Professor X (31 page)

He rose from his chair and started pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom. His jaw was set and his eyes unfocused. He was clearly enraged. I asked him to sit down. “I have to keep moving,” he said. “If I don't keep moving I'll throw something.” A chair, I thought? His instructor? I really wanted to call security, but had made no provisions to do so. There was no telephone in the classroom. I do not carry a cell phone, which at that moment seemed the apogee of folly. I didn't know security's number anyway.

We were alone, and I had leveled my damning accusation, one that could get him booted out of the school. Why had I chosen this moment? Hadn't I seen this situation countless times in movies and mysteries? Wasn't the hero always confronting the villain alone—stupidly, I thought—as the story built to a climax?

“I'm very disappointed,” he said. “Very disappointed.”

I said nothing.

“I'm going to be truthful with you,” he said.

The villain always comes clean in the end.

“I bought that paper,” he said. “I admit it. I bought it off a friend of mine. I paid him to write it for me. But I didn't pay for some old piece of junk that was out there, floating around on the Internet.”

Suddenly everything about him, his tale, his situation, his ineptitude, seemed sad. I felt sorry for him. He nodded at me, picked up his paper, and shuffled away. I listened to his footsteps fading down the stairwell.

When I got home that night, I checked my life insurance policies. The old cliché about the workingman was true: I was worth a lot more dead than alive. The thought empowered me.

All fear of death vanished. I have not a trace of it to this day. I walk around weirdly cocky for a middle-aged man. Maybe all middle-aged men feel this way. I feel pumped up and energetic, as though I've been eating well and working out. I walk the streets practically looking for violent street crime in which I can intervene.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.

The life insurance is a good start, but my wife would need more.

I asked her, “Do you know where I was tonight?”

“Teaching, of course.”

“No. Where? Which school?”

I've often got classes going on in both schools at once. My wife has her own busy life and can't always keep my schedule straight. “Huron State?”

“No, Pembrook,” I said. “It's crucial for you to know where I am on any given night, because when some dissatisfied student kills me, I want you to sue the right place. I don't want any Perry Mason endings with some registrar revealing that I wasn't even teaching at his college on the night in question.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“But don't worry,” I said. “If anyone kills me, you can be sure I'll take them with me.”

The whole enterprise of teaching in college sometimes looks dark to me. My students and I are in an impossible situation. Some of them move across campus as though in a fog: confused, always a little frightened, sometimes despairing, never sure at any moment what the next development will be, hoping against hope that they will pass.

My students and I are trapped in a tense and unnatural relationship. To do poorly in a course can really throw a monkey wrench into their life plans. If I have to lower the hammer, my students resent it mightily. Why wouldn't they? And when I leave campus for the night, my footsteps echoing as I pass the closed bookstore and shuttered coffee stands, I often question myself.
Wouldn't it be easier if I gave them all A's? What would it matter? Who would know? Who would care?

Late at night, in an empty, soiled classroom, with seemingly not another living soul on campus, grade disputes start to seem very personal. The administration isn't around; the students can't go vent to a dean or ask an academic adviser for intervention. Late at night, it's as though the administration doesn't exist. Lack of academic success seems my doing, and my doing alone.

Do I really think that a disgruntled student might pull out a gun and shoot me? I don't live in fear of it, but neither do I rule out the possibility. I am informed by the lessons of Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech and the University of Arkansas. Remember that one?

The participants in a student-teacher conference at 10:00 P.M. have both put in a full workday, about twelve hours' worth. Tempers will grow short. There are no metal detectors on these campuses. No full-body scanners. Who knows who's packing heat? Much of my clientele consists of people who are, in one way or another, up against it. I wonder if it is only a matter of time before one of them crosses a line with me.

I love my life in the classroom. I love the three hours discussing ideas. But I have few illusions about the daunting nature of our task, and sometimes there seems to me a somewhat grimmer reality just beneath the surface.

F
OR ALL OF MY BELIEF THAT reading good literature leads to spaciousness of mind, largeness of spirit, and generosity, I sometimes seem to myself a most small-minded and spiritually bereft person. Christ, I seem at times so awfully
cramped.

For a long time, I wasn't completely happy. I was less and less comfortable in my home and my village. I indulged in a new fondness for pornography. Not sexual pornography. Apartment pornography. I gazed longingly at the seedy rental condos on the outskirts of my village, at the base of the hills, the same rental condos at which I once sneered, despairing of their effect on my property values. Now they seemed a nice place to set up shop. I liked the little terraces. I watched reruns of
Seinfeld,
and noted that Jerry had a very nice apartment. It looked cozy and well heated. I started reading Paul Auster novels. His protagonists always lived in snug apartments on the edges of New York City. The life seemed attractive, especially since Auster never mentioned cockroaches or bedbugs.

Mine is a prosperous little village of picket fences and tidy flowerbeds. The French bakery serves lovely, bracing coffee. There is a warm and homey little diner for bacon and eggs, a drugstore with a pressed-tin ceiling, and a barbershop. I walk around my village on a Saturday morning, feeling too strapped to spring for a plate of bacon and eggs—though I will have a coffee! I must! Is life worth living without coffee from a French press? I see lots of people whom I know: neighbors, parents of my children's school friends, Little League coaches, an attractively pregnant bank teller. An attorney parks his Mercedes outside the diner. I purchase caulk from the hardware store. The youngest volunteer in the firehouse hoses down the hook and ladder. The rawboned woman who homeschools her brood cycles by.

I thought I was spiritually generous, but it turns out that I am not. Such is the smallness of my spirit that I rank my position in the universe against everyone I encounter. I never used to do this; now it is a tic that I cannot stop. Mostly I rank us all monetarily: income, assets, newness of vehicle, home equity, size of 401(k), and the like. Many in the village seem to have me beat. Their clothes are newer, their cars newer and bigger, their appliances (I've been inside some of their houses) shinier, their kitchen stoves all slick and flat-topped and digital. Nothing about them seems shabby.

The pink-cheeked, gentle old woman with the nimbus of cottony white hair and green garden clogs—she has me slammed to the floor, her clog on my throat. I triumph over only a few. I think I've got the bank teller beat. I don't think she wants to be on her feet this Saturday morning; the strain shows around her eyes. I'm also ahead of the barista who French-presses my coffee, and the barbers who speak no English.

There are several inhabitants of the village who seem right at my economic level, and so I perform a series of secondary calculations in my mind to evaluate our positions. How attractive is the wife? How much vacation time does he get? Does his health care coverage carry into retirement? I think about some of the local wealthy childless couples. I assume that they are tortured and miserable. I have to assume that for my own sanity. I feel like one of the townspeople in “The Lottery,” one of the locals who looks at the wealthy and powerful Mr. Summers and “is sorry for him, because he had no children and his wife was a scold.”

Walking my town is an exhausting endeavor. I cannot stop my mental gymnastics. Too bad I can't seem to exercise my body as vigorously as I do my mind—I'd be a lot thinner.

Some years ago, notices of foreclosure began to be put up in the post office, which became suddenly a lot more interesting a place to visit, a place not just of mail and stamps and Christmas parcels and stacks of tax forms but of the official record of shattered lives. Our post office is dark and cool, seemingly unchanged from the days of the New Deal. Above the parcel post window a cast-iron American eagle watches over all. On the wall hang display sheets of commemorative stamps and plaques honoring local dead in foreign wars. Week after week, the sheaf of foreclosure postings on the clipboard grows thicker. I don't know many of the names. Most of the houses are in the new developments outside the village, off in the hills, as I think of them. I recognize one woman's name. I believe that she works in the kitchen of a nursing home. Her 3,200-square-foot house, built in 2006, is in foreclosure. She seems like a very nice person. She lived in a mansion. I used to wonder, occasionally, how she and her husband did it.

It turns out they didn't.

They, too, are the victims of the postmodern impulse. It seemed the right thing to do to improve their narrative, to install them in a mansion that they couldn't really afford. “The development of lax lending standards, both by banks and by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” according to Thomas Sowell, resulted from a series of government policies “directed toward the politically popular goal of more ‘home ownership' through ‘affordable housing,' especially for low-income home buyers. These lax lending standards were the foundation for a house of cards that was ready to collapse with a relatively small nudge.”
¹

President George W. Bush said it back in 2002, back when I was buying my house. “We can put light where there's darkness, and hope where there's despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.”
²
Encourage
them—as though it were something that had slipped their mind, or that they hadn't gotten around to.

I took a shallow breath. I still walked a tightrope. Money was always tight, but things no longer seemed desperate. I hoped that enrollments at my schools would stay up. Teach my usual load of classes every year, and I'd be all right. And then, wonder of wonders, as the recession deepened, I heard for the first time Barack Obama saying words I never thought I would hear him say. Community college, he said. What? Yes, that was where his hope was. Community college. He had a notion to give $12 billion to community colleges over the next decade. I went to the White House Web site and read the description of the American Graduation Initiative: