Exit Interview

A. Jay Adler on leaving academe

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

Friends,

It has been a while since I last hosted a guest writer, but Jay Adler and I have been talking about this essay for a year now, nearly as long as we became acquainted on Substack. You’ll find that it resonates deeply with the questions I’ve raised about current trends in higher education.

But you’ll see that Jay probes more deeply than I have been able to do, because his history in higher ed outpaces mine. Among the heartwarming anecdotes about his mentors’ impact on him and his attempts to return those riches in his own classrooms, you’ll find some tough questions about why the inevitable march toward “progress” that we see in today’s colleges and universities needs to advance in the way that it is, and whether there might be a better way.

As Jay suggests, technology and industry are producing as many cultural problems as the ones they claim to solve. The more institutions continue to sideline the arts and humanities, the more essays we’ll see like this one by Tracy Chou, a Silicon Valley engineer, who explains why every tech worker should have a humanities education. Or this one by

Ted Gioia

, which tries to uncouple the current assault on the humanities in academe from the predictable outcomes of those trends in tech. But I think Ted and Jay end up in the same place, suggesting that the current state of education does not represent how it must be.

If you are new to Jay’s writing, I encourage you to explore his rich portfolio at

Homo Vitruvius by A. Jay Adler

. For now, I am honored to share this essay with you.

Take care,

Josh

Exit Interview

A. Jay Adler

The little squares on the screen had begun to extinguish themselves, disappear into blackness as the remainder resized.

“Goodbye, professor!”

“Thank you, professor!”

“Goodbye, everyone. Take care. And remember, your Blackboard grade isn’t necessarily your final grade. I do some bumping up. Be sure to check the registrar.”

“Thank you. Bye. Bye. See you, professor!”

“Okay, bye, now.”

And so, in January last year, not unlikely, my teaching career came to a close in a three-week, winter session, Introduction to Poetry class, staring at twenty small black boxes with a U.N.’s measure of names and identity-expressing icons on them.

I am not opposed ever to teaching again. But my career as a professor of English by which I make a living is over.

Various factors led to this milestone in my life in the manner and at the time it was reached, but I’m certainly at an age in which it is reasonably labeled “retirement” (from teaching), so let’s call it that. In that sense, then, I am unlike many readers of

The Recovering Academic

who are already recovering or contemplating doing so more purposefully than I. Yet I did spend about two-thirds of my late, second career in teaching willing to leave it, trying to change it, or working to adjust its conditions to my greater satisfaction, for many of the same reasons that motivate others to leave and congregate here at TRA. So, you know the expression – I feel you.

As I mentally composed this essay, some memories pushed their way to the fore ahead of others that came flooding. The English majors, of course, with whom I had more sustained relationships, including my student assistant Michelle when I served as department chair. I supported her Gates Millennium Scholars application, which earned her admission to a combined BA-MA program in England. She went on to teach, and we are still friends 25 years later. We had lunch together when she visited Los Angeles last month.

The student who searched me out on Facebook last summer after four years in order to write me. She’d taken only one class, first-semester composition, with me. In a course at Fordham University that isn’t designed to focus on imaginative literature, I’d concentrated the class reading on two challenging intellectual topics, civil disobedience and the international policy principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). She’d entered the class contemplating an English major, but in conference, I sensed and advised she might actually prefer political science. She wrote to tell me four years later that she had indeed majored in political science and that this past fall semester she was beginning a new, specialized master’s program in political science at Columbia University (my own graduate alma mater). She wanted me to know how much my teaching had influenced her approach to learning ever since. I made sure to let her know in return how much a message like that, with the effort she made to deliver it, means to a teacher.

There was the single mother, Timanni, from what was then called South Central Los Angeles, who took with me at her local community college what in California is designated a second semester “critical thinking” composition class. She had passed the first semester class with a C, so she met disappointment earning a D in mine. Most students in that situation, needing to retake a class, will choose another instructor. Timanni didn’t. She viewed me as a challenge. Through two semesters of significant challenge and disappointment, she never blamed me or exhibited resentful alienation from me. On the contrary, we had an easy, teasing rapport, through which she let me know she was going to meet me head on and I made clear I was rooting for her. I gave her nothing she didn’t earn, which in the end was an A- on that second end-of-semester research paper. The last time we saw each other, nearly twenty years ago, we crossed paths while I was talking to a student in a current class, who it turned out Timanni knew. Timanni offered her friend a wry, joking warning, then told her that she would learn from me. We hugged each other sideways, and I said how proud I was of her. She walked on through the building doorway into the rest of her life.

As a student myself, there was my junior high school social studies teacher Mr. Tewel, who taught me to see beyond the glamorous myth of JFK and later waited with me for six hours, queued up outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to view the casket of RFK, for whom, as a young high school student campaign volunteer, I had canvassed New York’s Washington Square.

There was Mr. Greenberg, my high school English teacher and drama club director, who introduced me to Shakespeare and to serious live theater, and once we became friends of many years, also to fine dining and how one drinks like a sophisticate.

At the City College of New York, in an English department film adaptation class, writer and Professor Frederic Tuten led those of us who were game in producing our own short remake of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up in Tompkins Square Park, where Tuten kept his writing studio.

Willard Hutcheon of the CCNY philosophy department (which had its own little building in those days! – an old, converted carriage house), uttered to me one of the two most influential statements of my life. That gruff, paunchy, existentially despairing man (we philosophy students had all determined in our collective imagining of his inner life), who rolled through halls and doors enveloped by an invisible aura of pipe-tobacco bouquet, like Linus’s visible halo of dirt, was leading our second-semester history of philosophy class through highlights of Bishop Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge when I stumbled face forward into the regrettable locution, “If I’m going to accept what Berkeley is saying . . . “

Instantly provoked to correction, Hutcheon quickly withdrew the pipe from his mouth, crookedly jutted out a bold, practiced jaw, and bellowed at me from his seat halfway across the room:

“Understand! Not accept! The head is not a soup pot!”

It was Hutcheon, too, in a summer session literature and philosophy class, who introduced me to Albert Camus – “not really a philosopher,” Hutcheon advised, but a great writer. We read The Myth of Sisyphus, and I learned, to a salvation from my own youthful, tortured despair, the final turn of mind that crowned, as Camus would have it, Sisyphus’s unexpected victory: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Hutcheon and I were familiar with each other, but neither one of us was good at initiating intimacy. He never knew the influence he had on my life.

I took several classes, too, with Hutcheon’s colleague K. D. Irani, Kantian and philosopher of science, who was then department chair. (The current department’s, and Substack’s own, Massimo Pigliucci presides today as the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at CCNY.) As a postdoc at Princeton, Irani studied with Einstein, who wrote the young scholar a letter of recommendation when he applied for his position at City College. Indeed, it was one day in our introduction to logic class, standing at the chalkboard on the low, raised wooden stage that comprised a quarter of the room, that Irani explained to us the state of theoretical physics at that time and Einstein’s dream of a Unified Field Theory.

Pausing when done, looking out over the class with his piece of chalk upturned in his fingers and held before his chest, Irani pursed his lips between mustache and goatee, as was his habit, and poignantly concluded in his precise, gentlemanly, accented English, “And if . . . you are . . . not moved . . . by this . . ..

He trailed off, at a loss to conceive the completed thought.

I was moved.

It was almost a decade later, finally completing my B.A., that I conversed with the Hunter College English department’s Alan Brick. At many of New York City’s urban universities, students don’t encounter their professors crossing a quad; they run into them on the bus or subway. This was a downtown, Lexington Avenue bus, when I shared with Brick my practical determination, at long last, to go to graduate school and become an English professor. (It was Hunter’s Joan Stambaugh, student of Heidegger at Freiburg, translator of Being and Time, with whom I studied her mentor, Hegel, and Buddhism, who introduced me to Zen practice at a nearby temple, and who, playing the role I played for my Fordham student, also helped clear my mind to pursue English rather than philosophy at Columbia.)

It wasn’t anything Brick precisely said but rather his face that conveyed to me the response, and you think this is a practical choice? The remainder of the conversation communicated only in the most oblique way my very first inkling that the profession was changing and that I would not find in it the same experience my esteemed professor had enjoyed over his career.

This was about 1982. It was a long time coming and many people saw it early.

Back a decade in time, I had originally entered college at the City University of New York near the start of its experiment in Open Admissions. Every city high school graduate was now guaranteed admission into one of its colleges. The policy was a response to political demands to address, with regard to educational access, the social problem of stalled economic progress for the city’s underserved minority populations, a problem believed then, as now, addressable through higher education. The policy’s opponents anticipated from the start the problem that vast numbers of these high school graduates were not actually academically prepared for college. Standards would fall and students would fail.

Every element of the policy and the prognostications was culturally charged and contentious.

Idealistic young pre-Socratic that I then was, an entering freshman myself, I thought, so what if a student drops out at any point along the way – any amount of additional education is life enhancing. It’s all good.

Well, I was eighteen years old. There is an extent to which I still think this true, but that wasn’t what Open Admissions was in any way about, for anyone on any side of the issue. What did my still tender worldly understanding comprehend of learning outcomes and state funding formulas and job creation balanced against a more humane soul?

The effect on CUNY was devastating, provoking the need for massive remediation and producing decades of diminished academic standards and reputation. By the time I returned to CUNY to finish my own B.A., after having myself left college more than once, I chose Hunter College rather than CCNY because Hunter had been the earliest to begin the repair.

My purpose now is not to reargue those particular issues, which were variously duplicated throughout the country, but to offer my personal connection to that one educational moment, then, as representative of a greater problem still: the political and cultural battleground that is all American educational delivery and American society’s demonstrated, systematic unfitness, over many decades, to develop either a consensus vision of higher education as a social instrument or effective processes by which to adapt educational delivery to social change.

Multiple social stressors since the Second World War have dramatically altered the demands on liberal arts institutions and produced divergent visions of the continuing role of higher education. Once, with the G.I. Bill and other cultural evolutions, the liberal arts institution was coherently and simultaneously envisioned as both a locus of human development and an engine of national economic success. However, many decades of economic and social change have altered the dynamics such that many people, including me, no longer think those dual roles consistently make sense for all.

That period of the mid Eighties also saw the decline of tenure and transition to a contingent, adjunct labor force. When I served on faculty-union contract negotiating teams in the Nineties, reversing contingency and establishing pro rata pay scales for adjuncts were already prime objectives. In California, where I was then teaching, with its, now, 116 community colleges, the CCs were reproducing on a massive scale the challenges of CUNY of the Seventies. While the UC system is charged with accepting the top third performing of California high school graduates, with the Cal State system extending offers through the second third, the CCs are obligated to accept all and any, however unprepared for college, because K-12 schools so often manifestly fail to fulfill their missions.

California, too, with its significant population of undocumented immigrants, faced particularly large numbers among them who were not only poor but already poorly educated in their native languages, now needing to learn a second with little foundation to build on. People can achieve various kinds of success from that starting point, and have so often in the past, but are far less likely to do so if their path is automatically directed through higher education when their goals don’t require it.

Students who have no interest in a liberal education – not necessarily students without direction or career interests, but not those of a liberal education – lured by the promise of STEM careers, are compelled onto various tracks to meet UC or Cal State general education transfer requirements. Parallels exist throughout the country.

On the one hand, higher education remains in conception what it was shaped to be after WWII and with the G.I. Bill – an engine of national economic success fueled by the next level of standardized education. But the nation and economy have dramatically changed since those days, and the general education and liberal arts university is no longer appropriate to that broader role.

On the other hand, the university is dramatically transformed into a commercialized peddler of services to student-customer needs, both heightened as commercial engine along the career track and diminished as any kind of transformative experience in humane education. At the same time, an expanding delivery system has been created in the form of online programs of high volume, low-paying contingent faculty instruction.

What’s this all about? What’s at the bottom of it? Where does it lead?

These are questions the culture, let alone its universities, is not conceived to ask.

Almost exactly two years ago, I spent a last week visiting and caring for an old high school friend just before he died. Over one of our last lunches, we counted up how many classes we had taken together – seven, as we recalled them, including creative writing, American history, physics, and “Problems in American Democracy.” Our educations were central to our lives and our friendship.

Alan, an unreconstructed hippie, had pronounced as far back as those high school days his essential, satirical civilizational critique, in a fun declarative that “progress must progress!” It was such an obvious, facile joke (I thought) that for decades I missed its profound challenge to human purpose. By the time Alan died, I had come to understand it.

For many, it will seem as foolishly meaningless as it long did to me. Of course, they will think, we need to expand trade. We need to create jobs. We need new home starts and year-over-year growth and profitability. We need to train tomorrow’s workers for tomorrow’s careers, fueled by entrepreneurial and technological innovation to meet the challenges of the future, because . . . Because?

Well, one practical reason is population growth. The world’s population has tripled since I was born. It has multiplied 2.2 times since I first entered college. That unceasing, unquestioned growth in people is what demands that litany of progress truisms above.

But why? Why must it be that way?

Where are we? How did we get here? Why are we here? What do we do? In what manner do we do it? To what end do we do it?

Answers may vary.

Only a humanities education teaches people to think about, care about, and propose answers to questions like that. Only a culture and civilization dedicated to achieving more than building a better treadmill – walked by people repeating the usual pieties as the drumbeat to their senseless walk toward some unconsidered end in place – only such a culture will provide that education.

Only such a culture will envision and embody wisdom somewhere other than in a tech bro in jeans and tee shirt, wearing a headset or earbuds on stage beneath a huge screen, not unlike, ironically enough, when you think about it, the one in that famous Macintosh Big Brother commercial of 1984.

Is that the future?

It isn’t mine, though admittedly, mine is shorter, probably, than yours. And I didn’t write this to talk about the future, anyway. I wrote it to talk about the past, my past, and how – just as much as my parents and siblings, with the foundation they provided me in family love and lifelong connection – my teachers, all along the way, shaped me into the person I became and developed in me the values I live by and that have enriched my life. They were that important to my life.

We — we teachers — can be that important to a life.

And as it turns out, since I began this essay, I was asked to teach a class this summer, so I’m not done yet.

Another chance, against ever growing odds, to mean something to a student.

Read more of Jay’s writing at

Homo Vitruvius by A. Jay Adler

.