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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Gina Barreca

Going Public

The dividing wall between public and private is thinning, isn’t it?

And even though later-boomer parents are determined to get their kid into the fanciest school possible, paying huge fees for private coaching and SAT-prep, state universities are most usefully serving their students by looking toward the future rather than invoking the past, admitting those for whom success is a right rather than an inheritance.

I teach at a public university. Let me tell you why.

I was the first woman in my family to go to college, practically the first to graduate from high school in a timely fashion. I entered Dartmouth in 1975.

Except in my case it was more like breaking and entering.

Not only was I in one of the first classes of women, but I also appeared to be the only person whose last name ended in a vowel; Michael Corleone was the only other Sicilian to have gone there, and he was fictional. Sure, I was grateful for — and good at working — the system: I was the first woman to be named Alumni Scholar, and one of the first to receive a Reynolds Fellowship. I put them to good use.

I graduated early and used the fellowship to go to New Hall, a women’s college at Cambridge University.

After Cambridge, however, I ended up on 42nd Street, just as several of my family members had predicted, although not for the reasons they imagined.

The Graduate Center of C.U.N.Y. was there (now it’s in what forever will remain for me the old B. Altman’s building on 34th Street), and CUNY is where I wanted to be.

OK, so I backed into a Ph.D. program. I was working full-time for a television network in the city and adjuncting at night at Queens College in Flushing (more about being an adjunct in a later post — lots more). My students were recent immigrants, young mothers, retired sanitation workers; they ranged in age from 18 to 81.

Their skill levels, like their points of origin, were all over the map: There were Talmudic scholars who had read far more every day than I ever would in a lifetime, and there were students who maybe had read an article in TV Guide. Once.

But I realized that teaching in those Quonset huts — where some of the English Department classrooms were lodged — was more satisfying, engaging, useful, and fun than any work I was doing for WNET or WABC.

I had to teach and teach at a college level; I had to get a doctorate.

With student loans from Dartmouth already accruing interest, I hesitated to get further into debt. When I thought about Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and Yale (which I did — of course I did), I measured my needs against what they could offer me. It didn’t work. CUNY would let me teach (“let me” being an interesting phrase, really, as I write it, but it was how I felt), work part-time in the Queens College development office, and continue to teach in the evenings while I took classes.

It seemed perfectly fair.

And I made good use of the place. I took every class I could, auditing the ones in which I wasn’t actually enrolled, and so had the privilege to study with Caws, with Brownstein, with Levin, with Day, with Timko, with Bonaparte, and with the man who became my adviser, Gerhard Joseph, and I loved their classes.

They encouraged me to attend conferences, to present papers, to write articles and essays for publication; I followed their advice. They said I had to be twice as good as any doctoral candidate from a more prestigious university, and I cribbed the old feminist line “Luckily, that’s not too difficult.”

They taught me, in other words, to turn myself into a member of the profession before I officially entered it. That, too, seemed fair enough. Who has time to sleep in grad school, anyway, whether or not you’re being productive? The only loans I took out permitted me a semester where all I did was write the dissertation. Those three months were a luxury no subsequent sabbatical could ever match.

I consider my time at the Graduate Center a luxury as well, in much the same way that I consider teaching at the University of Connecticut a privilege.

Because, let’s face it, what goes on in the actual classrooms of public institutions is as good as, if not better than, what goes on in those antebellum buildings on those ivied campuses. And part of my job is to demsytify the process for my own students, the ones who remain intimidated or awed by schools they can’t afford.

I try to make clear then, in these days of instant access to all manner of scholarly materials and of rising standards for professionalism amongst all manner of college instructors (yes, more about this topic too in later posts — I for one don’t believe the standards are “too high” or in danger of being anywhere near that mark at any institution, private or public), the essential differences between an education at a private school and a state one are most evident outside the small rooms or lecture halls where actual teaching and learning takes place.

As for arguments that “learning takes place everywhere,” those are dandy when making points about how lacrosse, pottery, and fraternity houses are part of venerable traditions. But the arguments seem to me less effective when the well-rehearsed choral voices are broken down into individual mutters and roars, school songs, or team-chants.

So when asked why I teach at a state school, or why a student might choose to attend a public university rather than a private one, I often reply with a line that one of the Corleone’s associates might use: Leave the ivy. Take the education.

Posted at 02:54:49 PM on January 1, 2008 | All postings by Gina Barreca

Comments

  1. A rough-cut version of my tale. I loved the idea of transmitting some of what I had acquired to first-in-the-family students at a public university. It worked out until the university sold education and bought training, leaving me less than delighted with my choice. Getting to good students with something of value became a guerilla operation.

    If you don’t be careful, I will become a fan.

    — francofou · Jan 1, 04:29 PM · #

  2. I won’t say that I “chose” to teach at a community college, but that is where my career took me, and I can’t say that I am sorry at all. The comments about the students and education and what goes on in the classrooms is exactly right. And yes, it is our job to “demystify” the process. I regularly tell my students that they are just as good, often better, than those in the name brand schools. I attended a name brand school for undergraduate work, and I have experienced what those schools are like. My students are often more “real” and more caring, and I love them for who they are.

    As for the comment that public universities have bought into training, not education, yes there is a good deal of that. But, in some cases students need to be trained before they can fully understand what education is.

    — sudy · Jan 2, 12:05 PM · #

  3. Since when are “training” and “education” mutually exclusive? Ideally they should not only both be emphasized, they should be intertwined.

    — Tad · Jan 7, 10:01 AM · #

  4. And yet—you skip easily from “I was the first woman in my family to go to college” to “I entered Dartmouth in 1975.” There is a tremendous leap there that remains unexplored. I was the first person in my family to go to college, in 1970—when Dartmouth was not yet an option for women. It would never have been an option for me anyway, though, despite my 4.00 GPA and 1350 SATs, because 1) I went to a substandard high school in a blue-collar town, and 2) my father’s $14,000/year salary for a family of four was considered too high for financial aid other than loans. I know this because I was the one filling out all the forms, my parents being totally clueless about college and how to get there—which brings me to another aspect of why Dartmouth (or any other Ivy) was never a possibility. No one even talked to me about this: certainly not my parents, but also not my teachers, nor my guidance counselor. You obviously benefited from the higher expectations of your family (possibly the men who had gone to college?) and your school and peers. Those are privileges that should not be taken for granted.

    — LitProf · Jan 7, 01:10 PM · #

  5. The Ivy League will always be an exceptional case, but when one takes that group out of the equation, the distinction between public and private colleges and universities has nothing to do with academic quality anyway; it has to do with social prestige. One sends a son or daughter to a notable private college to marry well. If you want a first-rate education, taught by first-rate faculty, and with superb facilities and resources, and you don’t select Ivy or Stanford, Duke, Chicago or Northwestern, for example, go to a flagship state university, particularly its honors college. One should not have to explain why he or she teaches at (or serves as president of) a public university. True, people who live on the east coast still believe that anything with a private name is “better” than anything public, but the rest of the country knows better, and has from the time of the founding of their great state universities.

    — /case hardened · Jan 7, 02:45 PM · #

  6. I just can’t agree. I attended a well-respected Canadian university and went to grad school at UC Berkeley. There was a huge gap between my college (maybe the 50-75th-best in North America) and the undergraduate program at the best public university in the country. That includes funding, facilities, the caliber of faculty, the rigor of the coursework and the post-graduate opportunities.

    But the gap between Berkeley and Stanford or the Ivies is not insignificant. This is particularly evident after graduation – the opportunities even for a Cal graduate pale compared to those afforded a graduate of one of the top 15-20 private colleges.

    The gap between where I went to college and a top school is even larger – a friend of mine graduated from Harvard with a history degree and became an investment banker – all they wanted was an Ivy League graduate who had played a club sport. [I know, it sounds gross. He got out of banking asap.] When the banks recruited from my college, they wanted just the top few Engineering, Math and Business majors. No history major could have gotten an interview.

    It’s not right, but going private opens a lot of doors, and it doesn’t matter if the same quality of education is available at a public university (which it wasn’t at the college I attended.) The people you meet in college and the college’s alumni network do more to help you after graduation than what specific material you learned.

    A graduate of one of “those” private colleges doesn’t need to major in anything practical, whereas English majors from public universities usually get laughed at (except briefly during the dot-com boom). On top of that, a job that would make a public graduate look lazy or unfocused (teaching in Cancun? taking any unpaid internship. mountain-climbing) is viewed as acceptable self-exploration by a private school kid.

    It’s not a world I’d really want to be a part of, but the benefits to those who join are undeniable. And in Bush’s America, it’s hard to assuage the understandable anxieties of students who can already see advantages going to groups of perhaps less-deserving people.

    — Dave · Jan 9, 07:30 PM · #

  7. Ah, and how could I forget? As a freshman in college, I had six classes with over 250 students, one with under 100 and none under 60. Sophomore and junior year, every class was between 100 and 200. Senior year, most of my classes had 40-60 students in them, with just two under 20. Berkeley wasn’t much better – I took two upper-level undergrad electives with more than 50 students in them.

    Until I was a senior in college, none of my profs even knew my name, no matter how well I did in their classes or how much I participated in discussions. This isn’t true of all public institutions, but the risk of having it happen at a place with a 17-1 or 22-1 student-faculty ratio is much higher than at a place that’s 6-1 or 7-1.

    — Dave · Jan 9, 08:56 PM · #

  8. “The dividing wall between public and private is thinning…” WHAT? Have you seen Ivy League admission/rejection stats? Have you seen SAT scores for Ivy vs public schools? Are you aware of the contacts that are made at Ivy schools vs public schools? Are you aware that many Ivy league students are recruited before they graduate? Are you aware that an Ivy league degree opens many more doors than a degree from a public school? Maybe the dividing wall could be thinned if public school alumni were more interested in contributing to academic departments rather than the football program!

    — john · Jan 11, 08:33 AM · #

  9. I agree with the idea of how “the dividing wall between public and private is thinning.” You don’t need to prove the value of your education by slapping an ivy league bumper sticker to the back of your car. I grew up in a “wealthy” suburb of Connecticut where in my senior year of (a public) high school, I was considered the ‘ugly duckling’ as the only person in my social circle planning to attend a public university. At the time, I felt ashamed. I was hard on myself, believing my best in any area (academics, sports, music, etc.) was never worth recognizing when compared to that of an ivy league bound teenager. I did my best to avoid situations where I would run into particular people who would interrogate me about my college plans, just so I didn’t have to hear their response of “…oh…well that’s nice…” Now, I am proud to call myself a student at the University of Connecticut. I believe the quality of my public education is no greater than, but in some respect equal to that found in a private institution. Why pay thousands more to attend a smaller school where the same or similar resources and opportunities within your chosen field of study are offered at a public institution? In my opinion, more prospective college students are learning to appreciate and enjoy their education regardless of a public or private distinction.

    — kelly · Jan 26, 08:09 PM · #

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