Eric Felten, perhaps best known for his writings on music and drinking, was in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week, reviewing the new book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, which is an expansion of an essay of the same name that ran in the Atlantic in the summer of 2008. The book's point, well-known to Flypaper regulars, is that too many pupils attending college should not be. The author, a pseudonymous Professor X, is an adjunct professor at two institutions of higher learning?a private, four-year school and a community college?at both of which he teaches nighttime courses in basic writing and reading. His students' work is, mostly, a mess; mostly, he writes, it's pre-high-school-level-type stuff. He surveys the classroom: his pupils are a hodgepodge, some still teenagers, others married with kids and mortgages, some employed, others full-time students. But Professor X writes that they share one thing: they do not want to be spending their evenings with him, writing and reading.
Felten wonders, though, if the professor's students are as hopeless as depicted and if ?part of the classroom problem is the teaching itself.? ?Professor X prides himself on bringing a real-world perspective to writing, one born of his own long experience crafting words,? Felten writes. ?And yet, what sort of writer is Professor X? Before the essay in the Atlantic, he was, by his own account, unpublished.? Not that the thwarted literary aspirations of an adjunct necessarily disqualify him for Teacher of the Year, but being a writer in dreamland only ?does leave one at liberty to indulge in endless reworking and revision, a process that may color one's notion of how to get words on a page.? Felten wonders if Professor X isn't conveying to his students that unless a piece of writing is crafted through agony it isn't any good. ?Or perhaps the literary ability that their teacher is trying to convey is of a sort?strained and sweat-stained?far removed from the straightforward declarative sentences and bedrock grammar that the students most need to master.?
Felten may be off here. Professor X writes that it is precisely lack of ?declarative sentences and bedrock grammar? that make his workshop sessions so ?strained.? He is not asking that his students' dissection of each others' papers yield Hitchens-quality essays. He is merely asking that they produce something readable, logical, and grammatically and stylistically acceptable, but even such a simple-seeming outcome occurs, when it does, only after hours of concentrated work. Felten is right that X writes about writing in a way that lends the craft more mysticism than it deserves, but that isn't the pupils' trouble?their trouble is that they're enrolled in a college class and cannot spell.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow