Notes on this piece: 1.) Names and identifying details have been changed. 2.) Rather than third-person-singular pronouns, I’ve often used terms “they,” “them,” and “their,” for simplicity and inclusiveness.
School is over, and I’m at leisure to reflect on the year. For its poignance, my mind keeps coming back to one local headline I saw, back in March.
Mills College, the private Oakland, California women’s liberal arts college, founded in 1852, is folding. Mills President Elizabeth Hillman announced that the college planned to accept no incoming students after Fall, 2021, and likely wouldn’t confer degrees after 2023. I was a Mills student, from Fall, 1983 to Spring, 1985. My freshman year at Mills was the first time I’d ever lived away from family, or from my provincial hometown. Mills was a diverse, stimulating place, where I cut my adult teeth—culturally speaking—in the Bay Area, back during the Reagan era. After my sophomore year at Mills, for personal reasons I’ll explain presently, I transferred to a public university. For my mixed feelings about Mills, I had formative personal experiences there. I made lasting friends. I am, overall, really sorry to see this place die.
I grieve for current students who had started at Mills, who were maybe settling in and hitting a stride, and who got the word in March, 2021 they’d have to transfer. I grieve for faculty and other employees--many of them talented and serious—soon to be cut loose, in a brutal higher-education job-market. My heart aches when I imagine what the announcement of the decision to close Mills did to student and faculty morale in the weeks following.
Mills had suffered years of rising costs and declining interest in enrollment, without a sufficient private endowment for it to keep up with its expenses. COVID-19, of course, was the nail in the coffin.
For my sadness at Mills’s impending closure, one unsentimental question devils me these days. Why is it that some expensive private colleges and universities attract enough private money from donors to thrive, to weather hard times? Why is it that other institutions—with storied histories, with distinguished faculty and alumni—don’t?
Pondering that question, I recall my own time at Mills. I remember my experience in Mills’s “interdisciplinary” lower-division survey course, taught by Professor “Theodore Meany.” Professor Meany, at the time, must have been older than I am now. He was a scholar of the European Age of Enlightenment. He’d published; he’d spoken at conferences. He was rumored to be fluent in Latin and descendant languages. Except in occasional snatches, we heard him speak only English.
Dr. Meany was supposed to be elucidating the Age of Enlightenment for us--its core assumptions, its effects on politics and religion, its cross-pollination with the nascent Western rational method. Ted Meany lectured a class of 20 or so Mills students, including me, from behind a podium. His soft, ill-prepared rambling never varied in tone or pitch. With one remarkable exception, I remember nothing he said. The beginning of each class, when Dr. Meany started up, always made me think of somebody dropping a needle into a phonograph. We had some textbook, I think. We read a primary source here or there. We wrote papers, none of which Meany evidently did more than skim and slap a grade on.
I’m a teacher, myself, four years into a career I started proudly at mid-life. I’m no professor—I teach at a gritty impoverished public high school. I teach traditionally disadvantaged students. Some days in my classroom go better than others. When I’m lucky, I see students drop everything they brought into the room, and grill each other and me ingeniously, to crack some thorny problem. Other days, I trip over the snarled cords between the projector-cart and the wall-outlet and send papers flying; I frustrate students, who find ways of letting me know it. Day-in, day-out, I succeed, I fail; I fail, and succeed. One constant: I prepare obsessively. Like a fiend. Hours go into each session of each class I teach. I pace the floor, I tap away at the computer, I get up and pace some more. I devise and modify instruction, up, down, and sideways; I grade and I follow-up, always, like I mean business.
I believe every student at every K-12 school or college that’s taxpayer-funded, or taxpayer-subsidized, has the right--at minimum--to a competent, run-of-the-mill teacher or instructor at each phase, for each subject, at an adequate staffing ratio. We’re accustomed to attacks on competent, run-of-the mill teaching by billionaires and politicians, who hate organized labor, who abhor the notion of an educated populace. These are pressing issues, but not my concern here.
My concern is that Mills College Professor Ted Meany drew what had to have been a comfortable salary, teaching at an expensive private institution. His was a vital field of professional expertise, the Age of Enlightenment--when you figure how Americans struggle today with the rightful place of science, or the notion of “liberty.” It was all wasted. Ted Meany didn’t engage students.
In my time at Mills, I had some fine instruction, by professors I won’t thank here. I also had one forgettable class too many. Though I wouldn’t have put it quite this way at the time—circa 1984-85--for the price of the Mills education, I wasn’t getting my value.
Here is my most troubling memory from Meany’s class. It happened at the beginning of one class, towards the end of my sophomore year. My transfer was already in the works; this incident didn’t decide the issue of my changing schools. Nevertheless. Right as Meany was getting ready to start up one day, I pulled a typed paper that was due in another class out out of my backpack, with a bottle of correction fluid. I settled in at my desk to proofread. I’d been at this a moment or two, when I heard Dr. Meany’s droning, curiously, halt. This was odd.
“Please, please, please, please, please!!!” The volume and emphasis rose on each iteration, in a dizzying contrast to Meany’s usual expressionless near-mumble. He was out in front of his podium now, feet from my desk. I could smell his sweat, his coffee breath. I realized in horror he was addressing me.
“Do that later!” he boomed, “You are in my class now!” Spittle gleamed in the corners of his mouth. His chest heaving, he waited for me—humiliated, fumbling--to put the paper and correction fluid away. Then he resumed his dry monologue as if nothing had happened.
(Pssst, Ted. A teacher-to-teacher pointer: If a student in class unintentionally engages in activity you find annoying, you ask them kindly to put it aside. Any other response is dereliction.)
Great, ageless teaching—the kind students at Mills and other private institutions pay through the nose for, and hope to get, the kind influential people write their wills to fund—is magnanimous. It welcomes students in, as equals. People who encounter it in youth, remember it till they die.
Stanford, Harvard, and many other top-tier private institutions have been shaken-up by the pandemic, but are unquestionably regrouping in 2021. Far from sharing Mills’s woes over declining enrollment, these top colleges are renowned for turning away would-be students in droves. Their ability to pay their faculties and staff isn’t in question; increasingly, they subsidize the educations of non-wealthy students they admit.
Perhaps because of its status at its founding as a women’s college, in what was then the backwater of the West Coast, Mills College didn’t establish itself--early or decisively—as a bastion of undergraduate teaching excellence. That, I believe, is the reason Mills hasn’t attracted the throngs of applicants, or the donor legacies, that would have kept it flourishing until today.
It’s no secret that the wealthiest have undo influence in society; they’re selfish and venal; they wreck things. Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but I would acknowledge also the flip side of the coin (so to speak). I would credit the patrician, benevolent tradition of great private wealth, in having fostered some of the finest post-secondary education America has to offer. I would like to think that the wealthy who funded colleges and universities, for generations yet unborn, for the betterment of society, personally, sincerely entertained the great question: “Who is my equal?”
Today, selective top colleges admit first-generation, poorer students, in increasing ratio to the culturally-less-varied sons and daughters of privilege they've traditionally educated. Poorer students at top universities benefit directly, among other things, from donor philanthropy. They graduate—broadly speaking--they democratize society. It will only continue. The white male aristocrat-benefactor of yore, from whose point of view history was written, never fathomed the myriad of contemporary answers to his guiding question. But here we are.
Hail and farewell, Mills College, 1852-2021. Besides the single-sex undergraduate venue with the delightful campus, the elegant buildings, and the homey dorms, we are losing also a locally famous, innovative teacher education program. We are watching the demise of locally famous, innovative dance, music and student reentry programs, and so much more. My heart breaks at the human cost. But maybe, for its noble intentions, for the ground it’s broken over its 169-year life, it really is time for Mills to cede the higher-education stage in 2021 to players readier to be on it.
I am looking forward to discussion on this piece, and will be back throughout the day to moderate comments. If I’ve made errors, point them out. But keep it civil, please.