Addendurm.

That last convo really made me down on ever teaching college again – the student debt is just appalling – but then like right after that I saw several times that in-state schools are free for families under a certain income line, and that made me feel better, because it really does make college accessible and that would not totally pervert the student-teacher experience by making it somehow predatory and rapacious…

I had been thinking about this a lot lately, too, because during my recent conference this fall I caught up with someone who I know from grad school who had transferred to the conference’s host university after getting tenure at a low-level state school in another state, and she had been talking about how at her last school the graduation rate over 6 years was horrible and you’d get all of these poorer students that came in thinking that college was a path out and up, but instead they just got a lot of debt and not even a degree where they could hope to recoup anything like that.

That conversation really made me realize once again how people who get tenure often lack certain moral sensibilities, where they have to be okay with just horrible horrible situations going on around them, as long as they get a personal job out of it.

Which, is really not me, and is really not for me.