In this weekend’s opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “What’s the Point of a Professor,” Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, took aim once again at an increasingly broken higher education system, this time with professors in his cross-hairs. Students, he reported, are highly transactional, interested only in their grades and unwilling to connect with, and be mentored by, their professors. And the professors? They are, in his view, pressed by their research demands, increasingly pushed to give more A’s and unduly influenced by student evaluations on ratemyprofessor.com to step up to the proper role of a professor. “You can’t become a moral authority,” he writes “if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it.”

When the US Department of Education tells us that distinguishing higher education experiences is no different than comparing blenders, haven’t we rendered the moral authority of scholarly inquiry moot? And when the public is more consumed with the earning potential of our college graduates than the education they receive, can we hope that the faculty might have the power to make a difference? As Bauerlein remarks, “finding meaning and making money have traded places.”

Despite the multiple assaults on the system that employs them, the professors can – and do – have the power to make a difference for their students, and to be effective agents for meaningful change.

We have asserted the critical role of professors at Books@Work here, here and here, but the Bauerlein piece makes it abundantly clear that we can never exhaust this important topic. Our participants never fail to share the import and impact of our professor partners – folks who not only “challenge” and “engage them” but also help them find something in the books, the conversations and themselves that exceeds their wildest expectations.

A few stories:

The professor who so inspired one hospital employee to find his voice that he wrote his first short story

The professor who introduced a group of senior managers to the art of deeper reading – line by line – and the palpable change in the breadth of the conversation that ensued

The professor who invited young women in a court-mandated life skills class to write poetry, and the young woman so excited by the experience that she now writes every day: “it’s saving my life” she shared

The professor whose enthusiasm for a particular Latin American science-fiction novella energized a group of public school staff members to tackle (and enjoy) a genre they would not have chosen for themselves

The professor who made herself so available to the staff of a private healthcare provider that they were shocked and touched by her willingness to answer questions and keep a conversation going – well beyond her hour-long seminar sessions with them

And the professor who taught a particularly difficult book – so broadly hated by the medical center employees she taught that they all wanted to give up at their first session together. But as she talked them through the content and the context, she inspired them to keep reading, as one said “if only to be able to participate in the next conversation.” To a one, every participant told me that it was the hardest book they had ever read but the book about which they were most proud – a “trophy on my shelf,” one described, and a reminder of a “fantastic professor.”

These are the professors we work with – from colleges and universities in multiple states. They all have day jobs teaching within the walls of the academy, but they are so passionate about sharing literature and learning that they work with us too, in diverse settings, to engage non-traditional learners. Without them, there would be no Books@Work. If Bauerlein believes that professors are the last hope to change a damaged system (and I hope he does), then we at Books@Work gather the proof – day in and day out – that this belief is well grounded. Let’s be careful to support their life’s work, rather than make them scapegoats for a system under attack.

Image: William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, 1854, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Merseyside, England [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons.