Wow. I was led to believe that this thing vanished.

Now, where was I?

 

(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.”

 My first serious run-in with an adjunct professor occurred during my second week as department head for English—a time which was technically my training period, the summer of 1995, for an assignment that would begin that fall. After only nine months as a full-time instructor at my community college (and after a quick series of retirements and deaths and one refusal by a teacher who did not care for staffing duties), the dean settled on me. I was barely 30, still in graduate school, still working on my dissertation, still a virgin in the area of departmental politics. Since becoming a teaching assistant eight years earlier, in a college a thousand miles away in upstate New York, my exposure to my supervisors—the chairs and heads, the coordinators and deans above them—had been minimal by design. By my design, anyway. As a teaching assistant, and then as an adjunct teacher at the community college that hired me, the pattern of my semesters was unchanging. Every August and January, I was given my class assignments, my books, and a roster; and for the next four months I would teach my class, grade my papers, and do my best to stay far out of sight of someone who might see me and tell me what I was doing wrong. (Had I made too many copies? Had I been seen taking my coffee to class, a violation of campus policy? Has someone reported about the walk I had granted the week I had left for home?) My grandmother had once given me an Irish tweed walking hat as a Christmas gift; I had adopted this as part of my permanent wardrobe, pulling its low brim down over my eyes, so if someone in authority happened to appear opposite me, and heading toward me, at the end of one of those long, long hallways that are the specialty of English Departments, I wouldn’t be forced to engage in the weird interaction that goes on, the minute or so of both of us pretending we didn’t see one another, looking at bulletin boards and fluorescent lights until we got within normal speaking range and I felt compelled to babble something both meaningless and incoherent: “Yeah . . . hey . . . uh,” a conversation conducted as we walked toward one another and then past one another. The choreography involved in that ritual would make my back sweat—He knew I saw him, he saw I ignored him until the last minute, but what? Should I have shouted at him? Or stared at him for a dreadful minute as we walked toward each other out of normal speaking voice?—and the sense of mortification would remind my of the moment of my youth when my father’s face would twist in annoyance when he looked up from the kitchen sink to be greeted by the sight, the sight, through the window, of a trio of Jehovah’s Witnesses walking up our driveway. The hat was my protection, pulled down far enough to avoid eye contact, but not so far that, staring at the carpet, I could not detect a pair of shoes from at least 15 feet away. No, I wouldn’t bump into things.

My desire to stay out of trouble, to appear agreeable, led me to accept what my colleagues would think of as indignities. I would be offered schedules that required two commutes in one day: a class at seven in the morning, then another a four pm. I taught wherever I was asked, and for comparative peanuts. The community college where I work is composed of dozens of campuses spread into three counties, and in those days it was worse. Our college had shoehorned tiny campuses into strip mall storefronts, rented entire floors in office buildings. Most commonly, high school classrooms were utilized in the evening as soon as the high schoolers had gone home. And, as the new kid on the scheduling block, I was given classes that had me on the freeway as often as I was in the classroom. Mr. Chips meets Willy Loman.

“Okay,” I was told, by the man whose job I would one day occupy. “Go to Antoine High School. Your eight a.m. class in there. Then go up Highway Six-Fifty to the campus off West Barrow. It looks kind off spooky in the middle of all that demolition, but it won’t be so bad in the daytime. Your class there will be at ten—plenty of time. Then, get back on the Six-fifty, head northwest to the tollway, then head south to New Rochelle High School. Your class there is at twelve. So? Hah, you have an hour to get to each class.”

I said yes. Of course I said yes. I wanted the work. I wanted to be thought of as a team player—and most importantly, I wanted the community college to hire me full-time. It is the industry standard that half the sections per semester in a community college will be full-time, those who teach five sections at a time, receive a comfortable mid five-figure salary and health insurance, and those others, who teach one section at a time for a salary that, after taxes, today, amounts to eighty dollars per week per class. This is how it works: part-time employees, per class, a paid thirty percent what full-time workers are paid, and for exactly the same work.

This, of course, is absurdly unfair, but I had neither the time nor the temperament to lead my fellow adjuncts in a revolt: What I wanted was to rise in my profession. If the full-timers had it that much better, I would work full time. A university job, at the time, was completely beyond my reach; grad students a few years ahead, some freshly minted PhD working as lecturers, would return to campus with stories of the competition, of three hundred applicants for every opening, all of whom had published extensively, some of whom had published books. Tenured university professors, I calculated, came to campus between seventy-two and one-hundred days per year, lectured from the same set of notes they had set down while scrambling for tenure, gave their students’ papers and exams to their TAs to grade, and had (as John Gardner once wrote) more free time than anyone besides a full-time hobo. These professors would not relinquish their assignments lightly. (Having come back to my university campus a decade-and-a-half later, I find my predictions borne out: not a single one of my grad school professors has left except for greener pastures or incapacity. The profession is in one large holding pattern, as twenty thousand PhDs wait for Harold Bloom to die so everyone else can move up a notch.)

My best chance, I decided, was to catch on full-time at the community college where I was working. I taught whatever I was asked, subbed when I was called, went to “professional development” (read: complaint session) events in freezing-cold hotel ballrooms on Saturday mornings. In a reversal of my previous behavior, I made sure the dean saw me as much as possible at all this ways.

And I kept applying. Unlike universities, community colleges have people leave all the time, so I applied and applied and applied and finally (perhaps to get rid of me) the college hired me. And, one year into my employment, thanks to a series of flukes, I was pushed to the role of department head of English.

My seminar on staffing lasted about fifteen seconds and been conducted in the office of the woman I was replacing. My predecessor was leaving for a summer sabbatical a few hundred miles down the Gulf of Mexico, and would return to her own promotion. Starting now, I would have discretion on adjunct staffing.

“Okay,” she told me. Two sheets of paper were on her—soon to be my—desk. One was the list of that summer’s classes not covered by full-time professors. The second was a list of adjuncts who had worked at the college as recently as a year earlier.

“Seven is the number,” she told me. “Monitor the class size with the office manager. Once a class goes to seven, call an adjunct, and say the date and time. If the answer is yes, make sure the teacher has the books.” I examined the second list, one consisting of teachers and phone numbers.

What struck me about that list was how the names were ordered: not alphabetically, but by category, “The best,” “Usually all right,” and “Avoid if you can.” I took it all in without a second thought—an impulse for which I would pay.

It is an axiom that community college growth and private-sector economic growth are inversely related. When times are at their best, when jobs and overtime are plentiful, who has time for school? So it was, in the summer of 1995, with the economy humming and a small list of English classes making, that I was able to staff with little difficulty. I found work for everyone on “the best” list who were interested in working that summer, and most of the “Usually all right.” The semester started, and I turned my efforts to other matters.

Midway through the first week of the session, I received a phone call from a woman, a teacher, who was wondering why she had not been contacted. To me, the reason was clear: this woman was on the “Avoid if you can” list, and I had been able to avoid her, and had done so. Trying to explain this was a little tricky, however.

“We were not able to find you a class,” I said. This had been the advice of my predecessor: Whatever reason you have for not staffing a teacher, as far as they know, the reason is always, always, We were not able to find you a class. Never ever say that everyone else you hired is more qualified, or has worked longer, or is a member of minority X. Don’t give them the idea of suing, and never, ever share with them what is probably the real reason, which is that you did not staff them because they’re terrible.

Understand—and I found this out that first summer—when we say a teacher is terrible, we don’t mean it in a sort of “Mr.-Chips-was-a-friend-of-mine-and-you’re-no-Mr.-Chips” sort of way. The first rule of most community colleges—indeed, of most citadels of learning—is that most bad teaching can be, and often is, simply worked around. This is why the better literature teachers find themselves teaching basic composition that should have been drilled in their charges two semesters earlier. Sheer incompetence, if confined to the classroom is—well, while surely not the best of circumstances—something that can be managed and, over time, tolerated. (Why it is tolerated, why it must be tolerated, is a matter for later.) No, “terrible” refers to out-of-this-world, oh-no-he-didn’t sort of behavior, the behavior that inspired open rebellion by the students. If students are complaining to chairs and deans, if factions are clustering at the receptionist outside the President’s office, if administrators have to talk to students and then teachers and then students and teachers together—well, we must then do something about it. If the teacher is an adjunct (with no job security and no right of re-hire semester after semester) and the complaints come in semester after semester (draining our time and energy), the solution is easy: We don’t ask the teacher back. If we don’t hire a teacher back, and a teacher confronts us to ask why, we simply say, “We don’t have a class for you,” over and over to infinity, if need be.

Now, I was new on the job, and so had no notion of what this teacher (call her Mrs. Fillmore) had done to warrant the “Avoid if you can” designation by my predecessor, but Mrs. Fillmore was there, and my predecessor’s judgment was good enough for me. (She had, after all, recommended first my hiring, then my promotion, to the dean.) So again, when Mrs. Fillmore asked me, “Why was I not staffed this summer?”, I would only say, “We . . . didn’t . . . have a class for you.” I said this robotically, somehow thinking that annoying her would drive her away. It had, of course, the opposite effect.

“I demand to speak with you,” she said.

“So speak,” I said, knowing full well what she meant.

“In person,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. We made an appointment for two the following afternoon in my office.

The following morning at eight am, I received a phone call at home from Marguerite, the dean’s new secretary-receptionist. Marguerite was almost as new at her job as I was at mine, but already she had picked up one of the necessary tools of her trade: the ability to transmit, over the phone, strictly by tone of voice and a pattern of stammers, when something was big trouble.

“Umm, uh, there’s a woman her to um see you. She says she has an appointment with you at eight.”

“Nobody has an appointment with me at eight,” I said. My schedule that summer was split between the one class I had to teach and my sixteen hours of office time, which could be fulfilled at any time between eight and five, Monday through Friday. Within those parameters, I had set up a schedule that borrowed heavily from my college years. My office hours were from noon to four, Monday through Thursday, and my class followed early in the evening. After my class in the evenings, I had dinner at a Greek restaurant near downtown, then crossed the street to begin the evening’s drinking with a collection of fellow graduate students who had stayed in town that summer at a bar where the day of the week was matched by the corresponding drink special: bottled beer on Mondays, Scotch on Tuesdays, something else on Wednesdays. Thursdays were martinis. We met up with a group without bothering to make plans; one simply showed up, night after night, knowing at least a half-dozen of a group of a dozen people would be assembled, all in the same booth, often enough in the same seating arrangement as the night before. The bartender was a friend who fed us free drinks (so many, in fact, he found himself fired before Labor Day), we were learning to smoke cigars (the whole cigar-single malt-martini-swing craze would reach its apogee fifteen months later with the release of Swingers), and our evenings swung on (to paraphrase Jay McInerney) one of those invisible fulcrums in which nine o’clock became two o’clock, and so we were all off to breakfast at the Spanish Flower, or else tequila at some fat kid’s creepy apartment.

I slept, that summer, from three-thirty to ten-thirty, awoke slowly, made coffee, and grabbed an early lunch at a pizza parlor in the same mall as my campus. At noon, I would enter my office on the second floor of a hallway—a cubbyhole, a closet next-door to the cosmetology department and hence forever spelling of hair oil—looking slightly worse for wear. Such was my routine that summer, as fixed and immovable as Mr. Stevens’ morning routine in Remains of the Day: four days per week, for all ten weeks of the summer, all but the Fourth of July and one Thursday when I was down with food poisoning. That summer, eight am was the middle of the night for me, and I attempted to convey this through waves of exhaustion and nausea, was what I was trying to convey to Maguerite: not only had I not scheduled an eight am meeting, but it was inconceivable that I had schedule an eight am meeting.

“Well,” Marguerite said, “Mrs. Fillmore was screaming to me just now. Like at the top of her lungs.”

“I don’t hear her.”

“She stepped away,” Maguerite said. “Though I can hear her in the lobby. She’s wondering out loud if anyone knows how incompetent that new moron English chair is. I mean, she’s stopping students and asking them.”

“Well, can you get her? I’ll talk to her now.”

“Thank you,” Marguerite said, and put down the phone. A minute later she was back. “She says she doesn’t want to speak with you.”

“Fine,” I said, and went back to bed.

I walked in at noon as usual, but of course she was gone by then. I called her house, no answer—not until four that afternoon, when she reached me at the office.

“You, sir, did not keep our appointment,” she said.

“Um, we were supposed to meet at two,” I said.

“No sir, no sir,” she said, her voice raised. I thought she might scream. I thought she might cry. “Our meeting was eight o’clock! Eight o’clock this morning!”

Now I thought she was crying. “Look,” I said. “Obviously there was a mix-up.”

“On your part,” she said.

“Look, never mind that . . ..”

“On your part,” she insisted.

“Whichever,” I said, “Can we reschedule? The thing is, I usually don’t come in until twelve. If that’s a problem, I can come in earlier.”

“It’s not a problem,” she said. “You might as well have told someone. But yes, two pm works.”

“Two pm,” I said.

“Two pm,” she said, and I could almost hear the faintest portion of a smile. We hung up on good terms . . .

. . . . Which lasted until the following morning, when Marguerite called to tell me that Mrs. Fillmore was staging a reprise of the previous day, not only accosting individual students, but now receptionists at the front gate. One of the receptionists told me that Mrs. Fillmore had even shouted at a security guard, seemingly attempting to persuade him to go off and find me and then bring me back to the meeting, in handcuffs if necessary.

By now, word of these contretemps had reached my supervisor, the Dean Parnell, a sturdy woman in her sixties who watched the goings-on in the college behind thick, turtle-framed glasses. Dean Parnell had Maguerite call Mrs. Fillmore and then call me. A meeting for all of us was arranged, and for this meeting, Mrs. Fillmore showed up—but in my office, one floor up and the length of the campus (albeit 200 yards) over from Dr. Parnell’s. I discovered her presence when I myself arrived at my office, meaning to drop off my bag, check my voice mail, and fix my face in an expression of concerned bewilderment appropriate for the occasion. I unlocked and opened my office door, and there Mrs. Fillmore was: seated behind my desk and talking on my telephone. To whom she was speaking I never found out and never asked; what she said, as she stared at my blotter and wrote something with my pen on my legal pad, was, “ . . . much chaos in my life.”

This was the first time I had ever seen Mrs. Fillmore, though by her voice I knew her. She was black, and tiny, and in her fifties, with a pale Eisenhower jacket and a hat with a bit of lace. I took one step forward and was thinking of clearing my throat when she noticed me, gave me an ever-hear-of-knocking-glare, and said, into the phone, “Well, here he is. The one I mentioned.” Then she banged the phone down.

“Uh, the meeting’s in Dr. Parnell’s office,” I said, with an air of apology.

“Well, fine.” Snorting with contempt, she arose and walked through the door as I held it open.

The walk from office to Dr. Parnell’s was the matter of a stairway and a hallway, but, walking side-by-side with Mrs. Fillmore felt like one of those dreams where on is drowning and struggling toward the shore that appears to recede. I snuck looks at Mrs. Fillmore, taking more of her in; standing, she was five-foot-even with curly hair and one of those triangular faces whose nose, mouth and chin all came together at the bottom of her face.

Dean Parnell’s conference room was a tiny cubbyhole with barely enough room for us to pull our seats out. I walked to the far distance and took the seat next to Dean Parnell; Mrs. Fillmore took the seat closest the door, opposite us. Dean Parnell began, in the roll and slide of an East Texas accent that pre-dated the Space Program. “I’ve asked Dr. Banya to sit in with us.”

The conference room door opened an in Alissa Banya, a fiftyish, gray, perpetually smiling Chair of ESL—and, simultaneously, the living embodiment of Dean Parnell’s policy of having at least one witness to every contentious meeting. Alyssa walked carefully around Mrs. Fillmore’s chair and sat to my left, leaving Dean Parnell on my right. “Terrific,” Dean Parnell said. “So, Mrs. Fillmore, I’ve heard you’ve got some concern about things—“ concern being the operative word for someone who is pissed off.

I braced myself, waiting for more of Mrs. Fillmore’s usual. Instead, Mrs. Fillmore, as she stared at us seemed to drop two inches in her chair. She looked at Dean Parnell and said, “I thought we would speak alone.”

“Well,” Dean Parnell said, “what is this about?” I looked at my hands in my lap. Was Mrs. Fillmore going to allege something new about me, racial discrimination perhaps? Had she been in my office long enough to find my predecessor’s “Avoid if you can,” reference? Might she have thought I had written the note myself? (And come to think about it, how had she gotten into my office anyway? Bullied a young security guard letting her in, then locked the door behind her?) I was two weeks on the job, and in two weeks my relations with this woman had progressed from Why wasn’t I hired to Where the hell were you? To breaking and entering to what she now repeated to Dean Parnell, “I thought we would talk alone.”

“What does this concern?” Dean Parnell said. “Can you at least tell me this?”

“A student,” Mrs. Fillmore said.

My brain nearly folded double. A student?

“Well, if it concerns a student,” Dean Parnell said, “then let’s hear about it. Let’s all deal with it.”

“Now wait,” Mrs. Fillmore said. “Just wait. I thought I would meet with . . .” and here she chopped her hand, “. . . you first, and then meet with . . .” another chop, “. . . this gentleman later.”

“Well,” Dean Parnell said, “if it concerns a student, let’s hear it so we can deal with it.”

“Look,” Mrs. Fillmore said, and she began to rise out of her seat, “could I see you alone?”

“No,” Dean Parnell said, and motioned for Mrs. Fillmore to re-take her seat.

The conversation would continue in the same vein for the next five minutes: Can we speak alone? No. Can we speak alone? No. But it had ended—I think the four of us, even Mrs. Fillmore, had known it had ended—with Dean Parnell’s first No. Finally Mrs. Fillmore looked at all of us, then brought her palms down with a mighty WHAP.

“I won’t take this anymore!” she screamed. “I won’t take this anymore! I won’t take this anymore! I won’t take this anymore!” And she left, leaving us to wonder about the student, or whether he or she actually existed, or whether her antics had been on purpose to embarrass me.

“Look,” Dean Parnell told me. “You did nothing wrong. Just don’t staff her anymore.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I said. “Tell me, who is she?”

“Oh,” Dean Parnell said. “She’s a principal of a middle school near here.”

Oh.

When my predecessor returned from to assume her new duties, I told her of what happened. She seemed unsurprised.

“Oh,” she said, in here trumpety Southern-gentle-lady’s drawl. “She does things like that all along, yells at students. She would request morning classes and sneak away from her middle school to teach them, until the school district found out. A few semesters ago she gave her students a month off—for an “individual project,” she said. Once she said that she couldn’t make it to class for two weeks, but the class should meet and discuss the materials. Bullied about a half-dozen suckers into doing just that. Things like that get you on the ‘Avoid if you can’ list.”

“Avoid if you can?” I said. “Why hire her at all, ever?”

She shrugged her shoulders, drew out a “Wellllllll,” and then said the sentence that would soon become my own motto. “Sometimes we have no choice.”

There it is on the college schedule, the last class.

The class no one will teach. 

The class that I will teach until a teacher is found.

It is the third week of the semester.

The class I speak of is sixteen miles away from where I work all day.  The lack of a teacher forces me to drop everything at quarter-to-five, get in my car, fight throught rush-hour traffic for sixteen miles, and then teach as best I can.

Because there is no teacher.

I didn't want to schedule this class.  I didn't want to run this class.  But because this class is at Thomas Hall--the famous campus with no students that must have students; the campus where five students make a class and it's always touch and go through the middle of the first week of the semester; the campus we don't think of until students have had enough time to register (sometimes until the start of the third week of class)--this class will survive.

I hear of other colleges, many universities, stripping schedules to the bone and then subjecting their students to the horror of core requirements filling up and shutting these same students out; to students dropped if they are absent the first day.  No, not us, not at Thomas Hall.  Whereas we run pretty much everything we schedule at Brookway Campus, inside Brookway Mall (hence the name of this blog), at Thomas Hall we strain and groan to produce five or six students per class, just so we can say, yes, our millions were justified. 

But: in order got get to five or six students, we have to leave the classes in limbo interminably, neither staffing nor cutting, just hoping.  Our president, Herlinda Garces, has demanded we leave classes open sometimes into the second week, not cutting, not staffing, not teaching, maybe nudging things forward (umm, taking attendance, taking a diagnostic, asking students what classes they've previously taken) while we wait for the magic fifth student.  Or sixth.

Always, in the classroom the questions are too probing.  My answers require translation.

Q:  Does this class even exist?
A: Of course it does!
(Translation: No comment.)

There are 25 colleges and universities within an hour's drive of where I now sit.  To my knowledge, we pay the least of any of them.  We also--as we hold classes open, waiting for the magic fifth student, or the sixth--staff last. 

So: we are left with pursuing the leavings of our competitors, who pay more and hire sooner; we are left offering eighty dollars per week to those with Master's degrees in English who have not been snapped up by insitutions of higher learning who often pay twice as much.

So: I'm left with the last class.

A half-hour commute to an industrial park at rush hour. A class with six students. 

So, after a full day's work,  I get in my car. I fight the parking lot that is the forty-minute commute to our campus-in-the-floodplain.  I teach the class for free.  And I confront the questions.

Q: Does this class even exist?

An email from a composition student--a college student taking academic classes--to a teacher in my department:

hi this is Oran in your 9:30am M/W class sorry that the class and i did do our paper but when you go back and forward with the lady that sit in the front i and the people around me get confused about what is going on in class. do not get me wrong you are doing a grate job if you knew how many people want to get in your class it is not you but is there anyway she can save her question after class write them down are something. it is one thing when i do not get something because i was just going to ask someone around me but i can not because they are lost too and do not no whats going on.like today we have to write two papers because we miss understood you. that's not good. like in class today it look like you where shocked that the work was not done and when i try ed to let you no why she said something like i was saying i did not have my work because of her well i was saying that because you gave the work we just got mixed up in you and her conversation. well anyway i
just had to let you no it was and is not you it is to much going on with the lady in the front i was told to email you from some students in class so i did.

Our college is chaotic.  This, I accept.  What I do not accept is that our college is so chaotic on purpose, from the moment we begin scheduling classes not due to start for eight months. 

Here is how we start, all by the decree of of President, Herlinda Garces.

Every September, every January, every May our college begins the process of scheduling, respectively, the spring, summer and fall semesters. Teachers request classes, department chairs update the rollover, deans remind us deadlines and supervise the results. Scheduling is a craft.  Like staffing and student mediation, one becomes better at scheduling by doing it, by seeing which classes will attract enough students to "make" and which classes will not.  Over and over, semester by semester, experience proves that a freshman compostion class at nine-thirty, Tuesday-Thursday, will fill up, while a literature class at two in the afternoon will attract five students, at most, and will end up cut from the final schedule.The result--as one semester follows another, as we muddle through--is an imperfect, but useful tool.

Do we deviate from the template on occasion?  Of course.  A teacher will want a particular class at a particular time, the class will be scheduled, and on the theory that, "You eat what you kill," the teachers will recruit the students.

The trouble occurs when the first draft of the schedule is distributed around the college, and the counselors and campus directors weigh in.  Our college is comprised of four campuses stretching across twenty miles. Our largest and oldest campus was built in a mall that, beginning in the late eighties, lost both its antique stores and half it boutiques.  When, a dozen years ago, our campus was retro-fitted into a six thousand square feet of empty mall space, I thought our act might play to a bay of empty desks.  Twelve years on, at this Brookway Campus, we're turning students away at the door, and our administrators are cursing themselves for not purchasing the entire mall instead of merely leasing part of it.

Another one of our campuses, in contrast, was built at a cost of several million dollars.  The land was given to the college by a wealthy local family, and it's not hard to see why.  The Thomas Campus is a half-mile from from a freeway access road whose off-ramp, if one drives from town, is a half-miles past the campus itself.  Thus getting gto the campus involves driving past the campus itself, the negotiating a U-turn beneath the freeway, then driving along a one-way parabolic side street until one sees the sign--the only sign--indicating the driveway that leads to the campus.  Miss the sign, and hence the driveway, and you've just lost the next hour of your life negotiating the various twists and turns, attempting to find some street, some on-ramp, some anything in order to find a campus you cannot see until you are back against its front doors. 

It is quite simply the rule that any new faculty--people with Master's and PhDs, most of them with a fairly developed sense of direction--will alwys drive miles past our campus and call us from a pay phone or cell phone, hopelessly lost.  Always. One new teacher, after twice negotiating the spaghetti strands of freeways, access roads, and exits, called me and abruptly refused to return again unless I met her at her day job in my car and allowed her to follow me to campus.

The campus's location is doubly troublesome.  Thomas Hall sits in the center of a flood plain, a bit higher than the parking lot and egress, with the result that a tropical storm a few years ago kept two dozen people , mostly support staff, stuck on campus ove a weekend, eating from the vending machines and sleeping on the sofas in the library.  Since then, the campus simply closes every time heavy rain drifts in our direction.

Still more.   If our college had commissioned a league of urban planners to draw a location for a campus where students were least likely to enroll, the result would be Thomas Hall as presently configured.  Unless one views Thomas Hall from a certain freeway overpass (from which Thomas Hall is utterly inaccessible), the single view one has of Thomas is down the long driveway between an enormous warehouse and a dealership specializing in eighteen-wheelers.  The view is roughly comparable to staring down a long urban street flanked on both sides by a canyon of skytscrapers; in order to appreciate the view of Thomas Hall, you must turn your head at exactly the right moment, within a window of maybe ten seconds before it vanishes.  Miss that one glimpse (while travelling, at minimum, fifty miles per hour), and you are lost.

This is the one view the campus affords.  Once you actually arrive, the campus looks like a software company set down in bad real estate.

The entire point of having a multi-campus college is accessability--no one in our community lives more than five miles away from an campus.  This campus, however, is ten miles away from the homes of most potential students.  Really, and I always ask myself, Where are the students coming from?  To the north is a farm; when the dean summons me to her office, I stare past her head, out the window, and see cows.  To our west, a thousand acres of grassland, then further on as many woods. 

And to the east? Monday through Friday, on my way to work, I drive past mile after mile of warehouse after flea market after abandoned factory after open field surrounded by cyclone fencing that seems to protect nothing worth stealing. I see this, and I think, Where are the students? Or, rather: From where, possibly, could students come?

I am not alone in my thinking.  From the time our college broke ground on the Thomas Campus seven years ago, the question of student population has occurred to most of my colleagues.   Drive east to where the people are, or north, or south, and you arrive within walking distance (long walking distance, granted) of another one of our campuses, or--even more so--another one of the twenthy-four colleges in the area. The sum total of our efforts, our accessibility, and our competition has led to classes at the Thomas Campus, in prime slots--say, Composition I at 9:30, Tuesdays and Thursdays--dxraw six or seven students at most, in a classroom designed for twenty-five.

To her credit, Dr. Garces has done a few things to remedy our empty campus.  Entire programs--law enforcement, trucking--have put hundreds of workforce students into Zach Mayo status: namely, they have nowhere else to go.  In fact, our public safety programs have been so effective that the professors of the  future cops and fire fighters have taken over our empty academic classrooms--in one, they shoved all the desks out in the hall, brought in rubber mats, and made themselves a self-defense classroom.  Their success in filling up the one b uilding we have has earned them, in the opinion of the Board of Trustees, a new instructional building, a "burn" building, a running track, and firing range, the aggregation of which will yank these students from the main campus building, leaving us again with empty classrooms.  Or rather, a few classrooms with six students.  Or seven. 

Which brings us back to scheduling.  And staffing.  And my one class.

In higher education, there are two types of problems.  The first are those for which no solutions are readily available: racial animosity, financial aid bearaucracy.  The second are those for which solutions practically scream themselves, but are never implemented.  The solution to the empty-except-for-specialized-classes campus is clear: simply give the space completely over to police, fire, trucking, and the forthcoming classes in homeland security, and remove our academic olfferings entirely, all but the few that these workforce students will need.  Either that or resign ourselves to living with six and seven students, forever, in English, Speech, Art, Government. 

Given those two choices, our Dr. Garces has chosen Door Number Three.  She has moved heaven and earth, proclaimed one idea after another, called every office obsessively day after day--and then blamed us when nothing happened, as we said nothing would.

Certainly no one can fault our president for lack of effort.  Though our population base might be miles away, within what she believes is our "service area," (in other words, neighborhoods closer to other campuses and other colleges), there is not a church whose social she has not attended, a Kiwanis at whose breakfast she has not spoken, and ethnic businessman's dinner at which she has not appeared--all to sing the praises of one single campus.  At Thomas Hall, we have hosted registration fairs (with free chicken), job fairs (free Subway), transfer fairs (free pizza).

The results of these exhausting efforts: six students per class.  Maybe seven.

We have all tried hard.  But . . . doesn't there come a time when you admit the dog doesn't like the dog food and try something else?  Driving to Thomas Mall through roads that wind through miles of industry, I wonder: what heroic efforts are in store for us now?  We have gone so far as to offer free tuition one semester, just to generate some foot traffic, an act that accomplished nothing besides infuriating the students at our other campuses, who saw our act as charging some students more than others--and really, who could blame them? (All of us who remembered the "discounts for cash" fiasco at gas stations in the 1980s saw the students' anger coming, and said so, at least among ourselves.)  Having tried everything and finding it not to work, and further realizing that we weren't going anywhere, my colleagues and I simply resigned ourselves to Thomas Hall, hard by the pasture and the industrial park, home of six and seven students at a time.

Then our preisdent had a thought.  The problem, she decided, was that the mass of students who would have poured onto our campus were kept away because . . . wait for it . . . we weren't scheduling enough classes.  The reason students were not flying through our doors was that our offerings were too minimal.  The solution: more classes.  Many, many more classes.

To those of us familiar with scheduling, this was sheer barking madness.  The only way we ran courses at all was our minimal offerings, which succeeding in penning our students into groups of six and seven, barely enough to sustain a class.  Double our offerings? Triple our offerings?  Ruin.

I have worked at my college for seventeen years, the last nine as department head or (as it later became known) department chair, and only once have I taken issue with our college president.  The occasion was the senior staff meeting when the new scheduling policy was announced.  (Senior staff meetings, I should mention, are the once-a-month, three-hour, no-bathroom-break marathons during which two things happen: We are told things about which we don't care about and will forget as soon as the meeting is over; and our input is, at great length and with hectoring zeal, solicited, and then disregarded as soon as the meeting is over.  Leading the proceedings is the energetic Dr. Garces, who shouts and gestulates, with no sign of fatigue, like Castro from the balcony.)  Our scheduling, Dr. Garces informed us, was too inflexible, too narrow, too--what was the word she wanted?--ah yes, insensitive. Yes, that was it.  It stood to reason (or rather, it stood as screamingly obvious to our president) that the reason our campus-in-a-cow pasture was was not succeeding was because we offered only, say, one Comp I class on Monday and Wednesday morning, instead of, say, six.  In additin to our nine-thirty MW class, we should have a class starting at eight, at eleven, and at twelve-thirty.  Plus--and here was the real killer--a seven to eight o'clock class to run on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. 

Then, she told us this thinking should be applied to every course, every day.  Only then, she assured us, would the campus meet everyone's expectations.

"I fully believe in the success of this," she said. "We need to boost our class average to twenty students per class, and this is the way."

It was here that I turned and whispered something to another chair--of social sciences, as it were.  The president looked down at me, lacking only a prince-nez at the end of here nose for a looked of imperiousness.

"Doctor Davidson," she harrumphed, "do you have something to share with us?"

She must have assumed I would back of, as she looked down and began re-arranging her papers.  Instead, now, I said, "Well, if we schedule like this, we're going to have nine thousand classes with two students apiece."

She looked up, apparently stunned I had said anything.  "Why," she asked, "do you have to be so defensive?"

"I don't . . . " I looked around, waiting for someone to support me--perhaps one of the dozen or more people in the room who had heard about Dr. Garces' scheduling plan in advance and would do so as soon as the meeting ended, but not now.  Nothing.  And so, three months later, when I was left with fifty classes with zero, one, or two classes each, we were compelled to call all those students and explain why their classes were cancelled.  The students in turn complained to the counselors that they could not make a schedule.  The counsellors complained to Dr. Garces, who ordered an emergency meeting, during which we were told that we were not meeting the needs of our students.

The solution?  More class offerings.

And so it started again.

Every department chair (and the term itself, thanks to Best of the Web, sounds like a piece of furniture, which I am, basically) has the One Professor.  The One Professor is the one who calls every hour, on the hour. Her calls are concentrated near the beginning of the semester, precisely when I'm in the mode Michael Douglas adopted in The Wonder Boys: whatever is in front of me I have to deal with, whatever is elsewhere I can ignore.

One Professor removes all doubt by placing herself in front of me, every hour on the hour.  By "in front of me," read, "constant e-mails, constant voice-mails, constant accosting of me in the hallway."

One week before the semester, she called.

"Yeah, Fox, my Multicultural Lit class, it only has five students and maybe it won't go up and maybe I should give it up and move to Comp Two."

"Don't worry," I said.  "We staff six and up."

(Digression.  Six and up?  Yes.  Our President, Herlinda Garces, operates on the theory that the more classes we schedule, the more students we'll have.  And so our college, semester by semester--by Dr. Garces' decree--schedules twice as many classes than our student body could ever fill.  The result is that we are left with nine thousand classes with two students apiece; these, we have to cut--at the very last minute, again by Dr. Garces' decree--and so our students, who had, months earlier, meticulously put together a schedule that accomodated work, day care, the bus schedule, the babysitter, the parole officer, the AA meeting, and the care of an ailing relative (most of our students deal with at least three of the preceding) are told, Sorry, you have seventy-two hours to fix it yourself.  For us, for all the classes we schedule, six students is a lot.)

We return to One Professor:

"But maybe it won't go to six."

"It will."

"But maybe it won't."

"Well, if it doesn't, we'll give you Comp Two."

"But maybe you should cut it now."

"It's one student away from running."

We hang up.  Two hours later, as I attempt to staff forty classes, find teachers willing to come out for eighty dollars per week, and negotiate a dozen students clamoring to test out of this or that, a phone call comes again.

She:  "It's still at five.  It hasn't gone up."

Me: "It will go up."

She: "But what if it doesn't?"

Me: "Then we'll give you Comp Two."

She: "Maybe you should do it now."

Me: "Fine.  I'll give you Comp Two now.  And when Multi Lit goes to six I'll give that to someone else."

She: "But if it went to six I would want it back.  If you give me Comp Two you should cancel Multi Lit."

Me: "I can't cancel Multi Lit.  I'm told not to cancel anything with five."

She: "Well, call the students up.  Tell them you will cancel it, and they'll drop.  Then you can cancel it for real."

Me: "I've no reason to.  It'll make."

She: "But what if it doesn't go to six?"

Me: "It is going to six.  So just keep it."

(Understand the environment here. I sometimes go two hours on the phone without hanging up, just switching back from one insistent line to another.  I have, at this moment, 12 classes without teachers at all.  And I have this one.  My One Professor.)

 The two-year college where I work--where I teach, where I chair, where I staff--is in a mall that (step by step, store by store) is meeting the wrecking ball.  We are promised a new campus in eighteen months, on the other side of the parking lot; meanwhile, we sit huddled as parts of our own building rattle and crumble and our parking lot resembles downtown Fallujah.  I am a department chair watching a faculty and student body slowly go insane as we play out the last year of the old campus's existence.  What I observe, what I hear, is the subject of this blog.  I hope you'll enjoy.