Teaching at a Toxic University by Lev Raphael
Teaching is a family thing for me: my grandfather taught economics part-time in Poland; my mother taught Yiddish language and literature in Belgium after WW II to Jewish children who had been hidden from the Nazis; my brother teaches Special Education and Yoga.
Me, I had a decade of teaching various English courses myself before I quit academia to write full-time because even though I loved the classroom, the politics wore me out very quickly. Twenty-four books later, the chair of the English Department at Michigan State University, where I’d done my Ph.D. years before, contacted me to ask if I'd like to teach there.
The synchronicity of his email query was perfect. I had just returned from a book tour in Germany for a memoir titled My Germany. The book explores the role that Germany, real and imagined, has played in my life as the son of Holocaust survivors. Among the many venues, I’d spoken in high school and university classes and realized how much I missed the contact with students. I actually asked my spouse when I returned, “Do you think there’s a way I can start teaching again?” The chair’s email came three days later.
When we met over coffee at a local Starbucks, he noted that I had published more books than any single member of his department and more books than the entire creative writing faculty put together. I hadn't tallied their output, but of course I was flattered. He made some heady promises about salary and even a special position that the Dean of Arts and Letters might approve, given my publishing background and experience.
But none of that happened. I ended up being hired as a regular adjunct and paid as if I were just out of grad school. I should have known that this was an omen and it should have tempered my enthusiasm for venturing back into the academic world after years of writing and reviewing full-time.
I had no idea that despite delightful, hard-working, creative students in writing and literature courses, I would be working in a milieu where my status was really that of a second-class citizen. The fact that I had national and international recognition as a pioneering American author writing about children of Holocaust survivors didn’t seem to mean much to the department.
The lack of respect started with something very small but highly symbolic. The department wouldn't give me a name plate for my office door. Why? The office manager explained that this was “policy” because I might be gone the next semester. That was obviously true if there wasn’t a course for me to teach. But tenured or tenure-stream professors could also be gone the next semester. Any one of those elite masters of the academic universe could decide to retire early, might abruptly take a position at another university, get hit by a truck, or succumb to a fatal stroke or heart attack.
Later, I found out that the budget for the department ran well into the millions, which made it even more bizarre that the department was unwilling to spend a few dollars for adjunct faculty's door signs. The department’s message was very clear: fixed-term faculty didn't count, they were dispensable, and they didn’t even deserve to have their names on doors like every other faculty member. That attitude permeated the faculty, too. There were any number of my supposed peers who treated me with disdain unless they needed a favor—when they weren’t ignoring me completely.
I joined the department with over a decade of teaching experience at other universities, but the coordinator of the creative writing program didn’t want me to attend meetings of the creative writing faculty. These weren’t meetings where any votes were taken, these were meetings about curriculum, a writing contest, and considering whom to invite as speakers. Thankfully this person was out-voted by senior faculty, at which point she lamented, “I feel ganged up on.”
Far more seriously, despite all my book, story, and essay publications, I was never allowed to teach an advanced creative writing class. One department chair said it would be “unethical” for me to do so. I was so startled by that assertion I didn’t ask what it could possibly mean. Not that there was time, because I was basically kicked out of the office when I pointed out that I was more than qualified. The chair was furious that I mentioned I had published so many books. I clearly did not know my place.
The question was really one of continuity: If students enjoyed working with me in an introductory course, they couldn't continue to do so in an advanced one. Instead, they had to choose professors I heard regular complaints about: one professor tended to pick favorites, another seemed to disrespect male students, and a third savaged students reading aloud, calling their work “bullshit.” This professor could make students tremble and even cry.
The one time I was assigned an upper level memoir course because I had three books of memoirs and memoir-essays, the assignment was snatched away from me because of faculty "objections." I only found this out later from the associate chair who’d made the original assignment.
Call that jealousy, petty clinging to the privileges of the tenured class, or just plain disregard for student needs. I was allowed to work with a few exceptional students doing their senior creative writing thesis, but even that plum was eventually taken away from me, despite my strong student evaluations.
When a senior faculty member had to cancel his participation in a summer abroad program, he put my name forward because of my qualifications and because of my popularity with students. But the chair actually surveyed the whole department first to ask if there was anyone else who wanted the assignment, because he wasn’t sure that adjuncts could teach in those programs. They could, and they had—and he should have known this. I shouldn’t have been surprised by his reflexive hierarchical thinking, but I was. Luckily for me, nobody stepped forward and I got to teach creative writing and literature in smaller classes than was typical in the department, and in an amazing city where I enjoyed theater, museums, and wonderful pubs.
The bright spot in all this was being made an affiliate member of the Jewish Studies program where I was indeed treated as an equal.
Looking back, I feel honored to have worked with so many fine, talented, good-humored students who didn't care what my official status was. They appreciated the fact that I was a working author who knew the publishing world in ways that nobody else in the department possibly could. And that I had done many dozens of invited talks and readings from my fiction and creative nonfiction on three different continents.
I’m well aware that I was privileged: I did not need the job to get by financially; I wasn't teaching to advance my career; I had a reputation totally separate from what I was doing at MSU. And I was definitely not alone in having been disrespected, of having been seen as not much better than a graduate teaching assistant, those badly paid academic serfs.
Pre-pandemic, adjuncts across the country have been coping with many adverse conditions worse than what I contended with: no office space at all, no individual mailboxes, and ridiculously low salaries. But the core problem is a deep disdain for who they are and what they may have accomplished, despite fulsome rhetoric about how much their universities "value" them. What those schools really value is a cheap, abundant, and subservient labor force. While I knew this from reading articles in various media, teaching again brought me first-hand evidence of a corrupt and debilitating system.
“I scrapped this piece for one main reason: I cannibalized it for my mystery series set in the wild world of academia. Once I did that, I stopped thinking it could stand on its own. I abandoned the piece and moved on to finish and publish many other personal essays in the last twelve months. With some distance, though, I like it better than before.”
Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres and has seen his work appear in 15 languages. He coaches, mentors, and edits writers at https://www.writewithoutborders.com