November 7, 2019: Long Live Jefferson College

In the spring of 1976, as I was finishing my MFA in creative writing at UNC-G, I must have seen some sort of notice somewhere (bulletin board?) of a job teaching English at Jefferson College, a proprietary college in downtown Greensboro. Forgive me, it’s been 43 years, but the details were fuzzy. I got the job. Somewhat ominously, Fred Chappell, the beloved fiction writer and poet, intoned, “Get your money upfront.”

I soon heard the story: Jefferson College’s modus operandi was that it recruited veterans from the community to come to this junior college on the GI bill. The vets would sign up, and slowly (or perhaps quickly) over the next week or so slip away. A dean would show up in the classroom and say, “I’m shocked, shocked, how few students are here. This class is canceled.” And then not pay the instructor.

The feds cottoned on, and, in what seems to me in retrospect a shockingly lenient posture, let them off with whatever they got let off with—but they weren’t, in the feds’ ridiculous rhetoric, “debarred” from doing business with the U.S. government. (Isn’t it enough to be “barred”? Isn’t to be debarred to have your banishment lifted? It is amazing to me that Ethiopian taxi drivers can master our foolish language. I wildly overtipped one recently on that basis.)

The night before my first class—and I was picking up two weeks into the quarter, some instructor had apparently just wandered off—I was seized by a great fear: I would be taking a classroom for the first time in my life. It occurred to me that I had no idea what they were working on. (Jefferson wasn’t big on training, organization, or communication.)

I called the guy who had the office across from me at UNC-G, Willie Mickelberry, an instructor in the English Department. He had been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where his best memory was of a colleague looking out a window and calling to the coeds in a strangled voice, “Turgid members!” He came to our fiction writing class one night and we nearly all committed suicide, his stuff was so good. I asked him what the fuck I was supposed to do, and he said, “Don’t worry. You know more than they do, and they’re more scared than you are.” This translates roughly to what a lawyer I knew once said, I hope as a joke: “I just need to know more than the clients.”

So I taught at Jefferson College. It was an experience that has left me a little shaken. There were young kids there, too, often black, but I also made a white hippie chick cry over something once. One of my students wrote on her final that she was hoping to go into “earlyhood education,” and I didn’t misread that just because my brother was visiting and we’d consumed an entire bottle of scotch the night before I graded the exams.

Against all odds, the school liked me and even hoped to retain me, even though I’d already accepted the offer of an instructorship at Auburn University for the coming fall. To entice me, they gave me a course in literature to teach. It was going to meet on Friday nights from 6-9. Thrilled, I accepted, and I developed a syllabus that probably would have challenged Harvard freshmen.

There was, of course, a glitch. The class was all veterans, and they received their VA checks on Fridays. That meant that they’d show up promptly at 6:00 and wait in line for their checks, so class didn’t really start till 6:20 or so. Then we’d take a break at 7:00, and half of them would go across the street to the bar at the Holiday Inn and agreeably drink up part of that check.

As one can imagine, the class from 8-9 was an experience in literature that no one would want to miss. I feel sorry that I don’t remember what was on the syllabus, save James Joyce’s story “Counterparts” and a little story by Donald Barthelme, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”, both of which must have mystified them. My favorite moment was when I asked about a detail in “Counterparts”: “Why is the fellow in the pub said to have yellow eyes? What does that tell us about him?” A big guy in the front row raised his hand: “He drinks too much. Jaundice.” The big guy had yellow eyes.

I did get in a little trouble with another class. One day, the students all showed up obviously not having read the assignment (so easy to tell), and otherwise misbehaved. What did it for me was when one withered redneck named Andy Carter, arms crossed and face as pruned as someone who’d just drunk vinegar, crossed his arms and shook his head and told his neighbor that the poem made no sense. That did it. What, after all, did he know? I told the class to go the fuck home and read the stuff with a clear head. That’s when the hippie chick started crying. I stormed home.

Then I got a call from my boss, a sad little guy named Larry Lefler. He was a history M.A. who lived in Reidsville, a little city north of Greensboro. He looked oily and smelled of something oily but meant as a disinfectant. He used to gaze at me with something like wonder. He made me go play golf with him (he was left-handed, no short game) and gently explained how I shouldn’t dismiss classes. Jefferson College had a bad history with that sort of thing. Oh. At my young age, of course, that wouldn’t have occurred to me. I didn’t do that again. On our next golf game, he explained in excruciating detail how his mother had died (“Then her kidneys failed….”)

Sometime in there—end of spring quarter?—Jefferson College held its graduation ceremony. The esteemed faculty (I never met another professor, it occurs to me now; were there any?) WOULD be there. That executive order was issued by the owner of Jefferson College, one George Shinn. Look at his Wikipedia page, and he doesn’t seem so awful: lots of charitable stuff, a rags-to-riches story leading eventually to his having bought the Charlotte Hornets with the proceeds of, yes, his selling his proprietary colleges known for fleecing the government. As is true of so many southern charlatans, he’s at least outwardly a religious nut. I have little memory of the graduation ceremony—it’s been 43 years, there was that half bottle of scotch with my brother, etc.

It was a great summer! Somehow I fell in with some undergraduates taking writing classes at UNC-G, and there was alcohol, sneaky kissing, parties, sex. One of the women fell in love with my brother Pete when he came through that time, and, the rest of the summer, would get drunk and wail, “Pete, oh Pete” late at night.

When it ended, it was with an ironic twist: I had lost my illusions. When I gave the final exam in the veterans’ literature class, I noticed some guy in the back row not bothering to hide that he was gazing at his neighbor’s paper. He was craning his neck to look at it. Do I confront him? Do I yell? But I had grown to really like these guys; they showed up on Friday night for an incomprehensible class (my fault), and they kept coming. I didn’t look at the guy, but just said to the class, “Hey, just try not to be obvious that you’re cheating, OK?” And then I packed up and moved to Auburn. It will not surprise anyone that Jefferson College is no more.