May 30: Pencey Prep, Higher Education, 70 Percent, Piece of My Mind

What I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep.  Pencey Prep is this school that's in Agerstown, Pennsylvania.  You probably heard of it.  You've probably seen the ads anyway.  They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence.  Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time.  I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place.  And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says:  "Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men."  Strictly for the birds.  They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school.  And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all.  Maybe two guys.  If that many,  And they probably came to Pencey that way.

Anybody familiar with The Catcher in the Rye knows about Holden's contempt for Pencey Prep and education, in general.  Holden has little patience for the teachers and students at Pencey.  Of course, his attitude has a lot to do with his deteriorating state of mind regarding life, in general.  Holden is depressed.  That's why he's flunking out of Pencey.  That's why he rides the train to New York.  That's why he checks into a hotel instead of going home.  He's at the end of his rope.

I have been a part of higher education for over half my life, as a student and teacher.  I've taught more than a few Holdens during my university career.  Kids who have no interest in learning at all.  And that's alright.  It takes young people a long time to figure life out.  I know it took me a while.

I started out in computer science major as an undergraduate.  Eventually, I started accumulating degrees in English and creative writing.  Today, I have a Master's in fiction writing and an MFA in poetry.  And I have a part-time teaching position at the local university.  That's right.  All of my energy and time has qualified me to be the academic equivalent of a French fry cook a McDonald's.

I'm not complaining.  Much.  I've been very lucky with the university on many levels.  The Department Head is good to me, and I get to teach classes that I love.  Good Books.  Mythology.  Intro to Film.  However, I'm an instructor with a terminal college degree working part-time.  According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "...some 70 percent of college courses offered are now taught by adjuncts--part-timers who are paid a pittance and have no job security."  And, I will add, no health insurance.  That's a huge number.

Now, those professors privileged enough to be tenured or tenure-track would respond, "Well, go out on the job market and get a tenure-track position at a university."  They know full well the chances of doing that are about as likely as capturing a leprechaun and shaking a pot of gold out of him.  And the tenured response to that statement would be, "Well, then go into another profession.  Find another career."  (I'm not kidding.  I heard one of my tenured colleagues say this.  Out loud.  In a department meeting.)

At my university, the contingent and adjunct faculty are now part of the professors' union.  That doesn't mean the full-timers are throwing us welcome parties.  No.  It means we have a little bit of protection, and the full-timers are nervous as cats.  Perhaps they see our inclusion as the first death rattle of the tenure system.  I don't know.  However, they feel threatened.

And maybe they should.  Instead of trying to make the part-timers' situations more secure and equitable, they have enforced a system of academic slave labor.  Maybe they deserve to feel like Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

That's a piece of Saint Marty's mind.

Be it ever so crumble, there's nothing like tenure

April 7: Favorite Job, Ghost Faculty, New Cartoon

On this Second Sunday of Easter, I'm going to write about my favorite place to work.  In fact, when I'm working here, it doesn't even feel like work.  It's not stressful or burdensome.  I like all of my coworkers.  Well, almost all of them.  And I get to do what I love:  talk about writing and books and plays and movies and poetry.

I'm talking about the teaching at the university.  Since I started studying for my Master's in Fiction Writing, I've been teaching college-level English courses.  Composition, literature, creative writing, technical writing, and movies.  That means I've been at it for over twenty years.

Last Wednesday, I met some of my university friends at a local micro-brewery for drinks and dinner.  They were going to a poetry reading afterward.  I sat there, listening to them talk about their careers.  Some of them had new books being published.  Some of them were going to some kind of conference this weekend in one of the Carolinas, I believe.  And some of them were raving about former students who were publishing books and starting doctoral programs.

I am out of this loop.  I don't teach full-time, so my forays into the English Department realm are limited to guerrilla-style pop-ins.  After I'm done teaching, I swing through on my way home to check out my mailbox.  I don't serve on any committees.  I usually can't attend department meetings.  I don't advise any undergraduates.  I'm one of those ghost faculty members.  An adjunct.

I have another job, one that provides me with the health insurance and benefits that the university doesn't.  That job eats up the majority of my time.  Out of bed at 4 a.m.  At the office by 5 a.m.  Work and work.  Teach at the end of the day.  Home by 5:30 or 6 p.m., if I'm lucky.  This other job is necessary.  It's not one of my favorite things.

When I was having a drink with my university friends last Wednesday, one of them started complaining about how many classes he'd been assigned to teach.  Four sections of Mythology for next fall.  A summer class in Spiritual Writing.  "Oh, my God," someone said, "did you ask for overload classes?"  Everyone looked at him with pity.

I sat there thinking, "You're living my dream, buddy.  You're living my dream."

Saint Marty is a little jealous, but he'll get over it.  He has to.  He has to get up for work tomorrow morning at 4 a.m.  He doesn't have time for jealousy.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 17: Miners, The Bowels of the Earth, Good Reads, New Cartoon

"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.

"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth," returned the Spirit.  "But they know me.  See!"

I have used this passage from A Christmas Carol before.  The Ghost of Christmas Present has brought Scrooge to a mining village.  The Spirit's goal is to show Scrooge that even people who live in the most desperate of circumstances celebrate Christmas.  Yes, the Ghost is saying to Scrooge, even these poor schlubs enjoy this holy time.

For my Good Read today I have chosen a book near and dear to my own circumstances.  The book is titled In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, and it is written by a person who simply identifies himself as Professor X.  Professor X is an adjunct English instructor, and he performs the same job I perform at my university.  In his Introduction, he describes his duties:

We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards, our peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, but we are nothing less than academic hit men.  We are paid by the college to perform the dirty work that no one else wants to do, the wrenching, draining, sorrowful business of teaching and failing the unprepared.  We are not characters out of great academic novels such as Pain or Lord Jim.  We have more in common with Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

Adjuncts are the miners of higher education, working in the bowels of universities and colleges.  Professor X doesn't use his real name, doesn't name the academic institutions at which he teaches.  He says he maintains his anonymity to protect his school.  That may be true.  However, being a 17-year veteran of the adjunct wars, I also know that Professor X is protecting himself.  As "contract" teachers, adjuncts are hired semester-by-semester, depending upon enrollment.  We are hit men.  The analogy in the passage above is fairly accurate.  We teach classes that the full-time professors cannot or do not want to teach.  We adjuncts are always one disagreement with a department head away from unemployment.

Professor X captures the plight of this underclass of higher education fairly well.  Most adjuncts begin teaching as a way to supplement their incomes.  A bad mortgage or high credit card debt or sudden job loss forces a person with an advanced degree to join the ranks of these teachers at the bottom of the educational mineshaft.  If I remember correctly, Professor X's situation involves the purchase of an expensive new home.

Don't get me wrong.  Professor X also writes about the rewards of the adjunct business, which are abundant.  There's always the hope of improving students' lives.  That's one of the reason why I have been an adjunct for close to 20 years.  I believe I can make a difference in the world, every year, every semester, every class, every student.  That is the ultimate goal of my teaching career.  Professor X captures this hope pretty well in his final paragraph, where he describes meeting with his students in the basement of the ivory tower:

We are, all of us there gathered, trembling with fright, short of breath, sick at heart, but perhaps hopeful.  That our senses are so alive is thrilling.  The whiteboard markers give off a vaguely medicinal smell.  The edges of posters from semesters past curl away from the wall.  Motes of dust bob in the light from the overhead projector.  The old heating unit comes on with a shudder.  There seems a meaning in all this mundanity that lies just beyond our grasp.  Every new assignment, at least, starts us all thinking.

 Saint Marty is ever hopeful, ever thinking.

Confessions of Saint Marty





May 9: Being an Adjunct, Saint Pachomius, Instructor Bridesmaid

I'm currently reading a really interesting book about teaching as an adjunct professor in higher education.  In the Basement of the Ivory Tower was written by Professor X.  The man doesn't want to identify himself.  He fears embarrassing his students and the institutions at which he teaches.  But Professor X is exposing the underbelly of colleges and universities.  Discussing full-time, tenure-track professors, he writes, "[a]ccording to a report by the American Federation of Teachers, only 27.9 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."  That means that I'm a member of the majority teacher class (72.1 percent) in institutions of higher learning.  That doesn't give adjuncts any more respect, however.  In fact, the Modern Language Association judges the quality of a school by this gauge:  "the fewer the adjuncts on the job, the better."

Buy this book!  Hug your adjunct!

I really shouldn't read this book.  I find it both enlightening and depressing at the same time.  I've known for some time that I'm basically on the lowest rung of the academic ladder.  For the last few years, the adjuncts at my institution have been trying to unionize.  The full-time professors have voted to accept us into their union by a very slim margin.  However, the e-mail debate preceding the vote was heated, nasty, and incredibly self-centered.  I understand where the full-timers are coming from.  They're an endangered species, and they're trying to protect their turf.  I would probably be doing the same thing, if I were in their privileged position.  I am not, however.

One of the things I have learned from Professor X's book is that I probably don't stand a chance of ever being hired full-time by my university.  Because I am basically gum on the soles of professorial shoes, scraping that gum off and giving it a full-time job with benefits, private office, and retirement is not very likely.  I have known this fact for a while in the back of my mind.  I mean, as the old saying goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free (or next-to-nothing)?  The only chance I probably have of ever being hired by my department is if I win the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, or the Nobel Prize.  Therefore, I will always be Instructor Bridesmaid, never Professor Bride.

I am not bitter about this fact.  Much.  I think I realized the truth of my situation a long time ago.  I just prefer to live in a state of intellectual denial.

In a lot of ways, my professional situation is a lot like the situation of Pachomius, today's feast saint.  Pachomius was born at the end of the third century in Egypt.  What he did that nobody had done before is "organize hermits into groups and write down a Rule for them."  Pachomius was the founder of Christian monasticism, although the credit is usually given to Saint Anthony (I don't know why).  Even Basil and Benedict, the most famous Christian monastics, based their rules on Pachomius' Rule.  But Pachomius is not a household name.  When you go to kindergartens, there aren't a lot of little Pachomiuses running around.  Basically, Pachomius is an adjunct saint, acknowledged only grudgingly by the full-time, big-name saints.

Professor X is still teaching.  Like most contingent faculty (that's the more politically correct term for adjunct), he needs the money and, also, believes what he does in the classroom actually makes a difference.  Which is also something that sets adjuncts apart from many full-timers.

Professor X, Pachomius, and Saint Marty--adjuncts for life and beyond.

March 15: Saint Louise de Marillac

Frequently when I sit in my office at the university, I find myself staring out the window that my desk faces. At this time of the year, the window's streaked with dirt and sand, and in the afternoon, the heat from the sunlight bears down on me through the glass. The view from the window is not spectacular. It looks out on the faculty parking lot on the side of the building. Above the lot is a grassy hill that leads up to the street. In the winter, kids sled this hill daily. The slope is free of trees, and the incline is steep enough to make most sledders scream as they sail toward the bottom.

Most of the time when I look out the window, however, all I see are college students walking to or from campus. I've been in this office for a couple of years. As an Adjunct Associate English Professor, I rank pretty low on the faculty pecking order. If a full-time professor needed a place to store his collection of ancient Peruvian belly button lint, I'd probably be given office space in the closest toilet stall tomorrow. I enjoy my current digs a great deal because I am pretty far off the beaten path and only people who are absolutely desperate to see me show up at my door. In fact, I'm convinced that the reason I have been able to retain my office for this long is that I have been forgotten. I prefer the anonymity to unemployment.

This is not to say that I wouldn't jump at the chance to join the ranks of full-time professorship. I would sacrifice my window, my office, and my isolation for the opportunity, but the chances of that happening are about as likely as Stephen King winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Translation: not an icicle's chance in Hades. So, I will enjoy my window seat until my inevitable next move, whenever that may be.

Students do not understand the precarious situation I'm in. That's because most college students still labor under the delusion that degree equals stable, well-paying job. A person with multiple degrees, like myself, therefore, must be indispensable to the entire establishment of higher education. They do not realize that the fry cook at McDonald's probably has a Ph.D. in Comparative Incan Poetry. To most students, I represent a combination of scholar, therapist, surrogate parent, and confessor. Unless, of course, the student is failing, and then I am an asshole, fuckhead, moron, monkey-ball licker.

I don't mind fulfilling any of these roles (except the monkey ball thing). In fact, I feel priveleged when a student opens up about a problem he or she is having. To me, that signifies a degree of trust I try to establish with all of those under my tutelage. I don't teach math where the answers are a easy as solving x + y = 4logz. (It's been years since I've taken trigonometry, so please don't try to test my mathematical prowess.) My point is that English is not a cut-and-dry science or discipline. There is always some degree of subjectivity and interpretation in English courses, and, therefore, students feel slightly more at ease with me, I think. When personal problems arise, I am sometimes the person to whom he or she turns.

A couple of years ago, I had a guy in a composition course I was teaching, and he was very clearly struggling with some issues. Some days, he would come to class, put his head down on his desk, and barely respond when I asked him a question. Other days, I couldn't get him to shut up. He was loud, interrupted my lectures, and made inappropriate comments as other students read their writings aloud. After a couple of weeks, I had come to the conclusion that he was either doing drugs or unmedicated and bipolar.

One day, I got an e-mail from him saying that he had to miss class. He'd been in the hospital all weekend and still wasn't doing well. When he showed up later in the week, he had bandages on his forearms.

That day, I was teaching an essay by Wendell Berry, who is a poet and avid environmentalist/conservationist. As a preface to our class discussion, I had the students write a journal entry on a subject they felt passionate about. I decided to write about my wife. I wrote about the day she ended up in the hospital after cutting herself. (Yes, I had my troubled student in mind.) After I read my journal entry to the class, I spoke about the stigma surrounding mental illness and how even family members can sometimes treat a mentally ill person like a two-headed Guernsey cow. "It's scary," I finished. "I know."

Louise de Marillac would have been all over this situation. Born in 1591, she dedicated most of her life to "corporal and spiritual service of the poor in their homes." Under the tutelage of Vincent de Paul (yes, he of thrift store fame), Louise founded an order of nuns called Daughters of Charity, Servants of the Sick Poor. Unlike me, who prefers isolation and anonymity, Louise sought out people who were suffering and made their lives better. That's why she's the Patroness of Social Workers, and I'm an adjunct instructor in a borrowed office.

After class was over, my student lingered until everyone else had left the room. He approached me and said quietly, "I really liked what you wrote and said."

I looked at him, at the bandages on his arms. "How are you doing?" I said.

He shrugged. He was a big guy who struck me as a person who was more comfortable talking about beer than emotional well-being.

I nodded. "Well, you know you can talk to me if you need help." I hoisted my book bag onto my shoulder. "My office door is always open." If they haven't moved me, I added in my head.

He stared down at his feet. "I hurt myself this weekend."

I didn't say anything, waiting for him to continue.

"That's why I was in the ER," he said.

We started walking out of the room.

"Are you getting help?" I said.

"I'm seeing doctors," he mumbled.

We walked in silence until we were outside.

"They're trying to kick me out of school," he said finally.

We walked a little further, and then I said, "You have to take care of yourself."

He stopped abruptly. "I gotta go," he said. He started walking away from me, saying over his shoulder, "I really liked what you wrote."

I never saw him again, never heard from him again. On my next roster, he had withdrawn from the class.

When I sit in my anonymous office now and stare out my anonymous window at anonymous students, I often think of that kid, walking away from me, alone. I wonder how many of the young men and women I see through me window are nursing unseen wounds, wounds they don't want to admit to or are ashamed of. They trudge up the hill by themselves. I hope they are heading home to someone who cares about them, who loves them. Someone who'll stand at the top of the hill and watch them sled down it, making sure they're safe when they reach the bottom.