November 1: Echolalia, Contingent Faculty, Why I Teach

It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much better off dead.  Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord's ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was not worth learning.  "What did he say?" said Rumfoord.

Lily had to serve as an interpreter.  "He said he was there," she explained.

"He was where?"

"I don't know," said Lily.  "Where were you?" she asked Billy.

"Dresden," said Billy.

"Dresden," Lily told Rumfoord.  

"He's simply echoing things we say," said Rumfoord.

"Oh," said Lily.

"He's got echolalia now."

"Oh."

Rumfoord continues to dismiss Billy, even though Billy is speaking clearly and answering questions correctly.  Rumfoord, again, doesn't want to be proven wrong, about Billy or Dresden.  Therefore, in his mind, Rumfoord turns Billy into a human tape recorder--repeating words and phrases that are said to him.  And Billy becomes non-human again.

I know a thing or two about being dismissed.  Having worked as an adjunct and contingent professor in an English Department at a university for over two decades, I have gotten quite used to being a non-entity.  I'm viewed by a lot of my colleagues as "part-time" and "temporary."  That is a commonly held belief among tenured faculty and department heads.  Of course, the fact that I have been teaching in the English Department now longer than most of the tenured professors sort of negates that assertion.

Another commonly held belief by tenured faculty is that contingents have no investment in the future of the university or the community, as a whole.  My counterargument:  I chose to stay in this area and raise my family.  I choose every semester to teach classes for less than half the salary of a full-time professor because I love being in the classroom and firmly believe in the mission of higher education.  I think that I'm making the world a better place, one student at a time.  That is why I teach.

Even graduate students seem to prescribe to the same attitudes as full-timers when it comes to contingent faculty.  I have encountered grad students who think they are smarter, more talented, and more entitled than contingents.  However, grad students are suffering from echolalia, parroting back the words, ideas, and actions of their tenured teachers.

So, you see, I am sort of like Billy Pilgrim in my position at the university.  And many of my colleagues come off as Rumfoord--dismissive and demeaning.

Tonight, Saint Marty is grateful for his students.

April 29: Outsiderhood, Terrance Hayes, "Derrick Poem (The Lost World)"

Another Terrance Hayes poem to end the day.  This time it's about race and Ella Fitzgerald and dinosaurs and loneliness.

One of the things I appreciate about Hayes is his ability to capture the feeling of being an outsider.  In this poem, the speaker is an African American man dating a white woman.  The speaker feels shame, as if he's somehow betraying his friends and family.

Now, I'm not going to talk about feeling like an outsider.  Nothing in my experience compares to being an African American male in the United States.  Yes, I've been an outsider in my family for my whole life.  I come from a family of plumbers; I teach writing and literature and film at a university.  I work in a medical office, but, on my breaks, I scribble poems in my journal.  At the university, I'm a contingent professor in a department of full-time, tenured faculty.

So, Saint Marty knows a little bit about outsiderhood.  Certainly, not as much as Terrance Hayes does.

Derrick Poem (The Lost World)

by:  Terrance Hayes

I take my $, buy a pair of very bright kicks for the game
at the bottom of the hill on Tuesday w / Tone who averages
19.4 points a game, & told me about this spot, & this salesman
w / gold ringed fingers fitting a $100 dollar NBA Air Avenger
over the white part of me-my sock, my heel & sole,
though I tell him Avengers are too flashy & buy blue & white
Air Flights w / the dough I was suppose to use to pay
the light bill & worse, use the change to buy an Ella
Fitzgerald CD at Jerrys, then take them both in a bag
past salesmen & pedestrians to the C where there is a girl
I'd marry if I was Pablo Neruda & after 3, 4 blocks, I spill out
humming "April in Paris" while a lady w / a 12 inch cigar
calls the driver a facist cuz he won't let her smoke on the bus
& skinny Derrick rolls up in a borrowed Pontiac w / room
for me, my kicks & Ella on his way to see The Lost World
alone & though I think the title could mean something else,
I give him some skin & remember the last time I saw him
I was on the B-ball court after dark w / a white girl
who'd borrowed my shorts & the only other person out
was Derrick throwing a Spalding at the crooked rim
no one usually shoots at while I tried not to look his way
& thought how we used to talk about black women
& desire & how I was betraying him then creeping out
after sundown with a girl in my shorts & white skin
that slept around me the 5 or 6 weeks before she got tired
of late night hoop lessons & hiding out in my crib
there at the top of the hill Derrick drove up still talking,
not about black girls, but dinosaurs which if I was listening
could have been talk about loneliness, but I wasn't,
even when he said, "We should go to the movies sometime,'
& stopped.

April 25: Academic Chasm

The last couple days have been difficult.  I can point to no specific cause for this impression.  Nothing particularly stressful has happened.  In fact, my stress is sort of winding down.  The semester is drawing to a close.  My students are taking their finals this week.  All I have left is grading.  However, there is much internal brouhaha between the faculty of the English Department at the university, and it sort of depresses me.

It all stems from what happened at the beginning of the fall semester.  In late August, contingent faculty members, for the first time in the history of the school, were included in collective bargaining with university administration for the new contract with the professors.  Since the contract was ratified, some members of the full-time tenured faculty have taken issue with the inclusion of contingent professors in departmental committees and meetings.  There has developed a definite "us" versus "them" mentality.

In some ways, it's based on class.  Some tenured professors see contingents as hired teaching hands, so to speak.  In their opinions, we don't really care about the English Department.  We simply care about ourselves and our needs.  Tenured faculty have nobler intentions.  They sacrifice their time and talent for the good of the department and university.  They do community service.  They write books and attend conferences.  They are full-timers.

Yes, it's a ridiculous argument.  I have been teaching for the university longer than a good portion of the tenured faculty.  Heck, I can remember when a good portion of them were hired by the English Department.  For close to 17 years, I have worked proudly alongside these people.  I consider them my colleagues and friends.  I also write and publish.  Every year, I teach poetry to elementary school students as a representative of the English Department.  I participate in food drives and benefit concerts.  I conduct community-based writing workshops.

The kind of disrespect being voiced now by some tenured faculty members is, to say the least, greatly disappointing.  It smacks of the kind of elitism I never thought I'd see at my institution.  Yet, it exists.  And it's ugly.

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to attend a department meeting that will focus on this academic chasm between full-time and contingent faculty.  It promises to be fairly heated.  I'm going because I care about contingents and full-time professors.  I care about the English Department and the university.  And I care about the students.  Am I angry?  Am I offended?  Am I sad?  Guilty on all counts.

It all boils down to the fact that every person (full-time or contingent) is worried.  Change is on the way, and change scares people.  It scares the hell out of me.  But the answer to this fear is not to cannibalize each other.  It's to accept each other.  Respect each other.  And help each other.

That's how Saint Marty sees it.

It's not my fault that people are threatened by me, is it?