Contingent Faculty
Pillars of Salt, Post Four
The way to Wichita Falls on the 287 passes through a series of small towns like Clarendon, Childress, and Quanah, whose main streets are the picture of Americana. That is, they would be quaint, charming, and welcoming if they really embodied the ideal of Main Street America, but the dream has been abandoned and the buildings that would house it sit crumbling along slow stretches of road. Through the shattered window of one storefront you could see the roof had collapsed into the showroom. In between we speed from one catastrophe to the next.
Although it is a city, Wichita Falls is not fundamentally different than these small towns and that, perhaps more than anything, explains the terrible circumstances I found myself in there.
We were staying with Tyler and Victoria. Tyler and I had become colleagues my second year on faculty when we both applied for the same job, me as an inside candidate, and he was offered the position. He and his wife moved to town and we all became good friends, despite the way his arrival had been framed as an absolute negative for my tenure prospects.
Like towns across the region, Wichita Falls was hemorrhaging young people. The old money was leaving. Oil-rich, Wichita Falls boomed with money from wells in the fields around town and shared space with cattle ranches spreading out east to Dallas-Fort Worth, popularly called the “metroplex.” Current Texas governor Greg Abbott and Rex Tillerson, former secretary of state under Donald Trump, are both from Wichita Falls. Needless to say, the town is super conservative. Reactionary, really.
But the offspring of these local elites were leaving for the metroplex or else out of state entirely. The traditional source of the university’s funding was drying up.
The barbecue being held in our honor would be hosted by a historian named Leland who was a colleague of mine over in the history department. I joined the faculty in the department of English, Humanities, and Philosophy, but it was Leland and some friends in sociology who provided the most robust welcome into the college’s social circles. My immediate supervisor was technically a political philosopher named Nathan who never really felt like a boss because we were such fast friends and both anarchists who shared a dissertation chair in Daniel W. Smith, the preeminent Deleuze scholar.
Nathan was a controversial figure to say the least, and there was some trepidation among our social circles about how closely I should associate myself with him. How could I not? He believed in me, trusted my work and my recommendations, treated me as an equal, and had my best interests in mind. He gave me my first chance to be a university professor, the thing toward which I had been working for almost ten years. I love him, even or especially when I realize he is not everyone’s cup of tea. Neither am I, frankly.
My first year, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor. But Nathan had grown the small philosophy minor into a robust program and had a clear plan to create a philosophy major. The university is a member of COPLAC, the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges, so is technically a liberal arts school, but that is a total farce. It is really a vocational school for nurses, petroleum engineers, and totally uninterested business majors who so completely fail to comprehend their own lessons that they couldn’t recognize how their huge numbers devalued their degrees through overproduction.
The plan I was sold, by everyone in the administration with whom I had any interaction whatsoever, was to turn the Visiting position into a tenure track one — the gold standard of full-time academic appointments in the United States. This was a crucial step toward completing the work necessary to establish a major. It was no longer a one-man job, so to speak.
Immediately, problems began to arise. The story I eventually learned was that donors were appalled by the shockingly bad, typo-riddled letters of thanks they received from the students in the business school. Pressure was being applied to the administration by donors to hire a full time writing instructor to teach business writing. The English department couldn’t really afford to allow the business school to run their own writing programs. They needed the enrollment numbers. And, of course, the business school was unwilling to fund the line that they themselves needed in the English department, despite the vast inequality in funding between the two. The business school is filthy rich, in case I need to be clear.
Now, there were supposed to be two tenure hires made in the English department. One in philosophy and one in the humanities. The humanities program had a major, but barely any students. I think there were maybe 3 total humanities majors when I arrived. There was no clear curriculum. Humanities majors mostly took two or three classes actually labelled HUMN and the rest were in other departments around the college. Philosophy had grown to around 18 minors and we were aggressively marketing a coherent curriculum taught entirely in our department. My presence greatly expanded our repertoire of classes.
We did have some trouble getting upper-division courses (at the 300-level) to make, but part of the problem was a draconian course cancellation policy that rigidly refused to let any course run with under 10 people enrolled, which causes problems for any small program across the university, including those in geology and mathematics. Generally, though, we worked our asses off to grow the program more. All of my 300-level courses made the first two years I was on faculty.
In any event, the very-near-retiring chair of the English department was basically told, in no uncertain terms, that one of the available lines of tenure track funding would be used to hire a business writing professor. Either humanities or philosophy had to give up its tenure line. The chair took philosophy’s, ostensibly because we were not a major program. But philosophy was the more productive program, which is all the administration ever professed to give a shit about. So even by their own metrics, the decision was stupid.
Philosophy could still make a hire, mind you, but at the level of lecturer — a contingent, non-tenure track position on a one-year contract that got paid thousands of dollars less than tenure track faculty. I could apply to that job, for a pay cut. I was perpetually on the job market anyway, so I did apply to both positions in philosophy and humanities, in addition to the 80 or so other applications I did that year, each dozens of pages long with their own specially tailored cover letter and diversity statement and teaching philosophy and sample syllabi and copies of student evaluations and writing samples and letters of recommendation.
None of my other applications bore fruit that year, but I got interviews for both positions where I was an internal candidate. I was almost assured the philosophy position, but was hopeful for the tenure track one which was advertised as a sort of hybrid position that involved some philosophy instruction.
I was not ultimately offered the tenure position. Ironically, I later found out it was because the coordinator of the humanities program felt that I wasn’t strong enough on visual art, even though I’ve held the title of Director of Philosophical Praxis for an art gallery since 2017 and now write a column on art and philosophy for Whitehot Magazine, a top contemporary art publication. My main job at the gallery was and is to develop educational programming for the general public centered on art, its history, and philosophy.
Even more ironically, they hired Tyler, whose PhD is in comparative literature and whose areas of research overlap extensively with my own. We both write on William Faulkner, for instance, both with backgrounds in the history of philosophy and the continental tradition. Technically, my PhD is in philosophy and literature, conferred by a philosophy department, but advised by a mix of Philosophy and English faculty and requiring comprehensive exams in each. So, I have a sort of comp lit PhD anyway. I can teach English literature courses and basic composition courses. At the time, Tyler was certainly no more qualified in the visual arts than I and now he is decidedly less so.
Folks were pretty shocked by the outcome of the search, or so they told me and I ended up with a pay cut and a terminal lectureship with the worthless promise that the contract would be renewed because we needed another philosopher for all the ethics, intro, and critical thinking that needed taught. I could easily have taught four courses of ethics every semester just to meet the demand coming from the engineering programs who were all required to take ethics by their accrediting body.
It was demoralizing, but I really liked Tyler, his wife Victoria, and their young child. Eventually, Tyler, Nathan, the coordinator of the humanities program, and myself began to conspire, cooking up ways that we might grow both programs and work together instead of battling one another for students deciding between our programs. We thought there might be a path to a philosophy major by working together, making the programs more cohesive and ending the artificially imposed contest between the two.
It was during this time of collaboration and solidarity that I began to see how thoroughly full of shit the administration was, including my own department chair. The dean of the college, a literal ex-CIA analyst whose faculty position was with the Political Science department, was unsurprisingly expert at subterfuge. He would blow his top in meetings, rant and scream at faculty, or alternatively explain in a low, slow drawl that the numbers were such and such, there was really nothing to be done, we had to make our case in terms the upper admins would understand, there had to be well established trends and so on.
The truly fucked up thing about the amount of gaslighting and exploitation that went on here is that all these imaginary metrics had supposedly already been met. Hadn’t a tenure line in philosophy already been approved, before the business school kerfuffle? Or was that too a lie? If anything we were in a better position once I was there than we were before. The program continued to grow. So what mythical trends were we supposed to demonstrate beyond what had already led to my presence in the first place?
Needless to say, the tenure position never materialized. The health of the department chair was deteriorating, making him a lame duck. It came out eventually that in my second year, now as an instructor, the chair claimed he had put in the request to hire a tenure track philosopher but had actually done no such thing. He gave us weird numbers to claim the program wasn’t big enough.
He once supplied us with a list if declared philosophy minors, saying there were too few — only eight of them. Looking at the list, Nathan and I noted how many names were missing, students who had just been in our classes, who were active members of the philosophy club, who we advised, were not on the list. We raised the issue with the chair. Where is this student or that one, or these ones? Why weren’t they on the list? More than half of our minors were missing! He had no answer. That’s what the registrar provides and that’s the official list of minors. Those were the student currently enrolled. What did he mean by “currently enrolled”? This was at the end of summer, before the fall semester started. Were they only those students enrolled in summer classes? Or what? No answers. I don’t know if he had no clue, or didn’t care, or had just committed himself to obstructing us while he waited to retire.
The other thing going on while all this transpired was a concentrated propaganda campaign by local fascist groups like Vanguard America whose members in the area were tied to the militant Atomwaffen division. Nathan came from Jewish immigrants from Poland who had lost whole wings of their family to the Holocaust. He had his office door vandalized on several occasions with swastikas, antisemitic slurs, and so on. A flyer he made advertising a course on Africana Philosophy was left at his office door with “n——er” scrawled across it. The admins eventually installed a camera in the hall to surveil his office. We were mounting resistance, bringing these issues to the Dean of Students. Mostly, they claimed the fascist flyers could be removed because they hadn’t been properly approved for posting. Which of course, raises the question of whether they would have let the fascists put their propaganda up if it got a little stamp of approval from the right office. Freedom of speech and all that. A story for another time.
At the end of my third year the chair retired, we got a disaster of a new chair. One of her first decisions was to fire me. At the end of my fourth year, it was done. In all likelihood, I had been washed out.
What I’m trying to say is, I wasn’t exactly excited to be back in Wichita Falls, no matter how amazing Leland’s barbecue was.