by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
Compared with Dr. Ludlow, I would be making a pittance. But I’ll say this: the pay wasn’t at all bad for part-time work.
“Welcome,” said Dr. Ludlow. “And if you know anyone else interested in teaching, we’ll be happy to talk to them.”
I was pleased with myself for getting the job, though I suppose Dr. Ludlow’s wondering in passing if I knew any other potential adjuncts was a tip-off that it’s not the greatest job on the planet. Do you suppose that when Barack Obama tapped Tim Geithner for Treasury, he asked him if he knew anyone else interesting in becoming a cabinet member?
I took the textbooks with me, sent Dr. Ludlow an official copy of my MFA diploma, and, secure in my conviction that the laws and etiquette of business didn’t apply to colleges, blew off the thank-you note for the interview and hire.
That is how I became an adjunct instructor—or, as they are sometimes known, a “contingent faculty member”—one of those reviled beings whose very existence seems to epitomize What’s Wrong With College Today. According to the Modern Language Association, here’s one sample yardstick for judging the quality of a school: the fewer adjuncts on the job, the better:
The Modern Language Association believes that college students have a superior educational experience when they are taught by faculty members who have appropriate institutional support. As a rule, full-time faculty members, especially those holding tenured or tenure-track appointments, teach under conditions that provide clear educational advantages for their students… . Part-time faculty members, while they may be fully qualified scholars and teachers, are generally poorly paid, receive substandard office space and other support, and have tenuous institutional standing and little chance to advance professionally. An institution’s use of a critical mass of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members therefore provides a measure for judging the quality of undergraduate education.1
I was a member now of what academic theorists call the “instructorate,” as opposed to the “professoriate,” which enjoys health care and retirement benefits and where anybody with any sense would rather be. As Michael Murphy, director of college writing at the State University of New York at Oswego and a former adjunct himself, puts it, members of the instructorate “are widely regarded as the great academic unwashed, the grunts, pieceworkers subject to—and even produced by— the crass economic pressures of the academic marketplace. To most of higher education’s regular citizens, part-time instructors are an embarrassment.”2 In the world of college, I was a screwball, a loser, a pretender, a scoundrel, and a scab.
The literature is filled with stories of adjuncts pushed to the brink and going over the edge. Consider the tale of Mary Ann Swissler, a luckless Seton Hall adjunct, who fired off an illconsidered e-mail to her students and, in the words of the administration, “would not be returning”:
After discovering that some of her students had used a public Web site to criticize her teaching abilities, her wardrobe, and other aspects of her appearance … Swissler said in her e-mail message to the students that such comments “confirmed to me what I had to keep to myself all semester: that most of you mental midgets are the most immature, sheltered, homophobic, sexist, racist, lying sacks of [excrement] I have ever met in my life.” She added, “Seton Hall may be kissing you’re [sic] asses now, but out here in the real world, brats like you will be eaten for breakfast.”3
The academic literature treats adjuncts with a mix of weary condescension and revulsion. Check out this headline from the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Keep Adjuncts Away from Intro Courses, Report Says,” as though the adjuncts had some manner of contagious disease. Adjuncts will almost never get selected for available full-time positions; to choose an adjunct is, to put it charitably, not a sexy choice. A recent survey of colleges in the Midwest revealed that only three of sixty department chairs said they would be willing to consider adjuncts, even long-term adjuncts, for full-time jobs.4
The full-time professor on the tenure track is an endangered species. According to a report by the American Federation of Teachers, only 27.3 percent of faculty fit this description in 2007, a decline from 33.1 percent in 1997. In community colleges, only 17.5 percent are full-time tenured or on the tenure track.5 Colleges are using more and more graduate students and adjuncts for instruction. The Tufts Daily runs an alarmed story: “Some Departments Seeing Rise in Number of Adjunct Professors.” 6 “Sharp Rise in Adjunct Professors Has Obvious Downsides” is the headline in an editorial from the Daily Iowan bemoaning the fact that the University of Iowa has increased its use of adjuncts by 19 percent over the past five years.7
I understood that the use of adjunct instructors like me was probably not good for students. I understood that adjuncts were an exploited class, and that they were, in effect, faculty-union-sanctioned scabs. I didn’t think about any of this. I was glad to have the work. I didn’t even think the pay seemed that bad. Fired up about my new career, I telephoned a much-educated and highly opinionated friend and, before telling him of my own plans, asked if he had ever thought about adjuncting.
He dismissed the question with an audible yawn. “I would never dream of it,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too little money. Adjuncts work for the pleasure of feeling important and being called professor. I won’t work for mental wages.”
2
Writing Hell
THE CLASS LOOKED UP AT ME with curiosity as I tossed my attaché case on the desk with studied casualness. The board was filled with writing; I erased it all and wrote my name, followed by ENGLISH 101—COLLEGE WRITING. I set out my attendance book and a stack of course outlines. I sat on the edge of the desk and cleared my throat. The class snapped to attention. The quiet in the room was petrifying. There was nothing stopping me from beginning. Mounted on the ceiling was a projector; its lens, like a gun muzzle, pointed straight at my heart.
I thought of what Stanley Edgar Hyman, the husband of Shirley Jackson, whose short stories we would soon be reading, said when asked how he went about teaching a college class. “I’ve been doing it for years, and before every class, I take a piss, I check my fly, I wish I were dead—and I go into the room and begin.”
I’d had a three-hour orientation with one other adjunct and one of the deans, whom I will call Dean Truehaft. He was a sixtyish man, spare and trim, with a high forehead and a prim mouth, a man who appeared to be moderate in his habits and well cared for. He wore a boxy suit, but for some reason I kept envisioning him in spandex, like one of the bicyclists who whiz through town on the weekends. He told us some useful things.
He warned us never to be alone with a student, particularly a student of the opposite sex. He told us that it really wasn’t acceptable to end class early. “Some instructors do that,” he said, with a weary rasp in his voice, “and frankly I am at a loss. It’s not ethical, it’s not fair to the students, and it can interfere with our accreditation.” The other adjunct asked a lot of panicky questions about photocopies and snow chains and whether or not he’d be working in a classroom with a SMART Board, and when he heard the answers he shook his head in despair—really, this wasn’t set up very well.
I didn’t know anything about teaching in college, but I did know about keeping a job. I knew he wouldn’t last. I followed his progress discreetly. He taught for a single semester and split.
I would call the orientation mildly useful, in the way that all training sessions of this sort are. I learned about parking stickers and library hours and how to contact security. As the session wound down, he broached what I would discover to be the most nettlesome, complicated, and foundational issue I would face as an adjunct. He talked about the academic skills of the students, and his voice dropped and deepened into a most patrician sort of groan. I might, he said, find myself tweaking my curricula a bit. The students often needed to brush up on some basic skills. But I was to adhere to the college standards at all costs. “Give them the grades that they deserve,” he said. “It’s rea
lly very simple.”
He seemed rather pleased with himself. Because there were only two adjuncts in his training session, he got through it quicker than he expected, and said we could leave 45 minutes early.
I told my class: “Let’s go over the syllabus.”
They held their papers before them, and looked up at me with great expectations. We went over nuts and bolts. As a somewhat paranoid government employee, I knew enough to put in the stuff that could have legal ramifications: the number of absences that would lower a grade, the policy on absences for religious reasons, the mechanics of the grading system, whether or not a quiz missed because of absence counted, etc. I told them how many essays we’d be writing, and said that they should put their cell phones on vibrate, and they should come to class. My words sounded alien to me. They seemed to be coming from someplace far away. I hadn’t yet found my voice as an instructor. It had been a long time since I’d been in a classroom, and even then I had been teaching middle schoolers. I was channeling all the professors I’d ever had, their bemused jokes and muttered asides; I may have ended up sounding like the creased gnome who’d taught me Pascal’s Pensées in graduate school.
Panic swelled in me. Everything about what I was doing felt wrong, and we’d been in class a grand total of 15 minutes. Why was I doing this—for a little vacation money? It didn’t feel right. John Cheever, in “The Bella Lingua,” tells of a middle-aged American man in Rome taking Italian lessons from an elderly teacher: “It disturbed his sense of fitness that he, a man of fifty, should be sitting in a cold flat at the edge of Rome, being read a children’s tale by a woman of seventy… .” That was how I felt. My sense of fitness was disturbed. I was too old for this. All of my life seemed askew.
“Let’s see who’s here, shall we?” I murmured. Shall we! That was my first British Lit teacher.
I took attendance. I asked the students about their majors, about why they were taking the class, and got essentially the same answers that I was to get in every class from then on. Two young men in baseball caps who appeared to be friendly already were getting degrees in criminal justice. Both were planning to make the law enforcement rounds, taking the state trooper exams for several nearby states. Julie, a young woman with a gentle voice, clad in pink scrubs and electric-green clogs, planned to work in pediatric oncology. I told her I thought that sounded like depressing work. (Perched on the edge of my desk, I found myself sliding right into college professor mode, holding forth with instant opinions about everything.) She said that yes, it could be sad, but there was lots of opportunity there, and really, wasn’t all nursing quite sad when it wasn’t very happy? Julie had a considered philosophy and put me in my place rather nicely. Several teacher’s aides were studying to be teachers. One middle-aged woman had a strong Spanish accent; she revealed that this was her first college class, and admitted, with abject deference, that she was very, very nervous. She did look terrified. “We’ll try to see that it’s not your last,” I said, trying to sound warm and vaguely self-deprecating. The class applauded her. “You’ll do fine,” someone said.
At that moment I marveled at just how good one human being could be to another.
There were a few other students hovering around my own age. One woman wore an oxford cloth shirt and a thin summer cardigan; the sleeves of her shirt were rolled halfway up, revealing tattoos on both forearms. Her children were out of the house, she said, and she was now following her dream of a career in public relations. Next to her was a Saturn mechanic in one of his mechanic’s shirts, with his name embroidered in script above the pocket. And there was a hulking building contractor, too big for his desk, who looked like a parent sitting at his kid’s school’s open-house night.
Oh, that innocent, Edenic first class! For at that moment I felt nothing but affection and admiration for the students. Here was a cross section of the citizenry with one thing in common: the desire to better their situations. How great a country were we living in that such dreams of academic salvation could be realized? On that night, the American sense of possibility seemed our greatest national characteristic. The women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the seniors’ rights movement all had simmered and bubbled and come to a full rolling boil over thirty years, and what was once the exception was now the rule: everyone, it seemed, either went to college or went back to college to fulfill their dreams. I took my hat off to them. They’d been working all day; I knew they were tired. I was tired. The classroom, having been used all day by the full-time students, was a demoralizing mess. Candy wrappers littered the aisles. Julie the nurse ate a tuna and bean sprout sandwich; she perched the wrappings daintily atop a garbage can filled to overflowing. On the blackboard ledges sat small dunes of chalk dust that eddied about when the classroom door was opened; by night’s end, I would look as though I had been involved in some sort of toxic cleanup.
“Let’s talk about writing for a moment,” I said.
We talked, or rather I talked at them, for an hour. I had a sense that perhaps no one had ever addressed for them the emotional component of writing.
“I’m a writing teacher, yes, but I’m also a writer,” I told them, and a case could be made that neither thing was exactly true. I didn’t care. “This is not just something I got a degree in. And the first thing to know is that we’re all in writing hell. All of us.”
What I was about to tell them—how writing was so tied to our weaknesses and lunacies and psychoses—was not covered in our English 101 textbook. I’d been thinking about writing for twenty years, and it all burst out of me in a torrent.
“You sit in front of the blank screen and feel like an idiot,” I said, “unable to form a single cogent thought. I sit there and I think to myself: what business have I writing anything, when I can barely remember how to burp? Breathing itself seems a cognitive struggle. At least the computer cursors don’t blink at you anymore. They used to, rhythmically, like the impatient tapping of a foot. Oh, the worry! The anxiety! I’ve been fighting it for years. I remember working on a typewriter, with the bond paper in the roller and my feeling, as I sat there, of rising panic. I’ve got to get something typed or that paper will be hopelessly curled! And then where would we be?”
I told them: the writer must just start, and write terribly until he can, with any luck, get into a groove. This is not how other endeavors work. The barber would go out of business if the first few haircuts of the day were complete butcheries. The surgeon does not leap into the operation knowing how badly it will all go at first.
Writing is difficult for so many reasons, I said.
It doesn’t fit in with our contemporary ethos, in which everything is neat, cleaned, pressed, ordered, and lightly perfumed, with ample backup systems in place. Ours is an age in thrall to perfection. We demand every contingency prepared for, routes planned to the last turn in MapQuest, high definition and great nutrition, stadium seating and mouth-covered sneezes and enormous umbrellas and frequent hand washing, spotless sidewalks, 20/10 vision, a New York City without crime; we demand sobriety, prudence, and good manners. Writing, no matter how disciplined the writer or detailed the outline, is a messy business. No matter how hard the writer works, the writing is never quite complete. The writer is like a kidnap victim: blindfolded, in a sack, in a car trunk, struggling for a glimpse of the light of cogency. Even the most careful and orderly-of-mind writer must fight battles on multiple fronts simultaneously, rendering repairs on the introduction that make paragraph seven entirely redundant, introducing the lightning-brilliant never-before-uttered concept in paragraph two that makes paragraphs three, four, and five seem vaguely sheepish, as though they are pointedly not mentioning this stunningly brilliant idea.
Writing is difficult because, at first blush, most of us have little to say. Even when we think we have an essay in us, even when our passions are inflamed, attempting to order and flesh out our thoughts just makes the reality apparent. The whole thing starts to deflate. Under no circumstances, though, shoul
d the writer stop writing at that point, for what we have to say emerges from the craft of writing—our pieces are in some ways a by-product of the endeavor, the way a toned body emerges from exercise, or a fluted and tapering vase emerges from fingers pressing on a spinning mass of clay.
We will not be writing “the college essay,” I told them, but rather “the college composition. An essay indicates something tried, something essayed. A composition is built, crafted, worked on, composed. It must be level and plumb, like a bookcase or a coffee table, planed and sanded, all of its nail holes puttied. The composition is not merely an end but a thing.”
And now here’s a contradiction, I told them—the first of many. Writing is difficult because of its many contradictions. The full, rounded, resonant meaning of prose emerges as it is worked over, but some of those ideas must be present at the outset. On the old television series The Odd Couple, Felix the photographer thinks he might like to try his hand at writing, and so follows Oscar the sportswriter around, taking notes on what he does. Oscar sits motionless at the typewriter and looks heavenward. Felix asks him what he is doing. “I’m thinking of stuff to write,” Oscar barks with impatience. “Ah!” says Felix, intrigued, and dutifully jots a note to himself: “Think of stuff to write.” Now that is a rather profound summary of the process. The thinking part of writing is often overlooked. I would be very pleased to have that as an epitaph: HE THOUGHT OF STUFF TO WRITE.
I had been looking off into the professorial middle distance, strolling around the room and not making eye contact. Now I looked closely at the class. They were with me. They had felt, in some form or another, what I was talking about. My tattooed woman dug into the flesh of her hands with her thumbnails. Her eyes didn’t leave me. She wore an expression of wonderment. I felt very powerful.