Learners and a Teacher, For Profit

The Dean of Ubiquitous University (UU)* told me he had received a "call from Regional"; too many "learners" were failing my remedial English class. I needed to pass more of them: What could I do to make this happen?

The first thing I did was swallow nervously.

"The learners who missed the midterm," he said, "they can take it now." Even though he worded the sentence in a kind of quasi-conditional tense, it was clear he meant it as a directive.

Demoralized at the necessity of obeying this boss, my brain spun like a slot machine trying to land on a solution. I had just finished grading final exams. One of UU's policies is that all exams must be graded on site and scores entered into the computer before instructors leave "campus" (half of the top floor of a four-story office building in a business/industrial park) the last night of class. It was 8:30 p.m.; class was over at 9:45. How was I supposed to administer a fake midterm to learners who elected not to come to class for the real midterm six weeks earlier? When they had just taken—not to mention failed, and failed hideously—the final? How could this possibly be fair to the learners who studied for and actually showed up for the midterm? I did not even have the midterm in my possession.

I saved myself.

"The first half of the final is the midterm," I said, remembering the prior semester when he had ordered me to allow my learners to take the midterm again as part of the final, because so many of them had failed. (As an aside, those who chose not to attend class for the real midterm were not helped to pass by the points I gave them for the fake midterm they did not really take).

Drumming his fingers together in Machiavellian satisfaction, he muttered, "Excellent . . . I hope other instructors can do the same." The Dean failed to realize that the learners to whom I was giving credit for a midterm they did not take were so far from being able to pass the class that awarding them these undeserved points was both laughable and moot. What I did instead was inflate the grades of the top five failing learners. That way only 50% of the class failed, instead of 75%.

Never able to land a tenure track job after getting my doctorate in 1996, I decided to break up with academia (my bad boyfriend—the one who had promised me the world then failed to deliver) and go to law school. My doctoral studies in English, African American literature in particular, gave me talents that could be of as much use helping black people in the courtroom as helping white people read black authors in the classroom. But eight years into my second career, my idealism shattered, I reached the point where I could not be a public defender for one more minute. To make my mortgage payment and tide me over until I found a new niche in the legal community, I picked up a class at UU—where the minimum qualification for teaching is eighteen hours at the graduate level—or six classes—not even a master's degree.

A while ago a secretary at UU took me aside, whispering under her breath, "The Dean is mad at you because you did not address him as 'Doctor' in the email you sent him today. Do you think this means he has some kind of inferiority complex? Always having to be called 'Doctor'?" When I was a doctoral candidate, I called the English Department Chair "Salli"; everyone did, faculty and grad students alike. I called most of my professors by their first names. Doing so never diminished my or anyone else's respect for them, let alone their respect for themselves. Once Ph.D.-ed and on the faculty at a remote University of Wisconsin branch, like all my colleagues, I called my Chair "Gary" and the Dean "Carol." Never before had I encountered someone who insisted on being...