Fueled by a desire to become a teacher, Loren Mayshark entered Hunter College in 2008, with the intention of gaining a master's degree in two years. Six years and tens of thousands of dollars later, he abandoned his studies without attaining the deg...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Finally, I returned to Hunter in mid-November to see what they could do for me, after I had failed my exam for the second time. When I met with Belview and Rosencrass they kept me waiting. In a microcosm of my experience with Hunter, I was ten minutes early and they were fifteen minutes late in getting the meeting started. I thought of a friend of mine who was beginning to enroll in the master's history program for education. He described Professor Rosencrass, whom he had met with once for advice on classes, as a "dick." The best way I can describe most of the professors at the higher positions in the department is humorless, cold, inordinately self-important sycophants. As a result, I would feel that explaining my problems with fitting in with their system would be futile, if not detrimental. I tried to push this train of thought out of my mind as we began the meeting.
The three of us sat in Professor Belview's new office, which he was still in the process of moving in to. It was the very same office that I had met with Professor Wallace in for my first meeting at Hunter, where she assured me that it would be simple to gain entrance into the program if I was doing well in my classes. They were formal and courteous; they seemed somewhat sobered by the tone of my letter. They told me that they understood that I was a "good student" and, given my academic record, I should merit another attempt to pass the comprehensive exam, but they quickly emphasized the fact that they could, according to "Hunter policy," drop me from the program after two failed attempts. While my head was spinning from the fact that these men had just told me that they could send me home with nothing after I'd paid thousands of dollars and undergone years of toil, Professor Belview continued, "Unfortunately, Professor Caraja has decided that you are not up to his standards to work with, as he has concluded from your exam and the pages of thesis that you sent him. He says that his willingness to work on the thesis was contingent upon your performance on the exam; therefore, he will be unable to continue working with you."
I was shocked. I responded that, although Professor Caraja contended that his ability to work with me was contingent on my exams, it was not true; he had never mentioned this to me after he elected to take it on. But I was quick to add that it did not matter since he was the unwilling party. As a result, they offered me a "deal": I had to find a new advisor to do an entirely different thesis with, and then I had to prepare to take the US history exam. If I agreed to this inane proposal it would mean reading another forty to seventy new books for the exam, since these were the books that the US history majors would have read in their coursework. Then I would have to come up with a new thesis. It felt impossible for many reasons, but the fact that I had grown to distrust Hunter was perhaps the most burning.
When I explained to them that my confidence in the program and the people running it had been broken after I'd failed the exam, which was in Latino labor history, a subject that I was passionate about, they stared at me blankly. Now I was supposed to embark on another preparation for a US history exam? Then they reminded me, again, that I could have been thrown out of the program after two failed exams and they assured me that I was being given an opportunity, a second chance. I thought: how was I supposed to prepare for an exam in a history that was less important for me, and for which I hadn't studied at the graduate level? I told them that I had not been preparing for such an exam in my coursework, which meant starting the entirety of the US history books from scratch. I told them that it would make it very unlikely that I would be able to pass the first time, since I hadn't been able to pass an exam on a subject I had worked on for years.
Belview replied, "We think that you would probably pass on the first time. Most people do." This struck me as either a venal statement or an unrealistic one considering my history at Hunter, coming off of two failed exams. Then they returned to the topic of my thesis.
I told them that I was doing the thesis because I believed in it; because it was poignant and compelling. It was the type of history that I wanted to teach. I said that I would have gone to school for a MA in US history if that was what I'd wanted. They told me that if I was passionate about the subject and if my thesis project was as groundbreaking as I thought it would be, I could always write it as a book later in life—nothing was stopping me. But in order to get a degree I would have to find a workable thesis within the program, and the first step to doing that would be finding a new topic and a new advisor. I wanted to scream, because I had already spent hundreds of hours on my thesis and I felt it and everything else I had worked for slipping away. I felt powerless. But I calmed myself, knowing that I had no recourse, and that losing my cool would destroy everything I had invested in this degree. At the time I had a feeling that this twisted token option they were presenting me with was no better than having them tell me to go fuck myself. But I feared that my emotions were taking over and telling me this; it couldn't be the truth. I had to take time to find the best way to respond to their insulting offer.
