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My Small, Impoverished, Careworn College
- University Press of New England
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1 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p mysmall,impoverished,careworncollege My school was once a military base, and this shows in the austere , blocky architecture of its widely spaced buildings. Spring and summer add a gloss of green to the desolation, but fall and especially winter are almost unbearably bleak. Think Murmansk, the industrial New Jersey waterfront (minus the water), or Chernobyl (without the glow). Iplodacrosstheblankfieldseparatingthebuildingthathouses my office from another in which I teach. The wind screaming in from the nearby airport tarmac cuts, in the poet John Masefield’s words, “like a whetted knife.” I pull my collar closed, flex my fingers for warmth, lean forward and press on. Actually, things have been looking up. At least a bit. For years we were little more than a “feeder” college for the—compared to us—mammoth University of Maine at Orono, eight miles up the road, with which we were associated. We received, by and large, the “rejects” who were not admitted to um, and here they seethed, marinating in their resentment for not being allowed to matriculate as engineering students with their combined 700 sat scores. Some of them kept a hand in at um, taking one or two courses “up there,” riding, between campuses, a yellow shuttle bus they had bitterly dubbed the “loser cruiser.” Those who managed to eke out acceptable gpas eventually transferred to um. In the meantime, the bigger school skimmed off our tuition dollars, viewing us more or less as a cash cow for its general fund. Truth to tell, nobody has ever known what to do with my campus . It had its inception in 1969 when the military vacated the base and turned the land over to the university. By default, we became the “South Campus of the University of Maine,” or scum, and later, Penobscot Valley Community College, then Bangor Community College, and most recently University College. In 2 p My Small, Impoverished, Careworn College 1998 the University of Maine, in a political move, disgorged us and our thousand students into the gullet of the University of Maine at Augusta, eighty miles to our south, ostensibly to pump up their flagging enrollment. The last ten or so of those first twenty-eight years constituted what a Soviet citizen would call the “period of stagnation.” Little to nothing was invested in the campus’s infrastructure—I don’t recall even a flower being planted. Once, when a window broke, we had to turn, hat-in-hand, to the University of Maine, which instructed us to find a piece of plywood. No wonder the students felt enervated, demoralized, neglected. They had come to us to learn, but divided their time between listening to the lectures and holding their coat collars closed while the frigid wind howled through poor-sealing windows, the radiators clanged, and paint peeled from the walls in sheets. In addition, alcoholics from the nearby residential treatment facility roamed the campus by night, looking for cans and bottles, and potholes as deep as watering troughs snapped the occasional axle. My office was in one of the old, squat, flat-roofed military administration buildings. The windows rattled in their frames, so in the winter ice crept in and coated the sills. In the summer the heat slowed my computer to a slog. Still, there was a certain romance. The kind that is kindled when one is prevailing against the odds. I had my own little corner ; my metal, government-issue desk; my metal, erector-set bookshelves; and a hotpot for my tea. I worked at my courses, did some writing, came and went as I pleased, and almost never saw the dean of the campus, who was ensconced like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain in a building far removed from mine, dreaming ahead to a university presidency that, alas, would never come to be. Another part of the charm was generated by a veteran faculty , many of whom had been teaching since the school’s beginning (in other words, when I was still in high school). I arrived in 1986 and in fairly quick time realized why there was relatively [34.236.152.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:11 GMT) My Small, Impoverished, Careworn College p 3 little turnover. It was because neglect has a flip side that is very seductive: we were left alone to do the thing we did best—teach. In short, if I wanted...