Thank you to the English teachers of Kansas public schools, who told a child from a family of laborers that she was a writer who deserved to be heard: in elementary school, Val Cheatham; in middle school, Patty Strothman; in high school, Stacey Walters and Lawna Bass Kurya; at a state university, Mary Klayder and Tom Lorenz.
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribner, 2018), p. 290
“I’m going to be a writer, Dad. Miss Bowler says she wouldn’t wonder if I’d got it in me.”
”Oh? What are you going to write? Poetry?”
“Well, perhaps. But I don’t suppose that pays very well. I’ll write novels. The sort that everybody goes potty over. Not just bosh ones, but like The Constant Nymph.”
“You’ll want a bit of experience before you can write novels, old girl.”
“Rot, Daddy. You don’t want experience for writing novels. People write them at Oxford and they sell like billy-ho. All about how awful everything was at school.
“I see. And when you leave Oxford, you write one about how awful everything was at college.”
“That’s the idea. I can do that on my head.”
“Well, dear, I hope it’ll work. . . .”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (orig, pub. 1934)
As it turned out, helping students cheat on papers was the only available job for which my college had prepared me. More than that, I was suddenly receiving an education. My god, the thought hadn't even occurred to me until right then. I had taken this job because it had found me. It had been the one job in my field that had responded to my habitual claim: "I can write anything. Just give me a chance."
This job had taken me up on my offer, embraced my talents, and found more outlets for them than a normal occupation could possibly have dreamed up. I was learning more stuff in a week than I'd learned in four expensive years of college. It was like kindergarten all over again. Suddenly, I was learning without the hassle of grades, the dictates of dickhole professors, or the looming pressure to declare myself a major and imagine a career therefrom.
I had no obligation to a course of study, no registrar's office to tell me a class was full, no admissions process to navigate. I was interdisciplinary, unregistered, and unadmitted. And without all the artifices, impositions, and expenses, all the things that made me hate school . . ., I rediscovered a love for learning that really only travel and psychedelics had satisfied for quite some time.Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 64
All of my classes graded for attendance. All of my classes were so big that the professors had to speak using microphones. All of my classes used multiple-choice tests with Scantron forms so that grading could be done by machine. All of my professors gave lectures with content lifted directly from the text. All of my courses seemed extraneous, unnecessary, and uninteresting. When I was counting down the last days of high school, I never imagined that freedom would be so mediocre.Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 6.
What are his thoughts on the fact that two hundred cheaters in his class of six hundred presumably felt that they could benefit more by passing the class than by learning from it? It seems fair to assert that Quinn and his university sowed the seeds for this type of blatant disregard for the honor system by failing to create a "community devoted to learning." When at least one-third of all students are proven offenders, it is the environment and not the individual that must explain itself.
No department was as well organized as Parking and Transportation. The school couldn't issue a schedule without two overlapping classes. It couldn't approve your financial aid without losing your paperwork. It couldn't print your transcript without accidentally faxing your medical records to the student listserv. But if your meter had expired twenty seconds ago, you could be damn sure that a parking attendant was already writing your ticket out nineteen seconds ago. Such graceful efficiency.Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 22
Hoover dutifully recited the devotions of the Presbyterian Church on Sundays, but the Library of Congress was the secular cathedral of his youth. . . . The reverent hush of its central reading room imparted a sense that all knowledge was at hand, if you knew where to look. The library had its own system of classification, and Hoover learned its complexities as a cataloguer, earning money for school by filing and retrieving information. He worked days at the library while he studied in the early evenings and on summer mornings at George Washington University, where he earned his master's degree in law in June 1917.Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 4
The young adults from working-class and poor families shared their parents' hazy understanding of college. The youths had hope and ambition, but their knowledge of higher education systems and the pathways through which they might gain additional training and then transition into attractive jobs was imprecise at best.Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2d ed. "with an update a decade later" (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2011), ch. 13
Today 15 percent of all college students take a single course in history. Or, that is to say, 85 percent of them don't take one. And I think if you have a nation that doesn't have a sense of history, when they set out to send an army into a Middle Eastern country, and someone assures them they will be greeted as liberators, and flowers will be strewn in their path, they may not ask the question, "Are we really sure that's true?" And I think that's dangerous for our nation and for our world.Victor Ferrall (former president of Beloit College, author of Liberal Arts at the Brink), in "Who Needs an English Major?," AmericanRadioworks documentary produced by Stephen Smith (fall 2011)
Middle-class parents, especially the mothers, appeared to embrace the idea that it was their responsibility to carefully manage every step of their children's transition to college. They gathered information, reminded their adolescents to sign up for tests, and watched for potential problems. By contrast, although working-class parents considered themselves as being involved and helpful, what they meant by being helpful seems different from what middle-class parents meant. Working-class and poor parents did not appear to see continuous monitoring as critically important. . . . With the exception of the financial costs involved, these parents generally knew little about the transition from high school to college. Their awareness of their child's SAT scores, the names of colleges the child visited, and the relative ranking of colleges was strikingly vague compared to that of middle-class parents. . . . Both parents and children in working-class and poor families considered post-adolescent children "grown." By contrast, in middle-class families, the young adults seemed to still rely heavily on their parents and, in crucial ways, the parents often continued to treat them as children.Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2d ed. "with an update a decade later" (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2011), ch. 13
Our only god was Fred Astaire. He was everything we wanted to be: smooth, suave, debonair, dapper, intelligent, adult, witty, and wise. We saw his pictures over and over, played his records until they were gray and blurred, dressed as much like him as we dared. When any crises came into our young lives, we asked ourselves what Fred Astaire would do and we did likewise. We though we were hot stuff but we were very young in those days.Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), pp. 160 (orig. pub. 1955)
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.J.K. Rowling, commencement address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," Harvard University, June 2008
When Victor proposed to her fourteen years ago, Rosemary had no idea what being the wife of a college lecturer would entail, but she had imagined it would involve wearing what her mother called "day dresses" and going to garden parties on the Backs and strolling elegantly across the plush green of the courts while people murmured, "That's the famous Victor Land's wife. He would be nothing without her, you know."Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004), p. 34.
And, of course, the life of a lecturer's wife had turned out to be nothing like she had imagined. There were no garden parties on the Backs, and there was certainly no elegant strolling across the college courts, where the grass was afforded the kind of veneration usually associated with religious artifacts. Not long after she was first married she had been invited to join Victor in the Master's garden, where it soon grew apparent that Victor's colleagues were of the opinion that he had married (horribly) beneath him . . . . But one thing was true—Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her.
We encountered a remarkable change in the student body, particularly the new graduate students in classics, which forecasted a general shift in the culture of American youth. In the fall term of the academic year 1964-65, as I approached the spot where my Homer seminar was scheduled, I saw the students unaccountably standing outside the building as though waiting, and moreover they all seemed to be smoking the same cigarette, which they were passing around among themselves. Once we had reassembled and I began, I quickly sensed an undertone of hilarity, which in the course of the two hours occasionally broke into giggles and even laughter at what I had to think was only minimally humorous. They were stoned, of course, but I had no understanding of this. At least not then, but it rapidly became an obvious feature of more events than I would like. I began to recognize a new kind of insouciance, a marvelous disconnect, sometimes adding a wonderful long-distance focus on the material at hand, sometimes just descending into a vague pit where any understanding was threatening to be demolished. Ironically enough, it resembled what I now encounter all the time in my dotage as my friends and I carry on conversations in which we often forget the thread in the middle of speaking. The only things missing are the giggles and the munchies.Charles Rowan Beye, My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p.
Yale in those days was an old boys' club into which I was pleased to see that I could fit. The very manner in which I was hired has always amused and gratified me. At the December 1956 Philadelphia meeting of the American Philological Association, Professor Dow had invited me to join his group for dinner at the famous, and expensive, Bookbinders Restaurant in the city, an event charged with hidden significance, since Dow was much too cheap to frequent such places ordinarily. In addition to three or four of his students, Dow had invited Frank Brown, who . . . was the chair of the Yale Classics Department. Fifty years ago when the old-boy network controlled the job process there was no neutral mechanism for those offering jobs and those seeking them. Opportunities were not posted on a public list; young people entering the field had no means for making themselves known other than what their mentors could do for them. Precious little, as you can imagine, for women or Jews or those from obscure institutions.
. . .
Charles Rowan Beye, My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 133
The following week I was surprised to receive a note from Brown inviting me to present myself as a candidate for the opening at Yale.
I have nothing but grim memories of Harvard University and its Classics Department, but I owe the institution the incomparable glory and status that comes from brandishing a Harvard PhD on my curriculum vitae or in conversation, plus, during the thirty years I spent in Cambridge later on, the chance to swim in the superb Blodgett Pool at the reduced fee offered alumni, and then the crown jewel of my Harvard experience, a yearly pass to the Widener Library, the use of which through the years makes up for any indignity or other horror that I might have sustained.Charles Rowan Beye, My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 112.
Our glittering system of elite higher education: students kill themselves getting into it, parents kill themselves to pay for it, and always for the opportunities it opens up. But what of all the opportunities it closes down—not for any practical reason, but just because of how it smothers you with expectations? How can I become a teacher, or a minister, or a carpenter? Wouldn't that be a waste of my fancy education? What would my parents think? What would my friends think? How would I face my classmates at our twentieth reunion, when they're all rich doctors or important people in New York? And the question that exists behind them all: isn't it beneath me? So an entire world of possibilities shuts, and you miss your true calling.William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), pp. 24-25
