On the Idea of Dual Credit by Unemeritus Professor Erskine Carter for Critical Civitates Volume 36/15/2015 Editor's Note: This essay was originally presented to faculty at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illionois where the author worked for a quarter century before retiring in the spring of 2014. Prior to retiring, Erskine Carter facilitated BHC Chieftain (the school's student newspaper) students who investigated and critically examined the College's dual credit program, eventually publishing FOIAs proving the College was not abiding by Illinois State dual credit laws. This essay, was originally presented as an appeal to colleagues and administrators to see the nature of the dual credit program in relation to ideals of education and to organize in opposition to administrators caught in an obvious deception. In response, the College Board of Trustees rejected Professor Carter's emeritus petition, with the president of the board saying that Professor Carter should be punished for his behavior.
On the Idea of Dual Credit at Black Hawk College or Why Did You Become a Professor? It’s the Journey, not the Destination “Why Did You Become A Professor?” It doesn’t take much contemplation to fire off a reply to that one. I possess an arsenal of prefabricated platitudes I use almost everywhere. After all, isn’t it poor manners to ignore even “Have a nice day” or “Enjoy the show,” no matter how hollow those sentiments? I am genetically programmed to be polite, so I apologize in advance when, sooner or later, I offend someone, unintentionally or otherwise, but the truth is Truth, and without the truth, what remains? As my lifelong friend John Keats puts it: Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know Remember those archetypal professors who drew applause at the end of every term? From the wise mentors to charismatic gurus to dignified scholars to those insufferable autocrats, all challenging us with Sapere aude! (Have the courage to think for yourself!) I count them my lifelong friends, now dead to the world but forever alive within me. Women like Francelia Butler, a reporter aboard the torpedoed Lusitania and a founder of what she called Kiddie Lit., who befriended me at UConn, and that’s how Joseph Campbell entered my pantheon and divulged the deep secrets of the myths I love. Or Northrop Frye peripatetically making wisecracks about the phoenix and the turtle and suggesting, “When it comes to tragedy, the crucifixion was no picnic.” And my mentor, John Dando, M.A., Columbia, 1952, real life friend to Dylan Thomas and lifelong friend of Shakespeare, master of Satire and rebel prof who refused to get his PhD: “Who in the world would examine me?” All faithful friends, and although we may disagree, we respect each other’s views as long as they are rooted in Reason. By fiat, I am their heir, and my legacy is their Knowledge, a precious inheritance I will bequeath to my younger colleagues. My academic life usually unfolds in days of instruction and delight. In enormous part, I have that privilege because my lifelong friends help me along, as do my real life friends, my colleagues and allies, dedicated college professors who have endured the slings and arrows and blood, sweat, beers, and tears of graduate school: those all night debates, “Derrida’s okay, but his disciples are lame patsies”; the wine and cheese and putrid sherry gigs; hours browsing in the stacks when surfing was just another ocean sport; interdepartmental softball games (our team was the Pathetic Phallusies); lecturing undergrads and fumbling through our notes on that crutch of a podium, boot camp for the Professorate, and we learned that we all learn as we go: studying our profs, watching them do their thing, taking in our department, then the whole university where academic freedom, institutional integrity, and quality education appear sacred to everyone... Enter reality... Bright eyed initiates in our caps and gowns, we soon fell from ivory towered innocence into that oft petty underworld of Blakean experience: university politics, our very own version of the uneasy marriage of heaven and hell. As a Connecticut Daily Campus alumnus, I understand how the Chieftain staff must feel having given body and soul to the College newspaper. Beyond their fine writing, empathetic behavior, persistence, creativity, and principles, what makes these student reporters and their editors so special is they are a team. On Day One, they surrendered their egos outside the newsroom door and went straight to work, sharing leads, interviews, photos, all their paraphernalia to build the best stories they could. And so they did. The Chieftain uncovered information about Dual Credit that awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers. What I had taken on faith, I had not examined skeptically. What once seemed a rather harmless serpent slithering through my garden had metamorphosed into a Yeatsian beast, a not so mythological Hydra that keeps sprouting headfuls of serpents, not only in a plethora of local high schools but also in institutions all over this land. I wonder what Pete Seeger would think of that? Decent fellow that he is, Pete would probably hope the serpent metaphor was unintentionally offensive, and I would admit that it was, but there is no way I am going to cut it; it’s too delicious. And off we would go, talking about inspiration, poetic license and justice and Dylan, and how Shelley and Byron were hippies and punks respectively, and how the punks don’t deserve Byron, the Sex Pistols was their apotheosis and that was that; how sometimes we get conned and don’t find out till it’s almost too late; how sometimes the heretics and blasphemers sneak into holy places like the college where you teach, and before the Holies become holy no more, sometimes you gotta get like Jesus in the Temple or Saint Patrick with the snakes or Hercules and the Hydra (at least he had Iaolus to back him up). And even if you don’t prevail, you’ve gotta stay true to your principles and go down with your sword in your hand, the sword that should be a ploughshare, and then Pete would gently remind me to abide by the truths in my own song. “And dance,” he would joke, but I get it: As long as a song and dance is a song and dance, a song and dance will remain a song and dance. But now the word is out! The clothes are off, all ye emperors and empresses! The problems associated with Dual Credit are reported in detail elsewhere. The program is a morass of non-compliance, an insane, education on the cheap rush through school with (long gone) administrative carpetbaggers demanding little tribute and hawking college credits to the lowest bidders, not a single credible advantage in evidence, an insult to the faculty, which, by state law, should have input and some oversight, an embarrassment to the College, and a deadly threat to its fine reputation and that of its professors and students. It’s the same old institutional tale of shortsighted, reckless visionaries establishing a gruesome policy like Dual Credit or forcing the inmates to use the friendly (as in fire) College web site to hunt and peck for info (when faculty and students have enough to do getting through all their damn junk mail), or jettisoning something of value like a student day care or a public television station, and then sneaking out of Dodge just before sun-up on a rickety buckboard, a glowing recommendation in hand: off to fix another college, leaving in the dust their grand achievements which will soon crumble to helpless ruins as the “permanents” watch the next Swiftian confederacy take over, glowing recommendation in hand, ignoring policies it likely assumes are firmly in place, and sets about creating new unnecessary monuments fated to go the misbegotten way of Ozymandias: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! I generally have compassion for the poor suckers left holding the bag (especially in such cases when I am one of them!), but regrettably, it’s an existential truth; those of us who inherited Dual Credit now own it, and as Pogo warned me when I was a kid: We have met the enemy and he is us. Myriad reasons make Dual Credit wrong, wrong, wrong, a Potemkin education, another casualty of a shrinking vocabulary wrapped in long term mismanagement and/or neglect and a not so covert anti-intellectualism that feeds on ignorance for its strength. Dual Credit, as it stands, has even less credibility than Charles Manson’s recent environmental agenda, which could actually achieve some worthwhile results. If it were up to me, I would terminate with extreme prejudice this loathsome monstrosity and disqualify all “credits earned” since its inception. Regrettably, that privilege is the province of others. What we have here is failure to communicate Way down in Hades, Socrates is probably dying to stow away on Charon’s raft, cross the River Styx, escape to the upper world, and offer a hemlock cocktail to all Illinois legislators who voted Aye! to the Dual Credit Quality Act (minus one hero, Republican Representative Suzanne Bassi who sagaciously voted Nay!) Next, that tough minded mason would come after me with messages from a horrified Plato and that fussbudget Aristotle: The deadliest weapon against education is Higher Education. Young people should have one mission. Ask are they thoughtfully consuming, digesting, and savoring all they can of life before life consumes them? Demand of those asleep-at-the-wheel politicians and bureaucratic stylus pushers what right have they to do anything but facilitate the transmission of your most precious heirloom, Knowledge? Does playing unregulated, make believe, high school college classes equate to college learning? Show me the syllogism! Once the bane of all incoming freshpeople, Dr. Samuel Johnson would call for a pragmatic procedure. As with a snake’s bite, the most potent antidote for poisonous expediency is to treat it with its own venom, expediency. Dr. Johnson’s solution is so simple it could be executed with one clean swipe of an Alexandrian sword, so simple it could also meander forever through a Dickensian matrix. Cutting the Gordian Knot in two seems preferable to spending an eternity of circumlocution in Bleak House, don’t you think? Marshall Mcluhan would be blunter, claiming kids are perfect marks for a scam like Dual Credit, taking it on faith and Smartphones and Facebook that they can blow this high school scene fast and become awesomely cool college dudes and chicks before you know it. For once, their parents agree: It’s a savings bonanza, Dear, and they’ll be out of the house even sooner! You know I’ve been dying to convert Suzie’s bedroom into a ------. As a father of six, Professor Mcluhan was well aware that all sixteen and seventeen year olds know what’s best for their education; in fact, they know everything (or whatever) until they’re old enough to realize they don’t know jackfeces about nuthin’. The State of Illinois, the Illinois Community College Board, the Black Hawk College Board of Trustees, and the high schools, administrators, faculty, parents, and community, we are all culpable in this fiasco. The only innocents are the starry eyed students, and little do they know they aren’t really following their bliss, poor devils. If the past defines the present, look to the future of this illogical nightmare and consider the reductio ad absurdum: as the value of transcripts shrinks along with campus enrollments and course offerings, the time will come when no community college remains to host any dual credit program. To travel is better than to arrive An unsolicited Modest Proposal to the Black Hawk College Trustees and Administration: Abandon this abomination forever. Restore our curriculum to one of integrity; remain a college that sets an example of excellence for the rest of Illinois and the nation, not a clockwork one “in synch with other colleges.” This alarm is not a chicken little serenade, and I hope direct action stops the Dual Credit kraken because hope without action is nothing more than hope without action, and the hafgufa, as you probably know, will swallow anything and everything within its horrid reach. And is not our modern history, oh my brothers, the story of brave men fighting these malenky machines? Awakening from my drowsy dream of life, I retrieved my inked-up copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and found Phaedrus lecturing: The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of Reason itself. “Will I leave this place I love better than I found it?” Regrettably this evening, I must answer, “No.” When the Thought Police and its ilk assault the real university, which Phaedrus christened the Church of Reason, I must take a stand, as he did. In the Church of Reason, authority does not reside in legal statutes and certainly not in the unqualified hands of administrators who are facilitators, not educators, Secular authority has no place in the Church of Reason where no scripture (or dogma) is followed, only faith in Reason, a covenant that each generation of professors will unwaveringly follow the primary goal of the Church of Reason, which is always Socrates’ old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it’s revealed by the process of rationality. When such crises attempt a blow to my faith, Camus reminds me that it is in such times that I am truly alive. Most of my life is spent in unconscious detachment from the reality that I constantly face my death. A professor’s is a comfortable life, assuredly: flexible hours, intellectual stimulation, academic freedom and relative independence (the opportunity to write essays such as this one), substantial breaks to research and recharge, working closely with students, the protection of a solid union, wonderful colleagues, the best academic service staff in the world bar none, a decent salary, education for my children, professional development, etc., etc. All the material goodies I could ever want, even a motorcycle to ride during the summer, enough to make me damn careful these things don’t start owning me. And when symbolic murder threatens the Church of Reason, I hear the sound of the shell. In the late 80s, my students in the reserves told me the serve my country bit was part of why they signed up, but they also enlisted for the perks: educational benefits, a stipend, security, and then one cold winter morning they weren’t in class at their desks but parked on their helmets, heading for Kuwait on a troop plane. Although certainly not as deadly, that’s how things transpire in the normally placid world of a college such as mine. All of a sudden, whatever the crisis, it is on, and while everything stays the same, everything suddenly changes, occasionally promoting tensions and divisions instead of unity, even among friends and colleagues. No matter the resistance, refusals, defensiveness, factionalisms, all the isms and policy debates over whom to blame and how it’s going to be fixed and who’s going to fix it, the red herrings, name calling, and veiled threats, I must always keep in mind that while Reason is impervious to emotion, feelings sometimes seem invulnerable to rational thought, but that does not prove that they are: True churchmen in such situations must act as though they never heard these threats. Their primary goal never is to serve the community ahead of everything else. Their primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth. For me, the path is simple, straightforward, the same one I’ve traveled since my return to college many years ago after a lengthy nomadic hiatus. Like my old pal Alex with Ludovico’s Technique, I always knew way down in my existential essence what I was condemning myself to once I viddied my Black Hawk College contract and grokked I was taking on a sacred trust. Tomorrow morning, I will be working on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” with my Comp II class, keeping a couple of office hours, and meeting the Chieftain staff at noon as they put to bed the semester’s final issue, which they met over the Thanksgiving holiday to lay out, and lay it out they did because reporting the news is what they do. I will fall asleep tonight knowing that when it comes to my faith in the Church of Reason and my occasional defense of it, I remain the same person I was before the irrational acid rain of Dual Credit came to eat Truth away, and I will still be the same faithful old churchman after the damage is done and the heathens either convert to belief in Reason or are long gone. Wherever I may find myself, I will defend the Church of Reason, and with all my wit and will, whenever I hear the chimes at midnight, I will resist the barbarians clamoring at the sacred gate and all other heretics, interlopers, and trespassers who would befoul its holy ground. I will be doing the work I love because I am the work I love, and that is why I became a college professor. I am a part of all that I have met Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever as I move confessions of a social worker
there are days i wish i could untangle my limbs from these lives pressed between creased sheets of cardboard i grow so weary of trying to bleed hope from clenched fists i can feel the marrow in my bones dry up and flake away i want to gather up these sorrows like mewling unwanted kittens bound for the river and follow forever in reverse until i’m standing in the center of the desert and with relief filling my lungs i will watch the wind and sand conspire to erase my footsteps Abdulhai's Afghanistan |
In our walk and throughout our lives, we experience and witness many things. Everyday, we see, hear and think about different things. There are things going on within us and around us all the time. It never stops. We can even have dreams and visions of things.
But for the most part, we don’t pay very much attention to them. We brush them off like they are nothing because we don’t understand them. “After all,” we think to ourselves, “they really don’t have anything to do with me or have any meaning to me. Why should I care about them? Why should I worry about them? Why should I hold on to them or try to analyze them?”
They are signs, warnings or messages. They happen within us and around us all the time. In a way, they are like a letter, a card, a gift, a present or a package. They come in many forms, shapes, sizes and ways. We can see it. We have an idea of what it is. We know what it looks like, who it is from and how big it is, but we do not know exactly what it is because we have not opened it, read it or looked inside of it.
People are the same. They send messages to us all the time and they try to communicate with us all the time. Sometimes, these messages are communicated to us in writing, verbally, visually or by actions, and other times, they are sent to us mentally, emotionally, physically, socially or spiritually.
A lot of times, we don’t get the message because we only see, hear or think about the things that have an impact or an effect on us. We worry too much about ourselves. We have our own problems. We have enough things going on in our own lives. We are too busy. We don’t have enough time.
Some of us even get that institutional mentality that boils down to “it isn’t my responsibility. There are programs and services provided for things like this, and the people running the programs are the ones who should be doing something about it not me.”
One thing that we have to realize and understand is that people or things aren’t always as they appear to be on the outside. Too many times, we only see or look at external or outward appearances, the covering, the current circumstance, the current condition, the current situation, the current actions or words being spoken, but it is bigger, deeper and more then that.
Regardless of how the message is being sent or communicated to us, we need to take the time to stop, look and listen. We need to be multidimensional. We need to open up our eyes, our ears, our minds and our hearts and receive the message that they are really trying to send or communicate to us.
Our people are hurting. They are crying out, and they reaching out. They are trying to get our attention. They want help, and they need our help. They are doing things that they shouldn’t be doing. We can’t continue to be one dimensional or narrow minded. We can’t continue to see things as they are or as we see them. We need to see things as they can be.
Sally Koch, a well known writer, once said, “Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us everyday.”
The message is clear, and there are a lot of things that we can and should be doing. A quote I read a while back said, “Small things accomplished are better then great things talked about.” The small things that we do today can make a big difference tomorrow, but we need to take the time to do it.
Lastly, “What we have in the present, was created in the past. What we want in the future, we can start creating today in the present.”
God Bless!
But for the most part, we don’t pay very much attention to them. We brush them off like they are nothing because we don’t understand them. “After all,” we think to ourselves, “they really don’t have anything to do with me or have any meaning to me. Why should I care about them? Why should I worry about them? Why should I hold on to them or try to analyze them?”
They are signs, warnings or messages. They happen within us and around us all the time. In a way, they are like a letter, a card, a gift, a present or a package. They come in many forms, shapes, sizes and ways. We can see it. We have an idea of what it is. We know what it looks like, who it is from and how big it is, but we do not know exactly what it is because we have not opened it, read it or looked inside of it.
People are the same. They send messages to us all the time and they try to communicate with us all the time. Sometimes, these messages are communicated to us in writing, verbally, visually or by actions, and other times, they are sent to us mentally, emotionally, physically, socially or spiritually.
A lot of times, we don’t get the message because we only see, hear or think about the things that have an impact or an effect on us. We worry too much about ourselves. We have our own problems. We have enough things going on in our own lives. We are too busy. We don’t have enough time.
Some of us even get that institutional mentality that boils down to “it isn’t my responsibility. There are programs and services provided for things like this, and the people running the programs are the ones who should be doing something about it not me.”
One thing that we have to realize and understand is that people or things aren’t always as they appear to be on the outside. Too many times, we only see or look at external or outward appearances, the covering, the current circumstance, the current condition, the current situation, the current actions or words being spoken, but it is bigger, deeper and more then that.
Regardless of how the message is being sent or communicated to us, we need to take the time to stop, look and listen. We need to be multidimensional. We need to open up our eyes, our ears, our minds and our hearts and receive the message that they are really trying to send or communicate to us.
Our people are hurting. They are crying out, and they reaching out. They are trying to get our attention. They want help, and they need our help. They are doing things that they shouldn’t be doing. We can’t continue to be one dimensional or narrow minded. We can’t continue to see things as they are or as we see them. We need to see things as they can be.
Sally Koch, a well known writer, once said, “Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us everyday.”
The message is clear, and there are a lot of things that we can and should be doing. A quote I read a while back said, “Small things accomplished are better then great things talked about.” The small things that we do today can make a big difference tomorrow, but we need to take the time to do it.
Lastly, “What we have in the present, was created in the past. What we want in the future, we can start creating today in the present.”
God Bless!