First College Teaching Job

            Winter term at Rogue Community College started this week, so I’m back in the classroom. As I was introducing myself to my students, I was put in mind of my first college teaching job, as a Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow in 1968.

            When I graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1966, I had won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate studies but also a Marshall Scholarship for two years of study at Cambridge University. In turning down the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in favor of the more exciting Marshall, I became eligible for the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship, which sent graduate students who wanted a year of reprieve from their studies to various poor colleges that generally couldn’t afford teachers from top universities. After graduating from Cambridge, I became a Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow, assigned to Pikeville College, in Pikeville, Kentucky.

            Pikeville is a small town in Eastern Kentucky, tightly wrapped with steep mountains in the heart of Appalachia. In the 1960s Eastern Kentucky was still the home of the feuding Hatfields and McCoys (I had one of each in one of my classes), a kingdom of coal ruled by coal bosses who strip-mined ruthlessly. A friend from Cambridge who visited me there remembers our going to look at one of these defunct mines. "You noticed something coming up the hill towards us," he told me recently in an email, "and remarked idly 'Here comes a man with a donkey.' Then you added: 'And a fridge.' It was a local hillbilly, using a broken fridge as a sled, pulled by the donkey, in which to put  scavenged coal." 

           People lived in hand-built shacks up the “cricks and hollers” on roads that were graveled, narrow, winding, and full of potholes. Cars rusted and rotted in the gullies and creeks, camouflaged by the fiery colors of the autumn hills. Televisions and telephones were just beginning to penetrate the isolation. Pikeville College students were, in general, unexposed to a larger world and unfamiliar with a wider culture. They dressed conservatively, and their eyes had never seen far beyond Eastern Kentucky.

            Into this scene I naively arrived. I had been attending operas at Covent Garden and plays in London theaters. I had had private tutorials with Cambridge lecturers, had been steeped in English literature and analysis, had lived among both grand and humble Medieval buildings, had learned to cook seven-course meals, recognize good wines, and drink sherry while talking about literature, art, and music. I was wearing miniskirts and knee-high, black leather, lace-up boots. I spoke with a British accent. My vocabulary was strange and my enthusiasm for Chaucer and Shakespeare incomprehensible. I was like an exotic weed among native grasses.

             When my students didn’t understand Shakespeare, I searched for other literature as starting points. We read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. When the Beatles came out with the White Album, I played selections from it in class and talked about the nuances of “Dear Prudence” and the poetry of “Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night.” My students looked baffled, as though the Beatles were as strange to them as Chaucer.

            Elsewhere in the country Revolution #9 was erupting. Men were growing their hair long, women were taking the pill, encounter groups were freeing uptight egos, musicians were singing the glories of drugs and the horrors of war. The Russian launching of Sputnik shocked the country. In Berkeley flower power was spreading love and peace. In New York the following year Woodstock would change the course of the nation.

            To those of us at Pikeville, these events were happening elsewhere. When I talked about Sputnik in my class, my students said that if God had meant for us to be in space, he would have put us there. Time magazine called Pikeville College the only college in the country with a right-wing revolution. Nonetheless, the sixties seeped in. The Pikeville movie theater showed daringly good movies: 2001, Lolita, James Joyce’s Ulysses. I met a man who was a government paid rabble rouser: he had a government grant to organize students politically. I also met the students he worked with. They were politically savvy. They smoked marijuana. They said, “Power to the people.”

            The feminist movement, too, reached Pikeville. When I discovered that the other Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow at the college, a man, had been paid more than I, even though we had the same position and did the same job, I went immediately to the college president with my complaint. He was astonished. Of course, I got less money, he said: I was a woman; I wasn’t supporting a family and never would. He must have known his arguments were weak, though, for he corrected the injustice without further stir. Thereafter the two Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows at Pikeville College received equal pay for our equal work. The far-reaching power of the sixties’ movements might be measured by the fact that even in Pikeville, Kentucky, things were changing.