Contigency, or how a bad situation for instructors and students became even worse

Way back in 2007, when I first began teaching at the community college level, there was at least a tiny sense of optimism about the future of our institution. The 2008 financial crisis had yet to hit. We were in the center of Silicon Valley, maybe five blocks from where Apple was rapidly working to make the iPhone ubiquitous. My partner worked at Apple, so I could run over to the employees’ gym after classes and hop on the elliptical and listen to Marketplace proclaim yet another record day for the NASDAQ and DOW. Once, I did find myself wondering just how long that could all go on.

I got an answer to that, fairly quickly. 

(I also got an answer to a similar half-serious train of thought, just over a decade later, when I marveled at the fact that we lived in perhaps the only time in human history when population density didn’t equate to horrific spread of disease. How much longer could that particular miracle maintain, I wondered, swapping out the laundry. There were no masks in that load, not yet, but it wouldn’t be long.) 

There are many other things I wonder. Perhaps it’s having a mind overly inclined to narrative that keeps me from a certain level of denial when it comes to considering the future. 

One thing, however, that I know: our education system is held together with duct tape, passion, and hope deferred along with loans. It’s bad at the K-12 level, though at least those institutions are far more inclined to hire full time staff and provide benefits, even if wages are subsistence-level and paid only ten months out of the year. In higher education, however, the system runs on contingent workers, adjuncts. 

Back when I was one, after I’d accrued enough seniority to be largely guaranteed work term after term, if you squinted, you could almost forget that I was second-tier. My students certainly didn’t know if I didn’t tell them. The majority of courses were taught by adjuncts; we held degrees, honors, publication lists, an intense love of teaching, remarkable classroom presence, student praise on evaluations, academic results, and whatever else it was anyone could want. 

But when the system is hell-bent on maximizing output and minimizing costs, when full time, tenured positions only open up upon retirement, despite a population explosion in California over the past fifty years, it’s a numbers game that is likely akin to certain levels of the statewide lottery. 

I left. An opportunity came up, after a couple rounds of hiring processes that didn’t go my way, to live overseas, and I took it. When we came back, I ended up working for an education publisher, snug on a team of other former instructors, salaried, benefited, the works. I missed the gestalt of the classroom; I miss it still. But it was good to be paid. 

I did go back, just once, when my daughter was very young, and the control over my time made that kind of work feasible. And then we moved out of reach of that particular school. It was only in January 2020, that I finally attended a local community college hiring event. I hoped to find a class or two for the summer or fall, just as my daughter started kindergarten.

But community college enrollment tanked with the pandemic. And that may well be all she wrote. I have no doubt that the system will creep along for a bit—duct tape and passion can do a lot, after all—but it’s a dying system all the same, sucking the life off of anyone and everyone who’s within reach. Every once in awhile I check in on the state of things; what I find is usually another article like this one, featuring near-homelessness, or suicide, or bankrupting illness and go fund mes that will only ever cover the interest. 

There is so much to be had. There are so many people ready and willing to build something new. Education in community is invaluable to any sort of sustainable future. If any gods or governments or billionaires are out there listening, this is a problem you could fix, tomorrow, with such a small portion of your budget. Give people a professional home, and watch the world they create. 

I am not a cynic. But I’m also not one to hang out in denial when it doesn't help me get things done. And my optimism in this particular corner of the world is completely rooted in what might come next, out of the ashes. 

I’m dreaming from the sidelines, no skin directly in the game any longer. But I’m dreaming of a world where people simply walk away, let it all crumble, and figure out a new way.

The Hills Are Dry

Coming home to the Bay Area for winter break during college was like stepping from Kansas to Oz. No more black and white of New England winters, or, far worse, dull brown if the snow hadn't yet arrived. Just lush, green hills, buds on the valley oaks biding their time in the wind and rain, muddy trails, and the start of the vernal pools.

This year, all is brown. It's unsettling. The oaks are bare, but their brown silhouettes blend into the sunburnt backdrop that is the hills. It's not how it should be. We aren't like other parts of the country here, not in summer nor in winter. This is supposed to be our time of regeneration. 

I spent time in the Bay Area as a child during the drought of the late eighties, and I know what to do if it's yellow and what to do if it's brown. I'm expecting that this will come back into vogue. I'm expecting a devastating fire season. I'm expecting water rationing and municipal squabbling over what little run off we get this summer.

But on the way back from Sacramento, we spotted something out the car window that at least gives me hope for my favorite, drought-tolerant trees: underneath those valley oaks, Quercus lobata, within the radius of where their bent, spread branches nearly reach the ground, the grass is green. Little green circles, slight, but there, protected and shaded and fed by the moisture the tree can spare. The hills are dry, but the trees are alive.

I've Been Thinking a Lot About Place

I’ve been thinking a lot about place. With my life these days, it's a hard topic to avoid. Right now I commute from one valley to another, straight up the peninsula, through San Francisco, and over the Golden Gate Bridge. I go through at least three microclimate zones, and probably more. The fog descends, then lifts. The scents that come through my cracked windows change—dry, golden grass, eucalyptus, low tide, dense fog, and finally, as I get out of my car, stretch, and take a deep breath, bay trees and coastal oaks.

I’ve been thinking about the city workers strike that happened in Hayward this summer, about the union member on the radio who told the reporter that they all just want to be able to live where they work.

I’ve been thinking about my state, the state that theoretically went from deficit to surplus in the year and change that I was gone, the state where housing prices have skyrocketed, but my friends and former colleagues at community colleges are, for all intents and purposes, losing their benefits, slice by slice. This is not just the voice of a woman who wants a full time teaching position (although I do); this is the voice of a woman who is seriously concerned about the health of her community.

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A Manifesto, Reposted

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.”

From Blue Pastures, by Mary Oliver

My college professor, perhaps my favorite, one who led me to write in such a way that my own writings, unbeknownst to me until far later, dovetailed uncomfortably with her own life, assigned her students this passage from Blue Pastures. Mary Oliver is never a bad way to begin a course on writing, but I can’t help wondering now, ten years later, whether she was intentionally frontloading us, giving us tools and information that would not come to fruition until, aptly, just now.

Let me explain: we were good writers, all of us, in a freshman year non-fiction writing class. We knew how to put together a sentence; we knew how to construct a line that would knock the socks off of our high school English teachers. And this knowledge had brought us to where we were, curled up awkwardly in stiff wooden chairs around an enormous wooden seminar table, deep in the bowels of institutional intellectual history--not far, in fact, from where the brave new psychologists of the 1950s had found that people not unlike us would shock others until the point of near-death if the man in white coat said so. That happened just around the corner, down a flight of stairs, back when the building had been the psych department.

But now it was the English department; the psych people had moved over, appropriately, to the base of Science Hill (always aspiring to be taken seriously by the hard scientists running down towards Commons from the nuclear labs), and we were there, at least twice a week, with our essays printed out and phrases turned and barely tamped-down egos. (The tamping would come, more fully, later on, after the towers crashed down and took the economy with them.) And we sat there, discussing Mary Oliver, as though we knew what we were talking about. My professor read her favorite passages as though the words had a taste to them, and we listened, nodding, professing awe at how she had gotten it right, just right.

Except. We had no fucking clue.

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Noise, Stress, Bombings, and Cats

So this past week was crazy for many people, in many ways, but in our immediate life here in Stockholm, we weren't faced with bombings or explosions of any sort: we just had to make a very last-minute move. I think that, in the end, we had about 48 hours notice that it wasn't going to be temporary. The entire thing was as painless as these things can be, we are now ensconsed in our new place, and despite the minor chaos, everyone's still alive and talking to everyone else.

That said, what I hadn't realized until we got here was how much happier this place would make our two cats. The entire reason for the move was major emergency work on the ancient plumbing in our old building, and for weeks prior to our evacuation, we'd been treated to noise-pollution levels of construction sounds and jackhammering, off and on, from about 7am until 4pm. We humans adjusted as best we could, though it was grating and we both currently work from home, but every morning the cats would freak out anew. 

Being cats, they had no idea that the sound of the wall being torn down in the apartment next door was not an imminent threat. They'd get used to it gradually each day, and then, after a quiet evening, it would begin again. Fast forward to our new place, and despite moving usually being one of their least-favorite things in the world, they are absolutely thrilled. They are relaxed. They are acting normally in a way that I didn't realize hadn't been happening for the past month. And I'm fairly convinced that the eye infection one of them developed just before we moved was completely stress-related. (We are also more relaxed, even though we understood that the construction guys weren't out to attack us with their jackhammers.)

All this to say that watching my cats come back into themselves makes me think of the humans who are actually in a situation where loud noises are not only really aggrivating but actually indicative of something life threatening--Syria, Iraq, and, this past week, Boston. I think of children growing up in those circumstances, with no knowledge of what it means to sit quietly at home, knowing you are safe. I think of what it must be doing to their bodies and minds, and I hope that we can find a way to give them that space, and soon.