Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Unemployed, in Greenland?

12 Unemployed, in Greenland? Four hundred years before the advent of the blog, the great English scholar Robert Burton wrote: “’Tis most true, [many have an incurable urge to write] . . . in this scribbling age. . . . Out of an itching humor that every man hath to show himself, desirous of fame and honor . . . he will write no matter what and scrape together it boots not whence.” My own itching humor has scraped together a lot of words these last years, much of which I published under the pen name Oronte Churm, a combination of two characters’names in a short story by Henry James that’s about who or what is real in society,art,and human feeling.I invented a pen name to begin with because I believed it was necessary to protect my job and my family’s well-being. For a dozen years I taught in the English Department of what I call here Hinterland University, in a town I call Inner Station. It’s a Big Ten flagship campus with enough very polite (mostly white,suburban) kids to form two or three infantry divisions, which most will never have to consider as employment. My wife and I moved to Inner Station because she’s a Hinterland alum and wanted her dream job in the study abroad office there. I’d just finished a later-in-life graduate degree in creative writing and was writing a novel. I asked for a job teaching undergrad rhetoric, creative writing, and literature, and became a lecturer at the university, adjunct faculty: “connected to a larger or more important thing”; “something added to but not essentially unemployed, in greenland? 13 a part of the thing,” as the dictionaries say. I taught more than tenured professors but was paid half, conditions similar to (or slightly better than) those of most contingent faculty in America who,along with grad students, now teach 75 percent of classes on college campuses for low pay, few benefits , and no job security. The human-resources rep told me I needn’t worry about signing up for state retirement.According to her,adjuncts were fired (by the euphemism of “contracts not renewed”) after four years, so the state wouldn’t be required to vest them in their plans. In this and other ways higher education in America has merely followed the larger corporate trend for outsourced and part-time labor.When I was hired,there were already some fifty adjuncts in hu’s Department of English alone, and that number would nearly double. Teaching is,generally,the best job I’ve ever had,and I’ve tried food service, snake handling, soldiering, house painting, bus driving, retail, graphic-arts production, advertising, and other things. I am never bored teaching, which counts for nearly everything with me. Most of us would just like to work at something fulfilling, to be compensated fairly, and to feel we’ll be allowed to continue to do our jobs without unexplained or capricious layoffs. I heard rumors of one rimy adjunct in the department who’d been there fifteen years. I cornered the assistant to the director of rhetoric in a bar and asked him how long I might really expect to keep my job if it turned out we stayed in town for a while. He was an older PhD candidate whom I liked and respected—he was the best teacher I’ve ever seen—and he would become an adjunct himself when his funding ran out. He took a long drag off his smoke and said seriously, “As long as you aren’t caught fucking a student . . . on your desk . . . during class . . . you’ll never lack for work.” But the stocks in Hinterland’s portfolio fell after 9/11, and a state budget crisis prompted the moneyman to whisper again in the provost’s ear: “We must revert to an older model and get rid of all these people. Never mind if they’re buying houses and raising children here; we warned them it wasn’t real work. Put it to them like this: A compromised operating budget requires reduced reliance on adjunct labor by increasing class sizes to enormous lectures and offering fewer courses. . . .” 14 unemployed, in greenland? I’m sorry to say, for our students’ sakes, that my friend in the bar, with his campus teaching awards and long experience, his good humor, wit, and institutional memory, had to...