Blight and the Story of Blight

We finished the third day of our Homeless Adjunct Road Trip, and are, as I type this, in a cabin in Maumee State Park, outside of Toledo, OH. We left Pittsburgh early Monday afternoon, after spending two days there, meeting with some wonderful, interesting people and shooting documentary footage: faculty and union organizers of the Steelworkers/ Duquesne effort; two students — one a grad students and the other who refuses to become a grad student — both of whom feel that their future success has been hobbled by the crushing debt of getting an education in this country; a passionate educator whose dedication to teaching, in the face of her own financial struggles, stems from her fascination with the proven intellectual and emotional development that takes place when the writing skills of her students are strengthened. Finally, we talked to the head of a community college English department, who shared his own frustration with the ways in which he is required to staff with underpaid, undersupported adjunct faculty while seeing the retention and success of students drop each year.

Arriving in Toledo around 5 or 6 pm today, we were surprised at how small the city seemed — I suspect we haven’t seen the “whole” city. We were also a little disconcerted with how much blight and ruin we saw. It was very sad. It can’t be an easy city for its inhabitants, if so many of its streets are in decay. The whole place seemed devoid of life. To borrow a phrase from Jane Jacobs, it felt as though we were driving through one large “dead zone”. Being tired, and uncertain of ourselves, we simply left, and headed back out on the highway, looking for somewhere that felt more vibrant, more alive. “Let’s look for Lake Erie,” I suggested, knowing it was around somewhere. (I don’t pretend to be a geography expert.)

We found the nuclear power plant instead, the Davis-Besse facility. No, thanks. We drove for miles and saw no lake. Finally, we saw a sign for Maumee State Park, and turned down the road, to see what was there. Water, we hoped. Greenery. Life.

“Maumee” comes from the Ottawa name, Maamii, or the Miami Indians who, until the European invasion, were the inhabitants of the area. This was a place of great fertility, water travel, gathering activities. And so it is again — this park and the facilities are very new. Lots of greenery, people playing croquet, catch, riding bikes. And, there it was — Maumee Bay, a part of Lake Erie. I found that the beauty of this place was welcome after the almost physical pain of being in such a blighted area before. Since we had to stay somewhere, and since the hotels we saw in Toledo didn’t feel especially inviting, we priced it out here, surprised to find it reasonable — even more surprised to find that the cabins on the grounds were only a small amount more expensive that a room. Since Chris was hauling all her film equipment, and we both were hauling computers, needing work space, wanting to spread out and dive into the work, we opted for the cabin. Expectations were that it would be a tiny, one floor structure, two bedrooms, with a simple living space. Instead, we found a two story structure, two bedrooms on the first floor, where there was lots of living space including a vaulted ceiling, a fireplace, porches, and a stairway to the second floor loft area, where there were several more beds. We could have brought an entire film team into this space and had plenty of room.

Always looking for the symbolic in daily life, I asked myself: So what does this mean? How is it that our experience, driving through the section of Toledo that first greeted us was one of such contraction, discomfort and unease, and this experience was one of expansion, excitement, joy, comfort? Was it the poverty of what we saw? The blight? Was it the seeming privilege of Maumee Park? On the surface, maybe it was.

But that is surface only. It’s what the blight means that is so distressing. It is symbolic of the struggle of human beings, the paucity of opportunity, the deadness born of depression and despair. The Maumee area provided the opposite. Greenery and growth. Joyful gatherings of people. Play and laughter. A sense of upliftment.

The wreck of the city of Toledo begins to feel like a metaphor for the very thing we are in search of on this trip — we are diving into the wreck of higher education, and on this road tour, looking for the wreck itself requires that we find the many stories of the wreck first. Toledo serves as a kind of image for what can happen when the life is sucked out of something, when the vibrancy and verdancy is drained and the empty shell remains.

Toledo was a manufacturing town, a factory town that was, several times in the 20th century, blighted by the collapse of the factory model. One of the things written and said about the corporatized university is that it no longer operates as true academia. It has become an edu-factory. What we see, in the blight of Toledo feels uncomfortably predictive….a warning of what can come if the corporatized university continues to operate on this factory model, this assembly line mentality of “information delivery”, job-training. We are headed for wreckage. We may have already begun to see the earliest stages of it.

There are, I think, two ways in which ruin becomes the ground of new birth. The first way is through art. Tomorrow, we go in search of some artists of Toledo – young members of the Occupy movement who have just returned from the NATO demonstrations in Chicago, who are strong and powerful in their determination to breathe life into their own world, take charge of their own destinies, and by so doing, re-vitalize, replenish dead zones — in their city and in their lives — with their own miraculous energy and talent.

The second way to rebirth, I think, is through the experience of rediscovering source. I’d like to keep thinking about this – about what it means to return to the greenery as a healing space and how that is symbolic in a larger sense. Returning to “nature” means, I think, returning to the true nature of a thing, a place, an experience. Returning to the purest state — the source. Could we return to the more natural state of learning, leaving this more commodified, plunderer model behind, and manage to find what is true and pure and alive, what is eternal in learning? How do we even know what the more “natural state of learning” is? Stripping away the software learning programs, the statistics and learning outcomes, “value enhancement” theories, “teacher proofing” approaches, the pedagogical theorizing, the spread sheets and budgetary considerations, the high cost/debt model — how much can be stripped away in the search for the pure experience of learning itself?

I have absolutely no answers to these, or the hundreds of questions I haven’t even formed yet. But if I start with the feeling of extreme discomfort brought on by the blight we entered into, if I keep paying attention, questioning, exploring, maybe things will begin to come clearer.

On the Road….

The first of the Homeless Adjunct road trips is about to begin.  Chris and I leave tomorrow from Philadelphia, heading for Pittsburgh.  We will get there sometime Saturday evening.  May 20, we will be meeting with people from the Occupy Pittsburgh movement — young education activists who have been working for justice in regard to student loan debt and affordability issues.  We’re also meeting with some of the people in the Steelworkers Union, and the Duquesne adjunct unionizing effort.  Some of the other cities on this trip will be Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.  In each city, we’ll be meeting with people who are deeply involved in issues of higher education, talking with them, filming, getting to know their cities and their own regional concerns.

I’ve packed my iPhone, and will be giving a shot to using it to shoot some video footage, which we will put up on our youtube channel, our facebook page and other sites.  I don’t know how sophisticated they will be at first, since I’m the type of person who blows up toaster ovens and blenders, and who may not be the best person to videoblog. Luckily, Chris will be videoblogging, too, on the 2255films.com blog.   I’m not much for Twitter, but I think Chris will be tweeting, and we have some friends waiting out there in the world who will be retweeting for us.

Since this is the first stretch of our road trips, we aren’t exactly sure what will happen.  But I’ve learned that the best thing to do is to work like the devil to get things lined up, and then just….show up and let the events flow.

Stay tuned, and we’ll try to keep everybody posted as the events unfold.

Of course, if any of you are IN the cities we mentioned, please email us at junctrebellion@gmail.com and let us know if you want to join in the activities.  We are still firming up our dates of arrival in the various cities, depending on coordinating everybody’s availability.

Wish us luck.

Being a Stupid Slut

When I was a teenager, many years ago, my boyfriend’s roommate had a girl he used to call regularly for sex. He would wake up in the morning, and without even leaving his bed, he would call her if he felt a bit horny. She would come over, walk up to his room, they would have sex; and, then, he would manufacture a reason that he had to go somewhere, and she would leave alone.

One day, I overheard him in conversation with a bunch of his male friends, recounting a conversation he had had with her.

“She asked, ‘How come we only date in the daytime?’,” he said.

There was an explosion of laughter in the room.

“Date in the daytime! That’s classic!” said one of his friends.

“She’s your ‘day-time date’!” laughed another.

“Daytime Date” became the name they all called her ever after.

“Somebody should just tell her, ‘Dumb-ass, you are a whore,” said a third guy.

“She’s not even a whore,” said a fourth. “She’s just a stupid slut. Whores get paid better.”

Fast forward several decades. I’ve been an adjunct professor in the Philadelphia area for over 15 years. Adjunct. Contingent. AdCon. Part-time. NTT. Lots of names are used for what I do as a precarious wage-laborer in the edu-factory that used to be academia. Two days ago, I took part in an all-day student evaluation event at one of the universities where I have co-taught a capstone course for three years. At the end of the semester, my co-faculty, a part-time member of the department (I am the “writing consultant” and therefore even more unconnected than she), was told in a very roundabout way that she would no longer be teaching this capstone course.  The chairman of the department simply offered her a list of courses and said, “Which would you like for next year?” The capstone course was not among the choices. She was angry about the way she was told. I wasn’t told at all. We continued to teach out the semester, devoting scores of hours to our students and their projects. This full day of evaluations was the culmination of all that work, where all the students from the program presented their projects to the faculty, advisors, and outside critics. From 8 a.m. to nearly 7 p.m., we met with each of the students, reviewed their work, evaluated them. At the end of this very long day, all the students were called back into the great hall, and everyone gathered for a final farewell. It was during this time that the chairman of the department called another member of the department’s teaching staff to the podium. She delivered a speech about my co-faculty, my partner in the class I taught. She spoke of how valuable her contributions to the department were, how although she would no longer be teaching the capstone course, her work in that area had been invaluable. Her students loved her. The department would always be grateful. Then they presented my co-faculty with a bottle of wine. Everyone clapped. Including me. During this whole happening, I stood there, feeling the eyes of my students on me, feeling mortified at my exclusion, with a plastered smile on my face, and a stiffness to my body born of steely determination to preserve some dignity.

At the end of this event, I walked out of the building, alone. I decided to walk home, nearly 2 miles, down Pine Street to the Delaware River. It wasn’t until I was a few blocks from the university that I was able to breathe. And with the breathing came the pain, a sharp kind of stabbing pain in my heart chakra.

“Admit that you are hurt,” I said to myself. “Feel it.”

I kept walking. Feeling it was somehow easier if my legs kept moving me forward. My eyes welled up. I kept walking, wiping the tears away. I felt sick to my stomach from humiliation and mortification.

“Feel it, ” I kept saying to myself. “Feel it. You are allowed to feel it. You have to feel it.”

And then I remembered the Day-time Date. For years, I’ve thought of myself as an academic whore. But I realized, on that walk down Pine Street, that I am not even a whore.

I am academia’s stupid slut.

I arrived home. My body hurt so badly that I simply changed to comfortable old clothes, poured a glass of wine and climbed into bed. The sun was just setting. There was a chorus of voices outside my window – revelers on South Street, joyous and laughing. I closed my windows and willed myself to sleep. It was the only thing I could think of to do.

Waking early the next morning, the first thoughts were of the experience. The next thoughts were ones of gratitude.

“Finally,” I thought. “The crack of the Zen Master’s stick. There’s no turning away from this.”

Yes, I’ve had humiliations before. Yes, for years I have known how little my efforts and dedication are respected. But they’ve been private mortifications — often between me and some departmental “course assignment” person. This event, yesterday, was the most public humiliation I have ever experienced. You can’t pretend after that. So I acknowledged it. I opened myself to feel it fully. But, with the dawning of a new day, I also felt gratitude about the clarity of the lesson.

I believe in the power of positive thought, yet have failed to find ways to apply those practices to my experiences in adjunct academia. This clarity gives me a day-glo red sign of what I do NOT want. It is a moment of pivoting. What DO I want? That’s the next step, isn’t it — to define what I want in a way that I can energetically work toward. I knew I had to look for experiences in my life that provided examples of the respect I want. And in that very next day, I had the experience I sought.

I have a small, low-budget, arts organization. That next morning, I was working with an artist who also directs a gallery; he helps me hang my gallery’s shows because he is much better at it than I am. We worked for a few hours that morning, and, slowly, the art took shape on the walls. It was a student show — my students. We would have their visual art on the walls, and one of my students, a singer/songwriter, would perform. A student from the Creative Writing MFA program would read her work. I felt a lot of happiness as the evening approached. I prepared the space, set out the refreshments. People began arriving. Students came with their friends and family.  Joy and excitement filled the room. The student who sang did a phenomenal job and got loud and appreciative applause. The writer received a lot of appreciation.

“You are a wonderful woman,” one parent said to me. “Just look at what you’ve done here.”

“This is what they have done,” I said. “I just gave them some encouragement and a space in which to do it.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Which is what makes you wonderful.”

I walked home from the gallery after the event ended. It was pouring rain. Lightning flashed across the sky. I got soaked. I was full of joy. Two days. Two entirely different experiences stemming from the loving efforts I put forth. One, the experience like that of sleeping with someone who has disdain and disrespect for you. The other, the experience of giving and receiving joy and love, being uplifted by a human exchange. Which of those experiences do I want in my life? I choose day number two. Of course I do. We all do. So how do I apply these practices of positive empowerment to creating a life where day number two is my reality and day number one recedes into the distant past? I want to work with young people. I want to teach, to educate, to interact with other people. I want to support and encourage new art, new creativity, new thinking. I want to do it joyously and successfully. I want to have “right livelihood” and a life of abundance and well-being. I want us all to have that. With so many conversations about the negativity of our experiences in adjunct academia, we may very well be re-enforcing more of the same.  At least according to those who believe that “you get what you think about”.

As an individual, I want to begin consciously shifting the focus, now that I have had such a powerful experience of what I do NOT want, to what I DO want. How do I do that? And then, by extension, how might I provide some perspective on how we do this as a population of scholars and educators? We have great power, great positive influence on the world. The question now is, “How do we stop being the ‘day-time dates” of academia and honor ourselves? How do we honor the love and dedication we give in such a way that the results of our talents is a powerfully positive one?”

First, stop answering that telephone call and delivering ourselves up to our own mortification. Second……? That’s where I am now. Yes, I’ve been here before. But I’m back with more determination, armed with both the worst and best experiences of my recent life.

Since we’re about to head out on the road with the documentary, I welcome a conversation about this — and invitations from others who might want to have this conversation as part of our film. We can certainly document the suffering; there is plenty of it. But can we begin now to deliberately contemplate ways of shifting this paradigm toward a new and positive reality?  I’m not talking about unions, or legislation, or walk-outs, exactly.  I’m talking about the kind of energetic shift that creates new realities.  Like the day the Berlin Wall came down.  It was as if the entire reality of East Berlin, of East Germany and its military, just melted away.  People tore at the wall with tools, with their bare hands; and then, the wall was gone.  When a large enough group of people stop believing in their own oppression, stop accepting it as reality, enormous change takes place.  I remember that day.  I remember being stunned at the new reality that was taking shape right before my eyes as I watched the television screen.  That’s the kind of shift I’m talking about here.

Oh…and whatever happened to that poor, disrespected girl from all those years ago? I found her on Facebook. She’s a happily married woman. A mother and grandmother. She looks glowingly beautiful and satisfied with life. I am overjoyed to know it, and ready to follow her lead.  All sorts of possibilities await.

The Homeless Adjunct Tour is Announced

In the last few months, the ‘Junct team – Chris LaBree and I – have traveled to NYC, D.C. (twice!) and to Chicago in order to show clips of the documentary and to give talks about the project, about adjunct/contingent faculty issues, and to raise awareness, build community, shoot additional documentary footage and interview more people. It’s been exciting, not only to experience the positive ways in which our work has been received, but to see how many voices are now being raised, how many conversations are raging about the issues of adjunct faculty labor exploitation, the break-down of the university, the corporate culture that has overtaken academia.

So here is the news I would now like to share: Chris and I are in the planning stages of a Homeless Adjunct Tour. There is much more news to follow, because we are in the earliest phases of planning.  We are hoping to be able to head out on the road a few times. The first trip, beginning the last week of May, will see us heading west from Philadelphia, to meet up with people across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and then, depending on how the route takes shape, perhaps Illinois, Indiana, and then back home, perhaps, through West Virginia. The exact route isn’t final for this first trip yet, because we are hoping to hear from people who would like to invite us to their cities, their campuses, their organizations. We are also planning two additional trips, one north from Philadelphia into New England, and one south into the southern states. We hope that more trips can follow, and it will depend on a few things – our work schedules, our success in fundraising, and the invitations we receive. Here is our hope: we will travel and speak at various locations, showing bits of our film, and shooting interviews for the next round of documentary work. We will meet with adjuncts and contingents as we travel, and speak with them, with parents and prospective college students in order to give them an honest picture of what is happening to students in colleges across the country. Finally, as an extension of a talk I gave at the Summit sponsored by the New Faculty Majority in D.C. in January, we are hoping to meet with adjuncts and students who have created activist art, creative ways of expressing the truths of the struggles of the academic untouchables. We will be creating open mic/reading events and gathering artwork as we go, with the plan being to publish and present the work online, and perhaps in published hard copy format. We would love to hear from you, and to begin to schedule our tour based on invitations and gatherings along our route west. Please email us to express interest, and we’ll go from there! We also welcome suggestions on how we might be able to create exciting events wherever we go. The momentum is building, and the awareness of what is happening in our universities is more important now than ever. As we travel, our goal is to create a network across the country that will work together in order to reclaim high-quality education, professional treatment of professors in our college classrooms. So The Homeless Adjunct Tour is gearing up to begin. Help us to make it happen! Of course, we would welcome donations, no matter how small, since we will be launching a fundraising effort to get us started. Just go to our website, http://www.junctrebellion.com, for donation information.   Thanks for all the interest and positive support we’ve received so far; it would be wonderful to have a chance to meet more of you in person.  Any questions?  Want to invite us to your city or town?  Please email us at junctrebellion@gmail.com!

UPDATE:  I apologize, because I don’t know why this is happening.  But the links I provided don’t seem to be working properly.  Instead, I provided the junctrebellion website url, and New Faculty Majority is www.newfacultymajority.info   Sorry for the inconvenience!

Activism Through Art

It has been over two weeks now since the New Faculty Majority Summit in D.C.,  where I was happy to meet and share thoughts with so many academic professionals on the faculty labor issues confronting the professoriate.  After the conference ended, it was extremely gratifying, and somewhat shocking, to see my own presentation mentioned a good bit — so thanks to all who included mention of my talk in the articles, blogs and twitter comments during and since our gathering.  I thought I might post here the talk I had written for the Summit.  Time constraints caused me to shorten the remarks during the panel and inspirations of the moment sometimes took me on asides, so what I post here is a little different than what I said to the group.  In any case, it is my best attempt at reconstruction:

While more and more is being written and spoken about the difficulties facing academia, about the failing institutions of higher education,  speculations about the reasons our higher education system is falling short, about how many ways it is failing our students and our society, there is still a great amount of ignorance regarding the complete picture of academic collapse. Conversation within academia has raged for nearly 20 years on issues of adjunct faculty labor exploitation, but rarely has that conversation crossed into mainstream arenas.  Many of us are trying to find ways to bridge the knowledge gap between the more public conversation and the many important, yet more widely unknown, issues of contingent faculty labor abuse. We are blogging, speaking, writing, signing petitions, posting on Facebook and Youtube — anything we can think of to get the general public to finally begin connecting the dots between what has happened to the role of the educator in academia and the failure of this new corporatized academic system.   There are those of us who are turning to art in order to explain and raise awareness of an issue that continues to hover outside the framework of much of the conversation about higher education.

Maria Maisto of the New Faculty Majority invited me to take part in this summit  because I am an adjunct and an artist.  She asked that I speak about the ways that art and creativity might be used to get this message out.  This Summit has provided us with very powerful information – statistics, hard research, strategies, talking points, models to follow.  We can talk about the ways in which contingency has negatively impacted the student’s learning conditions, or the ways it has limited the amount of scholarship done by a whole generation of scholars in a variety of fields; we can talk about the loss of faculty self-governance and the corporate take-over of American higher education.  We have Power Point, charts, hard numbers.  These are crucial in making the arguments, and proving the points.

But we also have the personal lives impacted by over twenty years of ever-increasing faculty labor abuse, poverty and suffering.  We also need to show the struggles of contingency, the many facets and faces of contingent reality.  We have to show the personal side of this experience in a way that reaches a wider audience, touching not only their minds, but their hearts.

I’m currently working, with my film partner, Chris LaBree of 2255 Films, to complete a documentary, and I’m working on a companion book, both titled ‘Junct: The Trashing of Higher Ed. in America..  Other documentaries exist, most notably Teachers on Wheels by L.D. Janakos and Degrees of Shame by Barbara Wolf.  Another documentary is currently in process, called Con Job that focuses on the lives of contingent writing faculty – both professionally and personally.  These documentaries are part of a rising tide of information.

If you think about the impact of a documentary like Super-Size Me, or Food, Inc. you can see how, through the medium of film, with its power to hold your gaze on a situation — in the case of adjunct poverty, for instance, holding the camera on the inside of an empty refrigerator, or on the holes in the soles of our shoes, or a 20-year old car being held together by duct-tape, you understand that you have a very powerful teaching tool.

I encourage us all to use all creative avenues to communicate these personal realities.  I have  written plays which either reference the situation, or have adjunct faculty characters.

One of my plays has a 50-something career adjunct who is facing homelessness, and is a huge embarrassment to her corporate attorney daughter.  This play addresses some of the issues more dramatically.  For instance in one scene, the mother tries to explain her choices to her daughter, trying to justify her calling and her dedication.  But the daughter’s anger is clear — “They were YOUR choices, but you made ME suffer them!  You pulled me into your poverty!  You forced ME into that struggle.  Where was the honor in that? Where was your concern for ME?”

Another play uses humor, and references a sperm bank frequented by lots of male adjuncts desperate to deliver a bit of themselves, for some financial help to cover their bills.  It gets uncomfortable laughs, and it makes its point.

Humor can be an important creative tool.  The Xtra Normal videos on Youtube, like “So you want to get a Ph.D. in the Humanities” provide lots of information about the realities of the adjunct professor, and the ironies of trying to communicate that misery to the starry-eyed potential graduate student who refuses to hear the warning. The fate of the starry-eyed grad student is re-visited nine years later.   Garry Trudeau was ahead of most of us with his Doonesbury cartoons about adjunct faculty abuse.  Humor done well can be effective and long-lasting in its impact.  It comes at you from a less threatening place, and makes a powerful point without raising resistance to the message.

Surprise is another effective method.  Flash mob activities, for instance, can create powerful opportunities for messages.  I’m thinking of the students in Chile, protesting the crippling tuitions and debt, creating a flash mob dance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.  They took over a campus, dressed as zombies, and danced their message.  The videos shot of the event went viral.

Using art to communicate grows your audience in many directions.

I believe you are going to see more characters in fiction and drama who illustrate faculty poverty as a reality.  More poetry, more radical theatre, more flash mobs — the Occupy movement has begun working groups around the country for Occupy Colleges activities.  They are well organized.  They even have a Facebook page.  But we have to go beyond the mere walk-out and megaphone of misery model to staging events, playing music, performing the kind of radical theatre we saw in other eras of protest.

Martha Graham said that,  “No artist is ahead of his time.  He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time.”  So, when you begin to see these issues expressed through creative avenues, you know its time has come.  Remember how the discussion about Vietnam shifted dramatically through the influence of all the films that were made, or through fiction, like the wonderful Tim O’Brien collection The Things They Carried?  The novels of Charles Dickens show how he was the voice of his time, pulling the veil away and revealing the evils of his age.

Paul Klee said, “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”  I believe he’s right.  Art doesn’t only appeal to the intellect.  It connects to emotions and invites a more empathic response; it calls on your senses, and you experience another’s reality within yourself.

I’d like to tell you a story to illustrate:  I attended a dinner recently at one of the few universities where part-time faculty are invited to take part in the decisions of the department.  We usually had pizza party meetings in the faculty lounge, but for this meeting, we were going to a restaurant in mid-town Philadelphia.  I was one of two adjuncts at the meeting.  When it came time to order wine, the other adjunct at the table told the server that he would just have some water.  Another faculty member — who was full-time faculty — chided him.  “This place is known for its wine bar,” she said.  “You have to try something!”

I knew, as she clearly did not, that the reason this adjunct wanted only water was because he had looked at the menu, seen the prices, and calculated how little he could afford.  But this was not something he could say.  So, instead, he ordered a glass of the house wine.  The same full-timer chided once again, “How can you drink THAT? What are your preferences?  Try something a little nicer!”

Now, it’s important to add here that this woman doing the chiding had absolutely no idea that she was causing this man, the adjunct faculty member, extreme humiliation and pain.  She had no idea what financial reality drove his decisions.  The chairman of the department was not picking up the underlying issues, either, as he joined his voice to this urging.  I sat there, sharing this other adjunct’s humiliation.  I had anticipated the prices there, because I knew the restaurant, and had factored that into the money I had budgeted for the evening. (And by “budgeting” I mean that I knew that for the rest of the week I would be eating tofu.) I too had ordered only the house wine.  We were both teased about having no palette, about being willing to drink swill.

The pain radiating off my fellow adjunct was intense, and yet I was the only one who felt it.  I sat there, angry and embarrassed for both of us, and thinking, “God, I wish I was filming this!” — Because it is exactly the kind of documentary moment that would communicate so much about the way in which the world of the adjunct is not the world of the full-time faculty.

Remember, this is the one school where I believe the desire is to treat us with respect and inclusion.  But how can you be included in such an event, when you aren’t included in the greater financial security that comes of the full-time faculty experience?  How can you feel like an equal, even in these rare moments when the effort is to treat you like one, when you are the poorest person at the table?  I believe that, were I to show that film to everyone who sat at that table, they would suddenly “see” what they didn’t see at the time.  The film would make the pain of my colleague visible.

Art makes personal that which can otherwise remain safely objectified.  I can tell you many stories of the struggles of the contingent population, as I have on the pages of my blog time and again.  Faculty on food stamps.  Faculty without healthcare, struggling with illness – sometimes dying for lack of care.  Faculty homelessness.  The contingent friend who lived in his van for two years, or another who lived in a homeless shelter for recovering drug addicts, the one who, on the edge of homelessness,  nearly lost all of his life’s creative work because he couldn’t afford to pay the storage facility, and they were about to confiscate the contents of his storage locker.  I can talk about the crippling despair  that is not at all unusual, among our numbers, even to the point of suicide.

My friend in the van tried to hang himself last year.  He was unsuccessful, but I remain worried about him, because things haven’t gotten any better.  The number of adjunct suicides is growing.  Dr. Antonio Calvo of Princeton killed himself when his courses weren’t renewed.  71 year old Dr. Rudolph Alexandrov of Chestnut Hill College hurled himself over the second floor rail onto the marble lobby of the floor below in front of his students and his wife, a fellow adjunct.  The couple in CA, aging adjuncts,  Michael Cour, age 60, and his wife Janice Gervais, age 70, died on New Year’s Day, 2011.  Both lost their jobs in this economic crash.   She had cancer.  They found themselves facing foreclosure on their home and filed for bankruptcy. Faced with an enormous sense of hopelessness, Cour shot his wife, set fire to the home they were about to lose, then killed himself.  It was premeditated.  His sister received a letter after the tragedy, where Cour explained the reasons he felt they had no choice.

There is also the story of a murder – Dr. Henry Acejo, an adjunct teaching at three universities in San Diego but unable to afford living there, rented an apartment in Tijuana, where he was murdered, robbery the suspected motive.

I can catalogue those stories, telling them to you the way a journalist would.  Or I can write a short story, focusing on the last day of that aged couple in California, describing in detail the old man’s preparation of loading the gun, or the way he might have gently arranged his wife’s body on the bed after he killed her, the thoughts that went through his head as he set fire to his home, and stood in the flames for as long as he could stand to, his flesh beginning to singe, the revolver in his hand becoming almost too hot to hold as he raised it to his head, and shot.

Which is more powerful?  Which will stay with you?

Nietzsche  said, “We have art so that we shall not die of the truth.”  Maybe that’s true.  But I think we also need art as a way to speak these truths.  Fearful or unpleasant facts can be elevated by art, our resistance to them made defenseless by creative presentation.

So let’s get creative with our communication. We are a remarkably intelligent, able, creative group of people.  Write a skit, perform a song, create an animated cartoon — it doesn’t have to be worthy of an Oscar or a Pultizer.  It merely has to communicate through creative means.

Just last night, a friend of mine sent me an article written by a journalist, Gautam Malkani in The Financial Times, of all places – raving about the magic of Leonard Cohen – poet, singer-songwriter, now well into his 70s, and on tour because, while he was living in a Buddhist monastery, his business manager stole his life’s savings.  This writer spoke of Cohen as being incandescent, a sage/poet returned from the mountaintop to sing for us, now that the Titans of Finance have driven us all to ruin.  This journalist suggested that what we all desperately needed right now was a return to what this profit-driven culture has all but destroyed:  The wise artist to call us back to our better selves.  A creative mystic to bring us all to a new shared awareness.  Art is not only a way to tell our most painful truths.  Its also a way to imagine new beginnings, and call new ways of being into reality.  I believe creativity and art can not only help us face difficult truths, but can help us achieve a better reality.  But we have to start by creating stories, plays, music, poetry, theatre, about where we are now, so that we can hope to create that better future on the basis of today’s painful truth.

Academia Occupied: The Academic As “Other” in Corporate Colonialism

The term “occupy” is all over the news now, with the Occupy Movement gaining power and momentum across our country, and linked in solidarity to the occupy movements that began in the Middle East. There is a strong wave of a growing Occupy Colleges movement, long overdue to my mind, that is finally beginning to take hold. The irony of this is something I would like to point out. We may be occupying in protest. But for the last thirty years, it is academia which has been “occupied.” We have been colonized by corporatism, and subjugated to its power.

A few years ago, as I was struggling in the worst of the 2008 economic collapse, about to lose my home, losing my financial battle to live on adjunct salaries, I was walking across one of the campuses for which I taught as night was falling. Ahead of me were blazing lights in one of the several newly-constructed buildings on campus. Looking through the windows of this new student community center, I saw a huge party in progress, there in a warm, well-lit space – banquet tables filled with food and drink, trustees of the university dressed in gowns and tuxedos, chatting happily with each other, no doubt congratulating each other on the increases in enrollment, the new buildings that were going up…..entirely unaware of the solitary adjunct walking across campus, with a hole in the sole of her boot, her sock sopping from the puddle she had just stepped in, the fact that she didn’t have enough money in her wallet to buy food for that night….it was unlikely that I would have been welcome at this gathering, at this banquet table.

The realization struck me, left me breathless: We are not welcome at the banquet table.

We, the majority faculty, adjunct and precarious on college campuses across the country, were not in that banquet room. Our students weren’t in that banquet room. Only the Administrators, the Board members, the Trustees.

The “us and them” feeling was crystal clear in that moment. That wasn’t a university party I was looking at in that well-lit banquet room. That was a corporate party. A party of people, instruments of corporatism, whose profit depends on 1) maintaining a low-wage work force and 2) charging continually higher pricers for their “services”. Faculty is being squeezed from one end and our students are being squeezed from the other. And those people, in their tuxedos and gowns, at that well lit banquet, were having a wonderful time.

I realized: Academia is a culture, a long-standing worldview that values the on-going, rigorous intellectual, emotional, psychological, creative development of the individual citizen. It respects and values the contributions of the scholar, the intellectual, to society. It treasures the promise of each individual and unique student, and strives to offer the fullest possible support to the development of that promise. It does this not only for the good of the scholar and the student, but for the social good. Like medicine, academia exists for the social good. Neither should be a purely for-profit endeavor. And yet, in both the case of the HMO and the EMO, we have been taken over by an alien for-profit culture, our sovereignty over our own profession, our own institutions, stripped from us.

We have fallen victim to corporate colonization.

We, the academics — both educator and student — are “the other” in the parlance of post-colonial theory. If you look at this thirty year period through that lens, you can see just how much has been stolen from us, and for whose benefit. You see more clearly those betrayers who serve the administrative/managerial class and are the petty chiefs of the academic departments, keeping contingents in line with the fear of joblessness. You see the mindless bureaucracy created to numb the mind and paralyze the will of our students. And history has shown that there is no negotiating with the colonizer. You don’t go begging to those who have stolen your sovereignty for their own gain, asking for just a little of your former rights back. You have to build an all-powerful movement to demand the removal of that colonizer, and reclaim ALL of your sovereignty. That is the only demand worth making. All others simply reinforce the usurper’s power to “give”, to “acquiesce”, and reduce you to collaborator in your own powerlessness.

Our students are realizing this now.

They, too, are suffering and struggling in this edu-factory model created by corporatism. They have been terribly impacted by the disappearing faculty and the overwhelming power of a mindless adminstrative class.

Research is pouring into the population now about the drop in skill level, the intellectual and creative unpreparedness of our students. Then, of course, there is the crushing debt which will keep them docile long after graduation as they work menial, precarious jobs and struggle to pay back these ever-mushrooming loans. Joe Berry,  Henry Giroux and others have spoken about how the development of the contingent class of faculty, the deprofessionalization of the professoriate has never been only about money. It has been about the subjugation and disempowerment of a certain worldview, a silencing of certain, more progressive, intellectual voices in our society. The simultaneous silencing of the left on college campuses, with the growing power of corporate “donations” which bought control of university culture, has resulted in the disastrous state in which we now find ourselves. This is being demonstrated with stark clarity now that students and faculty are standing up in protest of the state of our country’s higher education system. Police in riot gear are attacking peaceful demonstrators. In Berkely, the brutality of the police with their batons. The horrifying pepper spray incident in Davis that went viral immediately. These are only two of the incidents which I feel certain will continue as the number of people in this movement swells and the campuses finally, finally, become a place of outcry once again. I predict that it will become more and more clear just who controls these universities, and whose interests are being served and protected. The chilling video of the long walk of Chancellor Katehi of Davis through a sea of students, so powerful in their absolute silence, shows her driving off into the dark night. Let’s hope that this will prove to be a metaphor for what is about to happen to the managerial/administrative classes that have dominated and subjugated academia for these past 30 years. The battle lines are forming. We need to stand with our students and demand everything we deserve: Loan forgiveness. A return of free high-quality public university education. A return of the full-time, tenured faculty with full professional supports. We need nothing short of an academic Dien Bien Phu, and a commitment that we will do whatever is necessary to rid academia of the usurping managerial class, to reclaim our sovereignty in order to re-establish the social good that was once the culture, the world, of higher education in our country.

How long? How long?

Through the generosity of people who read this blog, the Adjunct Emergency Fund collected $625, which was sent yesterday to our adjunct in Los Angeles.  This money will save his art from destruction; he can pay the overdue amount to his storage facility, and might even have a little left over to rent a van so that he can retrieve the art.  The issue of his rapidly approaching homelessness, however, still remains, as does that of those others discussed.  Since posting our call for help, even more stories have been shared – an adjunct couple soon facing a choice between dropping healthcare for their family of five, or being unable to pay their mortgage.  A Teaching Assistant making arrangements to sell her eggs in order not to lose her apartment.  The list continues to grow, and the cries of the needy can’t be denied.   We have an entire professional class in this country that, in one generation, has been ruined.  We are now facing a second generation of unsuspecting graduating students, innocent and unaware that the scholarship to which they are dedicating themselves will award them with poverty and destitution.

As terrible as these stories are, there is another growing trend still more gruesome — that of adjunct suicides.  All over the country, there are adjunct deaths, often not publicly connected to the despair of this life of poverty which finally overwhelms the will to live.  There are instances where the schools hurry to hush up the grisly facts of such suicides.  The most public example of this was the recent suicide of Dr. Antonio Calvo at Princeton University.  Months have gone by and the incident was at first stonewalled, and then locked behind the ivy walls — we may never know the full truth of what drove Dr. Calvo to his death.

Denise Munroe Robb writes in The California Community College Journal of other deaths in the California region.  Michael Cour and his wife Janice Gervais died on New Year’s Day, 2011.  Michael Cour taught at El Cajon Valley Adult School and coached track and cross-country at the Grosmont Union High School District.  Janice Gervais was an adjunct, teaching in the English Department of Miramar College, as well as a humanities teacher at Grossmonth.  Michael Cour was 60.  His wife was 70.  She had cancer.  They both became unemployed, and found themselves facing foreclosure on their home.  They filed for bankruptcy.

This is one of the most despicable aspects of long-term adjunct abuse: the fact that people in their 60s and 70s, who have continued to work throughout their lives, don’t have enough savings or security to retire, rarely have healthcare for their illnesses  - and certainly don’t have enough savings to weather an economic crash that renders them completely jobless.  To have reached that stage of life and be facing homelessness and ruin is enough to break even the strongest person.

Robb writes, “After shooting his wife Janice and setting fire to their home, Cour died on January 1 of a self- inflicted gunshot wound.  Their bodies were found in the rubble.”

Only two days ago, 71-year-old Dr. Rudolf Alexandrov, an adjunct professor of math at Chestnut Hill College in suburban Philadelphia, joined this growing list.

Regina Medina, of The Philadelphia Daily News, reports that during a math class on Wednesday, August 3, Dr. Alexandrov became agitated, left the room, and leapt to his death from the railing of St. Joseph’s Hall.   He fell nearly 30 feet to the marble floor below.  The suicide was witnessed by his students and his wife, also an adjunct at Chestnut Hill.

Medina writes, “The tragic sequence of events remained a mystery yesterday.”

It is no mystery.  Not to those of us who understand the despair this life can cause.  Dr. Alexandrov was said to “suffer depression” and struggle with thoughts of suicide.

Many of us struggle against those same states of mind.  Who wouldn’t?

How long must this continue?  How long can this atrocity of extended labor abuse, and the long-term despair it causes, go unacknowledged by the general population? How many times will university presidents, with their high six-figure salaries, issue bland statements of condolence to families, then leave it to their well-paid PR staff to protect the school’s image?  How long will this inhumanity be tolerated?

Have we become a society where heartlessness and greed have gained such control that there is no law to protect us? That there is no human outcry?  Have we become a society so broken by this cruelty that we are numb to the suffering of our fellows?

Isn’t it time we begin to call this all out attack on our profession, the quality of our lives, and now our existence itself what it is:  a genocide of the American professoriate?

Yes, the Adjunct Emergency Fund is one small attempt to stop the suffering. We are grateful for even the smallest donation.   But much, much more aggressive action is overdue.  We are being destroyed.  We must become a mass collective of people, joined together, if not for ourselves, then for those whose despair drove them from this life.  We need to demand justice for the labor abused of this country, for all the workers who are feeling despair, and we need to do it now.  Behind the veil of the corporatized university, in the shadows just beyond our clear sight, lurks a deeper movement to destroy the professoriate.  I remember that, as an elementary school student, I was taught that when Communist regimes took control of a country, the citizens they arrested, imprisoned and killed first were the professors, the scholars, those able to formulate a cogent reason for resistance.  Capitalism doesn’t destroy in the same way.  It destroys by thrusting people into poverty and despair.

May Antonio Calvo, Michael Cour, Janice Gervais, Rudolf Alexandrov, and all the others driven to their deaths rest in peace.  But may we not rest.  Not until we gather together in powerful opposition to what is happening to so many of us.  May we not rest until we demand jobs with justice, lives with dignity.  May we not rest until we triumph.  We owe it to those who were so beaten that they could no longer fight.  We owe it to those who have fallen.