What’s up, neglected blog? Remember me? That person who filled your pages with updates about book reviews and readings for a year or so? Yeah, not so much of that going on lately. I did a little Friday Five thing over at Deckfight about the best things I’ve read lately, but other than that my life has been mostly about teaching and this new book proposal. Speaking of the former, we had another big day of walkouts and marches last week — a national day of events to defend education. It’s getting more and more dire at Berkeley and at schools throughout California and the US. I think Berkeley gets hit particularly hard because we are so huge — there is always someone “disposable” when you’re working at an institution of this size. And my own department keeps getting squeezed tighter and tighter because writing seems to be perceived as one of those troublesome subjects that gets in the way of the ones that bring in corporate grant money (I don’t even teach creative writing, mind you — I suppose people expect those grant apps will be written by robots?). But even while the economy lurches toward “improvement”, those crumbs haven’t dribbled down into higher ed.

A friend recently re-posted a link to this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece that caused some mumblings around the blogosphere of humanities types who either nodded in sad agreement or protested that it goes to extremes (you need access to CHEd articles so, in a nutshell, he says that people shouldn’t bother to pursue PhDs in humanities because you’ll end up a suicidal adjunct, and yes, he uses the word “suicidal”). While I agree that there are plenty of reasons not to get an English PhD right now, I also think the argument has problems, i.e. there are plenty of people with PhDs who are terrible, terrible teachers anyway and the academies were well rid of them but for one problem: they’ve got tenure so they are never going away. Many of them do everything in their power to avoid teaching required courses like the ones I teach, and this creates a market for cheap, disposable labor in the form of grad students and adjuncts. It’s a self perpetuating cycle. There are plenty of terrible adjunct faculty too, plenty of terrible high school and K-8 teachers, just lots and lots of people who are straight up in the wrong career and are doing untold damage to millions of students.

Teaching is a vocation, period. The money sucks, the work is hard, there is little in the way of feedback about your performance and the rewards are sporadic. If you don’t love it and work hard at being good at it, you shouldn’t be doing it and you sure as hell should not be sitting perched in your cozy, secure tenured gig scoffing at those who do it well for sh*t money because you are doing something important in your research (which results in some impossibly dense, practically unreadable tomes that nobody wants to read but does anyway so they can kiss your ass at MLA). A fellow comp teacher was told recently by a tenured person that he is “doing God’s work” by taking those classes off the tenured person’s plate; a guy at a party recently called my program “heroes” for doing the same. A grad student at Cal said to me years ago that it was awesome that I taught comp so she could “have the poetry classes all to [her]self”. Guess what she’s got now? Tenure. People, we do this job not because we’re unqualified for anything else, but because we care about it, okay? So don’t gloat about how happy you are to wash your hands of it.

Do I wish I had tenure? Do I wish I occasionally taught creative nonfiction? Hell yes. Please give me a job like that; I’d be a pig in sh*it teaching comp classes and creative writing. I’d be blissful about the occasionall lit seminar. I could use the security, the better money, the time to write, the occasional essay that works without a thesis statement. But primarily I want to keep teaching because I think I’m good at it (students: you are free to disagree), because I love the classroom, because the stuff I teach actually helps people later on. You can’t write a good cover letter/resume/etc without a comp class. But if you got a PhD in humanities and assumed you were better than the people who teach comp classes and you’d never stoop to our level, well, that sucks, but the reality of this market has been clear for decades now, so you should maybe have seen the problem coming.