Our hinterlands correspondent, Kathleen, enjoys a breath and scope of interests that never ceases to amaze.  In her travels, she’s come up with this poignant tale of “Professor X” in the Atlantic, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.

Parents tell their children that if they work hard, they can grow up to be president.  It helps if your father was president, of course, but still it’s possible.  Unless you suffer from one problem.  You aren’t very smart.  Okay, maybe not.  But let’s not let politics get in the way of an important point, shall we?

My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?

The rule of thumb is that everyone should have a college degree.  We take for granted that education makes us better at what we do, expands our horizons and allows us to understand and appreciate our world more fully.  But there’s a secret problem with this rule.  Not everybody is cut out for a college education.

The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

Whether it’s because students lack the requisite skills, intelligence or motivation to do well is no longer relevant.  Whether it’s because the teacher can’t communicate effectively to impart the information needed to succeed is irrelevant.  The idea that everyone in America should be a college graduate may simply be a pipe dream.  At some point, each of us takes responsibility for our own lives, and if we can’t manage the degree of effort required to produce work and thought at a college level, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.  And maybe that’s okay.

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 mini-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 instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

There can be no success without failure.  A college degree means little if everyone has one.  And the American Utopian dream of everyone receiving a fine education may have finally hit the wall.

As a relatively educated person, I have great respect for higher education.  I also have great respect for someone who can field-strip the SU carbs on my Healey.  Whether he can quote Shelley while doing so doesn’t concern me greatly. 

As a parent, I hope that my children will have better and easier lives than I did, or my parents did.  But most of all, I hope they find a place where they will be happy.  I expect that it will require higher education, but I could be wrong.  It would likely disappoint me at first, and I would anticipate fighting it because I, like most parents, think I know better about what would make my kids happy.  But ultimately, I would do everything possible to support their dreams.  It’s not like my choices have always panned out so well.

It must be terribly painful for the anonymous author to have reached the realization that despite all his/her efforts and desires to help, most of his/her students would still fail.  But even the ivory tower has a basement, and even the basement has a floor.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that those students who can’t manage to stand on the floor of the basement are unworthy, but just that they are in the wrong building.