A memoir of education.

The colleagues who had washed up in the early Seventies at Quinnipiac, this backwater college, established into a full college with liberal arts and health sciences added to a business school and a junior college in the late Sixties, were a varied crew, many of them quite interesting and thoughtful despite having long delayed or never completed doctorates. Few of them were so immodest as to think that they were creators of knowledge rather than purveyors and explainers of knowledge already established but they were quite knowledgeable about their own specialties though many lamented what a medievalist among them said to me, which was that he was not trained to deal with such deficient students.The chemistry professor would joke by  saying “Scotty, beam me up; there are no intelligent life forms on this planet”. When Eunice Shriver came to campus for an honorary degree, she quipped to the assembled faculty that they might never have expected to award a degree to a developmentally challenged  student, as had just been the case, and it got a big laugh because it seemed, actually, not that unusual at all. The more literary of the faculty read John Williams’ “Stoner”, a novel about a pedestrian academic at the University of Missouri in the Twenties who never gets anywhere and devotes himself to raising his daughter. Stoner is not a very good teacher, either. No “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” with its inner rewards despite what seems such an unspectacular life.

Rather, as the administration understood, the faculty did academic and scientific life to stay alive intellectually and were therefore generous in travel grants to conferences to support that and so I went to Toulouse, where the food was superb, and to darkest Louisville where I discovered that a local community theater had flattened out all the double entendres and other ironies so as to make it more acceptable for the locals than had been the case in the Broadway production I saw. The same thing happened when my wife and I, on our own ticket, went to Dublin, and went to an Indian restaurant where all the spices were toned down for local tastes. So much for Judith Blau adding up all the repertory theaters to see how cultural America is.  A local theater means a different thing in a different place.

A biology teacher found a wise and clever way to communicate with students. The medical services offered an expo on “Boobs and Weiners”, as it was called on the placards. When students asked the biologist in class why sex was so exciting, he said that there were a plethora of nerve endings in the genital areas but that sex was largely in the mind. He introduced students to the idea of evolution by declaring that giraffes did not exist because no one has figured out the hydraulics whereby the blood of giraffes is sent up to the brain so as to complete the circulation of the blood, much less how there were intermediary steps to their very long necks. When students said giraffes did exist, he said “aha!” and evolution is the theory of how that can work, disregarding that there might be a storehouse in Heaven that includes the blueprints for all biological creatures. He was respectful of my own view that I could not go past Steven Jay Gould idea of “punctuated evolution” whereby evolution takes place in spurts for reasons unclear and that Gould offered only a history of evolution whereby you can trace which species did in fact develop rather than explain why some species had to develop.

A psychologist was concerned with addiction. He wondered whether the term should be limited to substance abuse like heroin and alcohol or those other habits like gambling or shopping that also had highs and were addictive but did not require a substance. He was himself a bit of a gambling addict who claimed he only a few times left track of time at the poker tables, which is what the windowless rooms of the casinos encourage. I had a relative who had to make his  football bets high enough so that it would hurt if he lost. My psychologist friend thought that the cure for compulsive gambling was to teach people to be better or more rational gamblers. Set limits on how much to lose in a session. Don’t go for broke but gain on the margins. Master the odds and play those and then concentrate on  reading the faces of the poker players so as to pick up their “tells”. I was not convinced but he was trying to figure out addiction and he gave me a high compliment because, as he put it, I had mastered my own field and so could offer descriptions of the social class standing of my students. Their parents had  some money but their children were first generation students and so were only just middle class rather than established middle class.

Another psychologist colleague missed his calling, I think. He had started college to learn accounting but an introductory course in psychology had caught his fancy and he went into that field and became quite proficient at social psychology, a field of which I was quite skeptical, over the years criticizing Milgram and Kahane and he told me that I was lucky I wasn’t in a major university where I wouldn’t get away with that. He also was what psychologists considered “a natural” in that he quickly and accurately was able to appreciate people. He sensed that I had a troubled childhood and was still dealing with that many years later. But he didn’t become a clinical psychologist and he didn’t finish his dissertation but settled down at Quinnipiac with a very nice life, a big fish in a small pond, at a nice house he had built in a nearby rural town. What he really cared about, I think, was American history, of which he read a great deal, and he offered a course on baseball history so as to allow topics like integration and ethnicity and unionization to go down easy for students by putting them in the baseball setting.

My friend also became an advisor on academic problem students and in that role asked me to give a grade for a deaf student who had been asked to enter a normal introductory sociology class. I suppose he was thinking highly of me in that I would give an honest evaluation. He gave me no instructions as to how to handle the situation. The student had a notetaker and recorded my lectures as well but what she wrote on exams was very poor. Her mother asked me why I flunked her and I said quite honestly that I generally judge essays on the prepositions and other connectives whereby a student shows inferences and her daughter could not do that. The mother said somewhat smilingly and resignedly that a lack of connectives was part of the problem and I did not add that such inferences were also the heart of learning. So I think I had taken the burden from the college. There was no lawsuit. On the other hand, a blind student did quite well. She was clever and all she needed was for me to say in words the diagrams I had put on the chalkboard. More frazzled was the Vietnam veteran who had been a medic with a special forces unit but couldn’t manage the biology classes so as to enter a medical program. But he died not too long afterwards from cancer, the result of Agent Orange. A colleague of mine who was a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces served as an advisor to the Vietnam vets who passed through Quinnipiac.

I, on the other hand, did not miss my calling. I liked doing the combination of skills I was good at: teaching, because I liked explaining things over and over again as if I was discovering the material fresh, teachers having to be unlike actors in that they had to write their own scripts, resplicing their mental tapes for different courses and situations, and also writing and talking about social theory and social policy. It is just that I wasn’t very successful professionally at applying my long to develop writing craft and so went usually to only minor conferences. Finding one’s true calling did not guarantee a successful career. Some did and some didn’t. Barbara once said to me that I was Salari trying to be Mozart, but in truth I was just trying to be Salari who could, after all, appreciate Mozart.

The second generation of recruits to Quinnipiac were not as eccentric or interesting. They were more pedestrian sorts who had narrower intellectual and scholarly interests but had marched through their graduate studies at lesser universities and had also been recruited on the basis of knowing about topics to suit the proliferation of programs that the President of the college, then renamed “university”, was creating so as to increase enrollments in what after all was a tuition driven economy in that it bhad no endowment and so needed increased numbers of students to service its mortgage debts. He added a law school and a medical school and I was involved early on with the development of a Masters of Teaching Arts program which was at the time an elite degree whereby graduates of elite bachelor degrees could get a teaching credential but was now to be offered to the general population of college graduates as an entrance into public school teaching. The members of my committee were dubious about education schools and wanted to craft our program as more aligned to liberal arts values so that teaching literature was by a professor of literature who would help people what literature was rather than just go through the books that would be assigned to students when the graduates went to teach high school. But the accreditation agency who came to visit, all made up of professional educators, were dubious of that, and insisted that the head of the program had to be someone from a teacher training institute and for my part I was dubious about our own people could manage the professional educator very well, and that is what proved to be the case. I was asked to teach the required course on the history and sociology of education because I was the only person in the program qualified to do so while most of the program was devoted to classroom management and the psychology of adolescence and other topics drawn from usual schools of education. But while it lasted, I had fun, until people were found who had an educationalist background to replace me.

I offered my course for two sections of it during the summer for four days a week for three weeks and insisted that there be a hundred percent attention and that provided an immersion experience parallel to what happens in intensive foreign language learning programs  and which I think is still preferable to the usual thirteen week semesters where faculty and students meeting two or three times a week.(It also meant I was well remunerated for the work in a brief period of time.) 

I assigned the usual classics in the sociology of education, such as the description in Lynd’s “Middletown” of the high school of the Twenties which provided little educational quality and instead cultivated what it called its “Bearcat Spirit” of school camaraderie, and still is what most high schools are about. And then there was also the educationally adrift high school of the Forties in Hollingshead’s “Elmtown’s Youth”, the lack of achievement explained as the result of tracking that relegated non-wealthy students to lower tracks and so never to learn very much. I raised the question whether tracking was the cause of poor performance or just the result of the disparity of children to learn based on their social class upbringings. The poor are way behind by the time they reach first grade. And also there were some new books at the time, such as “Small Victories”, an inner city high school of the Sixties, where a very able teacher working at an underachieving student body thought of that entitled accomplishment as a success, and I wondered whether that goal was enough. I thought these successful courses because the discussions in class were lively but the adult women who were most of the students  thought just to get through their credential and I have  and had long thought that if all you wanted out of  an education was a credential that was all you would gain from it rather than open oneself up to an education.

Another foray into a new program was a criminology program that was put in place as part of the sociology department, and which I thought appropriate because the first course I ever taught other than introductory sociology was criminology, which I learned about from books on the topic and was easy enough to master because its ideas had been written by or borrowed from sociologists, such as the idea that people become criminals because they become associated with others on that career track. But criminology became as it once had been a separate area of study and the people we hired from it knew only criminology. I liked one fellow who needed to go through the rigoramole of getting a visa and a green card because he was a Canadian and so the Quinnipiac administration had to attest that he had specific qualities that could not be found in an American and Quinnipiac was willing to attest to that. The real reason he wanted to come to the United States was that his girlfriend was American and he wanted to be close to her, which seemed to everyone to be a sensible reason. Love conquers all. He came here and married her. Not so fortunate were the Iranian students at Quinnipiac who did not want to go back to Iran after its Islamic revolution and where the registrar insisted on following regulations rather than find excuses for allowing the students to stay in the United States. There are always refugees and I was partial, given my mother, to letting anyone into our shores, to the land of the free, rather than return to some foreign land of the oppressed.

The problem was that some of the students in the program which prepared students to  become prison guards were attracted to the work because they liked the idea of controlling and punishing inmates rather than just managing them. The department discussed how to respond to the students that were outspoken about their animus against their potential inmates. Punishment meant managing security rather than inflicting additional punishment. I was not sure that this was under the rubric of providing an objective social science orientation but instead offering a professional judgment, akin to law and medical school, of what were the preferred practices for engaging in an occupation. Liberal values rather than objective theories kept creeping into my own above the fray point of view. It reminded me of students in Berkeley who were taken with Barry Goldwater and his book “The Conscience of a Conservative” and would write about that in Freshman English class and the professors would say in an amusing offhand bravado way that  they would find a way to chastise them for engaging in such deviant ideas.. And those professors were merely English professors, not specialists on politics, but just part of what seemed to me a very illiberal idea of holding differing views against them.

Another program the President of Quinnipiac proposed and implemented to attract more students was one on mass communications, this program part of the English Department. President Leahy had established a center with all the latest technology for television and filmmaking and had located some CBS broadcast veterans on the time of their retirement to have greener pastures. One did tell me he found the students unsettling because people like themselves who had gone into broadcasting were news junkies who kept up in detail with the news. It was their mother’s milk, while the students didn’t care for the news. That was correct. The students were taken with the technology itself: film and tv cameras, how to handle and master those things rather than what topics about which to communicate. But it brought students onboard and also a few faculty members who cared about the art of film.

I became involved for a few years in the mass communications program by teaching a course on the sociology of mass communications, a major field of sociology for a few decades, and for which a course was required by the advisory agency, just as had been the case when I got to teach sociology of education in the MAT program. Sociology had indeed become what I had hoped, which was a field where you could study a wide variety of fields from a sociological point of view, minding myself to be sure to be informed by theory and fact rather than just blowing off opinions. My point of view on mass media was very sociological in that I thought the impact of the mass media on public and private opinion was overrated as opposed to the psychologists I knew who thought the impact profound, my own view to be thought of as the mosquito bite theory, a minor annoyance rather than the brainwashing that alarmists and theorists like Herbert Marcuse  thought it was. People respond more to their social class and ethnic attributes than to what they saw on tv and in movies which were just entertainment. I was thinking of the earlier time when people thought comic books would corrupt the population and I still think that superhero movies are artistically deadening but to no great personal effect. That is why I am dubious about social media as a blight on mankind, but I don’t keep up with the field and so can nowadays offer only an opinion rather than a considered view.

As for the courses that I developed myself, I got to teach courses outside my specialties of politics and what I called “everyday life”, which was a cross of Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman on friendship, courtship and social gatherings, and it fell like a thud, producing only essays about what I did on my summer vacation rather than the nature and complexities of having a vacation at all, how it was a reevaluation as well as a recreation. “Everyday life” did not seem to my students to be a real subject matter while social policy was a legitimate subject matter even if they did not know much about it. A curious phenomenon which I still ponder: when does a subject matter become an object of study? It was an historical event when universities, such as John Hopkins, invented political science rather than regard it as a part of social philosophy. 

More student appreciation, as measured in faculty student interaction, occurred in a course on race relations, which, as I gather, I would not have been able to do some years later because I was white. Most of the Black students in the college came to that course and some said they were surprised to find that someone who was white knew so much more about Black history than they did but all I was doing was trotting out standard ideas about prejudice and discrimination and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement as part of the waves of minority groups--Jews, Italians, Irish, Slavs and Puerto Ricans as well as Blacks--who had reached these shores, the theme being that the adaptation to America was a matter of resources brought with departure and circumstances and evolutions that occurred after arrival and that America was a place where succeeding waves became absorbed into the nation, through some Black students thought it would never come for them, while my view was in keeping with the sociological insight that whatever is at the present the normal situation does not seem capable of being altered.

One Black student thought that Black urban areas should not be demeaned by being called “ghettos” and he was suddenly clarified and enlightened, a big smile on his face showing he got it, when I explained that the term was originally applied to the areas in which Jews were confined. Facts redefine concepts and so are a part of education. But many Black students in this and in introductory sociology dropped out before the end of the semester, as colleagues told me also occurred in other low prestige colleges, because they found keeping at it exhausting or no longer novel or perhaps offensive. One Black girl who later in the term dropped out thought I should not assign “Life at Hamilton High” because its theme was that students were unruly and that is why they didn't learn. I was just going over the difficulties of inner city life to which students should be exposed.

Another course I would not have been able to teach in a major college or university because neither myself or my colleague in the joint course on the Bible knew neither Hebrew nor Greek. The course got a large following until I had to end it because more straightforward courses in sociology were more pressing. What we provided was what was once called “the Bible as literature”, which is misleading because the Bible is always literature whether or not you care to add doctrine which, as Bert Erdmann likes to say, is always speculative, theologians saying whatever they might care to. My take on that was that believers were credulous about matters of the supernatural that I thought definitely incredible, meaning not to be tested as assertions. But people I know who are devout Jews and Christians are dealing with the same texts and so draw the same observations, such as that it is a sublime moment when Abraham argues with God about how many good people are to be found in Sodom so as to spare it from destruction, thereby indicating that God is now conceived of as subject to morality. Or also sublime is that the parting of the Red Sea could be treated, as by Poussin, as a singularity which can be observed and therefore grasped only after it had passed. These literary matters are the paydirt. So I was able at Quinnipiac to keep up my interest in religion through Bible study but found a try at a course on the sociology of religion a bit too foreign for students to handle. A Catholic colleague wondered how two lapsed Jews teaching a course on the Bible could handle Jesus other than by saying that He was a nice man. My colleague joined us to hear us for a few sessions and paid us the great compliment of saying that both of us sounded like Jesuits. 

In general, the students of Quinnipiac were not lazy. They worked multiple part time jobs to make ends meet or loaded up on classes so as to graduate early. They just didn’t like school. They did not think, as I did, that school was a kind of liberation but thought instead that classes were just to be endured. They explained their low SAT scores to being poor test takers, that measure apparently independent of what they understood about life, and when I said that just going through one of those paperbacks of old tests would raise scores considerably, even without the cost of test tutoring services, they asked why they should engage in that ordeal. School classes, I gathered, were the real ordeal.

Faculty tried. Early on, a dean wangled a government grant to jump start ill prepared students, as the expression went, to function on a higher academic level. There were a number of faculty members who cooperated in delivering films, lectures and discussions in a large lecture hall to immerse students in culture rather than in a language. It didn’t work. The students were offended by being exposed to “Triumph of the Will” and didn’t follow a brief selection of Hobbes. It was possible for a faculty member to feel despair and just claim that if all students want was a credential that is all they would get. A journalist who visited a class to City College in New York  soon after Open Admissions began in  the Seventies to allow more less prepared students and not just Black ones to have a chance for college said to a professor of Russian Studies that her lectures on the Russian novelists were brilliant but that most of what she said passed over the heads of the students, and she responded that she didn’t want to hear about it. But most of the faculty that had washed onto the shores of Quinnipiac were interesting people who tried to devise ways to reach their students, each developing a set of tricks that got lost when they retorted because they were each personally crafted to suit their own abilities  and their students' limitations. A math professor found a subject matter that avoided the quadratic equation in a college math course, though I never solved the mystery of how. 

I crafted a course in what a colleague, who was a demographer, called “qualitative demography”, which was an oxymoron, but could be slotted into the college catalog as “Communities” that would not be too difficult to conceptualize but would tease students into knowing something of the wider world. I characterized and compared rural areas with towns and cities and suburbs and metropolitan areas and regions, showing how each of them are more or less creatures of political organization or patterns of commuting or economic activity, sort of a throwback to the ecological school on the study of cities done at the University of Chicago in the Twenties. I asked the class what the difference was between the parallel roads that came east through Connecticut: U. S. I, which went through the center of villages and towns; the Merritt Parkway, with limited numbers of access ramps, built in the Forties; and Interstate 95, built in the Fifties, where the lanes were more numerous and flattened out. One student was confused and flustered, saying that they were just built, avoiding my point that these constructions were historically occasioned and so gave me some evidence that explaining such things was worthwhile because they were not obvious to all the students. I also discussed the  upheavals that led to social displacements, such as the Warm Medieval Period that lasted from 900 A. D. to 1300 A. D.; the Black Plague, cribbing from Boccaccio and then Defoe; the Irish Potato Famine, stolen from Malthus and John Stewart Mill; and the great migration from Europe to America that I surmised was dependent on reliable steel made ships that doubled the population of the United States during the second half of the Nineteenth Century. These studies made me dubious, by the way, of speculations about climate change in that climate fluctuation preceded the Industrial Revolution which polluted the air with its waste products. Greenland had been relatively green in the Eleventh Century and there had been grapes at the time in Newfoundland. How come?

The best course I crafted, I think, was one entitled “Government and Business” which the Liberal Arts dean asked me to create so as to have as many seats as possible for Liberal Arts students by offsetting one semester of the year long economics requirement which many students found too quantitative, and so I got large audiences for what they thought was easier stuff, that buttressed by offering test essay questions pre approved by the students. What I did was to analyze the economic-political landscape. I covered monopolies and what “the free market” meant, and interstate commerce and how corporations worked. I made it clear to distinguish between what was the general consensus of scholars from what was a contested point of view and labeled when I was offering my own educated point of view so as to give students what objectivity meant. I compared the elements of business they learned in their business courses, such as finance, administration and marketing, with the similar aspects of government, which were, respectively, taxation, running the executive, and campaigning.

An election year was the best time for the course so you could see what the policies of each of the candidates would offer as hoped for impacts on the economy. I could read the Times each morning on the train trip north so as to find the material I would discuss in class that day. I remember comparing and contrasting the views of the Democratic candidates for the Presidential nomination for the election. I particularly remember the 2O04 primary debates. The election would be about foreign policy, on whether the Iraq War was wise or not, Kerry arriving to accept his nomination by saluting and saying he is ready to serve, but there were domestic issues as well, especially in health care, given what a debacle occurred when First Lady Hillary Clinton had failed to get through a national health insurance plan less than ten years before. The topic remained on the national agenda. Representative Richard Gebhardt, the Missouri populist, wanted to cover everyone and paid for through taxation, something similar to what Bernie Sanders proposed ten years later, a rather radical idea, while what was to be the eventual  nominee, John Kerry, proposed the novel idea of only having federally funded catastrophic insurance, which meant people would have to cover their own checkups and minor injuries but would not have to pay any large expenses, which is what people worried about, and was much less expensive than the Gebhardt plan but the Kerry plan also meant people might avoid checkups and minor ailments that might become major ones. My general point was that policy matters were consequential.

A girl came after class to say that after a few weeks of class she could anticipate what I was going to say about a topic. That is one of those moments that make a teacher think it has been worthwhile, an important influence reserved to be recognized years later if at all. She had picked up on my patter and saw that I was systematic and turned to the same insights and formulas over and over again. I had long ago abandoned the Socratic approach in elite classrooms whereby students were allowed to clash their opinions after the teacher had set the scene by providing some information and then asking some provocative questions. The students at Quinnipiac did not know enough to discuss what were not really even opinions to be honed. So I represented myself as a model for how an educated person talked about things, some of these traits perhaps somewhat rubbing off as happened in my own education or at least providing a standard for what constituted reasoning.

My work as a teacher made me part of the more than half century effort to improve school results that equalized ethnic and class disparities between students by equalizing spending and engaging in teacher training, which for many years my wife did, by providing new curricula and school reorganization. This effort could not be called a social movement because it did not involve marches and banners but nonetheless was a pre-occupation across schooling from the most elementary to the collegiate and seemed to those involved to be very important in making the nation more just however intransigent to change the nature of education proved to be. I even voted two times for Rudolph Guiliani sas New York Mayor because he wanted to take over the Board of education and revitalize a department of education. 

But the effort didn’t work. The disparities in test scores between Black and Hispanic students on the one hand and white and Asian students on the other remain. The increases in Operation Head Start and then in Operation Follow Through in the Sixties and Seventies were not sustained but students fell back to the achievement levels they would have had if the programs hadn’t taken place. A key data point when I followed those matters was the Ypsilani study which was very well designed and showed that students in an intensive preschool education benefited years later from that organizational intervention in that they were more likely to go to college and less likely to get involved in  crime. I would argue against the significance of these salutary results by addressing the fact that students did not improve their test scores. More optimistic experts said that educational improvement must follow from the social measures but I insisted that academic achievement, which after all was a major purpose of education, was independent of students becoming more disciplined or more orderly. 

Getting educated was a tough nut to crack. What worked for poor or educationally deficient students was very expensive schooling, triple what public schools could manage, those private schools supported by rich alumni or by philanthropy. They provided very small classes (not just from twenty five down to, let us say, twenty, but to, let us say, ten), and hired social workers to go into family homes to help them help their children to learn. As a skeptical sociologist said to me and which I persisted to think was otherwise, learning is done around the kitchen table and not in schools. Joe Biden wanted to revive a dead issue by funding universal pre-school and making community college available to all, but those parts of his program had to be shelved, perhaps to await another day.