In which the heroine is foiled

Original photo by Seth Kendall.

I was 46 and as eager to please as I have ever been, but I had come too far to entertain threats from someone whose greatest achievements were being born with a penis and being on the Tenure Committee at a women’s college. He couldn’t have survived two minutes in a room with my mother during one of her manic episodes, and it wasn’t about him anyway. It was about me. I wrote my resignation letter and hand-delivered it to the mail slot in the President’s office that same night. I’d been composing it for the past five years. 

Walking across the leafy campus dotted with red brick buildings on a spring night in 1991, I felt my spirits lift. I didn’t yet know where I would go; I had some vague notion about moving to Albuquerque and working in a bookstore. Anything was possible. Maybe I'd become a pole dancer or a delivery-truck driver. Five-year flashback: 

In May, 1986 the President of the University of Texas dropped a doctoral hood over my shoulders, and in June I proudly drove, unassisted, from Texas to Massachusetts, a Hertz rental truck holding everything I owned. Seth, my second son and love-child, was 12. He propped coltish legs on the dashboard of the truck, clutching his teddy bear and brainstorming  names for the dog I promised to buy him once we moved into our new home. I had rented, sight unseen, a small house in Northampton for $600 a month plus utilities, which I thought I could afford on a salary of $27,000, the most I had ever earned. I exhausted the last of my graduation checks on the drive up. After I bought Seth’s puppy, I ran short of money for food and was buying milk on a credit card, anxiously waiting for the office to open on the July day when I could collect my first monthly salary check. 

It was $1200. “Is this a typo?” I squeaked. The woman in the payroll window said no. The “take-outs” for tax, medical, retirement, etc. were more than half my monthly pay. 

When I stopped crying, I took my new landlord my paycheck and said I’m so sorry, (gulping back sobs) I can’t stay here. I won’t have enough to live on. 

“Is that all Smith College pays its professors? For a whole month? That’s wicked little money. What do they use all their money for?” 

My landlord was a plumber, a stranger to the ways of the academy, a kind man with a wife and two kids who  invited me to the local meeting of Adult Children of Alcoholics he attended. He let me out of the lease. In a week I was moving into a Smith rental for which I only had to pay $355 a month. When I was hired, nobody mentioned that Smith owned a passel of houses it rents to professors. So two moves that summer, the boxing and hauling, the nervous energy and anxiety, the rented trucks, the frantic course preparations, the chewed fingernails. Just before classes began, I stepped on the adorable puppy’s tail, fell on the stairs, and broke my coccyx. I started classes walking with a cane, sitting on a doughnut cushion, and smiling as brightly as possible.  

It was not the students nor my colleagues who had me examining ways to kill myself by October of that first year. It was the exploitation. This part is tedious, and it may make no sense to anyone outside the education business, but it has to be told or nothing else makes sense. I had to create five new courses to teach in my first year, five more in my second year, and three more in my third. Each course design meant collecting readings (the college did not use textbooks but reading lists), creating lectures, activities, papers, and exams. A grading scheme. A typed syllabus to hand out on the first day of class. I was drafted, in my fourth year, to be the untenured department head so the fellow who hired me could go on sabbatical. I agreed to it because in my escape fantasies it was useful to have administrative experience. In addition to teaching “writing-intensive” theatre courses, which meant hundreds of papers to grade every week, I also had rehearsals most nights and performances most weekends. 

Small, competitive liberal arts colleges in the USA offer a snazzy curriculum packed with one-time courses like “Queer Theatre,” “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Erotica,” and “Acting Across Genders,” all of which I taught, plus standards like “American Theatre,” “Post-Modern Fusion Theatre,” and so on. My department routinely hired fresh new teachers at the lowest possible salary, exploited them till they dropped from exhaustion or went mad, and then denied them tenure because, so sorry, they were not good enough at time management to publish significant contributions to their field in the all-important first five years. (I did publish a book during my nightmare, though it is riddled with typos.) 

The department head got credit for two playwriting courses taught in the same room at the same time, each for a maximum of ten students, but I wasn’t allowed to cap enrollment in my classes because, he told me, “you’re so popular, isn’t that great!” So while I was teaching three different courses of 50 students each, he taught one, with twenty. 

I didn’t realize what was going on till I was department head in that fourth year and saw for the first time the disparities in salary, in hours of teaching, in course creation: I saw how thoroughly untenured faculty were screwed. So when I said fuck you to the man on the Tenure Committee, I was saying it to the whole system. OK, enough of that. In the next installment, our heroine points her life toward Africa.