Trust me, I used to be a professor.
Or, really, an adjunct, but don’t worry about the difference. It doesn’t much matter to students. Except that adjuncts are more bitter than your average professor by a good 200 percent, thanks to being the university’s galley slaves, lashed to the oars of the terrible Viking ship called Academia. Adjuncts get paid a ludicrous per-class rate, receive no benefits, have to teach as much as double a professor’s load in order to not make ends meet, and they have to teach the classes full professors won’t touch. Like, for instance, the first classes you’re likely to take at the institution which has just chosen to swallow you whole.
So don’t be surprised when the first day of Freshman English is helmed by a twitchy guy who doesn’t look old enough to teach a kindergarten crafts class. He may seem somewhat like you, but his worn coat sleeves and misaligned hair will keep you from considering him fully human. Though he is, you need not concern yourself with this either, at least for a while.
There are other professorial types who will heave into view during your time here. It helps to know the peculiarities of each, but no short writing could do justice to the many species of the academic world. There are, however, standouts.
Primary among these is the cliche, the male professor who wears a corduroy sports jacket, often with elbow patches. It is not that he thinks he is fashionable or unfashionably fashionable, it is merely that the coat offers a sort of formality and he is probably unaware of the stain—chili?—that has permanently stuck itself to the bottom of one cuff. This type most often sports a beard and glasses. This is the professor who might hoodwink you into thinking it is important to know the differences between the Frenchmen of the Annale School of history, who will weave for you a tapestry of academic theories of knowledge at once drab, dull and confusing. You may, lulled by his drone, find yourself wondering why you have come here. Don’t worry if the smiling references to Fernand Braudel and Lucien Febvre find you wondering if in fact, you should have bothered being born if it would end in such a state of tedious time-wasting. This is part of the greater experience called college, and in the end you may be better for it, at least if you pay attention to the right things.
The elbow patch professor may teach you only that the French brain is a strange, wine-soaked locale. But that is information. And most professors, from the dishevelled promoters of the Annale School to the frumpy brain trust near the English building and sometimes even the sleeker pseudo-academics who teach management, know something.
The temptations of the college world are, of course, many. When you face the choice of all freshmen—opening that shiny textbook or ambling down the hall to see the drunk moron from Pennsylvania light his farts—life becomes simple. No one will blame you for hoping to see an accident involving flames and sensitive body parts. But the charge you level at learning—“When will I use this?”—might also be worth considering in regard to the working knowledge of flatulence and intoxication you will helplessly absorb during your years at the university.
The other professorial types—the rakish or waifish writing professors, the wild-haired minions steeped in theorizing, the exuberant poli-sci TAs, on and on—will parade by in a hazy procession, and all will seem to be mere extensions of the numb adults who have, for years, defined the borders of the world. But now and then, when you tune in more closely to the ramblings of, say, that twitchy guy at the front of your Freshman English class, you might notice something that rises above the mere imparting of a skill you imagine could prove vaguely useful in your world. That odd person is likely here after enduring a four-year stint much like yours, then years more of something called graduate school, in which he sought a brand of knowledge that would not serve him well in that strange place you’ve been told to fear, “the real world.”
He had his own crop of professors, and noticed, down in the cracks between the moments of classroom tedium, that something else lurked. It is hard to define that something, and you will remain unconvinced when it is described in flat terms like “knowledge for the sake of knowledge.” Many is the adult who will have attempted to convince you that this place called “the university” exists to equip you for some wheel-spinning career tucked away in an office, reviewing reports of retail sales. For that, however, these four years are not entirely necessary. You need skills, yes, but not knowledge for its own sake in order to compare sales reports or to create substances of use to manufacturing. And at the heart of the university lies something for which most of us are not prepared: a search for knowing things just because they are there to be known, because knowing them makes the universe seem bigger.
The representatives of the academic world knew this once, though they may have but a misty recollection of the brightness of first seeing it. The culture you have grown up in places little value on knowledge that does not lead to financial gain. But you have, in these four years, the chance to catch a glimpse of a broader universe. You will inevitably have a few professors who peddle something other than skills, who conjure in your brain an unfamiliar excitement, a glimpse over the horizon. What you see there may prompt you to sail right over that edge, or to have a peek and return to the acquiring of more directly rewarding skills. But know that picking up a coat with elbow patches may be the result of your professor looking over that edge and remaining there, in a world of different concerns.
You owe it to yourself to listen for those different concerns. You may find them even in the jaded pronouncements of the minor functionaries of the academic world if you listen closely. They use big words—“palimpsest,” perhaps, or “acolyte”—not to confuse, but to refer to something faster than explaining it in simple terms allows.
Forgive them their sins, for they have pursued an impractical world. That may make them seem of little use in what you thought you came here for. But learning of, even spending time in that world so opposite the “real world” you’re preparing for, is the true gift of the university. It may not increase your future salary, but it will make you a better member of your tribe, and can, at worst, do no harm.
What I would say in these pages, if I could, is this:
You have arrived among hundreds much like you, though you can tell who among the many understands the tilt of your hat, the import of your logos. And so, with slogging of stereos and a strange clang of parental grief, begins your passing of time among the corduroy-clad, the arbiters of academia. What you are doing here you have not, perhaps, questioned. It is the thing which one does, an anteroom to a place you’ve been warned about in wry asides from a weary uncle, "the real world."
Here, then, is an unreal world, a palimpsest across which you will, by force or free will, scrawl your four years of subjection upon the faded scribbles of those who have haunted these halls before you. You are giddy with freedom, shored up in your cramped new nest looking down upon paths soon enough full of earnest strangers, all of them hoping a furtive glance at someone friendly will turn into a soothing of the raw fear brimming over everywhere. The banners of your green army have yet to be unfurled or even thought of. No one, you are sure, has been like you are now.
As the outlines of the new order of your wild assembly darken, as you learn the path to the too-bright cafeteria and the grim office where you must pay the tariffs that have gained you entry, something too familiar creeps in: the crush of schedules, books and papers, adults who insist you listen to their distant prattling. You are, it’s true, supposed to be a newly-minted adult, or at least free to do what you please as long as you have fake IDs and look innocent. But these creatures in loafers and ill-fitting jackets who stand before you, surely, are adults in a manner you will never be.
In one of the vine-choked buildings that hulk around you like foundered galleons, you file into a room chill with fall air and soon enough one of these strange emissaries of the academic world shambles in with a quick glance that tells you he’s nervous, too. He’s older, but not by much, and as he speaks, you find it hard to listen. The odd hang of his trousers, the barely controlled frizz of his hair are more fascinating than bullet points enumerating the sins you will commit and jeopardize your standing as an acolyte in a church you’ve wandered into without intent. His job is not clear to you. He holds some middle rank in the haze of this hierarchy, with power he is trying to delineate in some fashion.
He sends you in search of things, of tomes that seem full of recipes you would never cook, samples of a language not your own. Outside of the walls within which you must appear to have taken the oath of his order, you do not think of him often. When you do, it is those trousers you conjure, or the odd stridency of his voice when no one relieves him in his search for the answers he seems to believe lurk among you and your kind. His requests for reading, for examination of ideas whose dim shine holds little reward fall through the still air and roll into the back corner.
When, a week or two into this odd endeavor, he proclaims that you must retrieve one of those dusty ideas from that corner and carve from it some representation of your thoughts, your judgment, you find that your sizeable sigh is more audible than you guessed. You swear that his eyes glinted, his cheek flashed with anger as he stared your way.
There is much you do not know about this minor functionary who wanders in from whatever cold monastery must house him. He arrived here, or somewhere like here, long ago. He slogged a stereo into a dank room already colonized by a stranger whose unfamiliar and hedonistic manner almost frightened him. He arrived pursuing something few of his colleagues knew of. He came here because of something he had glimpsed years before, a momentary pulling up of the shade in a dark room, the floor suddenly blazing with light from a flowering beyond. It was the "universe" in "university" that drove him, archaic and awkward though such thought might be.
Something lies beyond the walls of the dormitory where you have come to light, beyond the pull of new relationships and invitations to join the ranks of a raging bacchanale, in the blank interaction with even this man who stands before you and goes on about Emily Dickinson’s metaphors. You’ve been warned away from it, distracted from it, but look closely and its outlines will still take shape.
The adult who now remonstrates before you weekly came to the university hoping to find that same indistinct doorway, though he wasn’t quite certain of it either. Years before, he had noticed something in an accounting of a university even longer ago, by his own teacher:
“On the third floor of Old Main you see a lavender balloon floating down the hall at about the same height of the heads of the passing students and professors, but none of them are paying it any mind. You lean against the wall and observe the balloon in its passage. You haven’t attended your classes in days. Light streams through the tall windows at the end of the hall. What is a balloon doing here? Why doesn’t anyone notice it? What’s wrong here?”
James Heflin no longer teaches Freshman English. The quotation is from The Spectral University, by Tom Whalen.
