In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
The Truth About College
-
-
3.8 • 11 Ratings
-
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
A caustic expose of the deeply state of our colleges-America's most expensive Ponzi scheme.
What drives a former English major with a creative writing degree, several unpublished novels, three kids, and a straining marriage to take a job as a night teacher at a second-rate college? An unaffordable mortgage.
As his house starts falling apart in every imaginable way, Professor X grabs first one, then two jobs teaching English 101 and 102-composition and literature-at a small private college and a local community college. He finds himself on the front lines of America's academic crisis. It's quite an education.
This is the story of what he learns about his struggling pupils, about the college system-a business more bent on its own financial targets than the wellbeing of its students-about the classics he rediscovers, and about himself. Funny, wry, self-deprecating, and a provocative indictment of our failing schools, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is both a brilliant academic satire and a poignant account of one teacher's seismic frustration-and unlikely salvation-as his real estate woes catapult him into a subprime crisis of an altogether more human nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Professor X, who embarks on teaching literature and composition evening classes at two colleges (one private, one community) as a supplement to his full-time job to avoid foreclosure, describes his time in academia in a slow-going memoir. Taking the reader through the minutiae of teaching how he found his job, what he said to his first class, his grading principles, how he meets plagiarism along the way, he tosses in how his marriage is going and what he thinks of the mortgage crisis. He sprinkles his account with vignettes of literary analysis and reports from professional and media education specialists. The subjects Professor X approaches are the critical ones facing the growth, spread, and direction of American higher education, but his treatment of them is sadly shallow and self-absorbed. A book-length version of a June 2008 Atlantic Monthly article that was much discussed (which he comments on) becomes essentially an extended grouse about the inadequacies of the students and the institutions they attend.
Customer Reviews
In the basement of the ivory tower
This book should be required reading for every counselor, teacher, administrator in every high school in America. I would also demand every politician, pastor, parent to read it as well. Those of us who have taught English for decades can grasp every literary allusion professor x makes. Those readers who can't should ask, "why can't I?" It is because education has been watered down to bland, easily digestible pap. As a nation we must reevaluate the education industry and demand change. We have been led down a yellow brick road to a mythical oz and the students who finally realize there is no wizard to grant their wish and who have been denied a meaningful vocational education that will give them a trade to support themselves are the ones who suffer, along with the rest of society!
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
I looked forward to reading the book, but was disappointed. The book should be marketed to English adjuncts. Too many literary tangents. At times, I would understand the thought of the author, but it would be soon thereafter, the point went too far away from the topic. I don't think the personal information about his homelife was necessary. I would have preferred a commentary on teaching in general. Too many facts clouded any humor. Who cares... tell the story the way you see it. Who cares what the data says. It is not that kind of book.