In Memoriam
Letting go of all elitist pretenses for a better writer's experience
It has been 13 months since I submitted the last of my grades at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore Only six weeks have passed since I learned that due to low enrollment, I will no longer be professoring at American University in DC. Maybe if I were still in my 40s or if I was the primary breadwinner or if my college-attending son was still in kindergarten instead of 12-15 months away from finishing his BS in Psychology, I would be disillusioned and devastated.
But I haven’t been, not at all. I do miss the rhythm that comes with teaching in the fall, the winter/spring, and (mostly) in the summer (because I have been part-time contingent for most of my time teaching in higher education), with holiday breaks, spring breaks, and deep summers to recover. But I don’t miss class preparations, constant grading, losing my weekends, restraining myself while students lose their shit over a grade or over my mere presence as a tall and old-ish Black man while in class. I definitely don’t miss the sneers and whispers of duplicitous colleagues whose radical and liberal ideals stop as soon as they move their hands away from a keyboard to make hiring and promotion decisions.
And while I do miss the “Eureka!” moments of the classroom and watching students grow as young adult humans and even blossom into the people this world really needs, those moments had been fewer and further in between over the past four years. One of the few benefits of doing other work (including looking for other work while writing for Al Jazeera) outside of higher education is the time to think about what I really want. I never wanted to teach survey-level history courses full-time or part-time as the bulk of my higher education instructor experiences. Heck, if the Great Recession of 2008 doesn’t happen, I’m happily consulting, writing, and teaching maybe three seminar and graduate education classes a year from my late-30s to right now. Instead, especially from 2009 through this past year, I have taught as many as nine classes in a calendar year with three universities. My average over that time? Seven classes a year, making at most about the equivalent of my income with my first full-time nonprofit job in DC back in 1999 and 2000, and just as overworked.
No, I don’t miss the not-so-subtle racism, ageism, ableism, and elitism I faced every time I stepped on these campuses, into classrooms, and logged into virtual classrooms. So, I say good riddance to these experiences. May they burn and spaghettify in the most supermassive black hole in the universe!
Yes, I still want to teach, though. After all, I am still an educator. I just don’t want to teach the classes the full-time folk would rather dump on me than teach themselves. I want the same pay for the same work, and if I do teach more than six courses in a year, to be paid well for those, too. I want the higher level courses, the courses for majors, the grad level courses, too. And yes, I wanna a pony, and a banana split with a cherry on top with no irritable bowel syndrome repercussions, and gooey chocolate chip with walnut cookies from The Galleria Mall (which no longer exists) in White Plains, New York from 1987, too!
Short of that near-ideal future teaching job, I have settled for this. I am not bound to seeing the world through the eyes of narrow-minded PhD-ed elitists. I decided years ago to write for larger audiences for money, which doesn’t pay all the bills, but it does pay some. My hybrid-published first book (Fear of a “Black” America — which did well at 1,200 copies sold between August 2004 and January 2007) and my self-published memoir (Boy @ The Window — which definitely did not) I put out into the world with reluctance. “It’s too bad you didn’t put this out with a traditional publisher,” a friend of a friend said to me about Fear of a “Black” America back in December 2004. “It’s really good,” he added.
As I put Spinning Sage’s Gold out into the world, I know one thing for certain. I will hear from the elitist and “soulless minions of orthodoxy,” “You should’ve done…” one of 151,279 things that they themselves never had to do to publish a book or derive significant income. I suppose I could tell ‘em, “Go f—k yourself!” (although I will probably take the late Patrick Swayze’s character Dalton’s high road from Road House — “Opinions vary” — and call it). But not one of these numbskulls has ever helped me pay my bills, feed my kid, taken me on vacation, or generally created a sense of belonging for me on any of my previous campuses.
So I am not putting my third book out there with reluctance or trepidation. I feel pretty good about where the book is, and where I am with it. I am putting it out there to start a conversation about where we are, where we are headed, and one possible way of steering through the shitshow of the 21st century that might lead us into a better, Post-Western world. It would be great if academia came along for the ride. But I have no expectations that many of the folks in academia I know will. And that’s too bad — for them, not for me. I’m tired of being stuck in higher education’s muck anyway. For those in academia who don’t understand and aren’t rooting for me, I’ll add you to my thoughts and prayers.