I could never be friends with someone who likes country music

Today I woke up to clouds, and the rest of the day just went to hell from there. George, my landshark, arrived at about nine to continue his work (pounding, sawing, scraping) in the two bathrooms on either side of my burrow. He's retiled the shower/tub stall with shiny white tiles. I know this because I saw an example of his work when I went to tell him my bathroom sink was filling rapidly with milky water. Alarmed, I hotfooted it next door and found him in the bathroom, covered with white tile plaster and grout. It was pretty clear to me that George was washing up in the bathroom sink.

“George, my sink is filling with water. White water.”

“Oh? This sink is draining.”

Duh, dude. It's draining into my sink! I didn't say it. After some hemming and jawing, he said he'd take a look at it—tomorrow. He is apparently in grouting mode, not plumbing mode. I politely admired his tile work for a moment. Then I stomped back to my nest, and in a few moments, the air began to vibrate: He'd cranked his boombox up to some country station. Twang! I would have pegged him for a classic rock guy. Guess we'll never be friends, George and I. Too bad. A friend with plumbing skills can sure come in handy.

Seeking asylum, I went out to the front garden to pull weeds and plant the stringy rosemary my mother had painstakingly rooted herself over a period of several long months. George's full-size pickup truck made a nice barrier between me and the street traffic, but the cafe across the way was going full-swing. The acoustics on this corner are uncannily acute. I can hear everything. How do you like the potatoes? Oh, really, I read that, too! Jeremy, keep your hands to yourself! I had to look up from my labors several times to make sure the diners weren't headed right for me, coming to tell me what to do with last year's collard greens, now four feet high and gone to seed. Add in the frequent 40-foot buses swinging wide around the corner, the occasional pedestrian with baby in stroller, and George's crazy taste in music, and you've got a recipe for a lively morning at the Love Shack.

I heard a familiar sound: the Adventist Hospital laundry truck coming up Belmont, making its way over the hill, carrying fresh linen to Adventist. I have heard this truck for years. I recognize the engine whine and clinking of chains as it trundles around the corner. I never knew it carried laundered linens to Adventist until I found out one of my students works for Adventist. He once mentioned he drives the laundry truck. Today I was curious to see if it was him, but I was afraid to look. I didn't want him to see me wearing grimy grubbies, working in a dilapidated garden, the real me. At that moment a bus came along in the opposite direction; I knew that would occupy the Adventist driver's attention, so I looked right at the driver. Sure enough, it was my student, expertly negotiating the truck past the bus, the corner, the parked cars, and the pedestrians. For a moment I felt proud, like I had something to do with his skill. I smiled. Then I laughed, as it occurred to me that I will be a dusty foot-note to the great things this twenty-year-old kid is going to do with his life. Maybe my words of praise will live on in a letter of recommendation. 


I'm supposed to be working on my concept paper. (Yes, still.) But I also have homework for work. Now that I'm teaching at two campuses, I have to bring work home. Two heavy bags of books and files, one for each aching shoulder. It's like being an adjunct all over again. The homeless, worthless adjunct instructor. There's just too much to do. So what do I do? I turn to this blog to vent to the five people who regularly tune in. And to the folks who stray here by accident, and have actually read this far—(wow, you must have a lot of time on your hands), welcome to the hellish hand-basket.


Now a slippery whiny sound is coming from the bathroom next door. I am guessing George is rubbing his shiny new tiles clean. It sounds like a whimpering dog. My cat is looking askance at me, like, when did we get a dog? I shrug my shoulders at him: dunno. 

And now, to my profound relief, making a late appearance: the sun, or something like it. Cue applause.

The perfect storm destroys a perfectly good career college

In my last post I described the mammoth production known as graduation, which happened on Saturday morning (mandatory attendance by all faculty). The event was organized and produced by two strong and capable women, let's call them Janey and Sally. On Monday morning, Sally sent out an effusive email at 6:00 a.m. thanking everyone for their participation in making it one of the best graduation events in the history of the college. Sometime after that, Sally was called into a meeting with the human resources person and fired.

Sally was not the only one. Another staff member lost his job on Monday, too. In addition, a program director who teaches accounting was told that this would be his last term at the college: in five weeks, he, too, will be out of a job.

As news of the layoffs spread to our site, the shock waves rippled outward. We muttered in the faculty office. We mumbled under our breath about updating our resumes. But no one actually thought the scythe would sweep through our site. Today I received a phone call from my colleague, Sheryl. I could tell by her voice that something was wrong. I thought her grandfatherly cat had finally kicked the bucket. Nope. Apparently, the grim job-reaper visited our site today, lopping off one of our own. By the end of July, he will be gone. Do not pass go, do not collect your vacation pay or your faculty development stipend. Turn in your grades, dude, you are so outta here.

Today, as part of my feeble attempt to earn my faculty development stipend, I attended a workshop on fostering creativity and innovation in organizations. I got up at 5:30 a.m. on a day I would normally ignore until about 8:30 a.m. (painful when you work until 10:20 p.m. the night before). Bleary-eyed, I trundled in my old dusty Ford Focus up to Northwest Portland in spitting rain, found a place to park, signed in with a seriously scary security guard, hiked through a huge office building in search of the conference room, and eventually received my sticky name tag. The two woman sitting at the registration table, for some reason, looked dumbfounded to see me. Maybe because they didn't know me and they knew everyone else? That's all I can think of. Otherwise their behavior makes no sense.

“There's coffee,” one woman said, pointing. I followed her finger and found deliciously hair-raising coffee in urns on a back table, but only non-dairy creamer (Which is worse, dairy or non-dairy? Remind me to ask my naturopath). I carried my cup, half-full, toward the front table where one person was sitting, planning to bravely introduce myself. I was waylaid. The facilitator (call me Bud!) barred my path and held out a deck of cards. “Pick a card!” he ordered. I did, slipping it in my pocket.

“Don't let me walk out of here with it!” I laughed, trying to be friendly. A woman standing nearby smiled politely. I was nervous so I had to say something else.

“Wouldn't it be funny if you could buy playing cards individually to replace the ones that get lost? My brother was a notorious cheater.” Which is a total lie, as far as I know, but the words “notorious cheater” are just inherently funny. I was grinning, expecting someone to say something like, “Wow,” or “So was mine!”

“We never cheated in my family,” the woman sniffed, not looking at me, and sipped her coffee.

I didn't know what to say after that, so I drifted away toward my original destination, where I met a lovely woman named Lynne who apparently works as a trainer at some big manufacturing company, I didn't catch the name. Each time I go to one of these workshops, when I introduce myself as an instructor at a career college, they look at me like I'm from another planet. Like, what's the difference between being a corporate trainer and a teacher? She teaches people hardskills and softskills, just like I do. The only difference is my students pay to take the training, whereas her students get paid.

I'm digressing. I mention this workshop because the topic was about how management can foster creativity and innovation in the organization. One of the ways management can help its workers be innovative is by not punishing them when they offer suggestions on how to improve the company. Sally (remember Sally?) apparently went to the college president recently and passionately expressed her belief that the school could be doing more to improve effectiveness and efficiency. She presented a list of suggestions (rumor has it). What happens if management is narrow-minded, controlling, and territorial? A lively discussion followed.

Now we see what happens, for real, and it is not pretty. Sally's suggestions came home to roost in the form of a pink slip. You're outta here! That's what you get for being loyal, for caring enough to offer suggestions, and for busting your ass to put on a well-organized graduation event, and then emailing us at six-freaking a.m. on Monday morning to thank us all for being there! That'll teach you... you loyal, hard-working, committed (former) employee, you.

Speaking of dead and dying roosters, more heads are on the chopping block. If enrollments don't rise fast, two other instructors will be gone, and with one of them for all intents and purposes goes the entire paralegal program. Could this get any worse?

They hired two high-powered marketing/sales executives last month to boost enrollments. I hope it works. But who is going to teach all those students they entice into our classrooms? (Oh wait, that's what adjuncts are for.) It seems to me we are experiencing the perfect storm: the convergence of tightening government regulations, poor academic quality, and years of mismanagement. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a student of management to watch the ship founder and go under, just another career college, wrecked on the rocks of ineptitude.

I'm ok for another five weeks. After that, all bets are off. I may get to work tonight and find a pink slip in my mailbox. Thanks for all the fish. I'm outta here!

The fine old tradition of abusing adjunct professors

Today a colleague showed me a recent article from Salon about the “disposable professor crisis” in American higher education. In the article, the author s.e. smith, an interesting woman who writes for AlterNet and other alternative Web venues, accused institutions of relying on cheap adjunct teachers to cut costs, to the sad detriment of students. (s.e. smith is also a poet.) In the article, Ms. smith did not mention for-profit colleges; however, having worked at one small one for going on nine years, I can say my experience supports her claim. Leaving aside the question of whether you believe for-profit colleges should be included in the hierarchy of higher education institutions, the bottom-feeding for-profit institution I work for seems to be abusing adjunct faculty along with the best of them.

I find it fascinating what people believe (and don't believe) about college. But I want to know, what is college, anyway? The federal student financial aid Web site obliquely defines college as any education after high school. Not everyone believes for-profit education should be considered “college.” Tech school, trade school, career education, maybe, but not college.

Not everyone believes college should be the next step after high school. In the Salon article, s.e. smith linked to a speech by presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who said, “there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college. To sort of lay out there that somehow this is... should be everybody’s goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work” of “people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college.”

His argument sort of reminds me of the “Poverty is a virtue” mentality I grew up with. Like, education? I don't need your stinking college education! Living in squalor, thumbing my nose at the elitist college-educated snobs, was good enough for my dad and his dad before him, so it oughta be good enough for me. By gum. Of course, I will be the first to admit that a college education does not guarantee a job, a steady income, or decent housing. But it's a start. Assuming we agree on what college is and what it is for.


I downloaded out the spreadsheet created by Joshua Boldt at the Adjunct Project. It was enlightening to see the comments by people who work at higher education institutions in Oregon. While the college I work for was not mentioned, several local community colleges were. Their pay scales, benefits, and attitude toward adjuncts were noted. This anecdotal information can’t be assumed to apply to all the adjuncts who work at these institutions, but it certainly opens a window on a world that has been closed to me. When I first started working on this Ph.D., my objective was to teach online for some higher education institution somewhere... now it looks like that may be a disappointing proposition. Unless you believe the claims of Dr. Dani Babb.


Even though I work at a crummy for-profit college, I still see most of our students learning, graduating, finding jobs, and making better lives for themselves and their families. In spite of the Santorums of the world, in spite of all the for-profit college bashing that is popular these days, I still think we do some good. Yeah, maybe we do treat our adjuncts like second-class citizens. But we are just emulating our betters. It's a fine old tradition for management to abuse labor. That's one thing our little college does well. You know what they say: If you want to run with the big dogs, you gotta get off the porch.