Everything she needed, of course, was redundantly filed away with various office managers, faculty, and 2nd-tier deans. It made me wonder if similar collection efforts in the past had amounted to some kind of bureaucratic scam: file dumps to Potemkin Dropbox accounts in an elaborate pantomime of due diligence[4]. “Yeah, sure,” a sweaty administrator, violently loosening his tie, says to a frowning auditor, “we got all those records around here someplace. Heh, heh.”
Or maybe Joan didn’t want to settle for last semester’s CVs, since we might have won a Pulitzer in the meantime, but even so, she should have been able to book classes for the fall by referring to extant schedule requests. If memory serves, we had to do those again, too. In the end, working at Miller University meant working at Joan University[5], at least for a while.
This was Joan’s first job out of grad school, and it’s possible she was extemporizing her ass off, eschewing institutional tradition and memory because she didn’t know better. Or because she didn’t care. Still, we weren’t, on paper, guaranteed much of anything, which made it basically impossible for her, or anyone, to mistreat us. We could have complained, and sometimes we did, but our complaints were categorically irrelevant.
Around the same time, I got a job teaching at Lexus University[6], which is an MBA program with an expensive college dangling beneath it. I taught at both Miller and Lexus until the Pandemic started, at which point I began managing a neurotic public-school franchise and daycare in my house while my wife typed furiously in a makeshift office upstairs. Once the PANDEMIC WAS OVER, I was offered a few classes at Lexus, but there was a catch. Since I’d been dormant for a few semesters, I had to formally and officially reapply, which meant I had to furnish letters of recommendation and transcripts, notarize some fucking form—I can’t remember what it was now—and take a background check (they were probably scanning for book awards I had inadvertently excluded from my CV) all over again. The background check came up empty; unfortunately, the two-bit, vaporware subcontractor who conducted it was breached, and my personal information was exposed to potentially nefarious actors. The whole process was pointless, time-consuming, insulting, and possibly damaging to my financial future, but, technically, I should be thankful I’m not forced to do this each and every semester that I teach at any college in the US.
~
About 10 years ago, I was wrapping up what I thought was a pretty successful semester at MU. I was lucky enough that spring to have a class full of smart, engaged, and talkative students who gave me the feeling of actually teaching something instead of—and this is not altogether uncommon—merely administering some necessary but irrelevant procedural punishment to listless degree seekers. I was in a good mood. I had been clear in terms of course goals and expectations and had run my classes with purpose and efficiency.
It is not solely at my discretion whether I run a class with purpose and efficiency. I depend on collaborators to endorse and ratify the social contract implied by my syllabus and actions as a teacher. If a clear majority or even a persuasive minority of students adopts the terms and standards I’ve set forth, then the nature of our common enterprise is unambiguous and destined for success. But when the social contract of an expertly crafted syllabus is rejected or simply ignored by the majority, there’s no appealing to reason or common sense. In such cases, students don’t participate in class so much as work around it and then, when forced, litigate, countersue, and lie to avoid accountability of any sort. In such cases, everything is unclear, and even simple concepts require strenuous, detailed explanations, which are summarily ignored. Students who couldn’t be troubled to question a single assumption in any other context suddenly question everything. Write a rhetorical analysis of X becomes “What do you mean by analysis?” When you explain (or, in all likelihood, re-explain) what analysis is, they look at their phones. Later, when you return their essays with doleful but subtly inflated grades, they object and say they didn’t understand what you meant by analysis, or rhetoric, for that matter, so could you inflate their grades a bit more? Your ensuing round of explanations won’t pierce their misunderstanding because they don’t pay attention to, care about, or remember what you say. Their fundamental belief is that everything they didn’t do, learn, or look up was your fault because you should have made everything clear to them even as they avoided clarity with all their might.
In this particular class, I didn’t have many clarity-avoiders, and those I did were cowed by the competence and excellence that surrounded them. All except one. Dimitrious came to the final exam brimming with the twitchy impersonation of wounded pride. You see, Dimitrious had missed so many assignments and classes that he wasn’t even eligible to take the final exam. His goose was already cooked, and he knew as much going in. But! He didn’t like the idea of having a cooked goose. Instead, he wanted to have an uncooked goose with maybe a golden egg or two stuffed up its ass. The golden egg, in this case, was the A+ he was going to get on his final exam, which would rescue his class grade and possibly his college career.
As I passed out bluebooks, I watched him quiver in anticipation of the tantrum he was about to throw. It was all scripted. He was waiting for me to deliver my line so he could deliver his. He was like a Dostoyevsky character, who preferred staging an embarrassing farce of righteous indignation to shuffling away, unremembered. When I got to his desk, I explained, in the voice of a children’s librarian, that he couldn’t take the test because of his many preceding failures, at which point he huffed and spasmed in his best approximation of offense, before fleeing in a disheveled rush. Like a silent movie character unjustly accused of a crime, he had no recourse to speech, only stock, exaggerated gestures of protest.
He found his tongue later when he opened a seething laptop and sputter-typed an unpersuasive account of his virtues and my flaws. All of this was charming enough, but Dimitrious saved the best for last when he signed off, with grandiose sulkiness, “thank you again for a terrible semester.” Never mind that he hadn’t thanked me a first time.
~
Not every semester is terrible in the sense that Dimitrious meant. Many of them are pleasant enough. Most students don’t know that you are segregated from and exploited more thoroughly than another sort of professor, and think of you, if at all, as a qualified and sort of friendly obstacle between them and their dreams.
But there is no dignity in the work. You do not, in the eyes of administration or your tenured second cousins, once removed, gain professional experience and expertise over time so much as fail to advance. The longer you stick around, the more your storied but contingent work life becomes a parody of tenure. You are a depreciating asset, and, thus, you cannot, in good conscience, regard the job as a career[7].
Ultimately, you are just a person who is hired for one semester and one semester only. Whether you win a teaching award or find yourself consistently savaged on student evaluations scarcely matters. Everything—excellence, mediocrity, incompetence—is a red flag eventually, and nothing is yours unless they say so. And so, whether or not someone writes a perfunctory email to your ratty listserv, congratulating you on a job well done—usually a day or two before your break[8] has actually started—the message is always the same: “thank you again,” whoever you are, “for a terrible semester.”
[1] A fake-ass name.
[2] Ibid
[3] I wish.
[4] This was the longstanding suspicion of my erstwhile colleague, Doug. For example, MU collects copies of student term papers every semester, evidently for evaluative purposes, but who knows? In one case, they asked instructors to dump the papers into a literal recycling bin, which seemed like a tacit confession that no further review would be forthcoming.
[5] Joan was, if I’m to capture her in a phrase, a champion of the dagger-toothed “friendly reminder” email. I even considered naming her Friendly Reminder above.
[6] Fake!
[7] To me, it all feels like punishment for something I did in a previous life, an unremembered transgression that will only be explained fully at the end of time.
[8] Or LAYOFF.