Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

can muster, you say, ‘You know, dogs and cats are really different. Dogs are friendly. Cats are not.’ ”
    The class laughed. The writer of the essay, whom I had not identified, laughed as well. He reddened rather dramatically.
    â€œSo what’s the problem?” I asked.
    The laughter cut off. Confusion and uncertainty.
    â€œWhat’s the problem?” I cried. “You’re all laughing. What’s so funny?”
    My nice young friend who was on the side of cats answered again. I think she wanted to redeem herself. “You would never say that at a party.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œIt’s kind of . . . obvious.”
    Hallelujah. Now we were getting somewhere.
    â€œSo why would it be good enough for this assignment?” I asked. “The writer must seduce the reader, just like you want to seduce someone at a party. I, as a reader, have a lot of other stuff I could be doing. Why should I read anything? I could be watching a movie or eating a good dinner or surfing the Internet. Why the hell would I want to read about dogs and cats?”
    They understood, the class. They got it. They knew that what had been written was absurd, but it was just an assignment, with no relevance to the real world. For the indifferent student, all work is busy work, empty effort to occupy time and, hopefully, garner some credit in the end.
    â€œI think you all just may have to think harder and work better,” I said.
    By semester’s end, I believe the class had made some small progress, but in truth it’s hard to say. They were a challenge, and I was brand new. Certain assignments they made a complete hash of, and I, because of my inexperience, couldn’t help them even a lick. Their research papers, for example, were utter disasters, because I didn’t realize at how low a level they were operating; to dip into educational-speak, I didn’t know how fragmented and disjointed their schematas were. When I explained to them how to develop a thesis and how to use passages from scholarly articles in journals to buttress that thesis, I didn’t realize that I was speaking a completely foreign language: they had never seen, had never touched, had never even heard alluded to, this mysterious entity called a scholarly journal.
    As a new instructor, I regretted my incompetence. That semester, I failed only the hardest cases, those students who stopped handing in assignments or even coming to class. Some of the nursing students and the middle-aged moms, who tended to hand in papers twice the required length, finished with low B’s, which was already a compromise, as in my heart none of them did true B work. I gave one A. Everyone else swam in the polluted waters of C and C-minus and D.
    My administrative systems were not yet locked in place. I had given some students the benefit of the doubt. Some students claimed to have handed in assignments of which I had no record; I had to assume the mistakes were my fault. I was still a naïf. I did not yet realize that some students, behind their earnest masks of good effort, were coldly, ruthlessly—like any high school punk, like smarmy Eddie Haskell—playing me for a sucker. I looked at that marvelous college-Gothic architecture, the arches, the trefoil windows, the spires pointing to heaven, and I was still thinking of college as a place of elevated virtue—of nobility.
    My eye for grades was not yet sure. Some of those C’s and C-minuses should have been D’s; some high C’s could have crept up to very, very, very low B’s. But none of the students seemed to notice. I submitted the grades and never heard another word about any of it. I can do this , I thought rather merrily. Not too bad. I was happy to have gotten through it unscathed. We were in a college classroom, though we were often not doing college work. A visitor coming upon my class, in that stone fortress of an arts and humanities building, might