Cumming is an associate professor of journalism at Washington & Lee University.

For millions of Americans, community college is the gateway to higher education, job skills and a better life. This fall, for me, community college has been a gateway in the other direction.

It led me, temporarily, out of the bubble of elite higher education.

With a semester off as a tenured journalism professor at Washington and Lee University, I have spent this fall teaching a writing/research course at Surry Community College. Every week, I drive the 130 miles from Lexington to stay at our sons farm in Fancy Gap and teach a class of 16 challenging students on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Dobson, N.C.

I recommend the experience to other university professors. We have a lot to offer and something to learn.

This is Trump country. And yet, I have found more diversity here than at W&L. Four of my Surry students are Hispanic. One young woman wrote in an assignment of her mothers Hispanic shoe store getting ripped off by a few shoplifters. An African-American single mom in her 30s wrote in another assignment a memo to the principal of her daughters elementary school, questioning the decision to pull her daughter out of the regular class for special help.

One student manages the local Dairy Queen. Another works at Chick-fil-A. Four are Early College high school students. Four are repeating the class. Four more failed to show up or have dropped out.

Virginia has a system of 23 community colleges and an ambitious goal of making first-generation college student an obsolete term, with a college graduate in every household. North Carolinas community college system, once considered one of the most progressive in the country, has 58 campuses.

The funding of this system seems criminally low for being progressive. My pay as a one-class adjunct barely covers mileage and meals, even with the extra $4.70 a week thrown in for my Ph.D.

But the experience has been rewarding. It has freed me from a privileged liberal arts environment and tested my real value as a teacher. If this is left-behind America Trumps unrewarded supporters and demonized immigrants what could I teach them about writing?

A lot. Nonfiction writing, I try to show, is personal empowerment. Instead of a research paper, I gave assignments I thought could be useful to them: a memo, an op-ed, a press release, a blog post, a publishable book review. Writing, I said in every way I could, is connecting with a real audience. Its thinking logically, supporting assertions, making claims that persuade.

And what a time for applying these ideas with the U.S. House engaged in the ultimate Constitutional exercise from the Age of Reason: impeachment of a duly elected President.

I wanted to show respect for them, as they did for me. So for class discussion, I used a few good opinion columns I could find that leaned slightly in Trumps favor.

Professors in their ivory towers wonder what could have gone so wrong with America, that so many citizens could elect a big-time real estate cheat and reality TV star. For some of us, our reaction is a sincerely baffled curiosity, with a sense of obligation to serve the common good in a time of need with our modest skills teaching, scholarship and service.

Community college, as W&Ls provost told me, is where the real heart of American education is happening right now. A Harvard-educated law professor recently left his New York university to teach a semester in ethics in Appalachia, to try to understand what went so wrong in 2016. Evan Mandery was turned down by a Tennessee community college, but eventually taught at Appalachian State, writing that he took solace in the shared moral values he found underlying the argument of liberals and conservatives (but not libertarians, who he said valued abstractions over empathy).

I suspect that other professors would like to teach at least one term or course at a community college, if such experience were rewarded by their home universities. But that would take a fundamental shift in the reward system.

Community colleges could help by making it easier for us to teach there. I was dismayed at how many hoops I had to jump through for almost no pay.

But there are rewards. For me, the best reward is to be let into another world, sometimes poignantly expressed. I come from the kind of place where the tobacco grew and the factories fell, one student wrote. The place where Im from has little to offer and little to gain.

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Cumming: Down to the entryway of higher education - Roanoke Times