The Adjunct
I ATTENDED COLLEGE in the 1970s. Midsemester of my freshman year I found myself chatting with the girl who sat across from me in a history class. She told me she was studying to be a nurse. She was a sweet girl, with a friendly, square-jawed face and twin plastic bows holding the sides of her hair in place; no doubt she went on to make someone a solid and dependable wife. She asked me what college I was in.
What college? I said mockingly. Silly girl. This college. What do you think, I commute to UCLA?
She gave me the fisheye. She introduced me to the concept that a College of Nursing existed on campus, but that intelligence didnt spur me on to figure out which particular college I was in. I went to class, studied a little, read the campus newspapers accounts of research labs and internships and sometimes wondered: how in the world do you get involved with something like that? It was another classmate who finally clarified everything for me. Harry, twenty-five years old, was a chronic pot smoker and indolent film major. His checkered academic career had left him highly sensitive to the nuances of school enrollment and academic placement. Hed been cashiered from other colleges; he knew the ins and outs. He ticked off the colleges at our own institution for me. There were colleges of nursing and business and education and performing arts.
So which do I go to? I asked. You see how stupid I was?
Arts and Sciences, he replied.
Film seems like a liberal art, I said, my confidence in such matters growing. You must go there too.
Ah no, said Harry wistfully. He was in the College of General Studies, which was the least prestigious of all the schools. He was hoping to keep up his grades so the administration would allow him to transfer into Arts and Sciences, officially declare his major, and be taught by full-time professors, not just adjuncts.
Harry had truly enlightened me. I began looking at the teachers at our sprawling university in a new way. I took note of the instructors who appeared on campus only at dinnertime, the middle-aged bald guys in trench coats and Florsheim shoes carrying accounting textbooks. I saw them and thought: CGS teachers. Adjuncts.
And then I forgot about these distinctions for about twenty years.
When I finally finished my masters degree, my wife had a brainstorm. Why didnt I adjunct, maybe a class per semester? It would give us some extra cash for vacations, or maybe for a new car if the need arose. We speculated on how much money adjuncting paid. I thought a grand per course; she thought more like two. She turned out to be right. The money attracted me, but I couldnt get my arms around the idea of actually teaching college. It seemed highly unlikely.
Nevertheless, I made crisp copies of my newly minted MFA degree, retyped my unimpressive resum, photocopied some writing I had published, and prepared a package to send to nearby Pembrook College. Pembrook was nothing but a name to me, a tidy collection of buildings that I glimpsed on occasion from the highway, a place that sometimes turned up in squibs in the newspaper. Id never set foot on its campus, and didnt know what its academic strengths were, or if it even had any. I never gave a thought to who made up its student body. I sent the package off.
Normally this would be the place to write... and promptly forgot about it. But I had no time to do any forgetting. A scant week later I got a call from Dr. Ludlow, the chairman of the English department. We set up an interview.
The campus turned out to be lovely, a neat little collection of buildings from various eras nestled on a hillside. The place was a quiet haven of ornate stonework and columns, peaked roofs, stained glass windows, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and prim Victorian scalloping. Students chatted or examined their cell phones or studied languidly under spreading trees. On the athletic fields, balls clicked faintly against bats. Bells tolled irregularly. I sat in my car and breathed it all in, deeply. I felt an inordinate peace. I had a job interview looming, but I was not nervous. What place could be more tranquil than a college campus? The only thing I felt was a gnawing regret: why hadnt I gotten my Ph.D. and spent my life in such placid surroundings as these? The cares of marriage, of raising children, the crushing monotony and bureaucracy of my full-time jobthese all melted away. Could there be a healthier environment than college? A middle-aged professor in a polo shirt and WallabeesWallabees!moseyed abstractedly past the car, open text in hand. He was trim and fitlooking. He exuded calm. What must be the state of his arteries? How unobstructed must they be? In my mind, I could hear the strong rhythms of his sluicing blood.
Dr. Ludlow greeted me warmly. She was a petite woman, a flat five-foot-tall. She was attired exotically in a dark dress with slits through which I glimpsed a crushed red material, like coffin satin. She told me how much she had loved my journalism, and my ego arched with displeasure. I found her use of the term journalism just slightly, vexingly inaccurate: my essays had been published in newspapers and magazines, but the first way I would categorize them would not be journalism. Had I written accounts of Zoning Board of Appeals meetings, that would be journalism. But whatever. She was just being nice. She said she had laughed out loud at the humor in some of my pieces. Well, okay then. Now we were talking. She was flattering me. I knew immediately: she wanted me for the job. What they were looking for, she said, was someone to teach freshman English, known as English 101 or Introduction to College Writing, and English 102, Introduction to College Literature, to students in the evening program. She handed me the standard English 102 anthology, a big brick of writing from all eras, and asked me what approach I would take to teaching Daddy by Sylvia Plath.
Suddenly, I was very nervous. I paged anxiously through the book, looking rather desperately for the poem. I had to get a grip. Well, the first thing I would go over is basic study skillsthe use of an index and all that, heh, heh. She seemed unmoved by my self-deprecating humor. I finally found the poem and read it through quickly. I had read it in college. In fact, it was during this episode that I formulated the approach that would serve me so well with Dover Beach. I had gotten a poor grade on a paper about Daddy in one of my own freshman English classes because I had neglected to mention Ted Hughes. The simple explanation for this was that I hadnt known about Ted Hughes. Never heard of him. Of course, he was mentioned prominently in the little biographical sketch of Plath that introduced her section of poetry in the text, but I hadnt been assigned to read that, had I? But now I talked feverishly and passionately about Plath and Hughes, their symbiotic and consumptive relationship; I talked about the poems irony, about the way its foursquare rhythm comes at the reader like a drill press; I alluded to its childish rhymes, and of course its edgy metaphorical choicesthe Nazis and all. I could see in Dr. Ludlows face that I was doing well. This is a poem, I said, that simply couldnt be fully understood unmoored from its real-life circumstances. I talked about all I knew about the Hughes/Plath union, which really wasnt much, and then I saw a small darkening of Dr. Ludlows features. Her brow creased; her mouth made a moue. I had taken my approach too far. I hit the brakes and backpedaled. But of course, we dont exactly know where the reality ends and the poetry begins, I said. It would be a mistake to confuse the speaker with Sylvia Plath. And thats one thing I would want the class to be very clear about.
