A Cynic in No Man’s Land

by Maria

Life has its way with you.
You do your thing,
It does its thing.
In the end you are made to take responsibility for the result.
Life stays silent on the subject.

A Cynic in No Man’s Land

I am your garden variety cynic. I am an unforgiving observer-critic of humans and society with all their frailties and misunderstandings. For this and other reasons, I am an unreliable narrator. But I am the only narrator who is going to tell you the truth—a truth—about No Man’s Land.

No Man’s Land is the American community college in the twenty first century. It is the place where I have spent much of my working life. It took me forever to settle down to this “real” job; I was unshaped and floating in my 20s and my 30s.

Some of my colleagues claim that teaching at a community college is a calling, an honor, a mitzvah. I wish I had such an affirmative understanding of the meaning of my work. But remember I’m a malcontent. If I believed in the community college “mission” would that make me a reliable narrator? I doubt it.

I did not want the job in No Man’s Land, when I first got it. I have not wanted my job in No Man’s land for most of the years I have worked there.

I’ve kept myself judiciously, and often bitterly, aloof. Aloof from the institution, but never from my students. My students kept me breathing. They kept my heart pumping when the rest of me withered. My students are some of the most tender moments of my working life, the most debilitating moments of my working life, the most profound moments of my working life.

From the first year as a community college prof., I was plotting my exit, applying to jobs at four-year colleges, pushing myself to write and publish—even as I taught 5 classes a semester—presenting at conferences, everything that is expected of academics. I pulled all the correct leavers; the ones I had been told would lead to success. They didn’t.

Advancement in my job did not require these efforts. I just needed to teach and teach I did—to the whole of America. Open admissions community colleges take all comers—no narrowed acceptance rates to jack up institutional prestige. Sign up, pay, and you can attend. To the rest of academia (at least for the many four-year college to which I applied and hoped to flee) my association with No Man’s land diminished me. I had tumbled down into the basement of America’s stratified and status-driven higher ed hierarchy. I had crossed the Rubicon.

Please reserve your judgement. I know, so far, I seem to be a prickly unlikable character. Be patient, you may eventually side with me, that is if I do my job well.

All of America’s problems have walked into my classroom:

For instance, the young man, a child of recent Russian immigrants, who regularly reported to class disruptively late and sweaty with a football tucked under his arm (like he was John Kennedy Jr in a 1950s campaign photo op). When we privately discussed his lateness and behavior, he weepingly disclosed that he was living in his car. After his expulsion, for threatening fellow students, he hounded me to set up a meeting to sell me Cutco knives.

Or the girl who came to class incoherent and stumbling—claiming she had just been in a car accident. After sending her to the health center, the class and I tried to make sense of her odd behavior. One student informed us that she was high on heroin. He knew; he was a recovering addict at the age of nineteen.

And the young woman with long dark hair who revealed that she was falling behind in class because she had just moved to the area. She was in hiding from an abusive father who had raped her; she feared he would track her down. She told me this awful story one late fall afternoon as I watched the dusk turn to dark through the slim vertical window in my cinderblock-walled office.

Every variety of learning disabled, emotionally damaged, and behaviorally challenged young American has sat in my classroom. The quick-witted, the imaginative, the ambitious, the artistic, the academically gifted and the academically average have too. This list is not my complaint; I have enough character and humanity to feel deeply for these students. In fact, this list—my student’s catastrophes and the harshness of life in capitalism—is hard to bear.

Despite my cynicism, I became good at caring for America’s problems, mothering its victims. But this is not what I had dreamed for myself. After years in graduate school, I had hoped to spend my life reading and writing history and sharing it with interested students. Unfortunately, I underestimated the cutthroat nature of higher ed. In fact, my choice of university, a respectable but middling school, without real standing in my discipline, limited my chances from the get-go. If I had grasped the game, I would have made sure to get a degree from an
elite-brand school. Not coming from an academic family, I was making it up as I went along.

My grad advisor, an accomplished historian, also misapprehended my chances. Years after I signed on with No Man’s Land, he maintained I could scramble up to a “better” post. But maybe he knew that when I joined the community college, I entered a cul-de-sac. Perhaps his continued encouragements were really deathbed assurances: “You’re gonna make it, you’ll get better.” Or maybe, he needed to believe I would break out. His own reputation was on the line; my career for good and for ill affected his standing.

For him, and for me, his protégé, a better job meant less teaching.

During my training, he made clear that intellectual production was the noble cause; teaching was subsidiary. I remember one exchange that stamped this ethos onto my psyche. In my final year, I was teaching my own class, while writing my dissertation and pursuing other projects. Passing in the hall, he asked, “How is your class going?” Sheepishly I confessed that it had fallen to the bottom of my to-do list: I was so busy with my own work. “That’s how it should be,” he plainly replied.

Staying true to this ethos—pursuing the “noble cause”—proved nearly impossible as a community college professor of one hundred plus students per semester—with their myriad academic, emotional, and material problems. And the longer I stayed, the more prospects for migration evaporated. Meanwhile, my college and America unraveled.

Through the first two decades of the twenty first century state and federal funding cuts, curriculum bureaucratization, administrative expansion and enrollment decline left my college battered and wobbling. Over fifty percent of undergrads have some contact with community colleges. Yet, these significant civic institutions have never been on solid social ground. They and their students were vulnerable and expendable through their postwar expansion and into their anemic present. Community colleges come up in public discussion on “workforce development” and America’s need to “reskill” its labor force. But the students as striving, curious individuals with artistic, intellectual, and political insights and inclinations—with rights to dreams and desires? Nope, not actually ever.

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What follows are close examinations of some community college students making their way in the midst of war, economic crisis, and social uncertainty.