On Feeling Like a Fool and Dying Departments, Part II
My two years at Loyola University of Maryland are years I cannot get back
The below is a continuation of my previous Substack about my time at Loyola University Maryland. Aside from a couple of professors, the history department’s administrative assistant, and a couple dozen of my students, I never felt welcomed, I always was an outsider. Winning road games in front of hostile crowds is always hard.
That Tuesday mid-September morning after figuring out the plans of the now assistant dean and my colleagues was the beginning of full-fledged lecturing as only I would typically do, with music to start the class, video clips, lecture slides, and call-and-response interaction. And…nothing. And…more…nothing. And…more…nothing. I taught on the aftermath of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction to two classrooms full of students, and answered two questions from two students in my first class, and zero questions from students in the other. I even did my thing on the reality that anyone who fought for the Confederacy was a traitor, and there was not even a scowl or a frown from the would-be MAGA set to see. My students were mostly blank faces with eyes in a dormant, zombie-like trance.
“My students are brain-dead. I don’t know how I am going to make it through this week, much less through this semester and year,” I said to my partner when I called her after my morning classes. It was a double-gut punch, between the realization that I was on the clock from the moment I took this job and that my students saw me as nothing more than an elderly substitute middle school teacher with two extra heads growing out of my neck. I had seen myself as an educated fool for years. At that moment, I felt like a fool for real, the second time in just over a year.
My spouse convinced me to give the afternoon classes a shot. Which led to more…nothing. Until my 3:05 pm class in African American history. There, I had a few students awake enough to ask questions. It made me feel a little better, and by a little, think in nanometer-levels of better feelings. Their questions were about the origins of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. The only reason I didn’t quit that day was because I didn’t want to go back to the unstable and unsustainable fusion of two disparate adjunct positions with very different universities teaching the same courses over and over and over again to create a living wage in the low-$40Ks on my best year (which happened to be 2020, a hard-core pandemic year). That, and the opportunity to drop off and pick up my son from UMBC (because he failed to secure his dorm room for the fall semester on time), kept me going that first semester.
After our October 2022 faculty meeting, my department chair encouraged me to apply for the tenure-stream African American history position. She stopped me in the hallway and said, “You should go ahead and apply.” This was the first time she spoke to me about being at Loyola. Aside from our initial coffee meeting in June (where she said very little), a couple of hi’s here and there, and a minor freakout because an Al Jazeera Opinions piece I wrote sent trolls to their keyboards demanding that Loyola fire me, that is. “Either they really want me to apply, or they’re just trying to cover their asses,” I said to my partner when I came home that evening.
Of course I was right. Two months later, the chair of the African American history search committee — a member of the search committee that hired me back in May — summoned me to come to his office after another long day of teaching four classes full of drones who only woke up at the mention of sports and music made after 2019. Having been through what I went through at American University 16 months earlier, I knew at that moment I wasn’t even going to be interviewed for a job that I was already doing as a full-time, non-tenured faculty member. “Your scholarship, er, your work, is more outward-facing, very public,” my white colleague said, as if this was somehow a surprise. “We’re looking for someone, who, er, does more traditional scholarship.”
“Well, you really didn’t need to have me come to your office to tell me this. You could’ve just emailed me,” I said, thinking of the cowardly email I received from American in August 2021. “Besides, what else could this have been about? I guess you could’ve invited me to your office to offer me a tenure-track position,” I said as sarcastically as a Black man born and raised in metropolitan New York could say, “Yeah, right!” (This was also an endowed [meaning, special status with additional research funding] professor who ran am undergraduate seminar that semester on the connections of Loyola to slavery and the domestic slave trade in Maryland. Proof once again that teaching progressive theories or doing potentially progressive research does not equal progressive or radical behaviors in everyday life.) He laughed nervously, as well he should’ve. Thanks for wasting my time, liar. This was your and the department’s plan all along, was what I thought at that moment.
Then in February of last year, my department chair came to me with a shit-sandwich offer. Since the department had offered the funding line for my job to the tenure-stream hire, I was no longer needed per se. But, they offered me an additional year to teach HS 100 — Encountering the Past, a horrible intro-level course required for all first-year students (more on that in another Substack) — and a two-section course on the US Civil War and Reconstruction.
I politely asked her to leave my office so that I could think about it, but really, I needed to vent. If she hadn’t left, I probably would’ve flipped my entire desk over in her direction. But in that moment, I also remembered what happened to author Kiese Laymon at Vassar when his tenure committee accused him of lying about his master’s degree and called him a “fraud.” He later found himself in a Poughkeepsie police interrogation room staring at handcuffs, accused of sending threatening and anti-Semitic letters to his so-called colleagues. I knew that even at 53 years of age, I would’ve been Karen-ed into handcuffs myself. I had known for at least 36 years what Laymon wrote in Heavy: “the illest part of racial terror in this nation is that it’s sanctioned by sorry, overpaid white bodies that will never be racially terrorized, and maintained by a few desperate underpaid black and brown bodies that will.” That they are very much “intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans” when compared to me? I’ve known since losing the eighth-grade history award to Jennifer Lowe that being “twice as good” matters not.
I remember later ranting, “What a bunch of fucking liars!” on the phone with my partner after my chair left. I knew I was going to take the additional year, but I didn’t want my department chair or anyone else to think that my yes was going to be automatic. If I had been single, I would have imagined saying yes and then quitting on Labor Day, the day before classes in the coming year.
This is what a dying history department looks like, by the way. One where on a campus of more than 10,000 students, only 11 are tenured or tenure-stream, with three of the 11 also affiliated with the Classics department. One where there are almost as many emerita and emeritus professors as there are in the tenure-stream lines. One where they believe they are doing a better job than other universities because they “don’t hire part-timers. We offer NTT faculty full-time work” (yeah, but with all the hiring and promotion power residing in the hands of tenured faculty and an overload of undesirable courses). One where only about 20 students are history majors, with a few dozen students choosing it as a minor. One where few seminars are offered, one where they are even more committed to a high-school-esque, factory-floor, assembly-line kind of teaching schedule than the rest of the university.
That sense of dread in declining enrollments, in the lack of history majors, and in the loss of tenure lines was what likely drove them to use me in the most tokenistic of ways to keep their little academic party going. My tokenism, though centered in being Black, is also centered in my status as a contingent faculty member. Once a decaying carcass, always a decaying carcass, an itinerant minister of education, in the eyes of white liberal academicians (and their white-adjacent believers, too).
Yet this corpse still has the floor. I am two months away from the official end of my time at Loyola University Maryland. I have learned a couple of things about myself. One, I can function fairly well for weeks at a time on five hours of sleep or less, something that I couldn’t do 25 years ago working for 100-plus hours a week with hundreds of students and staff while “on program” at Presidential Classroom, no matter how much coffee I drank. Two, driving in and around Baltimore is no less harrowing than driving the Beltway and in and around DC. Three, I cannot and will not continue to take shit work for less than my worth. Especially from a group that, when taken as a whole, no one should think highly of them, even when accounting for their scholarship.