(Scroll down for Part I)

Sometimes we have no choice.

The mathematics are plain. Our full-time professors (those with mid-five figure salaries, health benefits, and long-term job security) are numerous enough and are worked hard enough (five classes per semester) to cover roughly half of the English classes our college offers. The rest are covered, a class or two at a time, by the adjuncts on a course-by-course, semester-by-semester basis. For each class an adjunct takes, he or she receives a shade above fifteen hundred dollars (and, it goes without saying, no benefits of any kind and no promise of rehire the following semester.) After taxes, what this means is that for teaching a class for us—for, in other words, for fighting the traffic to and from work, for preparing and delivering lessons, for grading mountains of essays of (to say no more) varying quality, for meeting students outside class, for answering student complaints that are becoming shriller and more numerous as time goes by—in other words, for all this, an adjunct professor receives the grand total of eighty dollars per week. In sum, and because of rules bound up with our accreditation, filling the thirty-five or forty classes not covered by the full-time faculty means finding enough teachers with a) a Master’s Degree, and b) the willingness to work for such a pittance. Teachers can make more money by teaching as many as three classes per semester (never any more, lest health benefits kick in), but nothing can minimize the fact that—accounting for teaching, office (ha ha) hours and class preparation in all its forms—part-time instructors at our college, all of whom have at least six years of college and graduate school combined, work for the grand total of nine dollars an hour.

Were they to chuck it all and become hotel chambermaids, they would earn (as soon as Speaker Pelosi’s legislation goes through) one dollar and eighty-three cents less pere hour, and not have to deal with twenty year-olds shaking their essays at them, shouting, “What’s this C-plus s***?”

Our adjuncts fit into three categories. There is, first and best of all, doctoral candidates, most of them from a local university’s Creative Writing Program. They are always willing to work for peanuts as a stepping-stone to something bigger, either full-time employment with us or a university job elsewhere. I myself started myself this way, with a phone conversation with the man who held the job I now hold. Our conversation went as follows:

Me: “I’ve heard you were looking for English teachers.”

Him: “Got a Master’s degree?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “You’re hired.”

The comers want to impress, want to do well. Unfortunately—for us, not for them—their ambition makes it harder and harder to hire them, and, once hired, to keep them. Regardless of what you might have heard about lack of funds in higher education, the endowment of the local university’s Creative Writing Program is visibly bursting, with young poetry and fiction studs pulled in from all over the country (often all over the world) and given grants that must look to them like all the money in the world. Or maybe not. My memory is of seventeen years ago, graduate students showing up wanting to get laid, get drunk, and eventually get published down the line. We were all TAs, and sleeping with three or four of one’s attractive students per semester was seen as a perk of the job, much like free coffee in the staff room. Nowadays grad students often arrive in pairs (either married or engaged), drink two glasses of wine apiece at parties, all of them seemingly with a poem in the Paris Review or a story in Granta, often wondering what tier they might shoot for at Bread Loaf. As for sleeping with students . . . in this climate, not so much, even for the singles. This new way of life may be better, and then again may not; in my first creative writing class, with Mary Robison, four of the twelve students ended up publishing the novel they were working on. (Then again, I haven’t published between hard covers at all. So you never know.)

It is hard to do my job when 22 year-old graduate school talent is hard to snare, and—once snared—hard to keep. I can’t blame these kids, who work for peanuts if they work at all, and are always looking over my shoulder for the next offer, the next grant, the full-time job, the tenure-track position, and by God getting it, and if I ever should want to work in a university, one of these days this bright young man’s going to be asking George Bailey for a job . . . if you get my drift.

Comers come, and then they go.

Second, and nearly as good are the moonlighters, either the best local high school instructors who can teach at night, or else retired high school English teachers looking to get out of the house. In some cases I strike gold, and run into a neighborhood legend, someone who taught English to local high school students in the fifties, and then taught those students’ children twenty-five years later. These instructors are mostly reliable; the best teach their classes with the ease of a thirty-eight year-old southpaw who can still paint the corners. I grab onto these when I can, and do not let go.

Problem is, the Comers and Moonlighters only go so far, and there is competition for them from twenty-four other colleges and university’s within an hour’s drive from our campus. Most of them pay better. It is difficult to induce teachers to drive into the ghetto once they have options elsewhere. So:

Every semester, I staff my adjunct. And after all the good teachers I can find have been hired, after after mediocre teacher has been snagged, after the presumptive teachers leaving applications downtown have been cold-called and every lead exhausted, after other chairs at other colleges have been button-holed for their best teachers, around ten or a dozen classes usually remain. This happens semester after semester, year after year, without fail.

When nothing palatable works, it is time to turn to the unpalatable. In desperation, it is time for me to open the final door, turn to the last group, the “Avoid if you Can” pile. It is time to call the teachers who work for such lousy pay because they have to, the ones who come to us because no one else will have them. These are the head cases, the falling-down drunks, the teachers with no ability of how to handle a classroom or relate to students. Semester after semester, I hire the least offensive of these, hold my breath, take my chances. They fill in one class here, another there. They fill the crevices, plug the holes. They are the Human Spackle.

I was idealistic when I took the job as chair, as idealistic as any teacher I have ever hired or seen in the movies. I had been exposed to sloth and narrow-mindedness, to lack of preparation in teachers as far back as I could remember. I had remembered those teachers in elementary school whose lesson plans were blank, and who resorted to having us read from the textbook, one at a time, one paragraph at a time, up and down the rows; I knew a teacher who was ten minutes late for her own second-period class, every day, and yelled at us to compensate for her own tardiness—“Get in a line, get in a line”—so that, rain or shine, in temperatures of a hundred in August or twenty in January, we found ourselves standing outside her door for an extra five minutes until she judged our line sufficiently straight. I had an eight-grade civics teacher who insisted to the point of ridicule—ridicule encouraged from my classmates’, and directed toward me—and beyond all evidence (first mine, then the textbook’s, then the encyclopedia’s, then that of every other middle-school teacher I could enlist) that the FBI was within the Treasury Department and not the Justice Department. I had seen teachers who played hand-held video football (remember that?) day after day while we worked on their dittoes, teachers who conducted class on a relentless series of slide shows, teachers who conducted every Monday morning’s lecture with a lengthy recapitulation of the previous day’s NFL games. There was one teacher in high school who didn’t do anything but sit at his desk, head in hands, nursing (I now think) a hangover while we answered questions from the book. And in college, I had seen teachers show up without notes, read a passage from the textbook, and ask, “What do we think of this? What do we think of this?”, then repeat himself again and again. I suffered through teacher after teacher, extending into graduate school, who did no real lecturing as such, but suspended the first half of the semester on the grounds that we were researching our presentations and gave over the second half of the semester for us to present our presentations. I had seen it all, with indifference curdling into disgust, and I thought (with the same idealism I had seen in Sidney Potier, Jon Voight, Edward James Olmos, Morgan Freeman, and would yet see in Michelle Pfieffer and Hillary Swank), that I would stamp out indifference, mediocrity and sloth in myself. And later, I resolved: as department chair, I would make a difference. I would create a department that was the envy of the two-year college world.

These were my thoughts were before I was forced to hire, and then re-hire, Marjorie Heyward, enormous and sloppy, forever losing student essays, hatefully glaring at the top of her lungs at anyone who asked too many questions about their work, especially if the questioner was, like Marjorie herself, black and female. Marjorie had a habit of detailing her latest complaints to me by phone, over a series of voicemails; one after the other. As my work voice mail would only accommodate two minutes at a time, Susan would give two minutes’ worth of her complaint and find herself cut off. She would then call me back, re-cap her last voice mail, and then plunge into the next portion of her story. Jacqueline Onassis Smith, the perpetual graduate student, was routinely twenty minutes late for class, except on those rare occasions when she was on time, whereupon she would lock her classroom door at thirty seconds past the hour and refuse to allow in students who assumed class would be starting at the usual time. Andrew Stuttaford kept losing his way to campus, then stopped at gas stations and calls me for directions.

And then there was Fred Fallows, who simply walked into my office one day and asked for a job. Fallows was in his sixties, with snowy hair about his ears, a wisp of gray hair about his ears, and a large face crinkled into a perpetual grin. His face was one with his clothes: lived-in. The resume he brought with him mentioned a PhD in English literature at Columbia, and a teaching history of a dozen colleges and universities. I actually apologized when I offered him a job.

“I’m sorry all we have are composition classes scattered all over,” I told him. “Morning, then evening. Nothing in a row. This works out, we’ll move you into literature, give you blocks of classes, one right after the other.”

“This seems fine,” he said. “Comme il faut. C’est l’ state.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I don’t speak French.”

“Let me give the once-over to my current obligations,” he said. “I will call you tomorrow.”

Fallows did indeed call me—at home. At four o’clock the next morning. I turned on my lap. My black domestic shorthair, who had been slumbering on her half of the bed, glared at me, as if to say, “Well, that certainly isn’t one of my friends.”

“Doctor Davidson,” Fallows said. “I am honored to accept the proffered position. I shall be on campus Monday morning, willing to lend my full support to the academic endeavor of your fine institution.”

“Uh, good,” I said, or something like it. I swung my legs off the bed and stared at the letters on the Caller ID: “PAY PHONE.” The next day, I took a second look at his application. The address was a downtown one that seemed eerily familiar. On my way home that afternoon, I swung off the freeway and drove the length of his street until I saw the building that matched his address. It was the downtown YMCA.

Well, I thought. All right, the YMCA. Frank Fallows might put on airs, but a great many teachers had come through our college in worse circumstances. (One, a few years earlier, I discovered had been thrown out of his apartment and was living in his car.) The problem, as I later discovered, was that finding out that someone like Frank Fallows lived at the YMCA foretold some later discovery whose early hints could always be traced back to the discovery that Frank Fallows lived at the YMCA.

The first problem came the third week of class, when a former student of mine, Adam Velasquez, dropped by. Adam had been a solid B student, never a problem, and beyond that bore an uncanny resemblance to Derek Jeter.

“Dude,” he said, “Professor Fallows, man. Where did you find this guy?”

I almost said, the downtown YMCA, but instead asked him to elaborate.

“Half his lectures are in French, or I guess French,” he said. “Someone asks him a question in English, he answers in French. Then in English, he goes on about the ‘damned silly stupid nature’—his words—of the current college student. Doesn’t bother me that much, but, hey. You may hear something about it. Thought you should know.”

I found Fred in the faculty workroom. “Fred,” I asked, “are you delivering your lectures in French?”

“Just parts,” he said. “Just to give my lectures a certain j’ne se qua.”

“Okay,” I said. “Please don’t anymore. Our students have trouble enough with English.”

“I was hoping for more, except for those absurd harlots who sit in back.”

“I’m hoping,’ I said, “you haven’t called them ‘absurd harlots’ to their faces.”

He smiled. “Only a matter of time.”

“Please, no.”

He nodded with something that was either agreement or simple acknowledgement, I didn’t know which. Within a week, three other students had come by, one nearly in tears, to complain that they weren’t learning anything, that Fred Fallows was condescending to the point of insult, and, yes, he was still delivering a generous portion of his lectures in French. After they left, I pulled out the cold-call list provided by the school. All afternoon and into the evening, I dialed about fifty numbers, trying to find someone—anyone—to take over Fallows’ class. No takers. The next day I confronted Fallows again.

“Fred,” I said. “I told you. No lecturing in French.”

“But English is such an inexact language.”

“English, Fred, is what you’re paid to teach. English. In English. Or . . .” I took a deep breath, “Or I’ll get someone else.”

He smiled again, which this time I took to mean his knowledge that there was no one else, or else I already would have replaced him.

Occasionally—and Four O’Clock Freddy was one example—a teacher became so untenable that hiring him or her (or, usually, re-hiring him or her) was simply out of the question. It was like this with Sheila French, who screaming matches with students in the hallways became so violent that security was summoned by the other students. (Every time one of these incidents would happen, Sheila would give me a calm, smiling, reasonable explanation that always placed the blame elsewhere. Sheila was the original Maybe-this-time-wasn’t-your-fault-but-why-is-it-always-you case.) It was also like this with Danny Crockett, the teacher who would give open-mike speeches about my purported racism at a Board of Trustees’ meeting if he didn’t receive a literature class. And Seth Daniels, a fiftyish adjunct who had been trying to break into full-time employment for fifteen years and was trying to discern the secret of his non-success. Unable to decipher a hundred different hints, he concluded it was not his bray of a voice, nor his ways of calling his supervisor (me) “Sonny Boy,” nor the half-dozen students who showed up to complain about how loudly, in front of other students, he would criticize their papers during “conference sessions,” which, by the fourth week of class became the only thing that took place during class. No: Seth was convinced that his failure lay at the edges, in assigning five-page papers instead of four-, in assigning two research assignments instead of one. Seth turned my life into a string of phone calls—I thought I’d put the research project first, is that okay?; I thought I’d let them do a revision, is that okay?; I thought I’d have them keep a portfolio, is that okay?; I thought I’d have an in-class midterm, is that okay?— that came in the office during work hours, calls that clogged up my voice mail, calls that came at eleven at night and, once, roused me from a sound sleep at seven o’clock one Sunday morning: I thought I’d have my last class be a review for the final, is that okay?

And anticipating the very obvious next question, my answer is, I did tell Seth all of the above was up to him: in-class, out of class, essay, short answer, conferences, peer review, group work, points for participation, make-ups—I told him, again and again, “I don’t care! What more, I trust your judgment.”

“Okay, okay,” he would say. “Just trying to be sure. Don’t want to do the wrong thing.”

Ironically, the one Seth’s one endearing quality became his undoing. Without any encouragement from any of us, Seth was a connissuer of free movie preview passes, and became an expert at collecting them and stuffing fifteen or twenty at a time in faculty boxes, and not just those in the English department. Seth, God bless him, did want to belong, and for awhile it became not-so-odd to walk into a multiplex on a Monday or a Tuesday night and see a dozen or so math and history and science teachers, some who were out with one another. (A college teacher appreciates nothing so much as free food and free travel, but free entertainment comes close.) On one of these nights a pass got into the hands of our President, who is not only a pillar of the local Hispanic community but was well-known supporter of the nearby St. Mary’s church, and often invited their choir to perform at our annual Christmas Festival (and yes, in contrast to every institute of higher education in America, Dr. Garces insists it be called our “Christmas Festival”). The movie in question was an inter-generational Irish story (as Irish stories tend to be) about fathers and sons and history and guilt. After the film, as we filed slowly out of the packed theatre by way of the two side aisles, I saw Dr. Garces with her back to me, her ex-State Department agent husband beside her. The two had come to the movies as if to a summer dinner party: she in a lime-colored dress and high heels, he in a blue suit and (I imagined, I was behind him) a tie. The next voice I heard was Seth’s, from across the theatre.

“Dr. Garces!” he boomed from across the theatre, in the other line. Dr. Garces tensed up, and she sought out Seth with the same glare she might reserve for an upstart maid.

“Dr. Garces!” Seth waved, finally catching her glare and—of course—remaining unaffected by it. “Now I understand! The Catholics are much more screwed up than the Jews!”

Dr. Garces gave Seth a curt nod and turned away; her husband took her arm and they made for the exits. Two days later, in an act that would surprise no one, I was summoned to Dean Parnell’s office.

“Were you there?” she asked me without elaboration.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, you know, under the circumstances . . .”

I shook my head. “Way ahead of you.” And Seth Daniels was never staffed again, and never told the reason why, other than my repeated, “We don’t have a class for you.”