The University of Last Resort

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Chapter 1 Call Me Ishmael ... at 555-3647 ... after Seven..........................1Chapter 2 The University of the Southern Region....................................15Chapter 3 Nun Greater..............................................................30Chapter 4 Lee Harvey Oswald Community College in Sheets, Texas.....................50Chapter 5 The Seamy Underbelly of the Ivy League...................................61Chapter 6 The University of Last Resort............................................68Chapter 7 A College That Has No Class..............................................73Chapter 8 Bored of Education.......................................................85Chapter 9 Big Lulu Redux...........................................................88Chapter 10 Don't Buy a Degree from Someone without One.............................92Chapter 11 You Have Toupee.........................................................98Chapter 12 Steroid University......................................................102Chapter 13 High Finance (In Both Senses)...........................................105Chapter 14 Sari, Wrong Number......................................................110Chapter 15 The Hotter the Water, the Stronger the Tea..............................116Chapter 16 Jack Daniels, Motel 6, and the Big O....................................123Chapter 17 Much Like the Dog.......................................................133

Chapter One

Heedless Parody in Topless Bar

It was supposed to be a harmless parody of what might happen at a bachelor party. But an event at the campus pub at Toronto's HumberCollege turned raunchy when some female exotic dancers, who had been instructed to remain clothed, instead doffed their tops. The student audience loved it. The administration did not. Officials made it clear that henceforth strippers are not suitable campus entertainment, especially when student government funds are used to pay them. Chronicle of Higher Education January 16, 2004

Call me Ishmael. No, that doesn't work. Let me use the name Michelangelo Schwartz. Mine is a sad story. At the end of my career, I begin a tale so lurid and shameful it is all but impossible to use my real name. What follows is a tale of higher education, scholarship, lust, drunkenness, and countless bad career choices. But amazingly enough, near the end of my working life, my career took a turn that was so unlikely you will think it was fiction. But we get ahead of ourselves, for the tale is in the telling. First a little bit about me.

My name, Michelangelo Schwartz, has always been a great way to open a conversation. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, in the last years of the forties. Newark was a typical city of that time. We all lived in wards, which is code for places where certain other ethnic or religious minorities are not welcomed, to say the least. I lived in the North Ward that was predominately Sicilian, which means we had great delis, great restaurants, Catholic churches, and a certain organization that I am told does not exist. I am part of that "huge goat moving through the python of American capitalism" known as the baby boomers.

I come from a Sicilian mother and a Jewish father. My father, Schlomo Schwartz, was a tailor from Minsk, and my mother's father was an olive oil salesman from Palermo. We lived in a simple two-bedroom apartment house that was stifling hot in the summer and stifling hot in the winter as well. Every floor running up to my place smelled of garlic and olive oil. To satisfy both families, I was raised both Jewish and Catholic. Now, you might well ask how that could be done in the fifties. It was simple. We just didn't tell anyone, and they never asked. The Italians and Jews kept to their own sides of town, and we chose a Catholic church close by and a synagogue on the other side of town. So I got two absolute truths from two chosen people. You can imagine my confusion until I realized, quite early on, that both of them were making it up. For them, it was a story. So I became interested in stories and thus in literature. I had the good fortune to learn early in life that the absolute truth isn't.

Because I met so many people who talked as if they had all the answers to life's questions, I became convinced early on they were making it up as they went along. This had a great impact on how I lived my life. I remember hearing stories from the Catholics about how the saints suffered terrible tortures for days instead of giving up their faith. I thought to myself, I would have said, "Where is the statue of Caesar? I will bow down to that right now!"

I also remember Jewish holidays (which are not much fun when you think about it) that centered on how hard it was to be a Jew, all of the bad stuff that happened to us, and how, even though it sucked, we should not give it up. I have to admit the Catholics had better miracles. Catholics told me about people being raised from the dead, the crippled who began to walk, and the blind who could later see. For the Jews, the biggest event was that oil in some lamp that was supposed to last two days lasted eight. They both had their virtues. The Catholics had more colorful church clothes but the Jews were funnier. So I came into adulthood with the idea that any stand on principles was usually based on some confused logic and emotion. I vowed to go through life quietly, without getting burned at the stake for some heresy only three people in the world could figure out.

Thus it was a mistake for me to live much of my life as a college professor. College professors are constantly taking moral stands on all sorts of issues and have been known to become furious if you disagree with them. Being absolutely sure you are smarter than everyone else is an occupational hazard for college professors, and it is easy to see how it happens.

Imagine you spend your life teaching Medieval History to freshmen in college. You have a PhD and you have studied the subject for twenty or thirty years by the time you get it down. You can read Latin, Greek, maybe a little Anglo-Saxon or Middle English, and you know your medieval world like a Mr. Goodwrench knows a Chevy engine. Then you stand for ninety minutes in front of eighteen-year-old kids who are there to get a degree so they don't have to work at McDonald's and who have a hard time writing sentences in basic English. Over time, this gives you the illusion that you are a deity among lesser beings. You mistakenly begin to think your peculiar expertise in some esoteric subject qualifies you to be an expert on all subjects in all venues. Thus, after years of always having all of the answers, a college professor gets in the habit of always being right in the classroom, and this translates to the mistaken belief that anyone who disagrees with him outside the classroom is an idiot. Now imagine a modern college where you may have two or three hundred of such geniuses, and realize that to get anything done they all have to agree. You can see the humor of such a set up before we get very far into our tale.

Modern college professors and administrators are defenders of the same system that produced them. The vast majority of them have never worked outside the system for one single day in their whole lives. They went from college to grad school to teaching and then on to college administration. So to understand them is to understand the system that produced them. It is a closed system isolated from the outside world. Once they get tenure, they can repeat the patterns they themselves learned in college. And tenure is a key part of the story I am about to relate. The job of a tenured professor in a big university is not a bad gig. Tenured professors can't be fired. There are no objective measures of their success or failure, and anybody who criticizes anything they do is violating their "academic freedom." If they were caught in the most compromising position or flagrant violation of college rules, they would be defended by faculty senates, colleagues, and, of course, the American Association of University Professors. The faculty controls most colleges. The most powerful faculty all have tenure. This means they cannot be fired, changed, or motivated in any way. Much like the Supreme Court, the pope, and medieval kings, they are hard to argue with. So we have professors who are certain they have all of the answers and who live inside a system that protects their right to believe this illusion. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the academy.

First, let me begin with a little about myself and my own college experience that made me the man I am. Just as the radicals of the sixties threw blood on administration buildings, listened to Janis Joplin, and knew how to handle a bong are now college administrators, I too learned the essence of my craft there.

I had the good fortune to arrive at Newark State College during the Summer of Love in 1967. It was a college right in the middle of downtown Newark, New Jersey. That is about as far from Oxford as you are going to get. The buildings were red brick, built by unimaginative state contracts (with the majority of the profits siphoned off by organized crime and corrupt New Jersey politicians). The campus looked like a prison. Because downtown Newark was so crime-ridden, the campus was surrounded by barbed wire and you had to show your campus ID to get in.

But even in this academic hellhole, it was the Summer of Love. The bras were burning and so was my desire. There were tie-dyed T-shirts and black lights and day-glow posters of Jimmy Hendrix and tigers. I could afford dope, gas, and my rent, a situation I would have great nostalgia for many years later after my second divorce. Hippie chicks wanted to cut the bonds of convention, and I was a pair of scissors. I joined the college literary magazine, grew my hair long, and started to read Nietzsche and Herman Hesse. My friends were pretentious playwrights and really, really bad poets. Pot works miracles.

It all worked out as one might expect, and at the end of the spring semester, I had flunked out of Newark State and gotten three years of probation for an ounce of Maui Wowi. Why is this relevant to our story? All of what I have just said is central to our narrative. Unless you fully grasp the insanity of the sixties on college campuses, you cannot get inside the minds of the modern professoriate. It was that bubbling cauldron of Marxism, free love, dope, and rock and roll that cooked up a stew of ideas that has made the modern university what it is today.

A life-changing event happened the last day I was on campus at Newark State before they kicked me out. I was on the quad outside the library with my girlfriend, who called herself Orange Sunshine. She owned a whippet that wore a Grateful Dead bandanna and could catch Frisbees. My girlfriend was a senior accounting major, and she was dreading her future.

"Ten days from now I will be working in a bank. I will get two weeks' vacation a year and work in a little cubicle with an adding machine. Wouldn't it be great if we could just stay here forever, smoke dope, make love, talk about nothing, and never leave?"

I took a long pull on the joint I was smoking and then placed the ice-cold bottle of Schlitz beer to my lips. Nearby, "Light My Fire" by The Doors was blasting out a dorm window. The sun was hot and there was no place I had to be. I realized my girlfriend was right. If I could somehow get a job in college I could avoid the real world. Words like accountability and productivity have always scared me. I noticed I could never find any of my professors after three in the afternoon and never saw any of them on a Friday. They claimed they were home "doing research" or "preparing for class." This always made me laugh, because most of the papers and indexes they lectured off of were so brittle and yellow they could be in a rare book collection at the British Museum. And for scholars who worked a good deal at home, I was amazed how many of them kept current on the cast of All My Children and General Hospital. I got the idea, there and then, that if I could find a way to stay in college, I could live a life free from oversight and accountability. It was crazy to leave college. Looking back many decades later, I am glad I never did. Thank you, Orange Sunshine.

If you flunk out of one college, it is easy to get into another. College in America is a traveling salesman's suitcase packed full of second chances. Most colleges are so hard up for students that they bend the rules to let almost anyone in. This is called enrollment management. How many people do you know who went to two, three, or four colleges?

I soon re-enrolled at Uppsala University, which was a private school in East Orange, New Jersey, on the verge of bankruptcy. Now East Orange is one step up from Newark in the same way that Twister Peppermint Wine is one step up from Mad Dog 20/20. The campus had some vague connection with Uppsala, Sweden, and the Luthern Church, but it was all very confused. The campus consisted of about five buildings on a block in a really bad ghetto. I used to get off the bus and run to class. When you say you are happy to get back to Newark, that doesn't say much for where you have been. The buildings were sort of Swedish in the same way IKEA is.

At Uppsala, I took up with a sociology professor named Ned Ephraim who taught me all about ideology and propaganda. This is an important point in our story. Most professors have some college professor they model themselves after and follow. Ned was my hero and lived a life I would later emulate in my own style. This fellow had a beard and hippie beads, and used to sit cross-legged on his desk the times he did show up for class, which was not frequently. He was about medium height and had a huge beer belly as he didn't believe in physical exercises, which seemed common for most of the professors I had in college. He often wore a jacket and tie, but the jacket had elbow patches and the tie was one of those woolen woven ones that only professors wear. He used the battering rams of Freud and Marx to break down all masks and hypocrisy. As he stripped away the fog of bourgeois lies, the one thing I noticed was that it made all of the women in class extremely horny. They had been taught all their lives about their subservient role in life and saving themselves for marriage. And in Ned Ephraim's class, it was suddenly closing time at the bar of religion and self-restraint. We were all sleeping with each other, and our professor actually encouraged it. He said we were "breaking the bonds of bourgeois ideology." Hey, I wasn't going to argue! He had singled out several beautiful co-eds who were his constant companions. He was grizzled, badly dressed, and his personal hygiene was lacking. But he was not lacking in love. It was from him I learned a new variation of the famous Henry Kissinger quote:

"A professor is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Later in my own career, I would apply these lessons again and again. It was Marxist theory by day and Ned's bare apartment just off campus with the bong at night. This was during my big anti-Vietnam-War phase. Our professor had somehow confused the Nixon government with the college administration at Uppsala College. He thought that both Nixon and the dean were spying on him. If either of them were, it must have been very entertaining listening to those tapes. I learned from him that if you were belligerent enough and crazy enough, most cowardly college administrators will be very cautious about tangling with you. A typical class began when Professor Ephraim came in twenty minutes late. I piped up.

"Professor, isn't there some rule that we can wait ten minutes and leave if you are not on time?"

Ann Lueba, a pretty business major who sat next me, joined in the fun.

"I also heard that if the professor has a PhD, we have to wait fifteen minutes."

Ned Ephraim took a long pull on his pipe. He smoked a cheap cherry tobacco that had a wonderful smell that I still remember to this day. He took out his pipe and looked at us.

"Don't you get it? Haven't I taught you anything? There are no rules. There is no rule about how long you have to wait for a professor. There is also no rule that if your college roommate commits suicide, you get all As. These are all myths, and you buy into them all of the time. Freud tells us that the ego mediates the superego, which believes all of the bullshit rules, and the id, which wants to party all the time. I say go with it. Now, Schwartz, why did you make that remark about me being late?"

I was now an eighteen-year-old put on the spot by a smart college professor.

"It was a joke, professor."

He took another pull on his pipe as he meditated.

"You know what Freud says in Jokes and the Unconscious? He says behind every joke there is a hidden emotion, a fear or some desire for pleasure or power. Now let's see how reflective you are, Schwartz. What were you really trying to say with that remark?"

At this point I was totally lost.

"No, it was just a joke."

Ned was having none of it.

"Schwartz, it is like the Vietnam War. We say we are there for freedom and democracy. But what about exploiting the rubber? What about all of the oil in the South China Sea that Exxon could use? Don't you see that the imperialist ambitions of capitalist America hide behind patriotism and morals so they can rape the third world and get it away with it? Schwartz, don't you get it?

I was really sorry I had said anything.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The University of Last Resortby Michelangelo Schwartz Copyright © 2011 by Dr. Michelangelo Schwartz. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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