The Shadow Scholar Read online

  I never bought a book during college. I couldn’t afford them, and I certainly wasn’t going to read them. Before college, I went to a fancy high school where the parking lot was sectioned off according to make and model. I parked behind the dumpster, an area specifically reserved for people who only had cars because some older relative had died. I had the same periwinkle Buick Century as the janitor. My high school was competitive, and the people who grubbed for grades there genuinely gave a crap. Truthfully, it was a lot more academically challenging than college. So I decided I could live without the books.

  In terms of survival, though, I learned a lot at Rutgers.

  College was a financially bleak time for me. My first stab at personal independence was marked by unpaid bills, undone laundry, and unpopped bags of popcorn for supper. So I was down-and-out in the ghettos of New Brunswick. And while I was down, Rutgers University kicked me repeatedly in the ribs and stood over me laughing while I tried to get my bearings.

  It locked me out of my classes, so I switched my major. It shunted me from main-campus housing, so I lived on a periphery campus and took buses to my classes. I couldn’t afford basic educational commodities like notebooks or Rutgers pep paraphernalia, so I got a job off-campus. When I applied for a parking pass, I was refused. I spent my first year of school looking for places to hide my car. When I accumulated a sufficient number of parking tickets, my transcript was withheld.

  When I called the Office of the Registrar to have my transcript released, I was told to contact the Office of Academic Affairs. When I called the Office of Academic Affairs, I was told to contact the registrar. When I called the registrar back, they told me to consult the head of my major’s department.

  All of my classes graded for attendance. All of my classes were so big that the professors had to speak using microphones. All of my classes used multiple-choice tests with Scantron forms so that grading could be done by machine. All of my professors gave lectures with content lifted directly from the text. All of my courses seemed extraneous, unnecessary, and uninteresting. When I was counting down the last days of high school, I never imagined that freedom would be so mediocre.

  Rutgers is like so many other schools of its size. It’s a money farm. I didn’t have a class with less than one hundred people in it until I was a senior, and by then I was too angry to care. One of the best schools for your money…

  It’s like saying that McDonald’s has great deals on food. Just because it’s relatively cheap doesn’t mean you’re getting a good deal. You could still develop heart disease.

  I don’t mean to complain. I’ve made peace with all of this. And it wouldn’t be a big deal if it was just me. I could be nothing more than one loudmouthed jerk with a gigantic chip on his shoulder. But I got ripped off, and I don’t think my experience was unique.

  I was a young, aspiring, and arrogant writer. I was doing album reviews for the entertainment insert in our university paper. I was writing a weekly political humor column called The Monkey Goes Where the Wind Blows for the multi-campus publication the Outside World, which was founded by the future great sportswriter and my old high school mate Howard Megdal. I had a small but nerdy following.

  I had written the manuscript for a novel but was unable to gain approval for an independent study at Rutgers. “There’s nothing like that here,” they told me.

  At this age, I was fairly confident that I would soon be a long-awaited revelation to the world. My first book was going to be a monumental success, and it would force America to examine its own psyche. It would not be very long before I was sleeping atop a mattress made of money on a yacht crewed by beautiful naked women. You know, like novelists do.

  Incidentally, I couldn’t sell my work to pay for Q-tips. I started college in 1998 assuming that by junior year I’d be able to dispense with taking classes and move right on to the lecture circuit. But by the arrival of fall semester 2001, I regularly considered faking my own death to get out of paying campus parking tickets.

  In 2001, the cost of getting your car out of tow in New Brunswick was ninety dollars. This was pretty close to a year’s wages for me at the time. I indicated as much to Erin, my fellow communication major. We had three classes together, so we became study buddies. We’d check in for attendance, then sneak out to get high. One day, as we sat out on her roof passing a joint and listening to Bob Dylan, I lamented the loss of my car. I told her of my desperate predicament and the sad reality that I would probably never see my beloved periwinkle Buick Century—Slow Lightnin’, I used to call her—again.

  She offered to lend me ninety dollars. My friends were mighty generous to me in those days. But I refused. I couldn’t even think of when I’d be in a position to repay that money.

  “Hmmm,” she reflected.

  “Eh?”

  “I’ll give you ninety bucks to write my sociology paper.”

  Well, now. This was something new. This wasn’t charity. Somebody was willing to pay for my work. My first commission!

  Suddenly, everything changed. Would you believe it if I told you that people started begging to give me money for my writing?

  Erin was happy with her paper, so she recommended me to a friend in a fraternity. He too expressed interest in paying money for my work. I established a formal pricing structure. I charged him ten dollars per page and an eighth of weed. He was thrilled to do business with me.

  I came over to his frat house at eleven a.m. to gather up his text and the details for his assignment. He mashed up an OxyContin and snorted it through a twenty-dollar bill. He took a big gulp of Busch Light and said, “Hey man, there’s a ton of guys around here that would love you.”

  Dude was right. I became quite the popular man around the fraternity. By the middle of the fall semester, I was carrying a significant portion of its course load. Word got around fast that there was a way to get out of doing work without being placed on academic probation. Giving a frat boy an easy way to cheat is like putting a preschooler in the priesthood. They were all over me.

  Of course, this did not make me a suddenly wealthy man. But now I had money for malt liquor and even some food. Anytime I could top that off with a little action on the side… I am a simple man of simple needs.

  My quality of life changed. I was getting less sleep but more of everything else. And finally—and really for the first time in my postadolescent life—I was actually doing homework. It wasn’t mine, but I was doing it.

  And I was writing for a living. So my name wasn’t on the work. So what?

  I was in high demand.

  2

  Rich Kid Sid

  My life in college was getting better. I was paying even less attention to my own studies and genuinely immersing myself in the work of others. My junior year marked a turning point. Rutgers was finally delivering on its promise as an academic institution. It had put me in touch with the kinds of people who could help me further my career.

  My fellow scholars, my college mates, my traveling company along this road of enlightenment toward the Lyceum in Athens, the great library of Alexandria, and all the temples of Buddha.

  Speaking of, here was my new client now, Sid.

  “Sorry I’m late, bro. I was taking a shit.”

  “No worries. I’ve done that.”

  “So you’re, like, a paper writer?”

  “At your service.”

  “Sweet. I really need this. I mean, I don’t need it like I couldn’t do this shit myself. I could. But I’m not going to waste my time on this class.”

  Sid was talking about Expository Writing, the basic composition course that most Rutgers freshmen are required to take. It rivals Barney the purple dinosaur as an intellectual challenge and an instrument for teaching.

  Sid was in crew. He was short but stocky. His head was almost perfectly square, and he had a crispy gel-helmet that told me right away he was from north of exit 10 on the New Jersey Turnpike. More than likely Long Island.

  Sid was a particular breed
, one that would fund my future profession.

  Sid was, in a greasy nutshell, Generation Y’s worst-case scenario.

  Sid was an examplar of a very specific segment of Generation Y, an archetype that would become a constant presence in my life. Surely, in his generation as in all others before it, there are honest, ambitious, intelligent, and compassionate individuals. And in every generation before his, there have been Sids. But the opportunities, pressures, and challenges distinct to his generation have made it easier and more desirable for Sids to take the easy way out.

  A Sid has no conscience. He has been coddled, prep schooled, propped up, and promised the world. He has been told that he is special. He has been assured that he is capable. He has been protected from any evidence that he might not be up to the challenges ahead of him. He should stink of self-doubt, but he is buoyed by his own sense of entitlement and the promise of lavish excess in his personal and professional life.

  And the Sids aren’t the only ones. According to a 2010 report by the Pew Research Center, “unlike the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X… Gen Y is the only generational cohort that doesn’t cite ‘work ethic’ as a defining characteristic.”1 The Pew report notes that a majority of Generation Y respondents cited technology and pop culture as having greater importance in their lives. To put this another way, a statistically significant number of Millennials are more interested in tracking down a Dick in the Box ringtone than in solving the pickle of global climate change.

  Not that this inherently makes Sid, or any of his contemporaries, a cheater. But it does mean that we are a legion of avid consumers. Today, more than was true for previous generations, formative experiences for the population of mostly white, middle-class and wealthy Americans who can afford to go to college and graduate school have increasingly come to center on social networking status and celebrity voyeurism. This is the retailer’s most perfect fantasy come true: a demographic organism more consumer than human. Its rites of passage are virtual. Its accomplishments are tweeted. It no longer loiters in front of the convenience store. It loiters on Facebook. It needs to hang out in a place where it can talk about itself, where it can be validated, where it can be assured that somebody gives a shit. It expects schools to be that way too.

  And if that means yet more consumption, so be it. New clothes to model on Facebook, new devices from which to tweet, new e-books for school. Sid was a consumer plain and simple. How far one like Sid might go to buy his way through life is generally a matter of resource and motive.

  Sid was flush with resource and guided by the twin motives of deficiency and ambition.

  I was introduced to Sid through my friend Bree.

  I first met Bree at an interregional Jewish youth group event when I was sixteen and she fourteen. She was sitting with her sister on a bench between the bathrooms, a pretty little hippie chick with an indefinable exotic quality, a tulip-petal face, and the narrow eyes of her Russian great-great-grandparents.

  Bree has situs inversus, a condition in which, relative to the average individual, all of one’s vital organs are on the opposite side of one’s body. The condition affects one in ten thousand, and its most significant medical ramifications for Bree are that she carries a special card to notify paramedics and pledges allegiance using her left hand. She also bats and throws lefty.

  From almost the minute we met, we were inseparable, entrusted, and codependent, even romantic, but never actually involved. Our allegedly platonic friendship took on a type of physical intimacy that is only really acceptable in high school.

  I went to Rutgers, and she followed two years later. There we remained close friends, part of the same weekend binge-drinking scene. She made mention of my services at a party one night, and this guy Sid was all over it.

  I met Sid that first time in the lounge of his dorm, surrounded by his floor mates. He explained to me that even though he was perfectly capable, extremely intelligent, and generally a straight-A student as far as he could recall, he was above the degrading tasks that comprised Rutgers’s Expository Writing course.

  “So, I don’t want you to think I’m stupid, dude.”

  “No, man, I don’t think you’re stupid,” I lied.

  “I just don’t have the time for this crap. With my crew schedule and my poli-sci courses and everything, I’m not trying to worry ’bout Expos.”

  “Yeah, I agree. It’s nonsense. I’d never do it if I wasn’t getting paid to.” I was fortunate enough to have tested out of this course in the summer before freshman year.

  “Besides, it’s not like it matters. I just need to do well enough to get outta here. I need to be going to a much better college before I start applying to law schools. I can do way better than this place… no offense.”

  “Hey, no, man. None taken. I’ve been to Chuck E. Cheese’s that were more educational than this.”

  “Yeah, for real. Wait, really?”

  “Forget it. Let’s just get to the thing.”

  “K. I just wanted you to know why I wanted your help. I’m not stupid.”

  “Don’t worry, man. I don’t judge”… out loud.

  Sid sent me home with some cash, some nugget, a textbook, and his in-class writing sample. We were supposed to take this sample and turn it into a passing paper. I got home, smoked his weed, and started reading over his work. Poor Sid. He really didn’t know how far off the mark he was. Nobody had ever told him.

  Sid’s in-class writing assignment read like the really long name of a Chinese takeout restaurant. It was a jumble of words slapped together uncomfortably, standing next to one another with an air of remoteness, like strangers in an elevator.

  Punctuation dotted the landscape of his work almost randomly, as though he had written the paper first and then gone back through it indiscriminately inserting dots and dashes. For all I know, he was a supergenius who had strung Morse code throughout his paper in order to subliminally impact the teaching assistant’s grading process. Unfortunately for Sid, the TA had missed it entirely. His in-class writing assignment had received a No Pass, the mark indicating that a student needed improvement. Invariably, a large percentage of students received a No Pass on the first assignment or two in Expository Writing.

  This was done so that students could be shown to demonstrate improvement and ultimately pass the writing requisite even when no improvements had been demonstrated at all. Starting at zero, most students would pass and some would not. Grading was arbitrary, and classes were instructed by TAs.

  Sid felt that his No Pass grade was among history’s greatest injustices. For although Sid lacked many things, confidence was not one of them. He thought the world of himself. He felt an incurable self-worth that could not possibly have been instilled in him by a teacher. It had probably taken a lifetime of little reaffirmations, of barely passable efforts reimagined as successes, of material and abstract gifts—all the tuition, dorm swag, and name-brand threads a kid could want. And you can be damn sure, whether they knew it or not, Sid’s parents were paying for his papers.

  Starting with Rich Kid Sid and extending through a line of customers that could wrap four hundred times around the trendiest, douchiest, most popped-collar club in all of Hoboken, I have come to know a portion of this generation that, I’m very sorry to say, suggests that Jersey Shore is the most realistic program on television.

  My customers are rooted to the common ground of school attendance in the millennial era. As I have reflected on the thousands of commissioned, completed, and archived assignments in my personal library, I am inclined to argue that at least a portion of the college-educated future leaders of this generation will be undone by their narcissism.

  Many of my clients believe that with little to no effort on their part, the world will be delivered to them on a platter. Of course, these assumptions are predicated on the idea that America will continue to produce more opportunities for the children of each succeeding generation. What distinguishes Generation Y on the whole, as opposed to that whic
h distinguishes its least admirable subsets, is the reality that this generational cohort will experience fewer opportunities and a lesser standard of living than its parents.

  A 2010 article in Bloomberg Businessweek reports that “Gen Y is in a tougher financial position than previous generations. The average salary for 25- to 34-year-olds, for instance, fell 19 percent over the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation, to $35,100… That’s if they can get jobs: Unemployment among 19- to 24-year-oldsstands at 15.3 percent vs. the overall rate of 9.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”2

  Combine these realities with salary expectations driven not just by the desire to own a luxury sedan with inbuilt ass warmers but also by the incredible expense of higher education, and you start to gain an understanding of why this generation isn’t faring well in a tough economy. America’s businesses are hitting the skids, and this is not a temporary recession. This is a leveling out. This is the great promise of globalization in all its glory. This is the backlash for a culture of utter selfishness, for a way of life that is ecologically unsustainable, and for a mode of consumption so voracious that we must make war on foreign nations to support it.

  And we’re counting on guys like Sid to lead us from this mess. I was meeting Sid in between classes at the Student Center to get details for his second assignment.