Notes from No Man's Land

Maria

September 9, 2025

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, like many in my generation.

I did not want the job in No Man’s Land, when I first got it. I planned to be a short-timer,

making this a service stop on the way to my wished-for career in a four-year college. That did not happen. Given the insecurity of American workers, my complaints may seem self-absorbed and petty. The conditions of my job are quite good. I have freedom to define what happens in my classroom. Compared to most, I have considerable vacation time (summers, winter & spring breaks). I haven’t gotten rich. Nevertheless, I’ve carved out a comfortable middle-class life. But making a living and fulfillment are not one and the same. I had a different vision for myself and my life.

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 I’m a malcontent, an unforgiving observer of humans and society with all their faults and frailties. If I believed in the community college “mission,” would that make me a reliable narrator? I doubt it.

My school and I have strong disagreements about what troubles community colleges.

When my colleagues complain about high schools and how they failed to ready our students for college level work, I reflect that the local university, to which 75 percent of our grads transfer, is probably saying the same thing about us. I imagine the academics within thinking, “What the hell is going on at the community college? Are they teaching them anything?” Those university profs may be grumbling to each other, “Why are we taking so many community college transfers: they just aren’t ready for college.” They may be correct. The scholastic weaknesses of some high school graduates are substantial; they aren’t fixed by two years with us despite our wholehearted efforts. They’ve been pushed through the system, from one grade to the next, because that is what the system is meant to do. And we comply, by pushing them along to the next stage.

Solutions to this puzzle are legion at my school. We need to crack down and teach

discipline and the basics. We need to collect learning-data to make “data-driven” decisions. We need to make learning “fun,” “engaging,” “personal.” Education should be teacher-driven; education should be student-centered. We need to give traditional tests and exams; we need to abandon the test and stop using red markers when grading. We need to use this technology or that one. We need a better advising system, counseling center, student life program, and on and on. As my school ties itself in knots, trying to remain socially relevant, student focus and intellectual engagement continues its downward slide. I recognize this descent and work hard to address it in my classroom, but I know our community college is neither the cause nor the cure. The problem is larger than us.

In the late twentieth century, a careerist dogma took over higher ed, pushing out a

competing vision which framed public colleges and universities as “one piece of a wider set of social and economic rights necessary for full citizenship” and general human flourishing. This revision dovetailed with shifting employment horizons brought on by the late 1970s post-industrial economy. Since then, public policy and popular dialogue has framed higher ed institutions as employment agencies. Community college students, perhaps more than other college students, have taken this transactional approach to heart. They do things to get them done and move on—to get the credit, to get the credential, to transfer to another college, where they will strive to get the credit, get the credential, get the degree, to get the job.

Yet, as Neil Kraus maintains in The Fantasy Economy, despite decades-long energy

tossed at work force development and career tracking, colleges and universities do not direct the economy or produce jobs. They cannot guarantee degree-worthy and debt-relieving employment. If they could, there would be a surplus of well-paying, high-status STEM and business sector openings—the disciplines sopping up higher ed dollars for the last half century. Instead, as Kraus records, “low ed, low skill, low wage jobs” dominate the employment landscape. College graduates still have better lifetime financial results than high school-only grads. But, as salaries and wages climb only slowly and inflation surges, a college degree is not as sure a thing as advertised.

With the economy presenting unsure prospects for many, higher ed is floating. It has no

cultural bedrock or firm political standing. There is little social respect for the life of the mind, for learning as a useful and necessary human endeavor, for learning as an end itself. Teachers, the stewards of these values, are at once mawkishly adored and acidly disdained. There is no simple pedagogic or technocratic fix for this turn. When I make such arguments to fellow faculty, some nod in agreement, but think this commentary is abstract and not useful.

Over time, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. I’ve become judiciously and often

bitterly aloof from the institution but never from my students. My students have kept me breathing. They have 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.

***

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

For instance, the young man, a child of Belarus 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 relative 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 feel deeply for these students. In fact, this list—my student’s catastrophes and the harshness of life in capitalism—is hard to bear.

I have become good at caring for America’s troubles, 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 the higher ed rat race. In fact, my choice of university, a respectable but middling school without reputation 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 a brand-name school. But my normal middle-class upbringing left me naive of academe’s rarified world: I was making it up as I went along.

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 five classes a

semester—presenting at conferences, networking, everything that is expected of academics. I pulled all the correct levers; the ones I had been told would lead to success. They didn’t.

Advancement in my job did not require these exertions. I just needed to teach. 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 colleges to which I applied) my association with workaday No Man’s land diminished me. I had tumbled down into the basement of America’s stratified and status-driven collegiate hierarchy. Maybe I was just not up to snuff, but I suspect that my association with higher ed’s homely stepsister made me unacceptable. I had crossed the Rubicon.

My grad advisor, an accomplished historian, 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 had 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 about 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? That I rarely hear.

The “Truth” of the Two-Year College in Historical Perspective

America’s colleges and universities were an elite affair from the start. By the turn of the

twentieth century, the nation’s founding universities were finishing schools for the upper classes, where football and social clubs took precedence over studying. In this era, the challenge of organized labor against capital, as well as mass immigration, brought public demand to loosen this exclusive system. Educational “democratization” was one of many Progressive reformist answers to the period’s crisis. Collegiate leaders from U Mich., Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago conceived a plan which would protect four-year colleges and universities from applicants who, in their opinion, were neither qualified nor able. James Russell, then Dean of Columbia’s Teachers College, wondered, “How can we justify [the] practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders?” The answer for these gentlemen was straightforward—make a college for the masses—a two-year stint that would “divert students away from the university.”

Although most attending students planned to transfer and complete a bachelor's degree,

the junior college’s founders hoped to make the two-year degree “the capstone to secondary education,” leaving senior colleges insulated from lower-level and lower-class graduates.

The community college grew during another period of political crisis, the 1960s. At this

stage the two-year college sat at the crossroads of Great Society state liberalism, cold war competition, the first leg of postwar austerity, and, less directly, New Left idealism. Pres. Johnson’s solution to American unemployment and incipient deindustrialization was to find the problem in the worker not the economy. Great Society programs invested in job training and “workforce development” rather than employment or re-industrialization. With the meritocratic guarantee of career advancement through higher ed, the community college absorbed and busied the aspiring middle and working class—stabilizing American society in a moment of disintegration.

Like all systems of class containment, some students in both the nineteenth century junior college and the twentieth century community college succeeded. They used this mechanism, despite its debased motives, to move up the social hierarchy and become professionals. But they were not the majority. Less than half of community college students complete an Associate's degree six years after they first enter, much less a Bachelor’s. As Pierre Bourdieu rightly observed in 1973, “the controlled mobility of a limited category of individuals... is not incompatible with the permanence of structures ... it is even capable of contributing to social stability in the only way conceivable in societies based upon democratic ideals and thereby may help to perpetuate the structure of class relations.”

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the professional class circled the educational

wagons, erecting nearly impenetrable walls around prestigious colleges and universities. Then they invested these protected spaces with outsized status. For the average American high school grad, who had come up in an entirely different educational universe, catching up was inconceivable. In that rigid hierarchy, community colleges became the higher ed pitstop for young adults wandering around America looking for a place to succeed.

Had I accomplished my escape into the “bright light” of four-year college professorship,

it is unlikely that I would have directly confronted these truths about higher ed and American society. I, like other scholars, may have stated my comprehension of the educational pecking order. I may have even written and theorized on the social issues that disrupt community college students’ lives. But I would have been experientially insulated. I would not have known these institution; I would not have known the people they serve.

What follows are close examinations of some of those students that we serve. I offer their

stories as a window into the community college world and to highlight the frank humanness of the (often unseen) young Americans within, making their way and looking to succeed in the midst of economic crisis, social uncertainty, and war.

Oliver and Ferdinand: Part I

I am Oliver’s advisor and former prof. He is an upright guy with a small moustache and Elvis Costello glasses. He wears bow ties, vests, sports jackets, pork pie hats, and wing tipped shoes. His posture is plank straight. Oliver has some form of autism; many of our students do. He is high functioning but has the unusual demeanor of a Victorian gentlemen caller—all politesse and formality. I find him charming as heck.

Oliver completed his AA last spring but returned this year. He and his mother decided

“that it would be better for [him] to stay on.” I’m thinking this is because he is a Victorian

gentleman caller and his mother can’t see a place where that will work. He is taking classes in our Archival Studies program. Maybe he will get a certificate: I am not sure. He can stay here as long as he wants. He wouldn’t be the first.

I have to remember to shift my talking style with Oliver. When I bumped into him the

other day, in front of the Café, I started talking fast and interjecting; he couldn’t work with my rhythm. Once I shut up, he made his statement. I have to remember this; I have to be quiet sometimes. I talk too much.

Oliver works at a hospital in the kitchen. Last spring, during a stretch of brutally hot

weather, the kitchen’s air conditioning broke. He pushed through his double shifts at an ambient temp of 92 degrees. The kitchen is understaffed. Machinery goes on the blink. People call out all the time and Oliver steps in to cover for them. He is dedicated to his low-paying, stress-filled job. He says, “They can’t live without me.”

Oliver and Ferdinand (Freddie for short) are friends. They belong to the It Takes All

Kinds club for kids “on the spectrum.” Oliver told Ferdinand to take a class with me, so Freddie is my student this semester. Freddie’s father migrated from Niger, before he was born, and is undocumented. Freddie is stocky and talks rapid fire. His body has a mind of its own—it jerks and spasms through our 75-minute class. On the first day of the semester, Freddie announced that he was “neurodiverse.”

Oliver and Freddie are a study in contrast. I asked them to find a time for the three of us

to chat about their lives and school and such. We made a date for the following week. When I bumped into Oliver prior to our meeting, he informed me: “Freddie and I have decided that we can see you on Monday. (pause, pause) We have class together and can talk with you afterwards.” He presented this info to me like Dragnet’s Agent Friday: “Just the facts ma’am.”

Oliver and Ferdinand: Part II

Oliver and Ferdinand met me in the darkest corner of the student center next to the

Starbucks counter and the cafeteria. They chose this windowless spot with a video screen

blasting music over our heads; they like it, I do not. We sit at an uneven and teetering round

table. The table’s crookedness drives me nuts; my former waitress-self wants to kneel and shove sugar packets under the feet to level the wobble. I resist the urge, so as not to get sidetracked.

I began by explaining my project: I am talking to students to get a better sense of their

lives. “I have been looking forward to our discussion,” Oliver crisply replied. Since “Oliver and Ferdinand Part I” focused mainly on Oliver, I will start with Freddie. Oliver calls Freddie,

Freddie-Eddie. I love this nickname.

Freddie-Eddie was born in small city in central Niger, not in the US as I originally thought. His father was the first member of the family to migrate. Settling in the area where Freddie now lives, he began working at a service station. Eventually he sent for Freddie, his older brother, and his mother; a sister was born several years later in the U.S. Everyone, except Freddie’s little sister, is undocumented.

Freddie’s father struggled with family life and especially with his son’s autism. “You doing this hurts me,” his father once told him. Eventually it became too much, and his father returned to Niger, divorced Freddie’s mother, and started a new family. Freddie has two brothers from his father’s second marriage. “They are not my step or half-brothers, we don’t have those kinds of names—they’re my brothers,” he related.

As Freddie-Eddie’s story unfurls, I notice that Oliver has lost interest in our conversation.

He is looking at the screen that pumps out loud pop music. Freddie will do the same when Oliver starts talking; he will also put his head down on his arm, as though taking a short nap. I stand by my original opinion of the meeting spot they’ve chosen—it is not ideal.

I ask about Freddie’s education before college. It was a disaster, from his perspective.

His small [special ed] classes “were always dull.” His I.E.P (Individual Educational Plan) did

“more harm than good.” It pitted his mother against the school and sometimes his mother

against him as she tried to abide by the school’s wishes. The teachers taught to the lowest level, “We read books for little kids in high school.” Freddie felt the special ed program wanted its students to be realistic and lower their ambitions. “They took us to a pizza shop to show us about jobs,” he snorted.

Sports saved Freddie. He loves sports. He is always covered head to toe in team shirts,

hats, sweatshirts. He wanted to play football when he was younger, but his family never had

health insurance. His mother wasn’t willing to take the risk. Instead, he became the water boy and manager. “Football,” he reflects, “got me into a different position as a man.” Currently he majors in sports business and loves college. Although he could apply for academic accommodations, he refuses to do so. “I feel great without the IEP. I have freedom.”

Freddie works, a lot, to pay for college—fifty-five hours a week at Kohls, Home Depot,

and PJ’s, a restaurant in his neighborhood. Because he isn’t a citizen, he can’t apply for financial aid.

Freddie’s main concern right now is his DACA status. He worries the Trump administration will axe DACA and then where will he be? His sister is going to sponsor his

mother’s citizenship when she comes of age, and then Freddie and his older brother. That is a long way off. Until then, Freddie-Eddie is in limbo. But he does have Oliver. Oliver and he are very close.

Oliver tells me, as an only child, he was “more or less a lone wolf.” His father, “much to

the chagrin of my mother’s family,” was “a coaster.” He worked at Walmart and at Shop & Stop but could never support the family. His parents eventually split. Oliver did well in school but was on the spectrum, “for obvious reasons,” he says pointing his fingers at me like he is shooting off two handguns—pshew, pshew. He had an aide and was considered “the special one.” His mother, he asserts, “was an iron titan.” When she came to school on his behalf, the faculty and staff “were like, uh oh, here she comes—then there was basically like a storm.” During the pandemic, things took a turn for the worse. It was, according to Oliver, an “interesting and dark time.” It is unclear why, but it was hard. Thereafter, “I needed to reinvent myself. And thus, all of this,” he states dramatically, sweeping his hands from his head to his toes. All of this refers to his dandyish clothes and his Victorian gentleman caller persona.

In the fall of 2023, his mother fell very ill with an autoimmune disease. For months, she

was hospitalized and Oliver lived alone. “I turned to this guy (pointing to Freddie) for emotional support.” At this point, the cafeteria staff shoo us out the door—they need to close. Freddie has to get to work anyway. We say our goodbyes; we will talk again soon.

My conversations with Freddie and Oliver have crystalized something I knew but never

fully articulated. They and most of their classmates are part of the working and lower middle

class that the New Left abandoned and that the post-sixties Left has ignored ever since. They are not the global subaltern heroically resisting neo-colonial oppression. They are not the mass incarcerated, the deported (although sometimes they are), or the homeless. They are not the bleeding edge of society. They are often white, although increasingly less so. Their parents may own a home, although increasingly less so. Their families are not on welfare, although sometimes they are. Before college, as suburban high schoolers, they slogged through insipid educations keeping themselves entertained with Tik Tok, video games, sports, work, and friends. They do not see themselves as working class, because no one says they are. America says nothing about them, because they, their families, and the community colleges they attend are invisible. While the (so-called) Left and Liberals protest the arrest and detainment of Columbia U activist Mahmoud Khalil, Freddie anxiously waits for his mother, his brother, and he to be deported. And while the (so-called) Left and Liberals stew over the Trump administration’s attack on Harvard, Oliver worries that funding for public archives and the jobs that go with them may vanish. “I’m fucked,” he has decided.

Many summers ago, I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities forum for

community college profs. The first day a famous historian was scheduled to give a presentation on the “state of the field.” I knew this historian’s work; at the time I liked it. Beginning his talk, he explained that he had looked up community colleges before he came “to learn about who you are.” Apparently, he was venturing into a foreign land inhabited by inscrutable natives. He found that we teach most of the higher ed history that American students take. “I did not know that,” he stated incredulously. My colleague sitting next to me whispered, “How condescending!” I hadn’t noticed. I was too in the thrall of his fame and history chops. But boy, since then I have built up a furious case of resentment. My buoyant and fresh young students worry about their future, but don’t feel condescended to by the world. They don’t have a working-class chip on their shoulders. I do. Despite my professional class credentials, I have a boulder of acrimony the size of Mount Rushmore on my shoulders on behalf of my students and, less admirably so, on behalf of myself as their teacher in the no man’s land of the American community college.

Teaching during War

The U.S. was at war when I first came to my college. It was the late aughts, so the war

wasn’t new, but its presence was felt on campus. Students had husbands, brothers, sisters, and sons in the service—some on the warfront in Iraq and Afghanistan, some on US bases. I had a knee jerk reaction to the wartime patriotism seeping into classroom discussions and campus culture. But given the college community’s connection to the military, I knew enough to keep my sharper thoughts about warmongering and jingoism to myself.

Overtime, the young men and women who served and were sent home started to trickle on to campus. Using the GI Bill, they pieced their lives back together. Their presence had a palpable effect on their civilian classmates, particularly the young men. If a vet used first-hand experience to analyze WW I or WW II or the war in Vietnam, a reverent hush would fall over the classroom. Self-certain history nerds with encyclopedic knowledge of armaments, generals, and battle maneuvers—who previously dominated these discussions—would go silent. They would visibly deflate, become smaller in the presence of an actual soldier. This deference, the “thank you(s) for your service,” and general admiration for the uniformed made me uneasy and at times angry. Little space was open for productive critical discussion of American war policy; social consensus deemed such talk disrespectful and insensitive. It shut critique down.

In the decade plus that war shaped America and our college culture, young men—civilian

and warrior—built muscle. They swelled and chiseled. They shaved their arms, their legs, and their chests to accentuate the contours and grooves of their workouts. Boys lugged gallon jugs of water from class to class (for efficient recovery and muscle gain). Tight tees, skintight pants, bright white socks, and bright white sneakers became the standard, muscle-framing uniform.

Once a semester, I bring in cookies to share with my students—a treat around mid-terms.

In this period, as the cookies moved from student to student, well-built guys would abstain. I recall hearing one brawny guy say to the other, “This isn’t my cheat day.” From there they were off into protein-loading, carb control, and other matters of diet and regulation.

Their bodies announced something, I never settled on what that was. Physically they

were hyperbolically masculine, but at the same time the fussy attention to calories, clothes, and body tilted another direction. In the face of a long, costly, and ugly war, the young men in my world bulked up to imitate returning soldiers. Ex-soldiers stayed bulky too, perhaps in

memoriam to their war experience. I wistfully wondered when bodybuilding would pass and my male students could be skinny or overweight or just run of the mill. I hoped that day would come soon.

Some vets returned, came to community college, and did well. They reconstructed their

lives and moved on to the next stage. Others did not; they suffered. I remember a troubled vet in an evening history course. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, compact, and unsmiling. The first class he sat in the middle-row, the next he moved to the back. His brother took the course to watch out for him. In the third week, they stayed after to talk. The ex-soldier explained: “I want to warn you that I may flake out. I got back from Afghanistan about three months ago. I am pretty fucked up. I want to make it through this class, but my PTSD is bad. I am fucked up.” I listened and assured him that we would make it work, that he could take breaks during class or be absent, whatever he needed. We could make it work.

I never saw him again.

One vet, a woman who transported the dead from the front back to the U.S, took every

class I taught. She was devoted. In conversations outside of class, she told me that she was at a crisis point before she entered the service: “It was either go to jail or go to Iraq, that was the choice the judge gave me.” She chose Iraq. But as she recalled, “I had no idea what that meant.” She was bitter about the war; she was bitter about what had happened to her. She was bitter about the things that she had seen, and that other young men and women had seen the same. She slept uneasily, awakening often sweaty and anxious. Days were not that much easier than nights. She had VA benefits for psychiatric care and for college, and disability for a shoulder injured while using a missile launcher. Her days revolved around physical therapy, counseling, and classes. Surprisingly, she did not disappear or fall apart. She kept taking classes and eventually moved somewhere West. I cannot remember where exactly. That is what happens when you teach for a long time. People come into your life. They are vivid and alive and impress themselves on you and then they move on—their details fade.

Another student, Dave, was in the Army. He took a U.S. history course with me and then

signed up for my cultural history survey the next semester. This is one of my favorite classes. It’s a romp, and students usually enjoy the ride. Dave was built, tall, and blonde. He worked on a landscape crew. I knew this because he would warn me before predicted snowstorms that he would be out plowing and would miss class. He was a nursing major, since, as he said, “I don’t want to stay a wage slave.” He had done some medic work while in the Army and thought nursing would make a good career.

One day we were exploring the works of Jack Kerouac and the Beats. We had read a

segment of Dharma Bums. While discussing, I remarked that Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady would drink, sometimes take drugs, and stay up all night talking—intentionally staying awake, sitting face to face, to see what would conspire. A student chimed in “That seems stupid, like, what did they expect to learn?” Surprised, I asked “Haven’t you ever stayed up philosophizing and gabbing and trying to get at some kind of truth or at least thinking you are?” The student looked at me blankly, “Not really.” Dave chimed in. He recalled a memorable night watch on a desert base in Iraq. “When we were on duty overnight, we were given pills to keep awake. I clearly remember four of us—vibrating from the pills—up talking about everything, telling each other things we told no one else, all night long.” I asked, “What did you talk about?” “Nope, not tellin’ you that,” he answered. Dave was moved by the memory. He got what I was suggesting and what the Beats were chasing after. On that night, on a military outpost in the Middle East, he and his soldier-brothers reached some epiphanies. A transcendent night in the midst of the War on Terror.

The war smashed onto our campus and into our lives, agonizingly dragged on, and then

skulked away without apology. After multiple troop draw-downs, the number of returning

soldiers decreased. It was a quiet subtractive process. The military culture slowly dematerialized. Those vets who were able benefited from the flexible recovery space the college provided. But our safety net was hardly robust; in fact, it was rather flimsy. As a school, we could only do so much. The seriously damaged slipped away, out of our grasp, maybe to suicide, drugs or homelessness, as did so many from this era.

Other social crisis would follow, but for now, at least war no longer haunts the halls of our college.

Redemption? A Year with Mobster’s Grandson

Salvatore (Sal) Abato distinguished himself from his classmates early on. He ferociously

took notes. He asked incisive questions. Yes, he was always late (really late), but once there and settled, he was engaged 100%. His class had the usual mix. There were the disaffected students—sleepy and expressionless, often absent, missing assignments, attached to the course work sporadically and barely. There was the gang of boys who didn’t really care about the subject but were game to have fun and get by. I can’t resist a gang of boys (or girls) trying to have fun, so I often played along, perhaps too much. One day, after class Sal scolded me for messing around with “those clowns.” He knew I had more to offer than that and wanted me to live up to his expectations. He didn’t understand that my behavior was a long-term consequence of teaching to all of America—a survival strategy. Facing class after class of detached and periodically resentful students, sometimes I take the easy way out—just make it through, play to the crowd. I have even been known to juggle pens, erasers, whatever is in hands-reach, to get and keep their attention. Oh, it is all quite embarrassing. Sal made me conscious of this reflex, that I wasn’t commanding respect. It was chastening.

At the end of that semester, I insisted that he take the history topics course with me in the

spring. There, with others in his major, we could get serious. We could work at the level he

deserved. In that class, he was a rockstar. He read everything thoroughly. In discussion he

brought clarity to things I found obscure. He was a diamond in the rough. But if he stayed

focused (which he couldn’t avoid—he's intense), he could really make something of himself, as a thinker.

Sal, like many of his peers, comes from a complexly broken background—a tableau of

America’s social degeneration. He is broad, black haired, and medium height. He loves Sinatra and wears thickly-inked gangster movie t-shirts. His family is from Staten Island. Growing up they were “very poor.” No one in his family, except for his biological dad, “was anything but poor.” His high school had an in-house drug rehab clinic. Addiction hounded his father and his stepfather.

Sal’s paternal grandfather was in the mob. He looked “like Joe Pesce from Goodfellas.”

His grandfather, great grandfather, and uncle were “enforcers.” Sal believes that they “probably killed people.” Being in the mob, though, did not make them rich. Telling me this story with his Sopranos t-shirt on was about as meta as it gets. I told him this and he laughed saying, “My grandfather loved The Godfather. He watched it a million times.”

Sal’s grandmother (his gangster grandfather’s ex) is a “crazy religious Christian.” She

influenced his brother who has addiction problems and who, once in a psychotic episode, ran outside in his underwear claiming he was Jesus.

His mother made it out of poverty and “off the Island” by “working her tail off.” She got

two master's degrees in business and started a credit card counseling agency. She now helps people get out of debt. Sal and I reflected that she assists folks like those in her old

neighborhood. She is a hustler, but she, according to her son, is not “quote, unquote smart.” For example, she didn’t know that California was on the West Coast. She is not worldly. Her son will be.

Sal is a hustler, too. He works hard in her business, and he works hard in college. He was

lucky to have been placed in a very small Christian school as a kid. There he met a teacher who nurtured his native intellect and to whom he is deeply attached.

He graduated this spring. In the fall he will move on to that local university where most

of our students transfer. I met his family after graduation. His mother was proud and effusive. His stepfather, on the other hand, hung back, away from us. I am not sure why.

Salvatore is a roughhewn thinker. His mind and his prose need training. He loves to

invent words that capture his complex and often convoluted historical theories. But his desire to know, to learn, to be around others who want to do the same is palpable. I am excited for him. As long as he will let me, I will try to guide him away from my higgledy-piggledy career choices. Honestly, I am uncertain that I can protect him from my fate or one even less desirable. Higher ed. jobs are scarcer now than when I entered the market, which then were at a historic low.

In 1892, in his work The Class Struggle, socialist thinker Karl Kautsky described the

precarity of the educated in the late nineteenth century which uncannily mirrors our time.

Education, he recounted, used to be reserved for a few. Trades people and small producers

weren’t attracted to it as long as their wares and work remained relevant. In that period,

education’s scarcity gave those who pursued it high prestige. Once schooling was opened to the many its value plummeted. The educated became a glut in the market. Formerly people spoke of “‘the aristocracy of the intellect,’ today we speak of the ‘intellectual’ or ‘educated’ proletariat,” Kautsky incisively observed.

In order to land a respectable position and earn tenure in academe, Sal Abato will have to

spend ten to twenty years in competition, peddling his ideas and himself. As Kautsky described of intellectuals in his era:

Place-hunting takes more and more of their energies. Their first care is, not the development of their intellect, but the sale of it. The prostitution of their individuality has become their chief means of advancement...They are dazzled by the few brilliant prizes in the lottery of life, they shut their eyes to the numberless blanks in the wheel and barter away soul and body for the mere chance of drawing such a prize.

Sal will tangle with this dynamic, as he chases a career and scholarly distinction. He will

also need to be cagey about admitting his time spent in the community college. At first, he may feel free to mention where he began his academic journey. But as he muscles his way up the ladder, he will need to hide that personal history. He will learn to regret his no name degree completed in No Man’s Land. In the prestige tally, his Associates will be a mark against him.

As for the college and faculty that Sal leaves behind? Our future is uncertain. Our school,

like others, dropped students like flies during the Covid pandemic. We were already in the midst of a decade long enrollment slump, but between 2019-2022 we lost 20 percent of our population. It seems that lockdown put the most challenged students into acute crisis. Maybe those same students, who had weak belief in the promise of education, never returned. Our school is not alone in this deterioration. Since 2020, colleges have been merging or closing at the rate of one a week.

There are a variety of possible explanations for this declension. A positive interpretation

might conject that the post-Covid job market is undercutting the need for a college degree. That good, high paying jobs are drawing students away from the uncertain rewards and expense of college. There is some evidence to support this claim, yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the top four “fastest-growing jobs in the US” from 2021-2031 will pay below or just above the annual median income. The largest growth sector is home-health care which is notoriously poorly paid and insecure.

A less empirically provable, but plausible theory rests on America’s fraught relationship

with education, particularly its colleges and universities. One can’t ignore that the recent

enrollment contraction coincided with Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s

campaign tapped into wide-spread discontent with the uneven results of the global neoliberal order. Community colleges (and public colleges in general) were essential supports in America’s mid-twentieth century transition to that arrangement. As the nation’s industrial core was dismantled, shipped south, and later offshored, community colleges stepped in ostensibly to educate the masses for the nascent information/service/entertainment economy. In a society that lauds education as the main tool for personal advancement, it is not surprising that the whole system came under hostile scrutiny in the twenty first century, a period when the neoliberal order began to fray and falter.

For life-long community college professors and administrators, the lethargic post-Covid

enrollment recovery and the attack on higher ed is a punch in the gut. When I first got my

community college job, my colleagues routinely announced, at meetings and in-services, how special our school was, how everyone knew we were unique and outstanding, how stunning our campus, how top-notch our faculty, how renowned our arts programs. Now the faculty report to work like the walking dead. On the surface the college is humming along, underneath things have gone tattered. Insecurity and chaos reigns. We are in debt; belt-tightening is constant. Faculty feel over-managed and menaced by administrators. Administrators feel stymied by a battle-ready and obstructionist faculty. There is bitterness and bickering and self-damage happening daily. This is what happens when people feel their social utility and their work undermined, disrespected, and threatened. We are all on a leaky unmoored boat, bailing out water, patching the hull.

I can life save some students, shepherding them on to bigger, better boats (which have holes too). Others will drown or simply evaporate. Our school could boom, or it could close, who knows? It’s all a crap shoot. American society and capitalist politics remain unchanged.

I’m still in No Man’s Land.