Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

As Seen on TV

Toward the end of last semester, I got an email from my department chair.  Well, not exactly from my department chair, whose messages are usually brief, often cryptic missives set from his iPhone. This email was a forward from a disgruntled applicant in the part-time faculty pool at Snowflake College.  Apparently, I was being asked to address his concerns.

The applicant wanted to know why he hadn’t been hired.  Reading the attached c.v., I learned his chief qualification was a master’s degree from a well-known online graduate program which is well known because it advertises on TV.  No classroom experience.  He once attended the state Republican convention as an observer.  He was a veteran who earned a Good Conduct Medal.  And that was about it.

I pondered the gentleman’s situation for a while, then wrote an answer choosing my words carefully so as not to offend.  I told him the academic job market was tight due to falling enrollment, and to seek other avenues to beef up his resume until things got better.  After clicking “Send,” I fretted that maybe I was a little condescending but he wrote me a rather gracious reply a few days later.

The incident got me to thinking.  As I’ve written in earlier posts, I’m not a fan of online education in general.  I look askance at those programs which advertise heavily.  So, I was gratified when Corinthian Colleges shut down a couple of years ago after years of investigation into its shady business practices, and was pleasantly surprised when ITT Tech abruptly ceased operations late last year. 

Our belief in our own shrewdness and common sense notwithstanding, we’re babes in the woods as consumers.  We will believe any claim as long as it’s stated authoritatively enough.  We’re told that studies beyond high school, which for most people means job training tarted up as “education,” is essential to getting ahead.   Public community colleges such as the ones I work for absorb much of the demand.  However, many folks can’t spare the time for in-person schooling due to work or family obligations.  That’s where the “virtual classroom” comes in.

Distance learning is an old idea.  Online classes are the latest manifestation of the correspondence course, which emerged in the late nineteenth century.  For generations, correspondence courses afforded its ambitious students the opportunity to learn everything from shorthand to TV repair to law.  Traditional universities had their own correspondence programs; living in a small rural town growing up it was common for people to take agriculture courses via our land grant university’s highly regarded extension program.  Britain’s Open University is considered a very successful experiment in affording higher ed to those excluded from it in the past.

Enrolling students who in an earlier time would never have considered college is big business.  P. T. Barnum would approve of the business model: Raise unrealistic expectations, take the money, then move on to the next bunch of suckers.  Speaking of P. T. Barnum, his latter-day incarnation faced controversy last fall when the revelation that Trump University had defrauded its students led the news for a couple of hours before the next lurid Trump tale took its place.  TU wasn't an online program, but it welshed on its implied promise that at least some of the proffered seminars would feature The Donald himself.  That particular example is an outlier, but many consumers are being sold a pig in a poke just the same when it comes to their postsecondary schooling options.

I suppose my sour attitude on this topic has been aggravated by the fact that I’m teaching an online course for the first time this semester.  It’s an honor on its face.  It’s a brand-new course, never before offered at Snowflake College, and I was given a free hand in its design and content. 

It’s not anything all that grand in practice.  The subject is the one in my discipline with which I have the least experience.  Except for a couple of hybrid classes which went dreadfully, I’d never taught anything but in-person lecture courses.

I got the job for two reasons.  The first is that my department has never seen me as the ideal public face of Snowflake College, in spite of consistently good student evals.  But they can’t force me out due to seniority and would prefer me to teach online as a consequence.  The second is that the new course is required for the transfer AA degree in the discipline but several of my colleagues already teach specialty courses they’d rather concentrate on instead of piloting a new one.  Since I like paying my bills and having a place to sleep, I accepted the assignment.

Its petty annoyances aside, I prefer the personal touch of an on-the-ground class.  I get to know my students as people instead of as names and email addresses.   My principal contact with the online students is to post brief comments on their discussion threads and written work and to troubleshoot the inevitable glitches with the LMS.  (These are more numerous and more consequential when the class is online than with in-person classes where I use the LMS mainly for posting study notes and grades.)  The absence of feedback in an online class is offputting for me.

Then there’s the odd cliquishness surrounding the distance learning people at Snowflake.  I took a preparatory training—online, of course—last summer.  We were hectored to drop our old-fashioned classroom personae.  We were informed in no uncertain terms that distance learners are different from those taking boring old traditional courses.  They don’t want a “sage on the stage,” we were told, they want a “guide by their side.”  The training was scattershot, but by August I felt ready to tackle the course shell.

Actually, I was ready well before that but the online programs director was out most of the summer due to a personal emergency and so did not create a shell until there were less than two weeks before the mandatory first review.  Add to that the fact I was creating course content from scratch and you can imagine how the first review went.  The evaluators, one a nutrition professor and the other a kinesiology ( ! ) professor, were not at all complimentary of my frantic efforts of the previous fortnight.  Much of it was nitpicking over the wording of certain passages in the syllabus and the absence of something they referred to as “instructor presence.”  Nutrition Proffie was especially scornful, concluding with a damning, “This instructor is not ready for the distance learning program.”  Ouch.

I pled for mercy with the program director who was partly to blame for the situation in the first place and got a re-review a few weeks later.  The course passed and now here I am.   Eight weeks in, and there have been only a couple of minor hiccups.  My fingers are crossed for the second half concluding successfully.

I’ve acquired a few insights concerning online classes based on my newfound experience.  Simply put, they’re a cash cow even for not-for-profit institutions like Snowflake College.  Once the 40-seat course was announced in January, it filled and waitlisted within days.  I was deluged with pleading emails from students desperate to add.  When the dust settled two weeks into the term, I still had 40 students but had experienced a turnover during the add/drop period of close to 20%.  When I read the discussion thread where I asked the students to introduce themselves, I learned nearly a third were not majors in the discipline at all despite the course being specifically intended for transferring majors.  No matter, they paid their fees, right?

Now we’re at the midpoint of the semester, a certain number have abruptly stopped submitting work.  A few more turn in stuff sporadically.  Several never attempted any work at all, which means I’ll have to cut them before the drop deadline so it won’t be my fault for their failing the class.  No matter, Snowflake College will keep their money anyway.

I’ll spend the next couple of months catering to the remaining, disembodied students who have persisted.  (Actually, a couple are students who took a class with me before whom I see around campus.  Even then, it’s hard for me to connect their online presence to our occasional real life interaction.)  I’ve been given my schedule for the next academic year.  I will be teaching the new course again in the spring.

Brick and mortar institutions benefit from e-learning because the ancillary costs are lower.  They still have to pay an instructor, true, but online classes reduce demand for physical facilities such as classrooms and offices, as well as saving on expenses for facilities maintenance, utilities, and campus security.  On the other hand, it creates opportunities for the burgeoning administrative class to advance their interests at the expense of students and the professoriat alike.

Back to the existential questions surrounding online instruction.  I’ll say what I’ve said numerous times on this subject.  For a growing segment of the public, higher education is a dumbed-down commodity hawked by cynical hustlers to take their money in exchange for goods of questionable value.  Even for the comparatively small number of students possessing the self-discipline to complete an online degree, the credential may not get them as far as they hoped.

Even in the much-maligned liberal arts, which do not have any immediately practical application and are thereby presumed to be readily communicable in the online format, distance learning has serious shortcomings.  Discussion threads facilitate peer-to-peer communication, but the asynchronous nature of the discussion hinder the sort of in-depth dialectical analysis of abstract ideas needed to foster critical thinking.  (Not that critical thinking is a skill particularly desired by employers, mind you, but I was always told that this was the lasting value of a liberal arts education.)   Real time classroom discussions are essential to an in depth understanding of the curriculum.

None of this is hinted at in the TV ads for University of Phoenix (the reigning king of nontraditional higher ed), National University (“national” despite U of Phoenix having greater market penetration), Southern New Hampshire University (my favorite—who knew tiny New Hampshire had an identifiable southern region?), and Grand Canyon University (for Christofascists wanting an online experience that won’t challenge them or their superstitions).  There are others as you know, but these are currently the worst offenders. 

I think of the spurned applicant from time to time.  How does a person lacking experience in mainstream academia but possessing the requisite paper qualifications break in let alone survive in a game whose nature he in no way understands?  It’s bad enough when your paper says you’re qualified in a particular field like my own where the economics of the game lead many well-qualified individuals to move on to more lucrative work.  But what if you have a degree in, say, nursing or clinical psychology without much (or any) field experience?  I’ve read of cases like these, where the students couldn’t find work in their chosen vocation and yet were stuck with crippling student loan debt.

Caveat emptor, some might opine.  The casualties of the education bubble are no different than those of the housing and tech bubbles before them.  The distinction is that while the previous market crises involved the relatively affluent and educated who should in fact have done their due diligence, the prey of the higher ed hucksters are more vulnerable and easily manipulated.  I doubt if this factored into their moral calculus, however. 

It’s just business, they’d say.  True, but it’s a shameful one,

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

  

Mondo Cane

As if we needed any more insight into our national character, this item from Reuters provides us with still another clue.

A 7 year old boy returning from a vacation with his terminally ill father suffered an attack from an allergy to dogs soon after boarding a flight with the cut-rate airline Allegiant Air.  As father and son were removed from the plane the other passengers broke into applause.

Give me convenience or give me death, I guess.  And the smirking, unsympathetic remark from the flight attendant who escorted them out that dogs were on every flight just underscores the odd relationship Americans have with their pets that puts them above the welfare of other human beings.

It’s one more sign that we are gradually losing our humanity…

Loops & Boomerangs, Jedi & Trogs: Thoughts of a Freeway Flyer

Inservice training week is over.  Convocation came and went.  And I can breathe somewhat easier now that all my scheduled classes are a go for Spring semester.  Now all there is is the nervous anticipation of what to expect when I return to work on Monday.

The latter part of the semester break found me in a kind of groove.  (A groove for me is like a rut, just not as dismal.)  We’ve had a let-up from the constant snow we experienced since before Thanksgiving, and the sunlight through the windows has been a most welcome sight.   I’ve spent my days cooking soups and stews for sustenance and catching up on my writing. 

The past weeks have had a pleasantly monotonous quality, the house quiet as I sit at my desk tapping away at the keyboard.  When I needed company, I would play “Feel It All Around” by Washed Out on an endless loop.  When that no longer appealed to my ears, I’d play The Beta Band’s “It’s Not Too Beautiful” instead. Or perhaps Eric Reed’s instrumental version of “An Englishman in New York,” interspersed with “Poinciana” by Ahmed Jamal.

I’m going to miss this peaceful interlude.  This week’s trainings included a department meeting, where I was pleased to learn that Snowflake College was going to tackle the problem of declining enrollment by borrowing a page from the for-profit vocational “colleges.”  The counseling staff would plan a student’s curriculum from start to finish with a goal of finishing up within two to four years.  (We are, after all, a two-year college.) 

At first, this was good news.  A plan!  Administrators actually providing leadership!  Why, the president had gone to the length of appointing a task force to tackle the challenge! 

Then came the details.  In order to place students on predictable schedules, the times of day courses are to be offered will be “rationalized.”   In other words, general ed courses will be offered mainly in the morning and early afternoon while major or career training-specific classes will be offered primarily in the late afternoon and evening.  That didn’t faze me, until the other shoe dropped.

Paradoxically, it wasn’t the move toward making students ready for the local workforce that was the bad news.  Rather, it was the plan’s effect on the four-year transfer students which got everyone’s attention.  Permit me to set up the background: My discipline is in the social and behavioral sciences.  The “service course” my department provides for gen ed fulfills the same transfer requirements of the state unis in our region as a similar course in one of the humanities departments.  Students may choose a two-course sequence in the humanities or mix-and-match one course each from both departments.

The cannibalization of enrollment this overlap already causes is a problem for my department.  And for me.  Treetop, my “home” campus, which programs its own schedule, often places my section(s) on the same day and time block as the other department’s sections.  The campus administration is quite open about its preference for the instructor of the competing course, so I get shafted by them pretty regularly.  What I didn’t know before attending the department meeting is this is a reflection of attitudes in Snowflake’s administration as a whole.

Matt, our chair for this academic year, a bespectacled fellow about my own age with a dry sense of humor, explained that our department’s offerings weren’t included in the gen ed course package planned for the initiative.  Almost in passing, he added a colleague had mentioned that an unnamed administrator had suggested that our department, even its gen ed course, were unnecessary and that the humanities folks could do the job we’ve been doing.

Matt’s words were met first with disbelief, than with a clamor to identify the administrator.  Anita, our department’s only other tenured professor, a lady with a strong personality and a well-earned reputation for getting things done, promised she’d get to the bottom of this and raise some Cain in the process.  We part-timers murmured among ourselves as to what the implications would actually be.

We needn’t have asked.  Each of us knew the score.  The existential threat for us adjuncts is now two-fold.   If the rumor is true, we won’t jockey about to get class assignments anymore because the assignments will be nonexistent.

This isn’t what I bargained for ten years ago when I got an out-of-the-blue email from my graduate advisor telling me Snowflake College needed a last minute hire to teach a class.  I’ve covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of the adjunct’s life in this blog.  But it just seems the stakes for survival in this trade have gotten dicier as time goes on.

I have my own private narrative for what I do.  As a “freeway flyer,” a part-timer who divides his time among several campuses and institutions, I’m struck by the variations in students and institutional cultures.  I’ve even come up with a taxonomy not only for my classes but my commutes.  Days where I start from home in Treetop, teach at one campus (or two if the evening brings me back to home campus) are “loops.”  Days where I drive to Verdant Fields Community College, forty miles to the east of home then double back on my tracks to teach at Snowflake’s Quartz City campus, which is fifty miles west of home, are “boomerangs.” 

Boomerangs can be particularly stressful.  Last spring I taught six sections.  Three out of four of my instructional days were boomerangs.  That semester I drove 550 miles per week.

This semester, all my days will be loops.  But that still leaves the question of the kind of students I’ll have.  All my sections are day sections, which means even at VFCC many of them will be traditional four-year transfer students.  Even then, I know the personality of each section will vary.  The section whose students show the best attitude and aptitude will be my “Jedi class.”  (I’m not a Star Wars fan; I just made the label up on the spot one day and the kids were really pleased when I called them that.)  The section I find most trying is my “Trog class.”  (As in “troglodyte.”  I don’t share this appellation with them.)  I’ve had very few semesters where I haven’t had one of each.  

The colleges themselves have their strong and weak points.  Snowflake pays better than VFCC.  On the whole, Snowflake students are better prepared for college work.  Despite its large size, VFCC has a sterling support staff for adjuncts who do their utmost every day to make sure we instructors have what we need.   The administration at VFCC is fairly supportive of teaching staff, whereas at Snowflake, as you may have gathered already, the higher ups tend to be autocratic.  (There are exceptions—the folks at the Quartz City campus are wonderful.)   If only I could combine the best elements of both and eliminate the long drives, I’d be content.

In the meantime, I hope for the best even when this is getting ever more elusive.  Now, if only that flutter in my stomach would just go away…

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar 

Midyear Postmortem

It’s over.  Final grades are in.  Fall semester is complete. 

All told, it was one of my better semesters of late.  (I’ve probably jinxed myself by writing this; now some disgruntled student will crawl from the woodwork to jam me up.)   All but one of my five sections had their fair share of engaged learners.  I’m guessing this is because most of them met in the morning or early afternoon, though my one evening section was okay too. The outlier was my Monday-Wednesday midafternoon section, which had comparatively low enrollment and contained the typical listless lot of “traditional” community college students.

A couple of my classes were pleasant surprises.  When I discovered both contained a large percentage of early-college program high school kids I felt a sense of trepidation if not dread.  My fears were misplaced, though the character of each section differed.  The first was kind of rambunctious since most of them sat together.  Nevertheless, they managed to endear themselves to me as the weeks passed despite my normal curmudgeonly dislike of teenagers.  It was kind of like the college gave me a box of puppies for the semester. The youngsters in the second section were somewhat more restrained but were pleasant company for the most part.

I kept reminding myself to enjoy what I could while it lasted.  I am now facing what may well be a protracted decline in my professional and personal lives.  Next semester I’m teaching a reduced schedule with a strong possibility that at least one section won’t “make” (enrollment). 

There are other factors contributing to my low mood this week.  Just after Thanksgiving an administrative assistant whom I worked with for years passed away suddenly, the second death of a friend and coworker in three months.  A series of snowstorms has brought hope for an end to a multiyear drought where I live, but the cold and the absence of sunlight is wearing on me.  Things continue to break around the house but I don’t feel sufficiently motivated to fix them.  I’m sleeping a lot but don’t feel rested when I’m awake.  I’m still dealing with the myriad minor afflictions that have bothered me for more than a year.  A few weeks ago it turned out that the malaise I was feeling for a spell last July and August may have been the product of a periodontal infection the damage from which required oral surgery to repair.  (Apologies for the TMI.)

There are reasons for me to be cheerful, though.  I’ve landed a summer school assignment for next year.  I’ve had one conference paper accepted for the spring, and a decision is pending on another one for a conference in June.  Best of all, I received an invitation from out of the blue to participate in a colloquium in South Africa this summer.  (Our summer, not theirs.)  It’s a long trip to be sure, and an expensive one, but there is a good chance that it will lead to my first ever peer-reviewed journal article.  Quite the feather in my cap if I pull it off.

Then again, nothing I do seems to impress my bosses.  Teaching awards, better than average student ratings, acing my classroom teaching evaluation, active participation in academic conferences, publishing a journal article, doesn’t matter.  I draw dog sections which can never attract high enough enrollment to avoid cancellation, I’m rebuked for minor complaints from students in the wrong, and the administration brings in additional instructors who are given classes which used to be mine.

I’m not the only one.  During the semester I struck up a friendship with a new adjunct prof who, like me, came to academia in middle age.  Despite rave reviews from colleagues and students alike, she was passed over for a temporary full time position and given a reduced schedule in the spring to boot.   Needless to say when she told me about this she was quietly seething.  There was a silver lining, though.  Her thesis advisor from graduate school invited her to teach at his institution where I’m sure she’ll knock ‘em dead.

It’s nice to have choices.  Another adjunct I’ve long considered a rival confided in me a while back that he was planning to go back to school for his doctorate or to earn a K-12 credential.  Being part-time faculty was too hit-or-miss, he told me.  Yeah, it is that. 

Unfortunately I’m too old to make a go at a new career.  Opportunities for men over forty are limited.  I still have a son in school, so (voluntary) retirement is not an option.  Most importantly, remaining in academia for me is worth fighting for.  It’s the third career I’ve followed in my lifetime and, notwithstanding the barrage of complaints I have posted on this blog over the years, it’s the only one I’ve loved.  And notwithstanding my position on the lowest rung of the professional ladder, I have not received as much respect in the community as I have as a teacher and academic.  It would be very painful to walk away from that.

At least for the next couple of weeks I will be spared the possibility of further bad news since campus will shut down for the holiday break.  (I’ve never been into Christmas very much, but this year I’ve barely noticed its impossible to miss trappings.)  I didn’t plan my usual post-semester vacation in a balmy clime this year, but maybe I’ll treat myself to a few days in Vegas instead.  After all, no place on the planet is farther removed from daily reality.

And who knows?  Maybe I’ll get lucky. 

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

For Whom the Bell Tolls

I’m not sure why I stopped to look.  The bulletin board in the Verdant Fields Community College faculty workroom is in an awkward location next to the door, so it’s easy to miss.  Whatever the reason, one item grabbed my attention.

It was a notice that Chuck Barnes, a longtime adjunct sociology instructor and evening coordinator for the part-time faculty support center, had died last week.  He passed away of a heart attack in his living room recliner, his Golden Retriever dozing at his feet.  He was 74 years old.

I’d had a long standing though casual friendship with Chuck over the years, stopping by the support center after my Thursday evening classes to hang out, drink coffee, and swap stories.  Chuck, a grizzled retired cop, had a lot of them.  He never disappointed.  Our Thursday night talks were one of the highlights of my week.

Returning for classes this fall, I learned that the college had ended the evening coordinator program and that the faculty support center would henceforth close at 7:00.  Chuck, whose department had declined to offer him any classes the previous year after over forty years of teaching, was abruptly and unceremoniously “retired.”

It wasn’t because he was a substandard employee.  Far from it; he had the universal esteem of his colleagues.  It wasn’t that he was a bad teacher; generations of students remember him fondly.  It did not matter.  He no longer fit the administration’s agenda, and so he was gone.  

Discussing Chuck’s passing with Amanda, the support center’s administrative assistant, I learned that he had been depressed over having had lost his position.  Chuck loved the give and take of the classroom, and being deprived of it was hard for him.  Losing his job as coordinator hit him just as badly.  It might have been nice to have someone to lean on, but his wife had died three years ago.  His son and daughter-in-law would check in on him from time to time, but most days his dog was his main company.  He had hobbies.  He was a motorcycle aficionado, but that is hardly sufficient to fill the days.  He was pleased with his new Cadillac, but where would he go?

Finding out about Chuck’s death made me think again of Margaret Mary Vojtko.  Vojtko, the subject of my last post, was the Duquesne adjunct professor who died in dire poverty after having had her teaching schedule cut back.  I know the all rationales for adjunct schedule cutbacks.  Enrollment is down.  We’re dealing with budget cuts.  The state legislature and the Board of Regents want more sections taught by tenured professors, though they won’t vote for any new tenure-track hires.  Yes, I understand.  But it’s funny that we haven’t seen any administration positions cut.  In fact, VFCC is hiring additional administrators.

Chuck’s dying was a premonition of things to come.  It has not been a banner week for The Scholar.  Daniel, my department chair, informed me by email yesterday that after seven years of teaching the maximum allowed three sections of my course each semester that I would be pulled back to two for the spring.  There was a vague promise (if you can call it that) that if enrollment allowed he would offer me a third, but I’m not hanging my hat on it.  Later in the afternoon I got a heads-up, again by email, from my department chair at Snowflake College that my spring schedule may be further cut there as well.

Living where I do I don’t have a lot of teaching employment options.  It’s Snowflake and VFCC or I’m on the breadline.  Like Chuck, teaching for me is the finest, noblest thing I have ever done.  Like Chuck, I am better than good at it.  Like Chuck, I’m facing career oblivion through no fault of my own.  I’ve been planning for an early retirement for a long time, but that assumes I’ll have a job in the meantime.  For the first time since I began my career I am genuinely worried for my future, not just in the classroom but for my life itself.  I think Chuck passed away because he had lost his purpose in this world.   For me this would be the worst possible thing I could ever face.

  

Amanda informed me that there would be memorial service for Chuck next month.  The police department will provide an honor guard.  I’m sure the service will be well-attended by the many people whose lives he touched.

I wonder if any of VFCC’s administrators will be there.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Margaret Mary Vojtko (1930-2013)

Margaret Mary Vojtko passed away two years ago today.

An adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University, Vojtko became a symbol for the abuses and indignities, great and small, experienced by part-time faculty. 

Vojtko was 83 years old, sick with cancer, and impoverished when she died.  Duquesne had reduced her course load to a single class per semester after twenty-five years of service before dismissing her outright.  She had been caught sleeping in her office because she couldn’t afford to heat her home due to the costs of her cancer treatment.  She was fired and escorted off campus by the police.  No severance pay, no retirement benefits.  A clean break, at least for Duquesne.

It wasn’t cancer that killed Vojtko, at least not directly.  A heart attack felled her on an August morning after she had received a letter from Adult Protective Services.  APS had received an anonymous tip which said Vojtko could not adequately care for herself.  If she didn’t attend a mandatory meeting with a social worker her case would be referred to a judge.  She was found prostrate on her front lawn.  She died in hospital two weeks later.

Obscure in life, Margaret Mary Vojtko became a cause célèbre after her death.  Daniel Kovalic described Vojtko’s plight in an article devoted to Vojtko titled “Death of an Adjunct.”  The article was widely circulated in academic circles and while there was much outrage expressed nothing has changed.

Adjuncts are a disenfranchised class, with little control over work assignments or working conditions.  It is mind-boggling that a woman who should have retired with a pension and healthcare benefits years earlier was still hustling for class assignments each semester and working nights in a restaurant to make ends meet.  Margaret Mary Vojtko was erudite, fluent in five languages.  The only explanation for her perseverance is a love of craft. 

An obituary noted she had begun a doctoral program in medieval French literature but that she never completed her dissertation.  A PhD is no guarantee of tenure-track employment, but it is a prerequisite even at community colleges where faculty generally don’t engage in research.  Vojtko plugged away semester after semester, year after year until she finally gave out.  She surely never anticipated her fate.

I can see how easily such a thing can happen.  During my first semester of graduate school a decade and a half ago, the professor leading one of my seminars invited us students out for a drink one evening.  The prof and I got into a discussion about careers in academia.  Being new I naively assumed that there was a linear path from graduate school to teaching and research.  The professor, himself a recent product of a prestigious graduate program, laughed cynically when I said as much.  He then told me what happened to most doctoral students.  He said most end up as cheap academic labor whose fellowships are renewed each year for the unstated purpose of ensuring the university has instructors for its lower division courses.  These graduate students become bogged down in their programs, make slow or no progress, and they eventually drop out or are dropped by their graduate advisors.  The nonstarters then drift into contingent faculty jobs at universities and community colleges if they stay in academia at all.

Listening to this I nodded and laughed inwardly and told myself I would never be one of those losers.  And yet, that’s pretty much what happened with me.  Four years into a six-year teaching fellowship I lost my funding due to budget cuts.  Although I was progressing well in my program I could not afford to pay my tuition out of pocket, so I abandoned graduate school and with it any hope of a tenure track position.  I enjoyed teaching so I stuck with it despite the pitfalls of being an adjunct.

I wonder if this is really what happened with Margaret Mary Vojtko.  I shudder at the thought of her end befalling anyone else.  It is as if we have come full circle to a postindustrial era of laissez-faire capitalism.  For Vojtko, a staunch supporter of labor unions whose father organized steelworkers in the 1930s, it had become a matter of every individual for themselves against the immovable object that is management.  I’ve experienced this myself but not for such desperate stakes. 

The shame of it all is that the regrets came only after the circumstances of Vojtko’s death became widely known.  I cannot see that any of the lessons of her case have been applied by higher education’s institutional leaders.  Perhaps they are counting on the public’s short memory.  They know they can.

They can, that is, until the next Mary Margaret Vojtko happens.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Vicious Circle

I had an epiphany today.  It occurred to me that as an adjunct professor I actually have something in common with corporate CEOs: Employment and pay aren’t necessarily tied to job performance.

The first week of classes went very well.  Three sections full and about half a dozen students seeking to add each of the other two.  I met with my last section of the week yesterday afternoon and went to my office to catch up on administrative work.  Opening my email I saw that the top message was from Matt, my department chair at Snowflake College.  The subject was simply titled “spring” [sic].

The message wasn’t what I expected to read.

From: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 1:50 PM
To: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Subject: spring

Hello,

I hope that all is going well.  I am working on the schedule for next semester and was wondering which Quartz City section you prefer - day or night.

Things had been going well—until now.  As happens so often when I get messages from administrators and chairs my heart leaped into my throat. 

Here’s a little background so you will understand my problem.  I teach at two institutions on three different campuses.  Snowflake is a multi-campus institution covering a large geographical area.  I live more than eighty miles from the main campus where Matt and the other profs in my department work.  For the last several years I have been the sole instructor in my subject at my “home” campus in Treetop, a resort town in the mountains, and at the Quartz City campus in the foothills roughly sixty miles away.

Although I am the least senior part-timer in my department, even after nearly a decade of employment, no one based at the main campus is willing to make the long drive into the hills to take sections at Quartz City and Treetop thus giving me a de facto monopoly.

Or so I thought.

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:01 PM
To: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

Hello Matt...Is there someone else teaching at Quartz City next semester?

The answer came a few minutes later:

From: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:05 PM
To: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

We are in the process of looking at adding some part time faculty and Quartz City would be an option.  In the past we have had two folks up the hill, which gives us some safety should we lose and instructor and it gives students so [sic] diversity.

I was puzzled and slightly disturbed by that last comment.  I told myself that he meant giving students a choice of instructor rather than being stuck with just me but it didn’t help.

I pondered my options, staring at the computer screen momentarily paralyzed with anxiety.  I remembered a remark the Quartz City campus executive dean (not to be confused with the Executive Dean from Hell at the Treetop campus) made last week during a faculty in-service meeting.  She said that the demographics of the Quartz City area were changing and that Quartz City was transitioning from a predominantly evening campus to a day campus. 

I replied:

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:27 PM
To: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

I understand the reasoning, though I clearly would prefer both QC sections.  Treetop has me tentatively scheduled for TR 4:00-5:20, which means it probably won't make enrollment.

If I have to make a choice the TR 12:30-1:50 section would be the best fit.

The next volley landed in my inbox shortly thereafter:

From: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:50 PM
To: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

Hi,

Interesting.  Patty sent a rollover indicating that it was taught 2:30-3:50 last Spring.  I imagine that they will cling to that section (regardless of the time) to the bitter end in Spring - they do not want to lose course offerings entirely.

We will list the night course as staff and see what develops; we might need you to take it on in the end.  It all depends.  But I hope to clear up the uncertainty as soon as possible.

Best wishes

Yep, clearing up the uncertainty would be pretty frickin’ great.  Going over the message a second time I found myself wondering about Matt’s odd practice of omitting his correspondent’s name from the salutation and his own from the closing.  I was also confused by the lack of precision.  Was “it” a section at Quartz City or Treetop?  “It” didn’t match the schedule I’d been on at either campus any time lately.  The Executive Dean from Hell’s administrative assistant at Treetop is named Patti, so maybe that’s the campus he meant.

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 3:01 PM
To: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

Hi Matt,

Last spring I taught a Monday evening section at Treetop.  Believe it or not, that class filled and ran a wait list.  This semester, nothing.   I don't know if it's scheduling or just the fickle nature of student demand on a small campus.

If you are referring to QC, all the TR afternoon sections I've taught there from Fall 2012 forward have met at 12:30.

I'll try to keep my dance card open Weds. evenings just in case.

Thanks,

Unassuming Scholar

I sat slumped in my desk chair, utterly deflated.  It’s been a day and I still feel this way. 

I honestly don’t understand why the department chair wants to scale back my workload.  For all the heartburn I’ve had with Treetop’s EDFH, my department has been great to work with.  Unlike Verdant Fields, my other institution, adjuncts participate in scheduled department meetings and our input is solicited on student learning outcomes for each course we offer, whether our institutional objectives are being met, best teaching practices, etc.  It’s all very collegial and an exception to the norm for part-timers elsewhere.  Until yesterday I honestly (and I guess naively) believed I was a valued member of the team.

It can’t be my performance.  It just can’t.  My last classroom evaluation was a year ago and it went swimmingly.  Matt solicited the students’ input while I was out of the room, which was provided along with the very positive write up of the visit.  Not a single negative comment from the class.  I even got an “attaboy” note from our associate dean.

That’s why the decision hurts so much.  I know I complain a lot in these pages about lazy, entitled students and self-interested administrators but I thoroughly enjoy the act of teaching.  Sure, I have my off days like anyone.  But when I’m in the “zone,” when the students are engaged by what I’m saying and every single one of them is hanging on my every word, it’s the best feeling in the world.  It is the closest experience I have to love in my life and it is painful to me when any of it is taken away.

Now I’m on tenterhooks awaiting my fate.  Treetop will continue to toy with me, and Snowflake’s part-time seniority system is the only thing keeping me on staff.  Not that EDFT wouldn’t jump at the chance to show me the door.  The funny thing is that she doesn’t know me well even though she’s been in her position for nearly seven years.  I got on great with her predecessor, but EDFH and I have never even had a proper conversation.   The only conclusion I’ve come to is she formed an immediate and irrational dislike of me at first sight.  One factor in her dislike is that I think my appearance and manner clash with her idiosyncratic vision for the campus.  The executive deanship at Treetop campus is a platform for EDFH’s vanity and she wants nothing or no one to contradict her viewpoint.  Unless I can outlast her, which I doubt, I’m basically screwed.

I still haven’t heard about spring term from Daniel, my department chair at Verdant Fields Community College which is located in a neighboring state 35 miles from Treetop.  The pay at VFCC is uniformly lousy with no seniority or benefits.  But Daniel has consistently assigned me the maximum allowable three sections per semester for years.  (Another plus of VFCC is that the support staff in every single office and department I’ve encountered have been without fail friendly and helpful toward part-timers.)  But Daniel warned me over the summer that he might not be able to offer me three sections for spring.  Our former academic dean is from our department and he returned to the classroom this year, reducing the number of sections available for part-time faculty.  That reasoning I can understand even though I still wish to have three sections.  Besides, the ex-dean is an established authority in his field…and he is a great guy to boot.

Meanwhile I’m trying to calm my nerves.  I worked with a much smaller teaching load for years and still got by financially.  My oldest son is an adult now and I’m not paying support, which eases some of my money problems.  I’ve built up my savings the last two years.  I tell myself it could be worse.

And that is the problem, particularly at Snowflake.  A smaller load slows my accrual of further seniority and salary step increases.  Snowflake faculty participate in our state’s public school teacher retirement fund which requires the equivalent of five years’ full-time employment to vest.  Fewer classes mean I have to work more years to be eligible for retirement.  (By contrast VFCC is in a Right-to-Work state.  It’s “retirement” system consists of mandatory contributions to a 457 fund.)

I do not know how much longer I can keep at this.  I have a small pension from my earlier career but the income stream doesn’t cover even my modest lifestyle.  My younger son, to whom I am obliged to pay a monthly allowance while attending college, turns 22 in a little more than five years ending my financial responsibility for my family.  I had hoped to have enough money put together by then to retire from teaching and moving to an expat-friendly country such as Mexico or Belize to live.

That looks much less likely now.  Course load reductions can send a part-timer into a vicious spiral.  As his teaching income shrinks, the adjunct has to look for supplemental income or give up teaching altogether to stay afloat.  The thought of leaving the classroom is hateful to me.   It is an integral part of my identity, and I am too old to begin again at something else.  I don’t want to do anything else.  This is my calling.

If only the people I work for understood this.  Unfortunately for me I am only another wheel in the machine to them.   

I guess that’s what I am.  Expendable.

I think I will crawl into a bottle of bourbon this weekend.  There doesn’t seem to be much else left to do.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar 

True Misery

This post appeared yesterday in The World’s Greatest Blog. 

An adjunct professor identifying herself as Neala Healy laments her situation.  It’s not the most pleasant reading, but it resonated with me in a way few other commentaries on our profession have in a very long time.

It’s good to know, even in some small way, even from a complete stranger, that I am not alone.

Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella

Take-out chain Pret à Manger’s workplace social engineering program is back in the news.

An article in the London Review of Books describes in detail how Pret enforces customer-friendly behavior on the part of its employees through in-store micromanagement and occasional visits by mystery shoppers.  The overarching idea is to inculcate an attitude in service workers at odds with their subjective state. 

Of course, all jobs require us to present a calculated, inauthentic persona to the people we meet; sociologist Erving Goffman pointed this up in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Even the most technically skilled positions entail a certain degree of playacting when dealing with others. 

However, service sector work conditions in recent years reflect the worst aspects of neoliberal capitalism.  The widening wealth gap seems to be heralding the advent of a new Gilded Age in which society consists of a small plutocratic class and a somewhat larger set of the merely rich on the one hand, and a large, financially insecure mass of servile contingent workers on the other.  Between these two poles is an ever-shrinking demographic customarily referred to in American cant as the “middle class.”[1]  Under such conditions obsequiousness has become a survival strategy for the masses lest they be made to suffer further.

What does all this mean for me, then, as a customer who swings by Pret on a business-day afternoon to grab a quick to-go lunch?  Do I want prompt, efficient service?  Of course.  Do I wish to be treated rudely or indifferently?  Certainly not.    But neither do I want insincere, overweening friendliness, particularly when I know that failure to display such behavior might lead to a loss of livelihood. 

That there is a happy medium to be achieved is beside the point.  The capitalist class must keep workers firmly in place.  And the surest means of doing so is to systematically deny each of them their very humanity.  Corporations like Pret à Manger are refining this process to near-science.  Whether we choose to believe so or not, we are all the poorer for the practice.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] That most of this population segment is made up of salaried and wage workers who themselves teeter on the brink of economic disaster is a truth most of us avoid thinking about.

Getting Away with It

So much for building a (nearly) perfect mousetrap.  Whilst grading a stack of written assignments, I discovered two which were clearly plagiarized.

I’d thought I was being clever with the assignment.  I had become weary of reading atrociously written research papers, so I came up with an alternative: Students were to choose two vocabulary terms from a list of six, define each term, and give a brief example of how the concepts work in real life.  Maximum length: One-and-a-half pages.  Double-spaced.  In 12-point font.

Three of these assignments make up the course writing requirement.  I thought it would preserve a degree of academic rigor for the serious students and prove a doable project for the rest.  The change has worked reasonably well in my classes at Snowflake College, where the students may be snotty, entitled brats but who are nonetheless capable of writing a coherent paper.

It’s been a different story at the school where I moonlight a couple of nights a week.  Verdant Fields Community College is an urban campus in Hickstown, a mid-sized city an hour’s drive from home.  Roughly three-quarters of the students are enrolled, if only nominally, in vocational training programs.  Since the liberal arts course I teach is required for graduation, I have a captive audience.

Verdant Fields' student body is largely made up of folks for whom the American Dream is an ever-elusive mirage.  Too many of them have been unsuccessful in their schooling up to this point, and yet somehow expect community college to be an entirely different experience.  A fair proportion of them suffer from diagnosed learning disabilities.  Many more seem to have undiagnosed learning disabilities.  I suspect a few suffer from some sort of emotional imbalance.

Each semester, I stand in front of a motley assortment of erstwhile high school fuck-ups, heavyset, prematurely aged single moms, inbred trailer park mutts, recovering alcoholics and assorted other species of addict, the occasional paroled felon, and, if the gods are smiling upon me, a handful of aspiring four-year transfer students leavened with the chance “mature” student possessing common sense, intelligence, and life experience.

Effective teaching in such a setting is a challenge for even the most skilled instructor, which I do not claim to be.  I quickly learned that a straight-up lecture class would not work.  The natives got restless pretty quickly.   

And so, I began to employ what the hacks at the teaching and learning center refer to as “active learning” techniques.  What this actually means is that I came up with ways to distract the children so I could teach the real students.   Group work, case studies, and role-playing classroom games have become my survival strategy…and it works!  Not to mention the fact that my student evaluations have improved substantially.  I even got the department’s teaching award last year.  Heck, I’ve had students tell me they chose my class because of my stellar ratings on That Website Which Shall Not Be Named.  (As a matter of principle, I steadfastly refuse to verify this.)

The downside of my new program is that my self-respect has been diminished.  I am fighting to stay afloat in the new educational marketplace where the student customer is king.  Whenever I find myself confronted with dishonest students, I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  It shouldn’t be this way.  It should be the other way around; the students should be anxious.  But I know from bitter past experience that I’m going to be the one in the hot seat.

Inevitably, the cheating students, instead of being ashamed of having plagiarized, will react with indignation.  (Never mind that in each case, nearly the entire content of the paper had been cut and pasted from the internet.  As if I wouldn’t be suspicious after reading grammatical, well-reasoned responses from two morons who can barely write their own names.) 

Next, I will be threatened with being reported to the department chair for having dared single them out.  (Once upon a time, it would have been the professor making the threat along with a promise of certain expulsion for academic dishonesty.) 

In the end, in spite of their bristling and blustering to escape the consequences of their actions, the students will take a failing grade on the assignment.  (And I will have a strained discussion with the chair in which his assurances of support for my actions will be shaded by a strong implication that I am somehow at fault.)

I can’t help but tie this phenomenon, as with so much of what I see around me, to the moral hazard of the neoliberal age.  Higher ed is now part of the larger shell game the powerful play with the powerless.  College has become but a credentialing vehicle.  No matter how humble the vocation, a growing number require some kind of degree or certificate.  In other words, postsecondary training has become a barrier to entry into a workforce where good jobs are harder and harder to find. 

Both instructors and students are thus locked into a scheme which practically encourages shortcuts.  We are pressured to pass students who either can’t benefit from higher education or are unmotivated to work hard in the interest of maintaining enrollment and guaranteeing “student success” (i.e., persistence and graduation) numbers.  They, with some exceptions, mostly try to get the highest grade while doing as little work as possible. 

I reassure myself that the kind of students who plagiarize probably won’t get very far in school or in life.  And it’s true.  Most simply lack the intelligence and work ethic.  For all the extravagant promises made by its public relations flacks that attending Verdant Fields will transform their lives, for all their hopes of being underwater brain surgeons, their lot in life will be to drift aimlessly from low wage job to low wage job, overwhelmed by debt, seeking solace in alcohol, drugs, and transitory relationships, existing in a mental twilight without the least glimmer of insight into themselves or the world that produced them.               

I know I should feel some compassion for my two miscreants, and in an abstract, impersonal way I do.  But next week, those cheating little shits are going to pay.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar