spectacle of a student to whom I’d given a C begging me for a failing grade. Or trying to bribe me: many of the men worked as limo drivers, and they’d whisper to me, on the first day of class, “Professor, you need ride to airport, you call me.” I wasn’t doing much flying in those days, but one offer sorely tempted me: a girl who worked for her uncle’s caviar importing business told me, “If I get hungry, I help myself to two or three tablespoons of the Beluga. You like Beluga, Professor?” Yes, I like Beluga . . . but your C+ stands.

No matter the dominant ethnicity of the students, there were always two girls who sat in the back row and whispered to each other but never spoke aloud. There were Ruth and Naomi, who were succeeded by Taeesha and Carmen, and they by Jiang and Huan, followed by their daughters Jen and Jess, and by the turn of the century, Galina and Svetlana. One thing they all had in common was that they regarded a liberal arts education as vocational training; they majored in computer science and education and speech, not in English. Inevitably, the number of students who signed up for literature classes dwindled. A typical professor’s program consisted of one elective (in my case, it was almost always Shakespeare), and two sections of required comp – 25 students in each, which meant 50 essays to grade every week. It was bad enough to walk into a classroom knowing that you were about to spend the next hour expounding on the use of the colon and semicolon; knowing that ten minutes after you’d finished you were going to do exactly the same thing all over again sapped the spirit. I’d had to put up with this when I was adjuncting during my grad school years, but the professorial life was supposed to be a comfortable one.

And then, in 1983, a wonderful thing happened. The chairpersons of the English Departments of BC and NYU colluded in an under-the-table scheme that sent me to NYU to teach undergraduate Shakespeare courses that their professors, who were only interested in graduate students, wanted no part of. In return, NYU sent our department two grad students to teach composition – a win-win if ever there was one. So there I was on Waverly Place, surrounded by rich, fashionably turned-out and largely white students, giving seminars and sometimes large lecture courses (my disapproval held in check by the perks: two or three teaching assistants to handle the grading and conference chores). Eventually, in 1998, CUNY offered a pension bump to full professors if they’d take early retirement, and I quit BC and moved over to NYU as an adjunct professor, teaching one course a semester and, not incidentally, spending far less time on the subway. I could absorb the salary cut, and it was fun, after all those years at a public school, to bask in Big Time. NYU, which had been a somewhat drab, second-rate institution when I turned down the chance to go to grad school there, had by this time transformed itself into one of the hottest universities in the country, and I enjoyed the company of my new colleagues, who, because I was their age and had been a full professor in my former life, treated me as an equal. I was popular with the students as well. In 2005, I won an honor called The Outstanding Teaching Award, which very few adjuncts had ever received. I made more close friends there in twelve years than I had at BC in thirty, and had begun to think and act as if I had tenure, as they did – until a regime change made me expendable and I was given my walking papers.