When the campus email came telling us the Diversity and Equity Center had become the Center for Inclusion, Advocacy, and Community, my first response was disgusted fury. It’s always my first response to wrong things; sadly, self-righteousness is my auto-setting. But age, at least, has helped me check that instinct quick and practice wondering what other ways there might be to know a thing, so I have been wondering which is better: to defiantly hold the high ground (like insisting that names and language matter) and be swiftly picked off for it, unable to do any more good work from that post; or to bend compliantly in the idiot wind (like the coastal pine that lives centuries by letting the elements shape its branches) so the work can continue under cover of darkness. What really matters: the welcome sign on the door or the secret headquarters in the basement?
What kind of promise, and to whom, is the “higher education” sign on the door of my company? They are training us now how to respond should ICE henchmen enter our hallways or classrooms (space categorization matters). These emails read as unflappably as the active shooter prep videos have for years now. What on earth has a teacher become?
Because we are an open access publicly funded college, the president reminded us in November that we are “an apolitical entity.” The VP’s first winter message urged us to mind our curricular lanes and keep politics out of class, unless political science was our approved subject area. It was not the first time in recent years our rule-makers issued this protocol; that first time, characteristically, I just simmered in the gross. But this time I’m seeing an invisible ink invitation layered underneath.
When I started this job a lifetime ago, I would never have considered my curriculum not personal. The anchor of almost any Freshman Comp class is called a personal essay. The syllabus goal of every Lit class forever is to develop understanding of our “universal human condition.” There is no Cultural Studies without mentioning the architects of power structures. The pedagogical is certainly political, if we agree that the personal is, too; and if these are persons – not robots – in my class and under my care, I cannot protect them from armed sociopaths or deputized bigots, without unpacking the systems that engineered such threats in the first place. Can I?
Or is my real question not can or should I, if that’s been long settled by the disintegrating door sign, but will I… This is my main job for life, and whether or not we say it’s socially acceptable to define your life by your work (perhaps a longer exploration of that later), it’s a lotta time to spend doing something that doesn’t ring true, or worse yet, perpetuates harm.
Does anyone setting out to be an English teacher today subscribe to the banking model or sorting mechanisms of traditional higher ed? What should Humanities courses be if not the secret headquarters in the basement? I’ve just combed through 80 applications for a tenure-track English position at a suburban community college – predictably double what any other position on campus collects -- so I have to ask, why else would so many wise sexy folks keep wanting to sign a contract for low-wage full-time work in a field that will never be uncoupled from scooping French fries?
The only reason to do this, to teach in what they used to call the liberal arts, is surely to put all the hot stage lights onto the scene of the crime and the historic efforts to solve or soothe it. It takes the whole crew, though, to subvert the company line. Will we?