Not All that High
As I viewed a historic collection of Appalachian photos with the Dean of the College during my all day faculty interview, the Dean whispered through her cupped hand her aunt had been a snake handling holiness preacher in the North Alabama Mountains. I knew I would fit as a faculty member at the College because my own aunt had collected road kill and made art and I shared that with the Dean. We both had a nice laugh. That was the point in my interview that made me feel better about higher education not being all that high.
While I was happy to get an offer and have landed a job in Tennessee, my earlier interviews taught me a lesson in what higher education. I had explored leaving the South for time in the Northeast and did a phone interview with a small New England university. At the end of the call, they asked if I had any questions, and I commented I hoped they didn’t have difficulty understanding my Southern accent to which they replied, “Why, no, we listen to Country music here, too.”
Another pre-screening interview with a search firm prefaced a question about diversity with “I know you’re from the South, but…”
I shared the rich diversity experiences from the South and added, “Perhaps a Southerner like me would add diversity in the North.”
She laughed and said I might be right, though I didn’t get a follow up interview.
I even did an in person interview in West Virginia, where a committee member told me, “I don’t know if I can get used to hearing your Southern accent.”
I was appalled, and when the offer came, I politely declined, choosing instead to hold out for a job in the South and stick to my region, its people, and their country accents, and where we can turn a one syllable word into at least three syllables, bless it and be proud of it.
Like most of the college’s students, I’d been a first generation college student and had gone on for a Ph.D. I often felt like an imposter in higher education and often feared someone would find my transcript and expose an “F” grade I got in Algebra before finally passing it with a “B”, but what they didn’t know was I had Pre-Algebra in middle school and had been taken off the college track, leaving me woefully unprepared for collegiate work.
I also felt like they might see my unsuccessful attempt at a foreign language translation test I had been too afraid to take. I’d overslept the morning of the test and had an anxiety attack when I realized it. Passing two foreign language exams before I could graduate with a doctorate degree was a major stressor for someone who had only taken one foreign language in college and would not be remembered for a stellar performance in that class. Twenty five years later, I have about two nightmares a year that I failed the Spanish translation exam. I wake up, my shirt soaked from sweat, my heart beating too fast, and I run to the restroom to splash water on my face. Interestingly, I never took a Spanish class or exam. I took Italian and French, so I’m not sure why I dream that at all.
Mostly, I have felt I might be an imposter because I am practical and pragmatic, which doesn’t seem to fit with higher education. I was conditioned by family---mostly salt of the Earth farmers and blue collar workers who were more concerned about putting food on the table to feed their children, paying their bills, and giving thanks to a God, like them, who didn’t put up with no foolishness. More than once, this seemed somehow incongruent with higher education, with abstract thought and theory.
Once, faculty members in the department fought over a textbook decision in departmental meetings, attacking each other personally. It didn’t make sense to me that their points of view had turned them against each other. In some cases, they didn’t speak for months. All they had to do was allow one group choose one book and the other group choose the second option. Both books covered the same material; the difference was the way in which the material was presented.
The great irony was the faculty all shared another book that was sacred to them. I had noted multiple errors in that textbook, had written to the publisher, and never received a response. When the next edition came out, it had the same errors, and I wrote again. The second time I received an automated response. When the third edition came out, the book still had the same errors, and I realized other faculty didn’t notice or care, and the book company didn’t care about higher education either. They were simply attempting to boost sales, increase profit.
I also recalled a faculty member who complained publicly via campus email to the President about the new mulch put out in the flower and shrub beds around campus when those funds could have been used for faculty salaries. The faculty member understood nothing about enrollment, public relations, development, much of which drives and funds all things at a college, but even more important, the little money spent on mulch wouldn’t make a dent in faculty salaries.
I always felt if higher education collapsed, I could get a job mowing grass, bagging groceries, helping with funerals, and so on. I could do anything and could carry on conversations with poor, middle, or upper class people, no matter what their background. I had grown up in deep South poverty, sweating and fanning gnats. We weren’t bottom feeders, but we were one paycheck away from the bottom.
“They might be a little crazy, but they are mostly good” is what you might have heard from others about our family, and what I noticed about my students were they were a lot like me: first generation, poor, and rural. Some hadn’t even been out of their county or been to a city like Nashville, let alone somewhere like New York City. What knowledge they had of the world, they’d learned vicariously through the internet and television, and over time, I introduced them to great books and ideas. What struck me most about my teaching and their learning wasn’t their performance in my classes; it was that those students began to see commonalities between great books and ideas in their own isolated Southern lives and realized they weren’t imposters in higher education. The education they achieved wasn’t all that high, and while I felt less like an imposter over time, I never collected road kill and I never attended a snake handling church, but I wanted to from time to time.
Niles Reddick is author of the novel Drifting too far from the Shore, two collections Reading the Coffee Grounds and Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies and in over two hundred literary magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, PIF, New Reader Magazine, Forth Magazine, Cheap Pop, Flash Fiction Magazine, With Painted Words, among many others.