On Feeling Like a Fool and Dying Departments
Always trust your the dread in your gut and the splinter in your mind, especially in history departments
If I am truly honest with myself, in those pre-dawn five o’clock moments when I have the choice between going back to sleep, staying up to write or workout, or solving a New York Times crossword puzzle while scrolling through my six social media feeds, I know one thing for certain. I know my own mind and spirit, even if I don’t fully get the why behind what I’m thinking or feeling.
I have felt ill at ease since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. I knew that it would bring out the worst in so many, no matter how many feel-good stories people would put up on Facebook and Twitter, no matter how people began this pandemic with “we’re all in this together” and pitch in and put “Black Lives Matter” signs on their lawns and wear masks little better than a cloth bandana. Only to give up on mitigation and give in to the social and financial pressures of “getting back to normal,” without a moment to mourn loss or to account for millions still chronically ill from an ever-mutating pathogen. I felt it beyond my bones the leaders of the US and the Western world, with all their addiction to money and capitalism and exploiting our lives, that they wouldn’t do right by us regular folk.
As it turned out, they unveiled themselves as the real-life wizards of this dystopian Oz, actually worse than any of us could’ve predicted, as lethally depraved and craven money-grubbing muthafuckas. It was disappointing beyond measure, and created an anger in me that still hasn’t dissipated. Even as I have finally stopped wearing masks outdoors in most sparsely populated settings in the past two months.
The same is true of my time at Loyola University Maryland. A lesser-than university in Baltimore off North Charles Street, Cold Spring Lane, and the college drive known as York Road (a connector between Loyola, Towson, Goucher, and Morgan State), a school less than one mile north of Johns Hopkins. After a year of in-person pandemic teaching at American University two years ago, I applied for my current job, interviewed for my position as Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in African American History, and was offered the job, all in the span of ten days.
I felt trepidation when the search committee chair (and now Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola) left the message that Wednesday, May 11, 2022. I felt it in my gut and in my bones this wouldn’t be the right job for me. I knew in my head there was more to this offer than a genuine interest in having me come in to teach at a lesser-known university in the greater DMV. I said as much to my other half: “I think there’s something fishy about this offer. No one calls to offer a teaching job two days after a 35-minute interview.”
It turned out I was right, although it would take seven months from the time I said yes to the job offer for me to find out how right I was about how low-down people can be. Before all that, I found out the details. I would be teaching on a 4/4 Fall-Spring schedule, at the truly paltry salary of $46,600 for one year. Sadly, it was still the most I’d ever been offered to teach, and after a year of dealing with American’s union-busting administrators, much better than being stuck at $4,425 per course as an adjunct until my son’s theoretical kids would reach middle age. But what made this offer even more terrible was that my course times were already set for Tuesday and Thursdays, with 75-minute classes at 9:25 am, 10:50 am, 1:40 pm, and 3:05 pm. I was teaching on a high school schedule with a salary easily $15,000 to $20,000 less than what I could make at Howard, American, really, almost any four-year institution on this full-time schedule. Not to mention, as a middle school or high school teacher pretty much anywhere between Arlington County, Virginia and the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.
I became concerned as May turned into June and then June into July. It’s not like I never have any qualms about a job. Really, I have ALWAYS felt some sense of dread about every job I have ever had, even when I worked for my father under the table in New York when I was 14 and 15 years old. (Well, except for freelance writing and consulting — those haven’t been just jobs, they’ve been part of my calling.) Just not this deep, abiding dread that came with my yes to Loyola. I met my soon-to-be department chair, along with the guy who hired me. Their indifference toward me outside a student union building that served half-assed Starbucks didn’t make me feel any better about my decision to work at Loyola.
But I convinced myself anyway. University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) had just accepted our son for college, and he for once seemed enthusiastic about getting out from under us and into college life. We wanted to move into a bigger house, especially as we had quickly outgrown our two-bedroom townhome in Silver Spring. And after four years of 120-percent of full-time teaching across two universities, I needed the mental break of only working one job.
Plus, I had the inside scoop on Loyola from a friend of mine from graduate school during my University of Pittsburgh years. At least I thought I did. She had attended Loyola as an undergrad and thought the place wonderful. Of course I should have taken her opinion with a grain of salt, a 15-year-old just a couple of years removed from Cameroon, whose only other American experience before Loyola and Baltimore was Pittsburgh, an uneventful place as slow as molasses in the wintertime. She graduated at 19. I don’t think she was old enough to understand how stifling an undergraduate experience can be when your choice of course meeting dates and times and actual courses in the offing are limited.
A week and a half before my first class, my partner took me on a retreat to Western Maryland, about 15 miles from West Virginia, with Pittsburgh’s local news the closest metropolitan area to us. It was a great weekend, but it would have been better if this feeling of dread and disgust hadn’t clung to me like a gray cloud full of omens.
It was like God was trying to prep me for what I had to go through. The day after Labor Day 2022, the skies opened up as it rained, and rained, and rained. I dropped my son off barely in time for him to catch the bus in from Baltimore to UMBC. I parked the car on Cold Spring with 11 minutes to spare before my first class. That first class went well, even with the rain and the rushing. But then my second morning class and afternoon classes were full of unbossed and unbothered fake folk, athletes, and wannabe athletes and students who likely spent more time pondering the shininess of a stainless steel toaster than the details of any syllabus. None of my colleagues checked in that day or that week to welcome me to the campus, or even to see if I was settling in.
Week Two was the confirmation I needed. When I found my way onto the History Department group email list, I found the missing link to my dread. Loyola had given the department the go-ahead to hire for a tenure-stream African American historian. It was the slot under which I fell, a slot that visiting professors like me had held a year or two at a time going back five years. I put together a series of Pascal-level if-then statements and realized the search committee who hired me had planned this all along. I was just a warm body, someone to hold a slot that they would otherwise lose, this after another Loyola history professor had retired that spring, this after years of not finding a tenure-stream professor in African American history. They were desperate to prove the indispensability of the history department at Loyola, and they were going to do it using me as their cannon fodder. What was worse was that they thought I was too big a fool to not notice their plans. Or worse still, their expectation that I’d play along even if I did figure out their deceit. (to be continued)