Question Authority

In one of my classes this semester, there is a student of approximately my age. We actually have the same rather unusually-spelled name that marks us as being part of a single generation. In class, she has trouble answering the questions and sometimes seems aggressively rude, but on other occasions she genuinely adds to the conversation.

She plagiarized her second paper. Blatantly plagiarized — copied one half from one website and the other half from another. This was after she had given me three successive stories about why she hadn’t turned it in on time. I caught her on the plagiarism and gave her a zero on the paper. Considering the blatant nature of the plagiarism, I would have had every right to report her to the dean had I chosen. I felt I was generous. So I was pretty astounded when I received an email from her admitting she had plagiarized but telling me that she has a lot going on with her four kids and worrying that she wouldn’t pass the class. I did not respond: Well, that’s why you shouldn’t plagiarize was all I could think of to say.

On the next assignment, she came and saw me. She gave me a rough draft. I suggested corrections. On her final draft, she hardly made any of the suggested corrections and did not really fulfill the stated instructions of the assignment. I gave her a 75%. In return, I received a very angry-sounding email about how she felt she was being “punished” for her plagiarism and how she had come in with her rough draft and I had still “punished her” and now she didn’t know if she should continue putting in “so much hard work” into my class  [this was someone who shows up maybe 2/3rds of the time] because she thought she would fail.

I had to go take a walk before I responded because what was running through my head was “She would not dare do this to an older male.” I felt insulted. I felt almost like pulling her aside and talking to her as a woman. Instead, I wrote a very tactful response, which seemed to gratify her. And then she missed two out of three of the next classes.

Seriously, in what universe does she think this is okay?

In the universe I allow her to inhabit.

I’m still getting into the knack of authority. Perhaps as a consequence, I still feel trodden over a good deal of the time.

A few weeks back, I went through an ugly episode with Department Chair. The immediate situation was as follows: in June I was obliged to submit an activity report to the dean. Without telling me anything about the protocol for this submission, he became angry that I did not realize that I needed to submit to him rather than to the dean and then called me “frustrating and uncooperative” and said my behavior “was getting to be a problem.”

A close friend of mine had just lost a job similar to mine; contracts were not yet out; I started hyperventilating.

For a while, I had trouble understanding what I had done that was so “frustrating and uncooperative.” Certainly getting angered at me for not knowing how to submit an activity report or what he wanted on it before he told me seems a bit irrational. I imagine what really triggered this episode was much more complex. First, as I was informed by a female colleague who has also been on the receiving end of such attacks, before Department Chair became Chair there were some perceived negative feelings among certain colleagues, among them Very Friendly Colleague, about Department Chair’s competence. So he now might be annoyed by the way in which Very Friendly Colleague has taken me under his wing. Very Friendly Colleague and I both graduated from much more prestigious schools than Department Chair– and this is made something of a deal of both by Department Chair (“I come from a very different world”) and Very Friendly Colleague (“the market was so bad that this school got people like us”). Very Friendly Colleague had just presented a glowing report of my teaching to the Chair. And I had just successfully negotiated that contract after receiving the offer from Dream City University (throughout that process, Department Chair became increasingly convinced that this was Very Friendly Colleague’s idea and that I shouldn’t have “gone behind his back” in doing this).

I guess Department Chair was just re-establishing the pecking order. Still, it seemed like a rather elaborate show of force on a person’s whose job– and thus income and health insurance– were as incredibly fragile (and as incredibly dependent on his performance review) as mine is. I’m hoping that in acting contrite and in informing him of everything I do I have successfully downplayed whatever threat I may have caused.

But I don’t know if I have the authority to say that.

The Amazing Inflatable A

During my first class, there are two students who come in early every day and talk, for about fifteen minutes before class begins, about grades. I do not feel I am eavesdropping on their conversation, since I very much feel they want me to hear it. The gist of the conversation, repeated monotonously every Tuesday and Thursday, is this:  they have so much to do and they really need to get an A. One of the students, who I have in two of my classes, put it this way today, “I don’t understand this [other] professor… I work hard, I do everything he says to do, and yet I’m not getting an A.”

Sorely tempted as I was to interject, I somehow controlled myself.

Frankly, almost none of my students genuinely deserve an A, if an A means what it theoretically is supposed to signify. Even if it doesn’t mean a genuine “expert” or “excellent” grasp on the material — and, during my entire secondary, post-seconday, undergraduate and graduate years when my transcript was written in narrow pointing beams, I never genuinely believed I had an “excellent grasp” on material — an A should not be granted for just doing what you’re told and showing up on time. Most of my students — including the one who uttered this remark– grapple with the basics of writing let alone analytical reading of texts and the creation of arguments. To me, getting an A on a history paper — let alone in a history class—  should signify you can proficiently demonstrate all of these skills. Yet I am giving As on papers to which I really feel I should give Bs and Bs to C papers and Cs to papers that are objectively catastrophic, but submitted punctually and make some effort to address the prompt. Every time I grade — and this last week of teaching marks the beginning of that one last long unpleasant week of having to give these students these arbitrary letters– I do so with revulsion at the grades I feel compelled to give. And with fear. Because I don’t know how long I am going to be able to with revulsion. Each time I give an undeserved A, an undeserved B, I feel cheapened, degraded, hollowed out. By the end of a batch of papers, I long for a shower.

I’m glad at this point I can still feel the nausea in my throat when I start off with the euphemisms “You raised some good points… it is very insightful when you say…” I’m glad I am not numb– that I do cringe– when I assign a paper a B. I feel though that soon this will go away. I will forget what it was ever like to grade the paper of 20-year-old who can write truly thoughtful sentences like a rational adult (to be fair, I do have a minority who genuinely can. And some for whom that is a goal in reach. But they are far less than half of my students).

A question could be asked… why don’t I give each paper what I think it “really” deserves? And I will truthfully answer, I do not have the time or the investment. With 100 students and my own research to do, I am not going to fail half the class. I tried that last semester. It was unpleasant for everyone and unproductive all around. Even after multiple revisions and office hours where I talked over mistakes, the students could not write. And my evaluations were stinging. This semester I consciously — at first– started inflating each grade I gave. A- became and A, B+ an A- and so on. That is how the creep started. As I grade this batch of admittedly more disastrous than normal papers where I made the mistake of asking survey class students to formulate an actual argument, I feel it has come up even higher.

And this is how grade inflation works. They are taught from earlier on that As are good and important. They go to high schools which, I can only imagine, are so poor that as long as they don’t cause discipline problems and turn in their work punctually they pass with gold stars. Then they get to college and meet a coterie of faculty increasingly like me (or adjunct).  It’s more convenient for me (read: less futile, read: I do not have tenure) to give them closer to what they want. I don’t want to be hated. I’ve seen how morale decreases when I give low grades. It’s so easy for me to think: well, I pick my battles. They are already going to “pay for their A” by it being an A at Employer University. They are not going into this field anyways — and why would they? There are no jobs. Why should I hold them to some sort of excellence in writing? What I give them doesn’t matter. I’d rather class be productive for them — and my evaluations not too scathing so that I don’t ruin my own chances of moving on — than hold so closely to my standards.

And thus I become yet another part of the problem.

The problem is, as has been documented in appalling detail, epidemic on high school and college campuses. I think of it as part of the massive self-esteem delusion that has been foisted — willingly, I will add– on the American public over the past twenty to thirty years or so with such disastrous consequences. Everyone is special and unique. Everyone deserves an A. Everyone deserves a house. Everyone deserves a good job etc. etc. Maybe it’s a human tendency to overestimate how good one is compared to other, but from the people I’ve met elsewhere I’d say it’s certainly a trait honed to perfection in America. I know I myself bought into this mentality — how else can I explain my bitterness about my post-doctoral fate? Still, the idea of expecting an A as my students do — when they just do not seem like A students — strikes me as kind of disgustingly self-delusive. Look at yourselves in the mental mirror, I feel like screaming.

But alas, the mirrors have all become a carnival show.

How to Teach the Sharia in a Catholic University with a Significant Muslim Minority When You Know Do Not Know Arabic

Yesterday, I had a “hot” day in the classroom. Indeed, it was the kind of day that, in my worst nightmare as a graduate student instructor, I feared would arrive: I would present material in a way that was alienating and/or insulting to certain students and I would be publicly unmasked as a “fraud” in front of them.

It happened yesterday. It was really not that bad.

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I wasn’t more concerned about teaching excerpts from various Islamic holy texts the day after a massive bombing where the suspects were still unidentified at a Catholic university where certain students refer to the Crusades as “the holy wars.” In so much as I was anxious, however, I was more anxious about my stumbling on the lecture part of the tenets of Islamic faith; I was not adequately prepared for objections to the actual text itself.

The world history textbook includes short excerpts from the Quran, the Hadith, Sharia and some poems by Rumi. I had assigned my students these sections the night before. As we started talking about them in class, I sensed some reticence. I have three Muslim students in the class; two of them, females, quite visibly so. The excerpts we had read included parts about using aggression against oppression as well as various laws demanding that those who do not pray appropriately “shall be put to death.” I noticed that one of the young Muslim females was becoming increasingly tense; I asked her to explain. She then said that the translation was terrible… that it cut off important parts (which she proceeded to fill in), that it chose one translation for a word or phrase that, in Arabic, was far more fluid (“English is a very static language.”) I had no reason not to believe her, as her comments seemed to make perfect sense. However, I was left, at the front of the class, looking quite unsure of how to proceed with the discussion. I told my students quite frankly that I do not read Arabic, and asked the Muslim woman to help out with explanations of the readings.

The awkwardness that resulted was palpable. Most of the non-Muslim students seemed even more cautious than normal about answering anything, and unsure to whom to turn for guidance. One of their essays prompts is based on a close reading of two of these documents, so I’m sure they will begin wondering about that. I could sense, however, that some of the students– a small minority but there none the less– were upset by how I could not answer what she said appropriately, particularly given my own approach to the Crusades (“channeling the pent-up violence of the Crusades”) the week before.

Then, as we turned away from the readings and back to the history of Islam, one of the Muslim students said that the Shia “do not believe that Muhammad was the messenger.”

Oh yes it was a barrel of laughs yesterday.

When I got home, I received  an apologetic email from the young Muslim woman hoping she hadn’t “come on too strong” but explaining that she feels constantly misrepresented. I told her that she had not at all, and that I would be grateful for her help in finding a better translation since I share with her the desire to give students a fair exposure to Islam.

I think I handled this as gracefully as could be expected, but it does highlight the problem of teaching far out of one’s own area of competence in subjects that can be, if not exactly controversial, than rather fraught. As an atheist, I know that the way I approach religion — Christianity or otherwise– must seem very alien to most of my students. While I do not necessarily feel that this is a bad thing, I do worry that, combined with my often relative ignorance of the areas I am teaching (What right do I have to be teaching the rise of Islam? Should this be responsibly handled in a week?), makes me a particularly irresponsible instructor.

But perhaps the most responsible thing an instructor can do is stand aside some times and allow students to see how they do, on some occasions, know more than the professor.

10 Improvements

We are now over two-thirds the way through this semester, and I can say that it going much better than last semester. I mean this both in terms of my sanity and in terms of how well I think my students are doing. I attribute this to a few key changes I’ve made in each of my four classes:

1. Emphasis on participation in grading: I assigned 5 points per day for participation. 5 out of 5 means active contributions in class. Moreover, they see their participation grade every week. I put checks by names when they talk in class. Participation has increased dramatically.

2. Characters: I assigned all of my students French Revolutionary characters in my French Revolution class. Seriously good idea. Not only does it allow them to feel more personally involved with the narrative (and I will gesture to them by their ‘Revolution names’ in class as I speak), but they also write blog entries about primary sources as that person and give presentations. The students seem to really enjoy listening to the revolutionaries’ odd lives.

3. Online discussion question/blog posts. I post an online question about the texts for the next day and make them respond with a quote and a couple of sentences. Students come in already thinking about the text and having something to say about it. They also often read each other’s work and respond to it in class.

4. In-class practice essay. I gave my French Revolution students several hard essay prompts. Then we spent two classes walking them through how to write one of them together. I told them that if they successfully pulled this off, they’d get a B. If they wanted a higher grade, they could select another prompt. The class went half and half and the essays were generally very well done.

5. Student presentations. I did this as part of the Revolutionary characters. It means I have to talk less and it also means that students get to hear from each other.

6. Creative essay assignments. My first essay in History of Emotions had them use various therapists to diagnosis patients. The essays I got were much more fun to read than they normally were and generally conveyed a good knowledge of the texts as well. 

7. Discussion based around debates or “real life” situations. I had my History 101 students divide into groups about primary sources on the Roman Empire. Some were “pro,” some were “con” and another group was undecided. The undecided group had to ask questions and then vote about whether to join the Empire or not. I did a similar project with “king elections” in Warring States China with 3 groups representing Legalism, Daoism and Confucianism.

8. Response sheets for primary sources. I use response sheets to make sure that my History 101 students actually do the reading and have started working out some of the fundamentals for their next papers.

9. Pre-test as the study guide for midterm and final. In History 101 I gave my students a 50-question fill-in-the-blank pre-test for both the midterm and the final. I did not give them the correct answers, but rather had them fill it out independently as we went through the course. I drew multiple choice questions for the midterm and final exclusively from these pre-tests. 

10. Never lecturing more than 40 minutes. Holy crap, why did I ever lecture longer than that? Such a waste of time.

So You Want To Get a PhD in the Humanities (or Humanistic Social Sciences)?

Once upon a time, not so very long ago (a little over two years ago), I posted the video above to my facebook wall. I would not believe this myself were I not bound by the rules of my profession to work from archival sources. Now, as it is again that time of year when prospective students are visiting campuses to make their selections, I am revisiting again my thoughts on doctoral study. Having been very pro graduate school for years (despite being personally miserable in it and unsure whether I wanted to or could be a professor) and then having been violently against it for about two years (as soon as I came in contact with what my committee refers to as the ‘vagaries of the market’), I’ve now realized that, like any choice this large, there is just no way I could ever advise anyone on what they could or should do about graduate school. On the whole, I think I’d probably come down on the side of saying ‘no,’ but even that is tempered by any number of considerations. My thinking goes somewhat as follows; feel free to argue me out of it:

1. In your mid twenties you do not know who you will be and what you want when you are in your mid thirties. Grad school in the humanities takes at least six years during a formative period of one’s development as a person. If undertaken, it should be entered into once one has been out of school for a certain amount of time (minimum = one year), but early enough that one can still viably commit not only to a protracted period of studenthood (student salary and living standards) but also a career that works slowly over the building up of years. The problem with all this is that while graduate school is based on the long-term suppression of instant gratification in favor of some future person, this person for whom one saves one’s self is so impossibly distant that one doesn’t know what it wants. Did I think when I entered grad school that I would be, at its end, so desirous of having a few pieces of nice furniture and health insurance? Certainly not. And most people want more than such baubles — they want houses and kids and cars and the whole caboodle. Obviously it’s doable to have these things in grad school or in the first few years when you are potentially on a series of unstable post-docs, lectureships, or the like but it’s highly stressful. Furthermore, by the end of grad school, were other doors as immediately open to me as academe, I would have explored them- a half decade thinking on one narrow topic with another half decade yet ahead before the book complements a tendency towards brooding and obsessiveness on my part. While I would like to say “know your stress level and how committed you are to scholarly pursuits before decide if you can handle grad school,” this too seems a moot point since — a) life itself is inherently stressful and b) one’s future self is a hard being to predict. A valid counter-argument could be made that we never know what we will become and the argument I have just made would invalidate any type of career planning, and that furthermore anything aspirational carries this risks. To this, I say, yes, granted, however…

2. The academic job market is beyond terrible. You know this one already; everyone knows this one already. Like the knowledge of death, we all know it’s out there and somehow continue to believe in our own exceptional state. On the other hand, I don’t actually think it’s as unambiguously bleak as people make out. The horrors of the job market are quite field dependent, and there are certainly some people who have an easier time (even within various fields and subfields of the humanities) than others. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to generalize. Nevertheless, while it’s somewhat safe to say that in 10 years from now Chinese history will still be hot, one doesn’t go into a particular subfield of this (and, frankly, one can’t given the skill requirements of most of the “hot” humanities subfields). Within fields, one cannot choose a project based on the idea that in a decade or so it will still find one a job because it seems good at the beginning.  On the other hand, the non-academic job market for just about anything that most humanities people without computer training could do is terrible right now and if one siphons off considerable time that you could spend on publications and a second project trying instead to gain experience in a second field (as I did), you could very well end up screwing yourself over all around. And, on a magical third hand, at least one is doing what one likes in the mean time and not wracking up immense amount of debt in pursuit of a job one might not like AND might not get to have. But still, planning around having an academic job one’s entire life is not necessarily wise except that one must because…

3. Graduate school is not about being an intellectual; it is about training you for a profession. I think one of the main reasons I was sanguine about grad school for so long (despite being miserable) had to do with not grasping this very basic fact. Indeed, In attempting to reconstruct my own logic in deciding to go to graduate school, I largely attribute it to a sense of my own exceptionality (that I needed to do ‘something great’) and to my not feeling ‘fully educated’ by my undergraduate training.  But let us be clear: the goal of every PhD program in the humanities — unless otherwise explicitly stated (and very rarely is this so) is for each and every graduate to become a professor of the discipline. If you do not want to be a professor, you seriously have no business in a humanities PhD program. And I say this as a person who very much did not. This is not to say there are not other things you can do after, but….

4. You can transition outside of academia, but having a PhD will not generally make that any easier for you than it would be for any other bright, hard-working person with a B.A/M.A. People always cite me the somewhat suspect statistic that PhDs have like a 2.5% unemployment rate even in this economy. First thing, this seems to elide all the various types of PhDs there are and the potential careers each one may or may not have outside of academe. Second, it does not tell me exactly what “employment” is here, largely because it cannot. Nevertheless, because PhDs tend to be unusually driven and intelligent people, it stands to reason that they often find jobs. This does not have anything to do with their having earned a PhD or not; it has to do with the characteristics that made them able to do a PhD in the first place. I am sure there are counterexamples here, where a PhD is actually helpful in an alt-ac job. However, even these jobs generally want experience in the field (academic libraries, for example, or academic publishing) and it is much easier even in these fields to get the job without the PhD than, say, to get the job without the experience (let us also not forget that jobs often brought up as alternatives– like teaching in a public high school or working as a librarian– generally require additional training and certification paid for, not infrequently,  often out of pocket). Yet….

5. In sum, I cannot even speak for myself as to whether I should have gone to grad school let alone give advice to anyone else at this point in time. While I can say without a doubt that particular circumstances in which I went to grad school — without any clear sense of direction, because I wanted to continue “my education,” without ANY MONEY WHATSOEVER from the university (!!!), and directly from undergrad—- is basically THE wrong way to go to grad school, I wouldn’t counsel everyone against it. There are some students whom I would, in fairly good conscience, counsel to go for it. They, however, are exceedingly rare, even at graduate alma mater (this has nothing to do, BTW, with ‘intellectual capacity,’ whatever that means). For most others, however, particularly those looking at grad school as a means of doing something meaningful with their lives, I’m just not certain what to say. I do not regret the years I spent in grad school; and I feel something eventually will work out for me in the long-run, whatever that means. I think I likely would regret whatever thing I did with my life if it involved some fork in the road where I could have made a decision and that I would see whatever path I chose darkly. I also feel that I am not ideally suited for this profession — that I do not think well enough for my discipline nor have the kind of passion I should have. Perhaps when I bewail grad school it is a form of saving myself from a kind of critique of my own inability to be the person I wish I could be in this profession. This is possible. Certainly I cannot proscribe a more meaningful or rewarding course of action or a less risk-averse one… certainly not in this economy or for those whose hearts are bent towards the humanities in a certain way.

Smells Like School Spirit

This blog has been quiet as of late because it is spring break. And also because, oddly enough, following my rejection of what came, in total, to a $83,000 offer (*plus health and dental insurance) to live in Dream City, I have become suddenly, dramatically productive and imbued with a sense of purpose in the scheme of things.  Now, I’m sure this reaction will dissipate and my immediate response to making said decision was to drink myself into the worse hangover I’ve had in a half decade and cry in public, so, mixed bag. Nevertheless, I guess there’s something about having your life valued that quantitatively highly– as well as having two entities not reject you– and now having a written contract providing you assurance of employment for three years that makes you think maybe you’re doing something marginally worth doing.

I’m pretty shallow.

Anyways, today, I received an email from the president of Employer University. Tomorrow, formerly best known as the Ideas of March, has been declared “Employer University Spirit Day.” All faculty and staff are “encouraged” to wear our “Employer University Apparel.”

I wonder if the President knows that it is spring break and no one is on campus?

Or perhaps that is precisely why it is School Spirit Day.

Opportunity Costs

Tomorrow — or, rather, later today— I will turn down the chance to teach for a year making nearly double the amount I currently make (while teaching fewer courses) at what I imagine to be my ideal type of school in my ideal city.

I will trade this in for the certainty of employment at Employer University, of the type that I was all but promised when I was hired a few months ago.

This is a decision that could not and will not be made without regret in some direction. I’m uncertain in which direction that regret will flow, and I guess, like all decisions, one cannot ever fully know the true price one has paid in missed opportunities. Still, despite the knowledge of future regret, and the stress of negotiation, part of me feels quite good; I am wanted. Deans are meeting with provosts to make special arrangements for me. The department chair said “Yes, we should see if we can get your title changed… that is a reasonable request.” I told administration at another school to wait.

Obviously, this is all so small in the scheme of things, but I cannot remember the last time I was actively courted by multiple entities. I think it may have been when I applied to college. Heck, I can’t even remember the last time that I was actively non-rejected by two entities simultaneously. It’s like some sort of astronomical event upon which ancient people used  to base calendrical systems.

As you may remember, despite being hired last August with the oral promise that renewal of my lecturership (decent pay, benefits, 4/4) would proceed basically as a formality each year provided I performed, by January I was given reason to doubt the certainty of this renewal due to the financial strain on the university. At this point in time, I was encouraged to apply elsewhere for one-year positions. Last week, I interviewed for a position at a religiously-affiliated university in a city near Undergraduate Alma Mater. On Wednesday, the dean called to make an offer: nearly $75,000, moving assistance, rent assistance.

Now, City in Question is a fabulously expensive city in a fabulously tax-heavy state and even with the stipend for an apartment deposit, rent and taxes would surely eat up a good chunk of that income. In Employer University City, one can live quite decently on half this amount…. for City in Question, such a thing would be impossible. Furthermore, I don’t have any desire, ceteris paribus, to make more money than I currently do. But the idea of that much money being offered to me, the same amount of money as full to someone who was so constantly scrambling for things like health insurance…. it was just hard to imagine. And in a city that I easily place among the most beautiful in the world… where so many of my friends live… nearby my parents. My future colleagues seemed so nice. I would finally move on with my life… out of the city of looming Graduate University, with whom I have never fully severed ties despite myself.

And I began to dream.

There were only two catches to the Dream: the Dream was one year and non-renewable. And the Dream needed a response by Friday.

I almost said yes on the phone. But I did not. Immediately I called my parents, who were overjoyed by the prospect. Then I emailed Very Friendly Colleague who suggested I use this windfall to obtain what the I had originally sought from Employer University: certainty that my position would be continued. He called me later that night and we talked about a half hour. I told him how, in a way, I wanted one more year on the market and then to leave. He encouraged me to try for at least another (I know he is right but oh god the thought!) two or three. He didn’t think administration would be willing to guarantee such a thing when contracts are yearly, but he suggested I talk to Department Chair and the Dean the next day.

Coming as it did a day after Employer University canceled class due to snow, and with the frigid March air still around me, I can’t say that this was the most effective time of year in Employer University City to be leveraging Dream City job. Indeed, when I told Very Friendly Colleague the exact money involved he suddenly started to say, “On the other hand, it sounds like a great opportunity…”But I talked to the Department Chair first thing the next morning. He promised nothing, but said he’d take it to the Dean.

Half way through a student test in my second class, the Department Chair beckoned me outside. The Dean, he said, had approved a multi-year written legally binding agreement. All she needed to do was run it by the Provost.

I nearly said “F***.”

This of course makes no sense. I had only applied to this position because I lacked such security. But a Dream once implanted has trouble being uprooted. Indeed, I spent the next few hours trying to find enough of a quorum of reasonability so that I felt less uneasy in my heart and mind. This quorum I found — my parents assessed the situation and came around, Advisor called me to tell me her angle of the story, while Second and Third Reader told me to fight to change my title to the more glorious Visiting Assistant Professor.

Before I headed off to what would be a rewarding class that evening (my students, bless them, too were apparently in on the Conspiracy Against the Dream), Department Chair came and talked to me. He agreed to take the title issue to the Dean, although he was not optimistic. He then, as he not infrequently does, insinuated that he was really going out of his way for this and that if I did not accept this agreement after the dean, provost and himself had gone through the effort of brokering it he would not be happy at all. He also thought I needed to have more “trust” in the system in general and in him in particular, and that he had assumed my contract would be renewed. This was far from apparent to me, as I learned bit by bit that after my predecessor left the job had nearly been given piecemeal to adjuncts and saved only by extraordinary intervention and that our budget was in surprisingly bad shape this year.  While it  is true that I am often extremely sensitive to any uncertainty whatsoever, I hardly think I was wrong to be somewhat alarmed by the way that my colleagues casually prefaced their remarks about their future careers with references to Employer University’s imminent bankruptcy.

On the bright side Department Chair decided that he didn’t need to evaluate my class that night,”We’ve already committed to you for next year,” he said and closed the door.

When he walked away from this office, I wondered whether I had been wise or foolish, independent or a pawn. In one sense, I was proving instrumental in going one step further to get the department what wanted; a line that could not possible be replaced by adjuncts. On the other hand, this had always been tacitly accepted before. What had I really gotten that I hadn’t been informally promised when I was hired? Had it been worth what I might be potentially giving up? Had I in fact gained any ground at all? Or had I been so consumed by the novel feeling of having a position from which to barter that I had used it to barter away my own turf?

And The Dream, somewhere along the line, slipped back into the murky pool of impossibility.

Tomorrow, I will email the dean at Dream City University with the opening phrase, “Unfortunately…”