Adjunctified: Introduction

I finally decided to start pulling together the many stupid stories I have gathered in 2 decades of working in higher education. It’s daunting because there are a lot of stupid stories. I wrote what might be an introduction to a memoir. Half of it is a quote from a previous Substack post, so there’s some self-cannibalization happening here, but as I tell my students, sometimes you just have to start. Life is mostly revision, after all.

Adjunctified

Introduction: Contingency

I took the signs off my office door when the erratic Minnesota temperature fluctuations and my building’s decrepitude conspired to weaken the 3-M adhesive holding them to the wood, one of the signs sagging, the frame bending against gravity. The struggling sign was the one telling students that my own education, at their very institution, this very building, taught me the administrators were lying to them.

The failing adhesive was developed at a Minnesota corporation, presumably by people with good educations. Education is transformative, but it can’t control the weather.

I hadn’t brought myself, after more than half my life, to commit to the university fully enough to fill the wall-length bookshelf in my office. At some point, I had committed partially, bringing in enough of my library, acquired over decades of single-minded commitment to a scholarly life, to fill half the wall. The remaining blank shelves seemed a better place to put the signs than the garbage. They had clung to the door for several semesters, so they had earned a rest, not destruction.