An Ode to My Daemons
Really, a quest for freedom from deadly obsequious Daemons everywhere
I’m shifting gears back to my professional life and times as a fool, whether I wanted to be one or not. This is a not-so-fictitious letter to a now former boss who remains the worst kind of boss anywhere, in academia, in the nonprofit world, or in government (I have experience with all three, by the way). I worked under this dude at one of my teaching spots for nearly ten years, but as an adjunct, especially before mid-2018, I needed the money. But even fools get tired of swallowing shit semester after semester. He was a boss so HNIC the only analogy worth pursuing for this post is Marisa Coulter’s golden monkey Daemon from the HBO series His Dark Materials (may that series rest in peace).
April 8, 2023
My Dear Daemon:
It is with the sincerest heart that I sever myself from you. A decade of working with and under you has left my spirit bruised, my mind more muddled, and my blood vessels ever more constricted. My love for educating others at this institution has long disappeared. Like a blood-sucking leech, you have helped me lose so much enthusiasm for educating that the only way you could have been more helpful would have been to poison my mind with a little arsenic every day for ten years. It’s only because I teach in other places and spaces that I haven’t abandoned this world completely.
You know how they say, “It’s not me. It’s you?” It truly applies to you, dear sir. To call you a micromanager would be demeaning to micromanagers. No, Daemon, you have been a nanomanager, blowing up minor issues and non-issues into near-epic crises over and over again. A minor complaint from a student turned into a “You Are Demeaning to Your Students'' email. A group of three students approaching you about firing me a few years later became an hour-long telephone call about how to use polite and indirect language as part of your lesson in how not to antagonize students. “Students are our clients,” you would say, as if my job was a mere receptionist or customer service rep.
In meeting after meeting, you would hold your reputation as a student whisperer over me and our colleagues. As if teaching a handful of grad students at a social work school in an Ivy League institution in Philadelphia is the same as teaching undergraduates whose level of skill, commitment, and patience for learning varied from class to class and semester to semester at this mostly online public university. When you mentioned flexibility, I envisioned you contorting your torso and sticking your own head up your own ass. Most of us spirits are not that flexible. Your blues ain’t like mine applies here.
You were a petty Daemon. You began your time with me blocking my attempts to advance in this job. My previous Daemon had assigned me the senior thesis course ten years earlier, just before you came on board. You took it away, citing reasons that made sense at the time. But you hadn’t disclosed the fact that the other educator wanted out. You hadn’t taken into account my own efforts in helping to put the course together. You decided a month into being a Daemon to be a Daemon that only the cruelest of spirits would want. A capricious dragon to educators, an obsequious toad with the other Daemons at our school.
When I finally decided to apply for a promotion seven years ago, you nixed the idea, saying I should postpone my application another year. My 4.1 evaluation score average out of a possible 5 wasn’t high enough, based on your one online “class visit,” a visit without my knowledge or approval. At that point, I had been an educator at this school for more than eight years. At that point, I knew I had a petty Daemon in my corner, ready to lash out and bite at any moment. At that point, I knew that me and the other spirits educating students stood no chance. You as Daemon would not protect us as the other blue-monkey Daemons attacked us, as spirits and as educators.
You were an arbitrary Daemon. You always sided with students, forcing me to bring overwhelming evidence of plagiarism to bear on those who found ways to cheat on assignments. Even then, you were a much better Daemon to them than you ever were to me. One student four years ago, claiming low-English proficiency, got away with plagiarizing for an entire course because of you, Daemon. This student was from an Anglophone country, meaning English is one of their official languages. Your rulings as Daemon forced me to regrade students who cheated, who regularly broke rules, who often had no respect for me as an educator or the process of educating. Your refusal to make difficult decisions as Daemon always made me the bad guy. All of this took away my ability to focus on the legions of students who were willing to learn and to seek help while learning.
My last exchange with you of any consequence was two years ago. That was when you finally reassigned me the senior thesis course. It had gone through two or three other educators between 2013 and 2021. All had the ability to say no to students wanting to take an incomplete in the course, because it is the capstone for history majors prior to graduating from this fetid institution full of Daemons like you. But of course not me. While making arrangements with a student to assure they completed the course instead of granting their I-grade request, you parachuted into the middle of my educator role and threatened to take the student out of my course and “grade her [your]self.” If a 18-wheeler had rolled into your home at 80 miles-an-hour and smashed into you while impaling you from ass to mouth with a tungsten pole, it wouldn’t have been good enough — at least not without it happening over and over again.
You have become the anti-racism and African American history Daemon at our Maryland institution. You, this same Daemon who did not know of any books on how white ethnics like Jews and Irish and Italians took generations to become white-as-WASPs in the US context as of nine years ago, an expert? The only thing you have ever been an expert on is covering your ass while passing on bad news in the most hurtful of ways.
You, Daemon, are everything I despise about Head-Negroes-In-Charge. You demean while accusing others of being demeaning. You abuse those you see as less-than while ingratiating other Daemons you believe hold greater powers. You fake-educate in order to have others see you as an expert when your only expertise is abuse and self-preservation. It is bad enough that all humans have to fight to live above their own personal Daemons, sometimes our whole lives. It is Daemons like you who make this life a living hell. I can only hope that you are the last Daemon I sever in my life. I can only hope that you vanish into the ether that you deserve.
Sincerely,
An Actual Educator