Cheryl B.

I never met Cheryl B., but I really wish I had.

I first read about her on Sinclair Sexsmith’s blog (the two of them created Sideshow: The Queer Literary Carnival together).She was a New York poet and performer who in November 2010 was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She chronicled her daily life in the wonderfully titled WTF Cancer Diaries blog–everything from having a spinal tap to chic outfits for cancer patients to hosting a head-shaving ritual in her apartment.

Reading her blog, I alternately laughed and cringed. What she wrote about sounded so painful and frightening, but she was so damn funny when she was writing about it. And she was right–she looked fierce with a shaved head.

Reading her blog, you knew she was going to be fine. Cancer, as scary as it sounded, would surely be just a blip on the radar.

Sadly, that wasn’t to be. Cheryl B. died on June 18. She was thirty-eight.

Other people have written some truly moving tributes to her: Anne Elliot and Kathleen Warnock, to name two. The video above shows Cheryl reading several poems–the first one, Reasons to Stop, is particularly awesome.

Wish I could have known you, Cheryl B.

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Update 4/8: Another Big One

A large quake, registering around magnitude 6 in Sendai, struck off the coast of northeastern Japan at around 11:30 last night. Got me out of bed and under my door to ride out the shaking, but thankfully it was pretty brief. Everything’s fine here in Tokyo, though the northeast is reporting power outages and some injuries and fires. All tsunami warnings have been lifted, and there is no reported damage to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi or other nuclear power plants.

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Yes, But…

I find myself getting testier and testier over the portrayal of Julian Assange in the media, and in particular the muddy, confused reporting of what he’s actually charged with (there is no such thing as “sex by surprise,” and a broken condom wasn’t the issue).  So here’s a quick rundown of what I would say in response to some recent statements that I find particularly irksome.

1. “The pursuit of Assange based on these rape charges is politically motivated.”  Yes, but…that doesn’t mean the charges themselves aren’t legitimate.  The women in question made their accusations in August–they didn’t rush to the police immediately before / after the WikiLeaks dump.  Under Swedish law, their charges are substantial–that Assange had sex with one woman while she was unconscious, and that he held one woman’s arms down and raped her after she told him “no.”  While I agree with Naomi Wolf that Interpol’s aggressive pursuit of Assange is “an insult to rape victims everywhere” (every rape case should get this much attention, not just the ones that involve well-known figures), I also think Wolf’s initial statement claiming that Assange had been arrested by the “dating police” was damned offensive.

So can we all agree that, even though the pursuit of Assange is politically motivated, we shouldn’t immediately assume that his accusers made it all up?

2. “We should do everything in our power to protect Julian Assange.”  Uh, no.  I applaud what Assange and Wikileaks have done.  We need more transparency.  We need people who are willing to stand up and expose governmental hypocrisy and outright lying.  But if the man’s accused of rape–and again, the accusations are legitimate, even if the pursuit is politically motivated–then he needs to stand trial.  Isn’t it possible to applaud and respect what WikiLeaks stands for without raising up Assange as some kind of saint?

Of course Assange is innocent until proven guilty.  I understand why anyone would be quick to condemn or dismiss efforts to prosecute him for anything.  He’s been vilified by politicians all across the political spectrum for the wrong reasons–for essentially allowing free access to information, as damaging as that information might be.  But in their quick dismissal of the charges against him as “hooey,” people like Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore are unwittingly contributing to a very powerful culture of victim-blaming and rape apology.  Regardless of who is accused or what the political circumstances are, every accuser has the right to be heard, and every accusation of rape should be given the serious consideration that it deserves.

The Assange case does not have to be an either-or situation.  We can stand up for the right to government transparency and take rape accusations seriously at the same time.  All the voices surrounding this case deserve a chance to be heard, especially when the voices that bring accusations of rape are so often dismissed or silenced.

 

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/wolf-n1.1.1.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121006996.html

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/12/michael-moore-doubles-down-on-rape.html

 

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Hello and welcome!

I seem to be getting a lot more visitors as a result of posting that So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities video, so welcome!  If you’re interested in more videos or posts of a similar sort, click on my “Grad Life” link.  You’ll also find similar stories and videos by clicking on the “Post Academic” link in the “Blogroll” section.  And if you have a minute, check out my random forays into spice rack puppetry by clicking on “Kameari Bookshelf,” also in the “Blogroll” section.

That PhD video has had a pretty profound effect on me, actually–more on that later.

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Random Round-Up

I seem to be spending a great deal of time online these days.  It starts out as just a ten-minute break from reading and writing, but unfortunately those breaks often get extended a little too long.  I heard recently about some software prototype that allows you to shut down your internet for a period of several hours at a time–if they could come up with a type that would allow me access ONLY to research-related websites, I would so buy it.

Anyway, to convince myself that all that surfing wasn’t a complete waste of time, here are some of the cooler videos and articles I’ve come across recently.

Jay Smooth being his usual brilliant self on Christine O’Donnell and a little phenomenon called “Gotnosensitive”:

Erin Gibson seems to be hitting her stride with Infomania’s “Modern Lady” segment (which replaced Sarah Haskins’ “Target Women”). Two recent videos poke fun at media coverage of female supreme court justices and Katie Perry’s boobs.

On a less humorous note, Kate Harding’s outraged response to the recent gay teen suicides was right on, and Liu Xiaobo’s words for his jailers and his wife left me pretty speechless.

Back to work…

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The Size of Memory

My paternal grandmother died at around 3 in the morning on Sunday, August 8.  She was ninety-two and had been mostly immobile and non-verbal for months.  There was sadness in her death, but I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t also a sense of relief.

I would also be lying if I claimed that I’d always been close to her.  In the last ten years we had seen each other once a year at most.  In the last five years her communication abilities had declined rapidly, and she had lost most of her short-term memory.  She remembered my name, but would often forget exactly how we were related.  At one point she tried to set me up on a date with my own father and / or uncles, going on and on about how handsome and successful they were.  I suppose some people might have found this tragic, but I just thought it was funny—and knowing how proud she was of her sons, I was more than a little flattered.   

My most vivid memories of her are, naturally, from my early childhood.  I remember endless hours spent playing in a house full of boxes of many-colored buttons, of fabric scraps that became clumsily-made clothes, of books with pictures of semi-precious stones that my sister and I never tired of looking at, pronouncing each exotic word carefully before we could read the letters ourselves.  My grandmother was there as we turned the living room coffee table into a fort of bedsheets and books.  She sent us to the bath with a wonderful pile of saucepans and metal kitchen utensils to bang and splash with.  She cooked crisp brown bread covered in a mix of butter, cinnamon and pecans, a breakfast I have always wanted to recreate but have never tried to, for fear that it would simply never measure up to my memories.  She tucked us into bed in the White Room, the reverently named guestroom where the curtains, walls, and duvet covers were gleaming white. 

Much of her life was a mystery to me until she was dying.  I never knew that she had three sisters and a brother and grew up poor in Austin.  I never knew that the sisters all made a pact that they wouldn’t marry and would instead go to business college to get jobs to support the family and take care of their ailing mother, and that one of them would become an outcast when she broke the pact and moved away. 

Going through my grandmother’s small pile of clothes, photos, and a large collection of classic movies, I found an unopened letter mailed to her in July 2009 from that outcast sister.  It was written with a typewriter, in short sentences.  “I have been wanting to have a long visit with you.  We had some hard times.  There was no money and there was the war.  I know it was hard for you when I left and you had to take care of mother.  I know it was hard because Gene (my grandfather) had a breathing problem and Favian had a drinking problem.  He died at 60 because of it.

“I live in a nursing home now.  There is nothing much to do.  I hope you have a TV.  That helps.”

 The letter ended with an address and a request to write.  I wondered if my grandmother had by then been too disoriented to open her mail, or if she had purposefully ignored it.  Part of me felt bad for opening it myself, but it seemed like the sort of letter that needed to be read.

I helped my father write the obituary, learning that it’s impossible to write obituaries without sounding clichéd, but that clichés can still have meaning. 

Though my grandmother spent the last years of her life in an assisted living facility, my father and uncles were there regularly to feed her, chat with her, and move her back and forth from her bed to the dining room.  One night I watched as they took her back to her room, undressed her, put her in her nightgown, picked her up like a small child, and covered her with a blanket.  These small acts, done repeatedly as she grew frailer and frailer and more ghost-like, taught me a lot about who they were. 

At the end of her life it amazed me that someone who had filled my childhood with her bigness could have become so small, her tiny body barely filling a third of the equally small bed where she slept.  But of course she could never really become small.    In memory she would always be a presence beyond the human, everything she touched somehow transformed from the mundane to the sublime.  Death could not reduce her.

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Alternative Acacemic Careers: Publishing

This is the fourth and final in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable organized by my university on May 10, 2010. 

Our fourth speaker, “Mary,” came to editing and publishing like a lot of people–she fell into it.  The editing / publishing world does seem to be a fallback plan for a lot of academics, though I’ve known a few who worked in publishing for several years before deciding to go back to grad school for a humanities PhD.  While the academic publishing industry (humanities-focused publishing, that is) is struggling along with the rest of academia, library and museum publishing is, according to Mary, very much alive and hiring. 

Mary emphasized the fact that there are plenty of specialized skills required for publishing–strong writing skills, experience with graphic design, and an artistic eye for layout and formatting of full-color books (this mostly for the museum publishing world).  Strong writing skills, in particular, are rarer than you might think, and this is one skill set that most humanities grad students definitely have.

For those interested in publishing / editing, Mary had a few suggestions:

1. Take a job with any organization you’re interested in where some kind of editing is taking place–chances are they’ll ask you to do some editing at some point and you can start to gain experience.  If you have experience teaching composition this will look particularly good to a prospective employer.

2. Work with one of your professors who is about to publish something.  Proofread, edit, and then the professor can recommend you to their publisher–publishers are more likely to work with editors who come with a professorial recommendation.

3. Take a course in graphic design–most community colleges offer them. 

4. Don’t email your resumes or writing samples.  Layout is important, and snail mail will showcase your skills in this area much more effectively. 

Several people in the audience mentioned publishing workshops that take place all over the country.  One that came highly recommended was The Publishing Institute, a 6-week course at the University of Denver.  With these courses it isn’t necessarily what you learn but who you meet–a lot of people make valuable contacts that can help them get a foot in the door.  As always, network and call everyone you know. 

All in all, this roundtable discussion was incredibly productive, and while the facts were grim I feel like most of the participants left feeling a lot less helpless and a lot more motivated to take charge of their post-graduate school futures.  There’s a follow-up discussion in the works, this time to talk about writing a non-academic resume.  Until then I’ll probably be writing about new recipes for chili as I enjoy my brief period of post-quals inactivity.

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Alternative Academic Careers: The Film Industry

This is the third in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Literature and Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable discussion organized by a professor in my university’s English department.

Our third speaker–we’ll call her Alice, this probably isn’t sensitive enough material to hide everyone’s names, but you never know–responded to a dismal academic job market in the early 1990s by deciding to work in the film industry.  How she got to where she is now made for a very entertaining story.

In the early 1990s, having earned a PhD in English literature, Alice watched as most of her colleagues settled for adjunct jobs with bad pay and no benefits.  From the beginning she decided that she wasn’t up for that and did a few temp jobs, traveled around the world for the better part of a year, and finally decided that her particular skill set might serve her well in the film industry.  I think this was a surprise to a lot of people in the audience.  Living in Los Angeles you’re surrounded by the film industry–it seems like every other person I meet is involved with it in *some* way–but as a literature grad student I never thought of trying to get a job in the film world.  The best I thought I could hope for would be a PA (production assistant)  job, that most dreaded of ”gopher” positions where you run around doing every kind of favor imaginable for impossibly demanding people for very little money, in the hopes that one day you’ll be behind the camera.  Needless to say, that sounded a lot worse than adjuncting (though the pay might be the same in some cases).  Judging by Alice’s story, though, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

She started by scouring the industry publications for anything she could find and called or wrote to every single one.  She had three miserable short-term jobs, one of which involved her going around to various Disney creative people’s offices and checking to make sure repairs had been done on their offices.  Then she got a job as an assistant for a woman who told her up front that she really didn’t need much help, giving Alice the time to sit on the computer for most of the day working on her own writing and research.  After a while, the woman noticed that she loved to write and research, and mentioned that she needed someone to create an extensive film archive.  This led to a $500,000 grant to create the archive and a much longer-term job.  Hearing of her research skills, a director who was working on a movie called Anaconda said that he needed someone to do a lot of digging for him–he wanted his giant, CGI, man-eating snake to look as accurate as possible.  And so Alice found herself interviewing scientists and closely examining a variety of snakes, inside and out.  Then the folks working on Minority Report said they wanted to make the future “really look like the future,” so she signed on and interviewed architects and engineers to determine exactly what the world might look like a few hundred years from now.  And now she does this sort of thing full-time, makes enough money to live very comfortably, has time to raise her child and be involved in her community, and doesn’t feel overwhelmed by her workload. 

Here are the main points I got out of Alice’s story:

1. As a PhD, you need to learn how to translate your grad student skills into skills that the rest of the world can understand.  Telling a prospective employer that you’ve just earned a PhD in literature may get you a blank stare, but if you tell them you’re proficient with PowerPoint, have a lot of experience with public speaking, have great editing skills, know your way around various research-related tools, and are an excellent writer, you’re a lot more likely to get their attention.  Humanities PhD’s are prone to write off their degrees as having little ”real world” value, and employers are too, but it doesn’t have to be that way–it’s all about re-packaging your skills.  Most universities have a career center that will be more than happy to help you with this.  

2. A huge portion of the film industry is devoted to research, and if you’ve spent more than a year or two in grad school, you’re good at that.  There’s a whole subsection of the film world called “rights research,” with endless resources devoted just to figuring out whether a company has the right to re-make a certain film, or use a particular song.  Archivist jobs are also plentiful.  The best part is that you get paid to do something that you (hopefully) love–spend time in libraries and with search engines, learning tons of new things and teaching what you’ve learned to others.  Sure, your efforts might go toward goofy efforts like Anaconda, but if you’re being paid well, using your skills, and doing something different and new every day, it hardly seems like a bad gig.  Alice commented that her job also leaves her enough time to occasionally write on her own or teach writing at local colleges. 

3. The film industry isn’t 100% who you know, it’s also about what you have to offer.  If you’ve got a particular skill set that’s in demand, you’ll be able to find work.  The point about retaining valuable employees came up yet again–if you can make yourself indispensable, the people who are paying you will find a way to keep you around.  (Sadly, the one place that this doesn’t seem to be true is in academia–Alice mentioned that several of her colleagues who got one-, two-, or three-year contract teaching jobs were gently shown the door when their contract was up, even though there might have been hints that they could stay on longer. ) Who you know is, of course, still important–network, network, network.  Call anyone you know with even the most remote connections to see if they can help you get your foot in the door.  I hate networking–does anyone actually like it?–but sometimes it’s just about putting a name to a face and giving people a positive first impression.  It’s less stressful to hire someone you know, even if you only know their name and face. 

The bottom line for me is that we’ve all got to start re-defining “success” in the context of post-PhD jobs.  As I move closer to completing my degree I had never imagined that doing research for movies might be a job option, but why not, if it’s a job you’re happy with and pays a decent wage?  Alice seemed to be one of the happiest people on the panel, and I have a feeling it was at least partially because she was willing to look for jobs in the unlikeliest of places.

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Alternative Academic Careers: Private High School Teaching

This is the second in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Literature and Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable discussion organized by a professor in my university’s English department. 

Skipping around a bit, the third speaker (we’ll call him Mark) earned a PhD in English literature and has been teaching in private high schools ever since.  He came to his career somewhat by accident–having just entered the job market, he heard through a friend that a rather progressive high school in Berkeley needed someone to teach an intensive, one-week course.  Freshmen and sophomores would read Joyce’s Ulysses in a single week–seven hours a day, page by page, with accompanying activities and discussions (everyone around me murmured that this sounded like a very cool idea).  Initially Mark said no, but the pay was excellent, and so he went for it.  He described it as one of the most inspiring experiences he’d ever had with education–getting up every morning very early, taking the BART to the school, and feeling genuinely excited to go to work (a lot more excited than he’d been feeling about his research). The approach was straightforward: read the book and talk about it, without bringing in a huge amount of literary analysis or outside criticism.  The students were hard workers, very bright, and everyone got a lot out of the experience. 

The school liked Mark and hired him to teach English (more on the “We like you so we’ll find some way to keep you around” tendency later).  While he initially saw high school teaching as a temporary gig on his way to a tenure-track professorship, ultimately he found the work so rewarding (and the money so good) that he stuck with high school teaching and never looked back.  For him, the only real downside is the loss of an intellectual edge–the focus is very much on helping the students to “experience” literature, with few opportunities to really analyze literature at the PhD level.  There’s also no real opportunity to write or do research–you get summers off, but most people spend them refueling and planning next year’s classes.  For Mark, though, the gains far outweigh the losses.  You get to be engaged with literature on a regular basis, you’re in an environment where teaching is highly valued, you have wonderful colleagues, the pay and the benefits are excellent, and you can essentially teach your dissertation if you like (you’ve got a lot more creative control over what your students read than you would have as an adjunct or even a tenured professor).

As someone who got a secondary teaching certificate in 2000 and spent a truly horrible semester trying to student-teach in a public school but feeling much more like a bouncer / security guard, I really responded to Mark’s story.  I’ve spent the last ten years trying not to feel guilty about abandoning the noble profession of public school teaching because I just couldn’t bear the frustration, the meager pay, the long hours, and the seeming impossibility of having any impact in a class of forty students, many of whom have serious behavior problems.  The idea that I could teach high school students who actually wanted to learn, who even wanted to learn about literature, sounded amazing. 

I was curious, though, about the public-vs.-private issue.  Mark admitted that he and almost all of his colleagues dealt on a daily basis with feelings of guilt that they weren’t using their skills in the public school system, that they were teaching only the wealthiest kids in the nation. But they just couldn’t bear the thought of working in public schools, particularly California public schools.  One of Mark’s colleagues justified it this way–they might be teaching the elite, but they’re teaching the people who will likely be future senators and CEO’s, and they’re doing their best to make sure those people have a deep appreciation for the humanities.  Some of them also volunteer in the public school system, where they feel they can have more of an impact than they could as full-time teachers.  If I ended up teaching at a ritzy public high school I’m sure I’d wrestle with guilt on a regular basis, but damn, it sure sounds appealing. 

For those interested in private high school teaching, Mark recommends checking out high schools in the area that you want to live in.  Introduce yourself to administrators, ask to observe classes, and stay in touch.  Private high schools love to hire PhD’s whenever they can–with such high tuition costs, it looks really good to prospective parents to have PhD’s teaching their children.  Most private high schools don’t require that you have an official secondary teaching certificate, the most important thing is that you’re passionate about your subject matter and can connect well with kids.  With so many teachers and people moving / going on maternity leave on a regular basis, positions are available almost every semester.  Unlike adjunct teaching, high school teaching doesn’t necessarily make it impossible for you to land a tenure-track professorship–several of Mark’s colleagues taught for a year or two at a high school and are now professors (I’d imagine that if you do it for more than a few years, though, you’re limiting your options in the tenure-track market). 

One interesting fact that came up several times during the discussion was the notion of retaining valuable employees.  The three representatives of alternative careers–publishing, film industry, and high school teaching–said pretty much the same thing: if they like you, and if you find a way to make yourself indispensable, they’ll find a way to keep you on.  In Mark’s experience, this definitely seemed to be true of high schools–even though he was initially hired for only a week, the school found a way to retain him because they valued his abilities.  The same cannot be said for the university, where a one-year contract is usually just that–a one-year contract.  The previous speaker, John, urged participants not to buy into the myth that universities will find a way to keep you after your contract is up because they “like” you.  They may like you, but when your contract’s up it’s up, and it’s rare that a university will go out of its way to create a whole new position for you.  This, for me, was yet another appealing aspect of high school teaching: the idea of being appreciated for your skills to the point where an institution would actually put forth effort to keep you around.

Next post: working in the film industry (or how a lit PhD can lead you to researching snake accuracy for Anaconda)

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Alternative Academic Careers: The Ethics of Adjunct Teaching

This will be the first in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Literature and Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable discussion organized by a professor in my university’s English department.  The two-hour session was some of the most productive conversation I’ve ever taken part in, and while there was a lot of very grim information there were also inspiring and funny stories, as well as practical advice on how to make the most of your post-PhD existence.  It was standing room only, which I think says a lot about where many grad students’ minds are these days.

The first speaker (we’ll call him John, I try to keep this blog quasi-anonymous since sensitive subjects get discussed) had been an adjunct professor at a variety of universities for about twenty years.  His comments were by far the most grim, though laced with a lot of sarcastic humor and advice on not letting the system beat you into the ground (when I talked to him one-on-one afterward he also revealed himself to be very passionate about Japanese films).  The first thing he told us was that the “death of tenure” problem is not going to go away, and that if anything the number of adjunct positions (currently 60% nationwide) is only going to increase.  For those not in the know, being an adjunct professor can essentially mean doing the same job as a tenured professor, but having no health or retirement insurance, no job security beyond a given semester, no office, no computer, and being paid a wage that often requires you to get a second job.  I’ll just list some of John’s main points here:

1. In the past decade or so the average salary of the tenured professor has increased, but the number of tenured *positions* has dramatically *decreased.*

2. Public school teachers, city bus drivers, and prison guards make more money than adjunct professors.

3. Academic freedom is very limited as an adjunct, and benefits are rare.

4. As an adjunct you are judged by your teaching abilities, but you are also sent the message that teaching isn’t really valued, and in focusing more on teaching than on research you are deemed “less serious” by the academic community.

5. Myths of adjunct teaching include the idea that if you stay at a university long enough as an adjunct you will eventually be hired for a tenured position, when in fact the opposite is true–the longer you stay at a university as an adjunct, the less likely you are to get a tenured position.  John argued that there’s a 3-5 year adjunct “window”–teaching as an adjunct for any longer than that effectively damns any chances you have of landing a tenure-track job.  Applications are removed from the pile if the candidate is deemed a “generalist” (i.e. someone who’s been teaching a variety of subjects as an adjunct for several years) or “not serious enough about their career” (again, an adjunct).

6. Succeeding as an adjunct–managing to teach all your classes well on a meager salary with no benefits and limited access to campus resources–sends the message to universities that tenured benefits are unnecessary.

7. Adjuncts are almost never “fired”–they’re simply told that there isn’t enough money in the budget to hire them for the next semester (which is sometimes true, sometimes not).  Not being fired means no severance package.

8. Bottom line: don’t adjunct while you’re ABD unless you’re able to teach only one or two courses related to your dissertation, don’t adjunct for more than a year or two unless you want to be labeled a “generalist,” find out what course credits you need to teach high school so that you have a back-up plan, and get familiar with new technologies and online learning.  And urge the MLA and the AAUP to start fighting for the rights of adjuncts.

One woman in the audience who had worked as an adjunct for several years made an impassioned plea–don’t adjunct, period.  You’ll be exploited, you’ll ruin your chances of a secure academic career, and you’ll contribute to an exploitative system.

A question was asked about unions, and John responded that the AAUP recently made the decision only to represent the interests of tenured professors, while the MLA still hasn’t done much to address the needs of adjuncts.  The against-adjuncting woman said simply that the AAUP sucks.  Everyone was urged to make their voices heard when it comes to adjunct rights, and it was stressed that there is a real need for a national or international organization specifically for adjuncts, though organizing adjuncts has been very difficult in the past.

My reaction to all of this was to seriously re-think my position on adjunct teaching.  John admits that his views are simply his views, and there are plenty of people in the adjunct world who might think differently, but his experience seems to reflect a lot of what I’ve heard from the adjuncts I know.  I would never condemn anyone for taking an adjunct job, especially someone who loves to teach and sees that job as the only way to do it.  But the ethical implications are hard to escape.  By applying for adjunct positions, particularly long-term adjunct positions, we are essentially sending the message that it’s acceptable to pay skilled workers unskilled wages.  We are contributing to a system that does not value teaching or the rights of the teacher.  Some might throw up their hands and say that the system is what it is, it’s not going to change, and we should be grateful just to have jobs.  But I have to believe that focused resistance can have *some* impact.  That if enough adjuncts or potential adjuncts stood up and demanded a living wage, benefits, and the same job security that even those without a college diploma can reasonably demand, we might begin to see some change.  At some point the university has to realize that skilled teachers are not commodities that can be discarded at a moment’s notice, and they won’t realize it until we demand not to be treated as such.

Next post: The benefits of teaching in private high schools.

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