1
Unworthy of a Calling as Noble as Higher Education
Composition and Critical Thinking professor Mike Manderlin was in Prospect College’s faculty bathroom stall, sucking greedily on a sugarless lemon-honey-flavored throat lozenge, his pants coiled around his ankles, reading his wife’s text: “You might want to check out this YMCA workshop for compulsive overeating,” with a link for registration, when he sensed the presence of Mary Beauregard, one of his students, standing just outside the stall’s locked door. How did he know it was her? Was it her familiar breathing, rasping and emphysemic from her chain smoking? Was it her familiar smell of mothballs and cloying talcum powder wafting from her green nicotine-stained skin? Actually, the tipoff was her signature neon pink luggage cart with her matching tote bag and backpack, which he could see beneath the partitioned stall.
“Mary, I know it’s you. You need to leave. Now.”
“Professor Manderlin, I need to talk to you about my grade.”
“What you’re doing is illegal. I could have campus police arrest you. Now I suggest you leave at once.”
“No, not until you explain why I got a C.”
“We can talk about your grade in my office,” he said. “This is not the place.”
“You didn’t even read my essay about my party catering service, did you.”
“Actually, I did read it. You can make one hundred smoked salmon canapés in a half hour. Very impressive. Did you not read my comments?”
“You said you liked my story of becoming one of the industry’s leading food catering services, but that my essay was ‘larded’ with grammar errors. Why do you have to use the word ‘larded’? It’s such a demeaning word, and it hurts my self-esteem.”
“We can talk about this later.”
“I don’t think so.”
Mary’s track record was well known. A forty-year-old student, she had been attending the college for more than a decade and had filed so many grievances against the school that she was known as “Scary Mary.” But Mike never imagined she would break into the faculty bathroom and corner an instructor while he was doing his business.
“Mary, you need to leave the men’s room this very instant, before this goes on your record.”
“Not until you give me more feedback.”
She was now gripping the top of the stall’s partition so he could see her thick, stubby fingers. Stacking her tote bag and backpack on top of her luggage cart to make a precarious stepping stool, she had elevated her 250-pound body so that her head was peeking over the stall. Her tight curly jaundiced hair was wet with sweat. She glowered at her instructor behind her black cat eye glasses and blinked her eyes repeatedly while crinkling her pointy nose.
“You need to help me,” she said, barely able to catch her breath. “I can’t afford to flunk this class again.”
“Get out of here, Mary, before I have you arrested.”
“No. Not until you explain my grade.”
“You want me to explain your grade? Okay. Your fifth-grade-level incoherent chicken scratch is so bad I stay up at night wondering if the college’s mission to educate the masses is a fool’s errand. Your writing is so conspicuously absent of basic critical thinking skills that it makes me want to ram an icepick through my forehead. There. Is that enough explanation for you?”
“You’re a terrible person unworthy of a calling as noble as higher education. I can see you’re incapable of helping me. I’ll leave now.”
“Good idea. And, Mary, I need you to drop my class immediately. If you don’t, I’ll report this incident to campus police and have a restraining order issued against you. Am I clear?”
“I will gladly drop your class. But you should know you have no empathy for your marginal, at-risk students such as myself. I’m going to do some research on Rate My Professor and find someone with more compassion and understanding as I work on completing my education.”
Satisfied with the way she put her professor in his place, she attempted to descend from her makeshift ladder, but she lost her balance and all 250 pounds of her crashed to the ground. Writhing on the tile floor, she shouted that she feared she might have broken several bones and may require a stretcher.
Out of the stall now, Mike looked down at Mary and told her she was going to be fine, but that may need to ice her injuries to reduce possible inflammation.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Help me up.”
“I’m not touching you, Mary. And besides, I’m late for class.”
2
Didn’t Know Shit Till I Took Your Class
After his encounter with Mary Beauregard, Mike rushed to his 6 p.m. Critical Thinking class. His students, many of them commuting from a long day at work, were starving at the dinner hour. Because he had a lot of empathy where hunger was concerned, he was lax about the campus-wide no-eating-in-class rules. Sitting at the desks, students were feasting on giant burritos that looked like fluffy pillows. Mike happily imagined sleeping with his head on such a soft burrito, waking up periodically, taking a bite out of his chipotle-infused cushion, resuming sleep, and starting the whole process all over again.
Other students were eating platters of chicken katsu over heaps of white rice drowning in thick brown curry gravy. The spicy curry was so alluring Mike had to muster all his strength not to hover over their plates and scoop mounds of curry into his ravenous mouth.
Some students were gobbling protein bars and washing them down with ice-cold mocha coffee beverages topped with white clouds of whipped cream, chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, and maraschino cherries.
One resourceful student brought a jar of peanut butter to class and spooned giant gobs of peanut butter on bananas and apple slices.
Another student was eating an oversized hot pastrami sandwich with melted Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles.
The only thing that stopped Mike from stealing his students’ food with his bare hands and devouring it in front of their very terrified faces was the fear that a student would video his piggish spectacle and post the disgusting display on YouTube.
The classroom was so redolent of spices, smoked meats, and vinegar that Mike felt a sharp tingling sensation in his nostrils, and his mouth watered. He look down to make sure there was no drool on his Dacron sport shirt.
In spite of the apples, carrots, and smoked almonds he had wolfed down during his office hour, he was so dizzy with hunger that it was all he could do to not cancel class, run across the street to the Middle Eastern restaurant, and inhale several skewers of chicken kabob dipped in their signature smoked paprika hummus.
After taking role, Mike stepped away from the podium and holding Viktor Frankl’s paperback edition of Man’s Search for Meaning, he announced to the class that he was unworthy of teaching such a great book.
“Ladies and gentleman, I suffer from what you might call the Rodney Dangerfield Factor. When I was in my early twenties, I read a newspaper interview with the sad-sack comedian who said, in direct opposition to Frankl, you can’t really change who you are. You’re born a certain way, and that’s it. I remember immediately agreeing with him. We are creatures permanently molded at birth, and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same? Because according to Viktor Frankl, we must struggle to find what life demands of us and embracing our responsibilities helps us find a higher purpose and this purpose transforms our character.”
Having taught Man’s Search for Meaning for over twenty years, Mike said these words more from habit than conviction. Even though he loved Viktor Frankl with all his heart and soul, he wasn’t sure he really believed in meaning anymore.
He was about to make his next point about Frankl’s cure for the emptiness of the soul, what Frankl called the “existential vacuum,” when Conner Patrick raised his hand. Conner was big, about six feet two inches, and weighed well over 250 pounds. He wore faded jeans, hiking boots, flannel shirts, and a he had a scraggly beard that partially concealed freckles on his cherubic cheeks. He wore a wool herringbone golfer’s cap over his curly reddish-brown hair. He always showed up to class with an old acoustic guitar. He had a generally friendly persona and socialized with the other students though sometimes Mike would catch Conner’s blue eyes narrow at others as if to reveal what he imagined to be Conner’s contempt for the human race.
In Mike’s close to thirty years of teaching, he recognized Conner to be by far his best writer. Conner was an English major, a determined slacker, who by his own admission had no career plans. Only eighteen years old, he had an immaculate prose style. He wasn’t one of those English major types who try to impress others by using “big vocabulary words.” Rather, Conner had this way of writing so that when Mike read his essays he imagined Conner walking happily through a boundless orchard of Language Trees, and he simply plucked the perfect word, like low-hanging fruit, as the word suited his writing purposes. Mike had told Conner he’d be shocked if his student didn’t eventually become a published writer, a prospect that didn’t excite Conner much as he had a refreshing absence of ambition.
He would often stay after class, and they’d talk about his essays or about his sister Jennifer who had taken the same class from Mike a year earlier. In one of his essays, he wrote a narrative featuring a bald football coach hanging out with his high school buddies in a bar. The vivid description of the coach and the manner in which he spoke made it abundantly clear that the football coach was a younger version of Mike. It was clear that Conner had gleaned bits and pieces of personal anecdotes his instructor had told to the class, and he had synthesized them to create a character who was in many ways Mike’s younger doppelgänger. Other students read the essay and got a kick out of it. The point is that Conner knew his instructor respected his intelligence, and he felt comfortable making a jibe at him in his essay. He was also comfortable disagreeing with his instructor and keeping him on his toes.
Conner has a look of mischief as he used one hand propped under his elbow to keep the other hand raised.
“Yes, Conner.”
“You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?”
“What?”
Conner looked impatient with his instructor’s flustered response. “Come on, man. You know you don’t believe in this tripe.”
To Mike’s surprise, there was a part of him that immediately agreed with his outspoken student. But contrary to this agreement, Mike said, “Well actually, I tend to be more agnostic when it comes to the subject of meaning.”
“Seriously? Come on, Manderlin, you know this is bunk.”
Conner was holding Frankl’s book in his giant hands and flipping the pages while looking at them with a sneer. “Take out the impressive Holocaust narrative and what are you left with? Just a bunch of homilies about positive thinking. It’s a bunch of Chicken Soup for the Soul crapola.”
Mike didn’t mind Conner disagreeing with him or Frankl. What he minded is that Conner seemed to be questioning his book selection. Mike had, according to Conner’s judgment, selected rubbish and was making the students write their final essay on a book full of clichés. He felt he had to defend himself and explain that he had a deep personal attachment to Man’s Search for Meaning.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Conner,” he said. “When I first read Frankl at the age of eighteen, the part where he is marching with the prisoners at dawn and he is comforted by the spirit of his wife, I wept like a baby for like five hours.”
Conner shrugged his shoulders, winced, and said, “I’m glad you got something out of it, and Frankl seems like a great guy. But all the stuff about finding meaning is bullshit. You know as well as I do there is no meaning.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to tell my seven-year-old daughters?”
“You can tell them the truth or you can tell them lies. It’s your choice.”
“I want my daughters to grow up, get educated, find meaning, and find love in their lives. That gives me meaning. Does that make me stupid?”
“Except that you’re not talking about meaning. You’re talking about survival and self-preservation. I get that. But that’s not meaning as Frankl would want us to believe it to be.”
“So you think Frankl is delusional?”
“Of course he’s delusional. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. Look, I get it. He went through horrendous shit, and he had to make himself believe that all his suffering was meaningful. I would have done the same thing. It probably preserved his sanity to make himself believe that, but at the end of the day his philosophy is just another mind-fuck. Most people do that. It’s a coping mechanism. But it’s not meaning.”
It wasn’t just Conner’s blunt words. It was his expression as he looked at his instructor, as if to say he was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mike was Conner’s kindred spirit and therefore he had to be in complete agreement with him. His expression was so convincing that Mike felt he was being swayed by not only his student’s argument but by some invisible force that he could not resist.
As an instructor with three decades of experience, Mike felt he should be an emotional rock, a man of solid conviction who could stand up to disagreement. And usually he was. But in the presence of Conner’s reproach, he felt he was standing on shifting sand.
Conner sensed weakness in his instructor, and this made him relentless. He said, “Why are you teaching us this crap? Does it make you feel better to stuff meaning down your students’ throats?”
“This is a critical thinking class. I want students to think for themselves.”
“But you’re a hypocrite. You tell us to think for ourselves, yet you can’t even do it yourself. You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment here. Look, I get you love Frankl. He was a great man. But you love him so much you can’t think straight. You tell us that to be critical thinkers we have to be dispassionate and remove ourselves emotionally from whatever subject we’re addressing. But you can’t do that with Frankl. Take away your admiration for his heroism and your fond memories of crying for five hours when he talked about his love for his wife and what do you have left? A book full of clichés about finding meaning. And you know as well as I do all the suffering we go through in this shit existence is meaningless.”
And then to make his point, Conner explained that his mother was very religious, and when he and his sister were little his mother felt called by God to be a foster parent for babies whose mothers had abused drugs and alcohol.
“Ever since I was a little kid,” he said, “there have been crack babies in my house. They don’t get better. They’re fucked up for the rest of their lives. They sleep all night with their eyes open. Some of them squawk like prehistoric birds. They’ve got permanent brain damage. It’s a nightmare. And what has my mother gained? The babies grow up to be permanently disabled. Many of them can’t even talk. And because my mother felt called upon by God to do this mission of futility, she neglected Jennifer and me. In fact, she relied on us to help her with these kids. That’s how we spent our childhood. Day and night, we had to tend to these squawking crack babies. To this day, Jennifer and I both resent our mother. We’re both dying to move out. Neither of us want children. Honestly, this higher purpose my mother has embraced is not something Frankl should be proud of. I always thought my mother either had this pathological need to do what she does, or it is part of her ego to show her religious friends that she is better than them. Or a bit of both. Bottom-line, I’ve grown up dealing with a bunch of bullshit in the name of meaning.”
Usually a commanding speaker, Mike struggled to find words to refute Conner’s position. Catching his breath, he eventually said, “Conner wants us to ignore Frankl’s heroism for a moment and analyze his claims about finding meaning through embracing a life of suffering. One, Conner claims that much of the suffering in this world is senseless and meaningless. And two, Conner claims that we just make up meaning to make ourselves feel better. Let’s concede to Conner that much suffering in this world is indeed senseless, such as the Great Tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people or famine that kills one baby in this world every five seconds. But let’s challenge Conner’s second claim, that what we call meaning is a delusion. What we’re really talking about, according to Conner, are coping mechanisms, not meaning.”
He looked in the back of the room at Conner. His student was apparently enjoying his devil’s advocate role evidenced by the beaming smile on his face.
“Conner says there is no meaning, but I would argue we all exist on a Meaning Scale with spiritual decrepitude at one end of the spectrum and flourishing on the other. Let’s take an extreme example of an addict. If a man becomes a drug addict, he is in a condition of decrepitude or moral dissolution. He has burned bridges with his friends and family, and he lives only for himself. As an addict, he loves the things he’s addicted to more than he loves people. His life is without meaning. Everyone with me so far?”
Looking up from their platters of half-eaten food, the students nodded.
“At the other end of the spectrum,” Mike continued, “there are people who find a passion for their life work and this passion combined with discipline brings out their higher self. They have found meaning, or at least, relatively speaking, more meaning than the addict who lives holed up somewhere in mindless squalor and isolation. So when we find something that we work hard at, we flourish in that discipline, and to flourish is to find meaning.”
Mike looked at Conner whose lips curled into a sneer. His student said, “It’s great that people flourish, but don’t confuse flourishing with meaning. I know a young evangelist who is amazing at what he does. He’s only sixteen years old, and talks about God and makes people convert to his religion. That’s his so-called meaning. But this evangelist has an older brother, a former evangelist now atheist, who travels the world explaining why he converted to atheism. He helps lots of unhappy religious people disavow their faith and become atheists. Both of these brothers are flourishing in what they do, but they both can’t be right. They are diametrically opposed to one another. At the end of the day, they do what they do because it makes them feel good. Therefore, meaning is not some objective reality. It’s a fantasy that energizes people. In other words, the notion of meaning is complete bullshit.”
His arms were crossed and he was grinning at his instructor with triumph. After a pause, he made it clear that he wasn’t finished with his professor yet. He said, “There’s a second problem with your argument. Contradicting the very principles you’ve drilled into us all semester, your argument smacks of the either-or fallacy. You’ve presented us with an over simplistic black and white universe where people are either decaying into a state of mental disintegration or they are blossoming in their craft. In fact, both processes can occur simultaneously. I know of many famous writers who flourished in the craft of writing novels while suffering the effects of alcoholism. People are complicated, Mr. Manderlin. You, me, everyone in this room. We can both self-destruct and flourish at the same time. You’re as smart as I am. You know this as well as I do, but you’re too emotionally invested in Viktor Frankl. Who wouldn’t be? Who wants to believe that against our own will we’ve been delivered into a world without meaning and purpose? Who wants to believe that all we can do is fiddle around with entertainments and hobbies that will keep us occupied during our lifetime before we’re buried into the ground?”
Mike had that dizzying sensation that he was on shifting sand again. He felt himself being pulled into Conner’s meaningless universe. In a panic, he relied on one of his canned arguments based on the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In the DVD extra, there is an interview with Gene Wilder. He explains that the movie is about teaching boundaries. Flailing for life support, Mike said, with cracking desperation in his voice, “Boundaries give us meaning. Boundaries teach us discipline. Boundaries save us from excess. Children whose parents teach them boundaries are happier than children whose parents don’t. You see, Conner, boundaries point toward meaning.”
Conner shook his head. “Boundaries are important. We’ve evolved to learn how to create boundaries as a survival mechanism. But they don’t constitute meaning.”
Still flailing for life support, Mike said, “Take away meaning and what’s left? A nihilistic free-for-all? A Darwinian nightmare of survival for the fittest where the strong kill and cripple the weak?”
With an insouciant smile, Conner said, “Calm down, Manderlin. Everything’s going to be okay. We don’t submit to raw Darwinism because that’s not in our self-interests. We’ve evolved to live in cooperative societies. That too is a survival mechanism, but it’s not meaning.”
“So we’re just products of evolution? Is that it?”
“Pretty much. Can’t handle it, Manderlin?”
“If what you’re saying is true, the majority of the human race would go into despair and kill themselves.”
“Not at all. The majority of the human race delude themselves in a variety of ways, including the stupid belief that there’s meaning. Books like Viktor Frankl’s add to the human race’s collective delusion. I’m cool with it. If people want to believe in Santa Claus for the rest of their life, more power to them.”
“Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Patrick?”
“Go for it.”
“Why are you going to college?”
“Something to do.”
“You mean you have no plan?”
“Not really.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a plan? I mean, if you had to choose between having a plan and not having a plan, isn’t having a plan the better option?”
“Not necessarily. I know lots of students who majored in whatever, and just before they were about to graduate, they realized they hated their major. Their life sucks. A lot of plans are misguided. A lot of times, having a plan is worse than having no plan at all.”
Mike felt like he and Conner were engaged in the medieval sport of jousting back and forth, and so far Conner had stabbed his instructor with his sword repeatedly in his midsection. Mike instinctively brushed his hand against the front of his moist shirt, but it wasn’t blood. It was sweat.
“But having a plan,” he said, “gives us a goal for our future. And goals help us live our lives more fully. As Frankl likes to quote from Nietzsche, ‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’”
“He who has a Why may in fact be deluded. Fascist autocrats and despots have a Why, and they are patently evil. As far as living life more fully, that’s a good thing to strive for. But it isn’t meaning. It’s just living in the present. And who needs to read a book to know the obvious? Truth be told, Manderlin, you’ve given us a book of worthless platitudes and clichés.”
By this time, Mike could feel the other students were siding with Conner. They were smiling at their hero as if he were about to mount a mutiny against the captain of the ship. Conner, too, sensed what was going on. He stood up and addressed the class.
“Okay, guys, the party’s over. Mr. Manderlin and I had this whole thing planned all along. It was a rehearsed script. It was to show you guys how Socratic Method really works.”
Students were chiming in by saying it was one of the most amazing classes they had ever been in. One student said he regretted not recording it on his phone and uploading it on YouTube. Another student said that Conner and Mr. Manderlin were remarkable actors who should make Hollywood movies. But a few of the students saw through Conner’s ruse and charged that he had made up the Socratic explanation to afford his intellectually inferior professor a sympathetic morsel of dignity.
The class ended. The students shuffled out of the room one by room. Conner remained in his seat. His teacher stood over him.
“What the hell?” Mike said. “You had your teeth in my jugular. You were destroying my arguments one by one. But then you bailed me out. Why did you do that?”
“Look, man. I didn’t know shit before I took your class. You taught me all these critical thinking skills. I wasn’t about to take the weapons you gave me and throw you under the bus. I don’t like very many people, but I like you, so that’s just how it played out.”
“Thirty years of teaching, and I’ve never lost an argument. You changed all that. I had my ass handed to me on a stick.”
“Which means it’s time to confess the truth. I’m right, and Frankl is wrong. Quit the bullshit, Manderlin, admit it.”
“I can’t. I mean, you make a lot of good points, but I refuse to give up on meaning.”
“Come on, man, I saved your ass.”
“What can I say, Conner? You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. You’ll probably be published someday. You’ll probably live a life of glory I’ve only dreamed about. But I can’t say you’re right just because you spared me humiliation. I sincerely have a kernel of faith that there might be meaning. If I said anything else, I’d be a liar.”
“Fair enough. But watch what you say next time in class because I’m going to kick your ass.”
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