In my first 10 years of college teaching, from the mid-60s to mid-70s, I modeled myself on my best teachers — men and women who questioned my ideas vigorously. They let me know that I mattered to them, they praised when praise was due, and they pushed me hard. Often I balked, and they continued to push. Indeed, the teachers who sternly, even at times angrily, called me out on my intellectual arrogance and sloppiness became mentors and, in several cases, lifelong friends. I think of one in particular, an English teacher to whom I'd brought a piece of freshman writing I'd ginned up only minutes before a mandatory conference. I knew it was junk when I carried it to his desk. He stunned me, growling, "You get the hell out of this office. And don't come back until you respect yourself and me enough to do serious work." The upshot — I admired his refusal of my bullshit. I went on to take all his classes.
Today, such a teacher would be subject, at least, to sensitivity training and, if an adjunct, fired.
But inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push — let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push — depending on whether or not a student's identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. The job I had been trained to do — help students work with the nuts and bolts of language as writers and readers, as well as help them (in the best of worlds) appreciate the power and beauty of written English — became more and more difficult. Some students considered questioning and criticism racist — and the texts we read and wrote about
white. Such thinking expanded, in time, to embrace a variety of identities.
I watched these developments unfold over more than 50 years of teaching — 35 years at a small, inexpensive, public college located downtown in my large American city, and later, almost 20 years at the state university located a few miles across town. The small college had opened in the 60s to serve a lower-middle-class to middle-class area, one that included a large black community. It was part of the laudable spread of such colleges, an initiative begun in California. Our charge was to provide opportunity to first-in-their-family college students — to high school graduates who were not ready for and/or could not afford a private college or the state university.
Comment: What about this doesn't scream scheme?