Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2004
OBSERVER Keeping the Faith By SHANNON HODGES
In 1965, at age 5, I was swept away, with my four brothers, from Kansas City to our grandparents' rural Arkansas home. My mother was at a Kansas State psychiatric hospital in Osawatomie, and, having recently survived a domestic gulag of abuse, we boys found our new residence in the laconic Ozarks to be a godsend.
But I disliked school. Head Start in Kansas City had been a stifling experience under an authoritarian teacher fond of administering public corporal punishment. In Arkansas kindergarten was a tranquil though uneventful series of naps interrupted by occasional coloring. Bored stiff, I petitioned my grandparents for a withdrawal. My request was granted, though my grandmother counseled, "Next year you can't quit. And someday, we want you boys to go to college." I nodded dimly, as first grade was a hazy concept and college seemed as distant as Saturn's rings. But for the moment, I was freed from a dull classroom with strangers speaking in weird accents.
My "gap year" holiday ended abruptly. "Get your clothes on. We'll eat in town," Granddad said as he woke me for the start of first grade. The sun was just making its lazy ascent as we walked in silence (we had no vehicle) to the C&C diner in our matchbox-size downtown. Granddad was something of an enigma to me: a self-educated man who taught in one-room schoolhouses, he quoted Shakespeare, debated politics, and offered commentary on topics from astronomy to zoology. A firm believer in the Lord, a college education, and the Democratic Party -- in that order -- Granddad steadied me. "Remember, education is how you improve your life. Not money," he instructed like an earnest country preacher. His ideology was in stark contrast to our environment. We lived in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the union, where, by my rough estimate, less than a fifth of the local high-school graduates went on to college each year. In Salem, Ark., a college education seemed as practical as fluency in Swahili.
When we arrived at school, I noticed Granddad was the only male guardian at registration and by far the oldest. I felt the red mask of shame tighten when some classmates asked, "Where's your mom?" and "Why's your grandpa here?" In Sunday school we had studied running from responsibility in the famous allegory of Jonah. Though I lacked an appreciation for the finer considerations of biologically programmed fight or flight in the face of a perceived threat, I could empathize with old Jonah. Stifling the impulse to spring for home, I stood my ground. "You'll go in Mrs. Brink's class," Granddad said quietly. That was a disappointment, as Mrs. Mooney, who taught the other group, was a family friend. To make matters worse, my classmates evidently knew each other, and their camaraderie reflected the small, rural nature of the area.
The social adjustments continued. In one school discussion, we were to talk about our mother and father, our room at home, and the family car. I flushed with shame when it came to be my turn. As one of two kids in the class from a "broken home," having no contact with my dad, a mother in a psychiatric hospital, sharing a bed with my younger brother in a dirt-floor basement in a household with no motor vehicle, I was well outside the margins of the exercise.
At some point during our lives, we all have felt that sense of standing on the outside peering in. When we arrive at doors that appear barred, a role model can make the difference between acquiescence and fortitude. The teaching guru Parker Palmer speaks of Rosa Parks as his inspiration. Granddad was mine.
"Look, everybody feels scared their first day," he began, big gentle hand applying a reassuring squeeze to my shoulder. "Don't let it stop you from doing what you need to do."
Growing up in the rural south of the 1960s also created great dissonance. On TV, people who looked like me crushed demonstrations by black people seeking the educational and social opportunities afforded whites. Each morning as our class sang the national anthem, the phrase "land of the free, and the home of the brave" clashed with those images of a separate and unequal society. When I pointed out the apparent contradiction to my first-grade teacher, she simply shrugged. My grandparents, converts to Dr. King's dream, saw it differently. "We're all people," my grandmother would say, shaking her head in disapproval at the fuzzy, hubristic image of George Wallace in white shirt sleeves and porkpie hat, spewing the Jim Crow rhetoric of intolerance and division. The grainy black-and-white images of campus unrest didn't dissuade my grandparents from a fervent belief in education. They were quick to point out that many students and professors supported integration. Later, disillusioned with the Vietnam War, my grandmother confessed she admired the long-haired student protestors -- at least those who protested nonviolently.
Over the years, my grandparents supplemented our meager school curriculum by tutoring us at home. My grandmother, who graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class (all that was offered), was self-taught in mathematics. Granddad was highly educated -- all 12 grades, plus some college correspondence courses -- and a natural in English and social sciences. He had also served in the state legislature, wrote poetry, and regularly preached his populist politics in the pulpit of the courtyard square. A strong proponent of civil rights, subsidized higher education, and universal health care, he found few sympathetic ears among proclaimed self-reliant locals in the rough knobs of the Ozark foothills. Undaunted, my grandparents espoused the philosophy of social justice, covering areas our formal schooling ignored.
A college education and degree were the high-water marks in my grandparent's hierarchy of values; for them education was the vehicle of both personal and societal transformation. The reverence my grandparents accorded education was on a par typically reserved for the teachings of Moses or Siddhartha. While this altruistic, spiritual model of education seems a trite relic of the Cardinal Newman era, it was the mantra passed down to my siblings and me. Correspondingly, three of us became college professors.
As a professor, I struggle to reconcile my late grandparents' transcendent faith in higher education with the realities of an evolving 21st-century environment in which students are "consumers," faculty members are "stakeholders," and administrators are likened to CEO's and CFO's. Increasingly higher education is governed by the golden corporate rule: "It's the money, stupid." Moreover, elite institutions with obscene endowments of well over a billion dollars would actually have us believe they are strapped for cash, as they cut tenure lines, rail against graduate-student unionization, and pay service workers poverty-level wages. Weekly I read the comments of elite faculty members thumbing their noses at poor, underprepared students from impoverished areas like my hometown. Just imagine -- college leaders actively despising the poor!
Research universities deride community colleges, despite the fact that two-year institutions provide a stepladder for first-generation American and middle-age working adults. Women and members of ethnic minority groups continue to struggle for equal pay and professional respect from their campus colleagues. Colleges seem far more concerned with magazine rankings than with addressing inadequate financing, the crushing student debt load, and the narrowing of educational opportunities for underprivileged students. Roughly half of college faculty members nationwide are part-time adjuncts in this "Have doctorate will travel" era of oversupply and under-demand.
Reflecting back on my formative years in my grandparents' home, where I was molded to believe that education was the most respected profession of all, I am frequently discouraged by what I see. The job I love has been reduced to that of a mere service occupation with faculty members as interchangeable parts -- parts easily replaced should they become squeaky.
For all my fear, however, I cling to Granddad's belief in education, and his conviction that college is a conservatory for informed, sustained, and passionate debate. What are my challenges compared to his? If he remained committed, what possible right could I have not to?
Shannon Hodges is an assistant professor of mental-health counseling at Niagara University.
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
