In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The Truth About College

by Professor X

Overview

A caustic expose of the deeply state of our colleges-America's most expensive Ponzi scheme.

What drives a former English major with a creative writing degree, several unpublished novels, three kids, and a straining marriage to take a job as a night teacher at a second-rate college? An unaffordable mortgage.

As his house starts falling apart in every imaginable way, Professor X grabs first one, then two jobs teaching English 101 and 102-composition and literature-at a small private college and a local community college. He finds himself on the front lines of America's academic crisis. It's quite an education.

This is the story of what he learns about his struggling pupils, about the college system-a business more bent on its own financial targets than the wellbeing of its students-about the classics he rediscovers, and about himself. Funny, wry, self-deprecating, and a provocative indictment of our failing schools, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is both a brilliant academic satire and a poignant account of one teacher's seismic frustration-and unlikely salvation-as his real estate woes catapult him into a subprime crisis of an altogether more human nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101476208
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/31/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	302 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Professor X has been teaching English composition and literature for ten years at two small colleges somewhere in America.

Editorial Reviews

…a clear-eyed report from what the author calls "the college of last resort." It's the work of a compassionate man who longs for academia to be crueler to be kinder.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner

Expanding on his controversialAtlantic Monthlyessay, "Professor X" assails the ill-considered optimism that encourages unprepared students to assume crippling debt to get college degrees they don't really need.

The author is an adjunct English instructor—tenure, no insurance, no benefits and no status—who teaches basic college courses on a part-time basis. This is in addition to his regular civil-service job, which no longer covered his expenses once he and his wife "marked the turn of the millennium by buying a home that we really couldn't afford." Indeed, perhaps the most unsettling thing about this disturbing screed is the parallel that Professor X draws between the housing boom that provoked the 2008 financial crisis and the recent boom in college enrollment, which promises people who barely made it through high school that a college degree will improve their employment prospects. "There are no guarantees," he writes. "Markets tumble, houses enter foreclosure, students fail." The author makes it painfully clear that many of his students deserve to fail. They cannot construct a basic sentence, let alone an essay; they have never read a book for pleasure in their lives. Yet they are expected to savor the glories of poetry and to produce coherent, properly organized and cogently argued essays. Contrary to what many of the angry responses to the originalAtlanticarticle suggested, Professor X does not look down on his students or think they're stupid, but he cannot pretend that they have the background and skills required for the classes he is allegedly teaching. (In fact, he's doing remedial work.) He questions the necessity of higher education for people who want to be corrections officers or nurses, reserving some of his most scathing words for the "credential inflation" that keeps upping the amount of education demanded of applicants for blue-collar and technical jobs. The author offers no solutions, but makes the profoundly un-American suggestion that not everyone is college material.

Intelligent, convincing and depressing, despite the author's evident zest for teaching.

Kirkus Reviews