Higher Education

After finishing George Orwell's Burmese Days (which I may comment on in a separate post), I picked up Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong. Published in 1959, Bradbury's first novel was another departure from my "between the world wars" reading program, but is in keeping with one of my longest standing interests in modern fiction -- academic or campus novels. For some reason I never got around to reading this one, which is also a book about the 1950s, another of my abiding interests. (After reading Eating People is Wrong, I read Bradbury's The History Man (1975), a peek at academics in the 1960s and 1970s.)  I'm still digesting my reading, so I don't intend a full report, but I have been struck by so many things that continue to resonate with current concerns in higher education, especially in the humanities, more than a half century on. Take for example a recent blog post I stumbled on in a Twitter post, retweeted by a former NEH colleague: The Working Class and Higher Education, Pt. 2.

Stumbling on the blog post as I was reading Bradbury's novel confirmed my sense that much of what we continue to worry about in the academy, both here and in Britain, is not new or even of recent origin. Instead, we seem still to be coping with the strains of class conflicts set in motion at the close of the Second World War. Like the young man who wrote the blog post, and some of the characters in Bradbury's novel, I was a "scholarship boy," and the first of my family (and my generation) to go to college (or university, as they say in Britain). And like the blogger, I sometimes had to work when not attending classes, and depend on my wife's working, as well as contributions from our families.

At the time I did not appreciate how much the world had changed in the few years since World War II had ended. Most of the kids I went to school with were just like me, working class offspring (although at the time some of us might have said we were middle class) who were the first in their families to attend college. And yet nearly all of us assumed not only that we would go to college, but that it would be relatively easy to do so. Public colleges and universities were plentiful and inexpensive, even without scholarship assistance, which also seemed fairly easy to come by. Just about everyone I knew graduated from college, found work, and began making their way in life. The only fly in the ointment in the sixties was the Vietnam war. But even that was managed, partly by luck and partly, I suspect, as a result of demographics. None of us went to war.

Where things began to resemble the stories told by Bradbury and other academic novelists, was when I decided to return to graduate school in the humanities and make my career as an academic. What I had not fully realized was the extent to which I had been part of a boom my entire life. My generation (who often thought of ourselves as rebels, non-conformists, individualists) were really one of the most coherent cohorts of children and young adults ever to inhabit the planet. For most of our childhood and formative years we shared experiences and the thrust of parental aspirations that were common to our entire generation. Everything we touched (or that touched us) seemed to become a phenomenon. To some degree, and perhaps inevitably, we are now reaping the disappointments that come to those with too much early success and expectation of privilege.

But at the time what was actually rather unusual, if not extraordinary, seemed to us the norm. And so we inhabited a world of plenty and opportunity and naturally began to assume that even if it had not always been thus, thus it would remain for us and for our posterity. The first snag, as I said, was Vietnam, but somehow we survived that, and at the time many of us felt it had made us stronger, both individually and as a generation. We did not immediately perceive that the rest of the world was not yet ready to accede to our vision of reality or of the future. But with Vietnam behind me, the first inkling I had that things may not be going to go quite as I had expected came to me in graduate school.

After failing my draft physical, I returned to graduate school, having spent a year teaching Latin to high school students, and knowing that I had made a mistake in thinking I could be a schoolteacher. But I still thought perhaps I could be a college professor. That seemed to be the perfect career choice for someone with skills and inclinations such as mine. And so I returned to the University of Texas determined to pick up more or less where I had left off. But somehow the world had already begun to change. Getting admitted was easy enough, and I even managed to find agreeable work as a teaching assistant. But as time went on I learned that while getting back into graduate school was rather easily accomplished, getting out with a job as a college professor might prove to be more difficult than I had imagined. It now seemed that I was not alone in my desires, and that higher education was becoming a little overcrowded with working class kids who aspired to join the intelligentsia.

Had I been more interested in economics than in literature, I might have realized more quickly that it was merely a matter of supply and demand. The numbers just were no longer adding up. We boomers, who had provided a bubble of students that had spurred a growth in demand for college and university teachers, were now competing for an ever diminishing pool of new teaching positions for a smaller cohort of students coming up behind us. Whereas the shrinking numbers of new college students were being processed through the system every four years or so, the teachers hired in the 1950s and early 1960s to teach them were lingering on to continue their work. The capacity of colleges and universities had expanded rapidly to meet the earlier demand, but further expansion was likely to come much more slowly, and new positions in colleges and universities began appearing much more infrequently.

It wasn't all bad news for everyone. Many small institutions that had been struggling, found they also could grow in these times, and could now find new faculty among the increasing pool of newly graduated Ph.D.s. Some of my graduate professors, who saw more clearly the problem now confronting their graduate students, counseled me to seek a more prestigious degree. One of my professors actually helped me find a spot in an elite, top-ranked, graduate program where one of his own former colleagues was now chairing the department. It was my first glimpse of the way things had used to work, and sometimes still did. Although I was a working class kid, I had found my way, by a mere trick of good fortune, into a sort of "old boy" network. But now it would appear the rest was up to me.

In some ways, I benefited more than I knew from my few years as a graduate student at the University of Texas. During that time, I had been able to teach classes on my own. I had experienced two different graduate programs, in Classics and in English. And I had matured a bit. When I arrived at Johns Hopkins I was ready to take advantage of a program that was smaller and somewhat more high-powered, and to compete (which to my surprise was much encouraged at Hopkins) with a small but talented group of graduate students. At Hopkins I saw a different sort of higher education. All of the professors were from a very few schools: Harvard or Yale (or Harvard and Yale) or Princeton (or Harvard and Princeton) or Hopkins itself. The students were a more diverse group (academically and geographically, in other respects we were almost uniformly white males), and in part this was by design, but more of my fellow students seemed to be from families with academic backgrounds, sons of professionals and college professors. While we were all on scholarships, fewer now seemed to be working class "scholarship boys."

By luck and hard work I somehow managed to compete successfully in this new (to me) environment. But when the time came to find employment, things were not much different than they had been when I left the University of Texas. There were few jobs in the humanities, and there were growing numbers of recent Ph.D.s seeking academic employment. When I came out there were unemployed graduates from previous years still on the market and looking for "permanent" work, which meant a tenure-track position. The great prizes were, first, job interviews, which were elusive, then offers, which were almost mythical. After a trip to the MLA meeting in San Francisco for a few interviews, I heard nothing: no campus visits. I was on the verge of accepting an offer that came over the phone to teach composition at a small campus in Arkansas, when one of my professors lined up a campus interview for me with one of his former graduate school buddies who was now chairman of a department of English at a small liberal arts college in Louisiana. Once again the old boy network came to my rescue.

There's more to this story, but for now I'll stop here.