I taught freshman composition and English literature survey classes at Auburn University in Alabama from 1976-82. I had thought till about 1980 that this would be my life’s calling. I loved teaching, and I loved the academic life.
I also had a ready-made rack of rollicking buddies. As the year-long freshman comp course was required for all students, the department needed tens of instructors, that is, full time faculty members like me, and graduate students who taught one or two classes a quarter. People in that circle drank at everyone’s house, played lots of basketball and softball, and had sex with anything that wasn’t nailed down.
We instructors were more or less competent though discreetly condescended to by the tenure-track and tenured faculty. It was a good gig! We were generally allowed six years’ worth of one-year contracts (generous in the industry even at that time), after which we were expected to absent ourselves graciously with the Department’s sincere gratitude and maybe a handshake.
The graduate students could hang around as long as they wanted provided they didn’t poop in the classroom or denounce our Lord Jesus Christ—it was Alabama, you dig? I’m not sure how much progress they were even expected to make toward their degrees, cheap labor that they were. Fellows getting some degree or another were there when I was an undergraduate senior, and they had their feet up on the same desks after I came back from my two-year MFA as an instructor.
In a cruel twist of fate, someone overheard Denny Rygiel in the restroom speculating that they should tenure some of us instructors so as to ensure institutional memory in the freshman comp program. Oh the hope engendered in instructors’ breasts! But in retrospect it seems like either the indentured servitude forbidden by the 13th Amendment or residency in Lubyanka.
In the event, I left after my sixth year, with the Chair Bert Hitchcock’s benediction: “You need to get out of town.”
Alabama was, is, and shall always be an impoverished state. The only industries that worked for them were cotton, coal, and steel, and we know where the latter two went. I don’t know what they export anymore, except, like Ireland for a century, people.
The university was always confronting budget crises. But Alabama led and still leads the rest of the country in anti-intellectualism, so no one cared whether the legislature supported the pointy-haired hippies at Auburn.
One year, the legislature made it personal. I have no idea how the august personages on Goat Hill, as the capital in Montgomery was appropriately known, worked it all out, but somehow the word came down to us that instead of entertaining 25 students in our freshman composition classes, we might need to go to 27—or 28!
This occasioned an outraged meeting of the English faculty: what to do about this infringement of our personal liberties? I was willing to shrug and go along, as I was lucky to have a job. But for the senior faculty, this was not an indignity to be borne.
To step back, though, let’s get real: in those days, the English department was pretty ugly. When I was an undergraduate in 1971, they had just begun to hire some people with smarts and ambition: the comparative lit guys, the fellow who mysteriously showed up from USC, a woman in American lit who was even Jewish.
There was also an even younger cadre of scholars who were forced to teach “business writing” rather than their specialty, for instance 18th century English prose (Miller Solomon’s domain) or Shakespeare, jealously guarded over by Barbara Mowat and Jim Hammersmith. The pipeline was blocked for at least a generation, like a third baseman in the St. Louis Cardinals’ organization looking up at Nolan Arenado. At least Arenado might get injured.
So it was a rather dispirited group that shuffled into the one auditorium-sized room in our nine-story office building. Haley Center was perhaps the most impressive achievement of Auburn University yet the source of one of my worst nightmares.
A central core of nine stories housed the offices of the various Arts and Sciences Departments: Education, Psych, History, Political Science, Philosophy, English, Foreign Languages, a couple of others that my memory and history have consigned to the trash heap etc., like the poor Journalism Department of two.
Then connected to the core squatted four three-story quadrants containing the classrooms for all of these disciplines (see photo below for guidance). The rooms were numbered, to my mind, ingeniously: room 1234, for instance, would be on the first floor, second quadrant, room 34. My office was 9076: ninth floor, the middle core which was numbered 0, and room 76. Very clever. A Yankee must have conceived it.
My worst nightmare, which I recall decades later, involves me walking back down from the library to the office building to teach a late-afternoon class, in, say 1204—first floor, second quadrant, room 4. Except: in my dream, the rooms have all been randomly renumbered. So 8074 was next to 2307 etc.
In the dream, somehow I found the room in which I was to teach, which happened to be the room where that faculty meeting was held. But, weirdly, Francois Truffaut was sitting in the first row, with sunglasses and wild curly hair. He was going to give a lecture in that room later, and he wanted to take in a class.
So I felt like I should teach the class in French. I got a few sentences in, gave up, and then woke up. Anyone with any idea what this dream means, please call me immediately.
In any event, we were at the faculty meeting in that very room to talk about the size of our freshman classes. I like to think that Truffaut would have been amused.
The word from the state legislature was “proration”. I suppose the idea was that every department would get a prorated amount of what they were expecting.
A general chorus of dismay: Would the state ever recover? What were the permanent ramifications of this pronouncement (like anyone could predict)?
Sitting next to me, Denny Rygiel, the avuncular ex-Jesuit who taught old English etc., whispered, “Proration now and forever”, paraphrasing George Wallace’s permanent enshrinement of segregation.
The really revolutionary talk arose from Marcia Friedman, our American lit scholar, curly haired and spinsterish. She owned a Manx cat. To the proposal that we take more than 25 students per freshman comp class, she shrieked from the back row, “Why don’t we just say no?”
“It always worked with Daddy,” commented Pat Morrow, the shady Los Angeleno who taught Joyce and the contemporary American novel.
Muttering ensued.
Finally, Benjamin “Budge” Bixley, a gaunt little fellow who taught the poets of the Romantic era, said, “I think we should go down to Goat Hill and invite them to come up here and see what we do!”
As a junior member of the faculty, I knew enough to sit on my hands, but I wanted to say, “Are you out of your mind? I teach 12 hours a week, a lot of you somewhat fewer. Budge, you want them to see how you teach from yellowed notes you haven’t updated for generations? When was the last time you published anything? And we get summers off. I play tennis with Latimer, Dunlop, and Hug in the late afternoons. You really want them to know how little we work?”
And, a great unspoken, in those days we could chase coeds. Though in all honesty, a good percentage of the time, they chased us, which of course didn’t make predatory activity right. But that’s how much free time we had.
OK, truly I worked pretty hard. If you’ve ever taught, you know that teaching four hours a day is exhausting if you do it right. And I always tried to do it right: mix up sneaky pedagogy with entertainment to keep the cow college freshmen engaged. They gave me excellent teaching evaluations, which no doubt means that I was too soft. But I did grade 75 papers a week plus whatever tests I gave my lit students. It was just doable.
Now the money: In my last year, I made $17,400, which in today’s dollars is $63,379. Good thing I lived in cheap Alabama! And senior, tenured persons had to have had it better.
I was never behind at the end of the month, and I even saved enough for law school, which was dirt cheap in those days. For a nine-month a year job, isn’t that pretty good? Teaching a course in summer quarter netted a few more quids.
If the typical Alabama legislator knew anything about their poverty-stricken constituents, what would they think about us? Whiny communists worthy of being taken out and shot. And forget the cigarette.
In any event, I bet the senior faculty never taught a freshman comp class at 7 a.m, like I did. That should have been worth a bonus.
When I checked my schedule that quarter, I sprinted to Bert Hitchcock’s office: “Bert, I’m not awake at 7! Please? I just can’t do this. I’m just not a morning person.”
Bert smiled his sly Mona Lisa-like Bert smile. He had come to Auburn as an undergraduate. Hoping to walk on to the basketball team, he was directed to a downtown pool parlor to find the coach who was lining up his shots. Without looking at Bert, he said, “Come on down to the gym and we’ll see.” Click.
“You know,” Bert told me, “We have a lot of kids from the farms who aren’t bothered by early classes. They ask for them.” He gazed at me, gauging my resolve and finding it wanting. “Everyone has to take a turn. You haven’t had a seven o’clock yet.”
OK, I did it. One kid said he’d bring doughnuts, but he didn’t. It was a wild experience. One day I taught to much snickering. After class, a chunky fellow approached me: “Mr. Jarecke, your fly’s undone.”
You are wondering why I’m not describing this faculty meeting in any real further detail, and perhaps why this blog post has wandered. All of it is a metaphor for how nothing came out of that meeting. I don’t even recall how it ended or if anyone proposed any further steps.
We ended up with 27 students a class. I don’t remember noticing a difference. Woodrow Wilson famously said that academic politics are particularly vicious because there’s nothing really at stake. Word, Woody.
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