Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

I would park, jump out, and rush over the bridge, and get stalled by a parade of Hare Krishnas, Muslims selling incense, or business students lined up at the booths of prospective employers.

At the risk of losing my job and alienating about half the people I know, I'm going to make a few observations about colleges and universities, San Diego State in particular.

Back then, most all the dark-skinned people were Anglo surfers.

My mother and several aunts and uncles attended during the '20s and '30s, when it was a teacher’s college. I arrived as an undergraduate in 1963. Between a bachelor's degree, a teaching credential, a master's degree, and positions as instructor and academic advisor, I’ve come and gone ever since.

There’s still the rift between the fraternities and sororities and the too-cool-for-all-that crowd.

In many ways it hasn't changed much. It’s still a zoo. During 1987 I was teaching mornings at USD, afternoons at SDSU. Midday I would leave a classroom with padded chairs around a mahogany conference table, pass down the high-ceilinged halls where even the soft footsteps of nuns echoed, stroll along the path between beds of pansies and rosebushes taller than me. I would drive through Mission Valley, turn up College Avenue and into a parking lot, then circle the aisles until somebody vacated a spot.

Because a five-class schedule is considered full-time teaching, instructors are usually restricted to two classes per semester.

Then I would park, jump out, and rush over the bridge, commonly late for class, and get stalled by a parade of Hare Krishnas, Muslims selling incense, or business students lined up at the booths of prospective employers. The transition between USD and SDSU made me feel as though I'd been exiled from Eden and chased into Disneyland.

“There’s no damned chalk in my classroom and they’re building a sports complex.”

It’s now not much different from the ’60s, when employers set up booths in front of the bookstore. Among them were General Dynamics, the FBI and CIA, the U.S. Marines. Students would gather around the booths, shouting arguments and propaganda slogans at the recruiters and each other.

Five of us at SDSU have landed in the University Advising Center, where the division of undergraduate studies treats us with a pinch more respect than do most departments.

An orator from Students for a Democratic Society would gather a crowd in the free-speech area — a grassy, eucalyptus-shaded place where the library now stands — and recite the latest atrocities our Vietnam troops had committed and carry on until a fistfight broke out between a flag-waver and a Socialist.

Now the gatherings have moved to the steps of Aztec Center, and the issues begin with religion or sexual preference, but it’s the same drama of monologue becoming dialogue interrupted by ego or outrage and rising from that spark to the tension of potential violence.

There’s always been the thud and rumble of construction and detours beside temporary fences where semiliterate graffiti and public art collects. Now the contractors are raising another wing of the library and breaking ground for a sports complex about which professors grumble, “There’s no damned chalk in my classroom and they’re building a sports complex.”

There’s still the rift between the fraternities and sororities and the too-cool-for-all-that crowd, though the uniforms have evolved so that I can’t always differentiate. Both Greeks and un-Greeks — whom we used to call naively “independents,” as if fraternities were the only conformity — might wear baggy shorts, with their caps on backwards or with ponytails looped between the crown and the adjuster band. Yesterday I saw a guy with darkly tattooed arms wearing a TKE shirt. During the ’60s, the only tattoos around SDSU were on servicemen or veterans.

Students still patronize espresso cafes. The coffeehouses used to be folk music dives like Circe’s Cup in an alley off College and the Candy Company on El Cajon Boulevard, where I got to hear and meet Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Steve Martin, Big Mama Thornton, a couple of the Eagles before they became Eagles, Hoyt Axton, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Reverend Gary Davis. These days there are coffeehouses without music and people study in them, which is a major development. The old places were dark and smoky. You might sit in a corner reading Sartre, the Kamasutra, or a Communist leaflet, but that was mostly for show. You wouldn’t dare study biology.

Since that time, there have been two enormous changes. One is surely for the better. Back then, most all the dark-skinned people were Anglo surfers. Recently on KPBS I heard a poet and founder of the MeChA group at SDSU contend that during the mid ’60s there were only about a dozen Chicanos on the campus.. Another source estimates 200. During 1964 the roving reporter for the Daily Aztec interviewed me because I wore a beard. The interviewer claimed I was one of only five or six bearded students. Out of about 18,000 students, probably 17,000 of us were white. If somebody were to tell me that the 1966 SDSU basketball team didn’t include a black person, I wouldn’t argue. During summer of 1965,I spent a month in Berkeley and met students from the world around, but the only foreign student I met at SDSU grew up in Tijuana.

Yesterday in the University Advising Center, out of 16 students I advised, 3 were Middle Eastern, 2 Asian, 1 French. These days there’s variety. That’s better.

The other enormous change is for the worse.

The change that most troubles me isn’t so obvious. Walking through the campus, you won’t see it. Sitting in a classroom, you might not notice unless you’ve been sensitized. Maybe unless you’ve come and gone and come back.

My first college teaching was at SDSU during 1978. Creative writing. I was thrilled but nervous, especially after realizing that students took as gospel everything I said. Because I’m always pondering aloud, I had to issue a warning— “Don’t trust anything I say, please. Just file it away and test it against what else you hear and against your experience.”

Students would gaze astonished at me, as though unable to assimilate the news that a professor could be wrong. In those days, students didn’t realize the difference between a tenured professor and a temporary instructor, and they stood in awe of our having achieved such noble position and of the wisdom that position certified.

The attitude had inherent and obvious dangers. Suppose the professor is a Nazi, a terrorist, or the guru in his wheelchair on Beverly Hills 90210.

Or suppose a professor does have all the correct answers, at least about his or her subject. Even so, we humans don’t always hear what is actually said. As often, we hear what we want to. Many years after taking a class of mine, a student wrote to ask for a reference letter and also claimed to have followed verbatim a piece of advice she believed had come from me — that once a person starts to write seriously, she ought to stop reading. Horrified, I wrote back, “What I said was, I knew a writing teacher who told students to quit reading when they start to write, and that was the stupidest advice I’d ever encountered.”

Anyway, today’s students aren’t so gullible. And that is good, right? Maybe. But they’re not only wary, they’re next to incredulous. Too often they treat you as they ought to treat a lawyer or doctors who get bonuses for operating and want to amputate a nose.

Last spring I was teaching a fiction-writing class when the realization arrived; I'm going to have to convince these guys that I know what I’m talking about before they’ll quit arguing with every simple point.

I said, “...so don’t overuse adjectives.”

A young woman countered, “But I love adjectives.”

I said, “Okay, use all you want, but keep in mind that most readers get distracted by strings of adjectives.”

“Well, how come everybody reads so-and-so? She uses three or four adjectives for every noun.”

“I couldn’t tell you that. I’ve never read so-and-so.”

“Well, you ought to,” she mumbled, rolling her eyes and gazing around smugly.

Half the semester passed before I could make the simplest observation about fiction writing without risking an argument.

I don’t run from arguments, especially about a subject I have vigorously studied for 25 years against a 20-year-old who just last semester noticed that Stephen King made more money than dentists and this semester changed his major.

Though naive trust in the wisdom and motives of your teachers is dangerous, its opposite might be nearly as dangerous. As my 15-year-old son observed after reading some Proverbs, “We need to ask people to tell us what we’re doing wrong and at least listen closely to what they say, otherwise we’re never going to know, and we’ll keep making the same mistakes forever.”

Certainly distrust wastes a whole lot of time.

What happened, I wonder. Were these students all brought up by hippies who taught nursery rhymes titled “Question Authority”? Did Watergate and the other political messes undermine their faith in the system? Doctor Benjamin Spock — it might’ve been that fellow’s goody-goody, touchy-feely advice that fostered a generation of know-it-alls.

Naw, I mean, even if those assessments were true, I don’t buy them as the primary reasons. More likely, students don’t believe professors because they don’t respect the position. Anyway, not like we used to. No longer does the title “professor” inspire awe. Why should it? We humans don’t respect knowledge a tenth as much as we do success, generally measured by the dollar. If not strictly by the dollar, then by the furnishings of life attained.

In my family, anyway, the most respected occupations were doctor, lawyer, and college professor. Because doctors could heal you, lawyers could get you out of a jam, and college professors could enlighten you about the more subtle truths. Even back then, college professors didn’t make as much money as the others, but neither were they overworked. They were blessed with secure and balanced lives, often splitting their time between research, lecturing, and contemplation. They were protected like an endangered species. They had found sanctuary in an ivory tower, surrounded by great books and music, as close as we earthlings get to heaven. The lousiest tasks of their occupation, like grading tests, they turned over to student helpers. Most enviably, nobody could boss them around, because they had tenure.

This may still be true for some old-timers and those worthy or fortunate enough to land at certain elite universities. But if ivory towers still stand, their foundations are rotting.

I suspect professors are no longer as esteemed as they were because the institutions of tenure and affirmative action plus the reluctance to hire permanent faculty when part-timers are cheaper and easier to discard have conspired to cast them down.

Tenure protects teachers of kindergarten upward from getting their livelihood snatched away. My mom always wanted me to be a tenured professor. Only then would she fed secure that I wouldn’t offend my employer and land back on the street, from where I might stagger to her door and ask to borrow $50.

Tenure serves as a license for the teacher to speak her mind, pursue her own curriculum, lead her own life outside the classroom, and goof off all she cares to. As long as a tenured elementary teacher doesn’t molest a student or threaten the life of the PTA president, or a college professor doesn’t run off for the weekend with the chancellor’s 16-year-old son; as long as she shows up to class most of the time and turns in grades at the end of the semester, she’s virtually immune from unemployment.

Professorial tenure apparently began in 1158, when Frederick Barbarossa introduced an ordinance guaranteeing educators safe passage, freedom from assault, and compensation for injuries. Thereafter, faculties successfully lobbied for “immunity from the reach of power” and “corporate autonomy.” During the Reformation, a teacher’s continuation of duty depended primarily upon allegiance to the corporation and its standards. For absences or poor performance, teachers might be fined or suspended. They were only expelled for disloyalty to the corporation.

The founders of Harvard College sought to create another Cambridge in the Colonies. At Harvard the modern concept of tenure began to form, based upon the European tradition. As the institution was passed around, the boundaries of tenure varied widely. During one era, the maximum length of a teaching appointment was set at eight years to avoid “reappointment due to neglect or sympathy.” By the 1820s, unlimited tenure for instructors was common policy. Josiah Quincy wrote in his history of Harvard, “Even if they did not possess the ability to become eminent in a profession, they would be fixed on the college for life.”

In 1940 the Association of American Colleges and the American Association of University Professors agreed upon a plan that presented tenure as a guarantee of academic freedom and provision for economic security, which they deemed necessary to make the teaching profession attractive.

So it stands. Once she or he has achieved tenure — a three-to seven-year process — a professor might have to search vigorously for a way to get fired. I know of a middle-school teacher whose recent conviction for possession of cocaine earned him only a 30-day suspension. A local college math professor lost his tenure for allegedly discussing Marxism instead of math in his classes and enrolling more students than the classroom would hold, most of whom probably showed up because everyone in his class would be given an “A.” An English professor was fired for persistent drunkenness and absences. SDSU threatened to discharge several tenured professors three years ago by eliminating their departments. But outrage killed the plan. The dismissal of tenured faculty is rare.

Should the abolition of tenure be earnestly proposed, the educators of the world might take up arms and transform into savages. Even those least likely to need it, the impeccably competent, diligent, and inoffensive; even those who have witnessed and been outraged by flagrant abuses by their colleagues might join the struggle. Because without tenure, a new department chair might send packing those who opposed her. A libertarian could be axed by the socialist dean. The curriculum committee could threaten the professor of literary theory, “Become a deconstructionist or you’re out to pasture.” As the old argument maintains, any place dedicated to the free expression of ideas requires an environment wherein constraints and coercion are minimized.

Suppose the new chair of political science proves to be a closet utopian socialist who reveres the work of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. The venerable professor who served Governor Reagan had better retire on his own, or his behind will soon feature footprints.

At one Cal State university, the chair of religious studies was an ordained Protestant minister, while several faculty members adhered to the “God is dead” theory. These people were buddies, played softball and poker together. Remove tenure, the minister has to send his pals packing or beg God to forgive him for allowing heresies to be preached under his mantle.

When I arrived at a new campus, my office partner was an older fellow, congenial and mild mannered, until he spun in his chair and delivered a warning. “Don’t settle down in this place or they’ll kill you.”

“Huh?”

“The young man who sat there before you, they killed him.” I stood up and backed toward the door, mumbling that I had some errands to run. He said, “Forty years old, he walked out of the office one morning and fell over dead of a heart attack.”

My office partner was a warm, honest, honorable man, a learned professor of literature who rarely if ever allowed his political or any other prejudices into the classroom. Yet had there been no tenure, he and his crowd would’ve battled to the death for power to chase the other crowd out of town over department politics, curriculum, and such. Whether the traditional literary canon should be required or junked. If the composition program should be standardized.

I used to presume that people as educated as college professors would naturally rise above violent passions and jealousies. While I was a graduate student at SDSU, an English professor published a story about a departmental quarrel that escalates into a running shootout through the halls and classrooms. I read it and cracked up but considered it wild hyperbole. Then, a few years later at another university, during my first faculty meeting, a professor of Renaissance and Enlightenment literature rose and said, “Mr. Chair, please notify Doctor So-and-So that if he denigrates myself or my committee again, I shall drag him into the hall and beat the shit out of him.”

These are not all peaceful, absent-minded scholars, pacing their libraries, books in hand. An English professor I knew was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon for using his expertise in karate to thrash a student who nicked the paint of his car in a shopping mall parking lot. The last I heard, he was still a full professor, thanks to tenure.

That’s the downside. Most every one of us has suffered through a year or semester with a teacher who would’ve been thrust into a different occupation if not for tenure. The second-grade teacher who stupefies the kids with endless worksheets. The middle-school teacher whose impatience and criticism seems calculated to break the adolescent spirit.

I recall a music professor who, should one of us arrive a minute late, always broke off his lecture to demand an explanation. We sat in constant anxiety, knowing that any second he might summon us to the front to play our daily lesson and stand over us while we plunked, scowling, wringing his hands.

Among our lessons were “Swanee River,” “Jimmy Crack Com,” and “Ol’ Black Joe.” Slave songs. In the class were two black students, one named Sam. The class meeting after Sam’s first absence, the professor called for an explanation.

Sam said, “It was a holiday, sir.”

The professor sighed. “Samuel, it was not a holiday.”

“Oh, yes, sir, it was a holiday."

“And what holiday was it, Samuel?”

“Why, it was Malcolm X’s birthday, sir.”

The professor’s face reddened alarmingly before he wheeled, strode to his piano, and banged out a furious tune.

Every couple of weeks, each of us had to meet with the man in private and demonstrate our skills. One of those times, in an uncommonly congenial mood, he inquired about how my semester was going. I claimed I’d been preoccupied with job hunting to foreshadow an excuse for my massacre of “Alouette.”

“Do you need money?” he asked.

I nodded.

He offered me $5 if I could do him the favor of moving some boxes he couldn’t lift on account of his bad back.

Friday evening at 6:00 p.m., I arrived at his apartment just off campus. My girlfriend had promised to knock at the door in half an hour.

The man offered coffee. While we drank, I babbled nervously about my girlfriend, explaining that she would arrive at 6:30 because we had to go to her folks’ place for dinner, and they were punctuality freaks. Sullenly, silently expressing that my haste to be gone wounded his feelings, he showed me to the boxes on the floor in a wide, doorless closet. He asked me to put them on the shelf above the clothes-hanger rod. Four midsized cardboard boxes. As I hoisted the last of them onto the shelf, he grabbed my butt and squeezed firmly but gently.

I tried to think clearly as I nudged the box securely onto the shelf. Clobber the man — lose $5, fail Piano 1A. I dropped my arms, stepped out of his reach, and flashed him a look that I had learned from my father, which implied that I was still choosing between mild and corporal punishment, and the outcome might well depend upon his response. He stiffened, brushed his hands, and offered another coffee. I said my girlfriend was waiting. Could I have the $5?

The following weekend, I began to tell a friend about the incident, when he slapped his leg and roared. Two semesters before, he sputtered, the same professor had invited him to move the same boxes, in the same closet, only down from the shelf to the floor. When he was grabbed and angrily inquired about the meaning of the gesture, the man declared, “Sir, I am a gentleman.”

A music major friend told me that the department had tried to fire the gentleman, but tenure saved him. Thereafter, he was allowed to teach nothing except Piano 1 A, for nonmusic majors.

I got a B.

In 1983 I earned tenure and promotion to associate professor at CSU-Chico. My mother, a normally reticent person, howled with delight. No longer would she wake before dawn expecting me to show up, mooch breakfast, and fantasize aloud about the cruise to which I would treat her when I made the bestseller list. Now, she believed, I was set. She could relax and unwind for the remainder of her twilight years. Then came the bitter irony. She got sick, and I returned to San Diego, giving up tenure to care for her and because I missed my kids, who had moved here with my ex-wife.

Nine years later, I still wonder if my mom might’ve lived longer had I stayed up north and held onto my precious tenure. But I landed back home and returned to a position I had hoped never to see again. Once more, I became a part-time instructor.

When I began college, part-time instructors were moonlighting, supplementing other, more substantial jobs. One taught full-time at San Diego City College. Another was a scientist at the Naval Electronics Lab. There was a high school principal. And a lawyer. But the ’60s altered many things, including the university.

During the ’60s, the first wave of the postwar Baby Boom flooded most every campus. Besides the swelling population, the Vietnam War promoted enrollment. I started college in 1963, lasted one semester, then set out to roam the world; but after a few months’ traveling, I got a notice to appear for a Selective Service physical exam. Before the exam date, an official letter arrived and informed me that a new bill through Congress would allow me to receive Social Security checks — my father had died young — until my 22nd birthday, as long as I remained a fulltime student.

I thought, “Hmmm, I can get $150 for hanging out at school and reading novels or $140 for ducking bullets while dodging mines and booby traps. Which should I choose?”

The ethical and political decisions came later.

Junior colleges appeared all over, and most anybody with an advanced degree could find a teaching position. Bright candidates were recruited before they completed their dissertations, while undergraduates, learning that advanced degrees were tickets to the ivory tower, borrowed from the newly funded government loan programs and rushed off to graduate schools.

But the war ended, enrollments stabilized, and the colleges were already full of young tenured professors. Besides, with a multitude of qualified applicants willing to work for about minimum wage in hopes of landing a real job one day, the universities wised up.

Perhaps the folks in charge reflected, “Okay, so we’ll exploit the suckers, pay them a third of the money per class, with no benefits. Hire and lay off as enrollments fluctuate, because we don’t have to grant part-timers tenure.”

Because some tenured professors are like Californians who move to Oregon and a year later lead campaigns to barricade the border and keep the damned Californians out.

Here’s the deal, in approximate numbers. An instructor at a community college earns about $2000 per class, maximum. At the university it may rise to $3000, but little more, since the instructor salary schedule ends a step below where the assistant professor schedule begins.

Because a five-class schedule is considered full-time teaching, and any schedule over 50 percent of that requires the school to pay benefits and eventually give the instructor a tenured line, part-time instructors are usually restricted to two classes per semester. To pay their bills and increase their chances of making the contact that will land them a full-time gig one day, they often teach at two or three schools. A five-class semester at three community colleges usually will pay $10,000. Add a couple of summer school classes, that’s $24,000, with no benefits.

There may be a few who can teach 12 classes a year while retaining their enthusiasm. The rest of us bum out or cut comers — ditch office hours or invent suspicious, labor-saving pedagogies.

“Pedagogy” is a pretentious word for the art of teaching. It’s used as a synonym for “philosophy” or “method.” At one of the schools for which I instructed, we freshman composition teachers were requested to forgo marking grammatical, spelling, or stylistic mistakes. Rather, we were to comment in general upon the work as a whole and perhaps recommend that the student visit the tutorial center for help with the details.

The past few weeks I’ve been reading portfolios of graduating seniors who intend to become the elementary teachers of your children. The portfolios include many essays marked and graded by instructors of English and various other disciplines. What I find most appalling isn’t the quality of the essays, but the frequency of incomprehensible sentences left unmarked and uncommented upon by instructor, tenured professor, or tutor.

I won’t blame a part-time instructor — who may have to race 40 miles from Chula Vista to Escondido to meet her next class — for adopting a dubious pedagogy that allows her a few extra hours of leisure or family time. But I’ll surely blame the tenured professors. They receive a minimum, at the community colleges, of $3500 per class, plus benefits. At the top state universities — a friend of mine, the last time he confessed to me, was teaching three classes per year for more than $75,000. That’s from 2 to 13 times what a part-time instructor at the community college makes, though he or she may have taught there 20 years waiting for the real job to materialize. Usually it doesn’t materialize, because whenever someone hired in 1969 retires, the position is filled by a couple more part-timers.

An aside about good ol’ boys. A friend of mine was teaching at a school in the South at which most everybody in the English department was everybody else’s cousin.

Enter affirmative action. As I understood affirmative action, its purpose was to recruit minority applicants so they would gain every opportunity for which they might qualify in education and employment. Jobs couldn’t be handed to your favorite; they had to be widely advertised, and steps by which candidates would be selected were prescribed. Probably because affirmative action exposed such blatant inequalities, piqued the consciences of some employers, and caused others to fear accusations and lawsuits, hiring priorities and informal quotas became routine.

Still, from my angle, affirmative action appears to have gotten a sluggish start and idled along for years, then finally zoomed up to cruising speed when women gained minority status, about the time I was in graduate school. I graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in the summer of 1977.

A year later, SDSU took me on as a part-timer. I sold a novel to Viking Press, a short story to Esquire, got the nerve to apply for some real teaching jobs, and landed a temporary position at a major university as the backup candidate to an exceptionally qualified woman, who accepted a different job.

The university’s creative writing program had recently hired two men and a woman on tenure lines, bringing the total to ten of us, eight men and two women, all white. During my stay there, we hired a Native American woman who would teach a few semesters until she received a MacArthur “genius” award, a black man who accepted a different position, and a white woman as director. Since then — I’ve kept a tally because for years my fondest desire was to return — they have hired at least ten women on tenure lines and zero men. One of the women was black, one Native American, the rest white. Half of them moved on. All the original men remain.

I’m pleased that women and minorities are working. Besides the equality issue, clearly it’s best for students to encounter teachers from all cultures and backgrounds. And although there may be fields in which unqualified people are hired on account of race or gender, in college teaching there are so many fine candidates for so few jobs, nobody needs to hire a loser.

Affirmative action only aggravates me when it’s grossly abused — as when it carries on long after equal representation has been achieved in a given environment — or is dishonestly represented. Last spring, a position opened at a college where the chair of the hiring committee was a pal of mine. He told me not to bother applying, because they would hire nobody except a woman or minority. I said, “Hey, what makes you think I’d want to teach at your silly school.”

When he was in town conducting interviews at the Modern Language Association convention, he told me about a British fellow who had applied who was the son of a famous actor. This guy has five published novels, 20-some plays and screenplays, numerous articles in major magazines, and is a charming and articulate fellow. Everything they could ask for.

I said, “What do you do with him?”

“Send him back to England.”

“Why’d you fly him over here if it’s all a hoax?”

“We had to interview him, because he’s so obviously the best qualified. If we didn’t at least interview him, he could sue.”

“Who says?”

“Affirmative action.”

Last I heard, that same friend of mine and several of his colleagues were enmeshed in a lawsuit. The trouble began when the university hired a dean of arts and letters from back East. For the first couple of years things went smoothly enough, until the new dean got reckless and began dictating what had previously been left up to the departments. When she claimed a veto over all new hires, a faction of the English department threatened mutinous actions. Several of her most outspoken opponents were creative writing teachers. So she called in women graduate students and asked them to reveal any sexual harassment on the part of any of the creative writing faculty. According to my source, a woman graduate student who was also an attorney, the dean had broken regulations. There are specified procedures to be followed in such cases, and these assert that no investigation may be launched until a written complaint is on file. There was no such complaint. Still, the dean persevered until she uncovered an incidence or two of fraternization, which proved unworthy of sexual harassment charges.

The creative writing faculty declared war. Most of them and half the literature faculty joined the battle. After hearing months of protests, accusations, and countercharges, the president axed the dean. Finally, several professors sued for defamation of character.

I have a close friend on each side of that battle, one a professor of writing, the other of literature. The literature professor landed in the dean’s camp on account of his feminist stance, which I suspect he assumed because, following his divorce, he realized that feminism ingratiated him to the majority of female graduate students. Get him alone, he’s no less sexist than the next guy. Before the feud, he and the writing professor tolerated each other; but the past couple of years, whenever they meet, they snarl. One snitched on the other for smoking in his office. I expect one day they’ll square off in an alley and draw their Colt .45s.

When I left Chico, I asked the chair to consider replacing me with a Latina friend of mine. The chair happily took my advice. But my friend only stayed a year, and during her last semester she served on a hiring committee for the position she was leaving. We used to talk on the phone every couple of weeks. One time she explained that she was in a quandary about filling the position, because the Mexican-American woman they were considering was too politically conservative.

I said, “Whoa, arc we talking about equal opportunity or politics?”

She contended that everything was politics.

“Bullshit,” I said.

If the governor asked for my opinion about affirmative action, I might say, “Tune it up a little, after you do the same for tenure.”

My first semester at CSU, I attended an English department meeting to discuss the workload. Full-time in the CSU system is five courses per semester, with an automatic release of one course for committee work, whether or not you’re on any committee. Between preparation, class time, grading, and office hours, only a magician or malingerer could teach and manage a three-unit class in less than 10 hours each week, so four classes each semester easily requires 40 hours. In addition, to gain promotions, professors are expected to research and publish. There go your summers and lots of free time. The faculty is justified in seeking a workload reduction. For years the unions have meekly attempted to negotiate the actual load down to three classes. But since nobody’s willing to give up a dime, it doesn’t happen.

At this meeting, somebody clued us that the president realized a university couldn’t recruit top faculty — the kind who draw grant money into the place and thereby increase the stature of the university and the value of its degree — if they require professors to teach four classes each semester. But there’s a way to juggle the numbers....

The last I heard, it has something to do with counting FTE, full-time equivalency, which represents the total number of units for which all students are enrolled, divided by 15. Take that figure, divide by the number of classes, then divide once again by the number of full-time positions covered by full-time and part-time faculty. The sum of this equation is, professors get away with teaching three instead of four classes per semester, though some departments may teach as many students on account of increasing class size. Still I suspect that professors teaching one quarter fewer sections than they were paid for might be a factor.

Though my math skills are negligible, I calculate that professors teaching one-quarter less than they’re paid for might be a factor in the scarcity of open classes halfway through registration. Students without priority registration who find any classes owe a debt of gratitude to the endurance of part-timers, like a woman with whom I shared an office desk during 1979 who has continued instructing ever since, about 20 years without climbing to the bottom rung of the assistant professor salary scale, even though at least a dozen English majors I’ve advised have praised her as the best teacher of literature they’ve known. Knowledgeable, kind, lively. Still, she doesn’t know whether she’ll be offered any classes next semester. She only sticks around because she loves teaching, the market is especially tight in San Diego, and her family is settled here.

One guy with a Spanish surname, after ten years at a community college, finally eased into a full-time position. Another fellow, whom I’ve heard called the best, most enthusiastic teacher of poetry writing in the county, landed a real job at the same college. A gifted teacher and writer packed up and moved to the Imperial Valley, thrilled that after all those years of staggering between one college and another, he could buy a home. So there is hope if you’re especially talented and are willing to relocate to Holtville and modify your ambitions so they reach no higher than a community college. There’s just enough hope to keep the most dedicated holding on.

Others of us wander into occupations on the outskirts of education. Extension courses. Workshops to guide students through one of the numerous competency exams. Tutorial sessions for athletes. Five of us at SDSU have landed in the University Advising Center, where the division of undergraduate studies treats us with a pinch more respect than do most departments. Here, after a couple of years, we can feel secure that if the budget holds and nobody else appears who either knows more or costs less, we’ll most likely be rehired next term. Bui the contract won’t be finalized until a few days before the semester commences.

A few have merely paused in the advising center on their way to administrative positions, which they’ve earned by particularly loyal and diligent service. Even these most successful part-timers I hardly envy. One wrong move, they could lose it all. No matter how high they climb, nobody’s giving them tenure. Not at SDSU.

If I were among them, I’d go searching for a different university that would grant, as a benefit to my administrative position, return rights to a department. With tenure. That’s the way it’s done, so that when a dean or other officer falls out of grace or gets bored, sick, or weary of the grind, she can go back to professing in her field no matter whose toes she has tromped upon.

I wonder how quickly the dean at my friend’s school who challenged the creative writing faculty would find a job if she didn’t have tenure and could only toss her resume into the pile with those of several hundred part-timers. And I wonder how many full professors could earn their jobs back, should there ever come a season of open competition.

Ah, well. The little struggles enrich our lives, right? And surely the problems of us instructors don’t mean a hill of beans compared to what’s becoming of all those students. They’re the ones who have to sit still for endless lectures and discussions led by characters whose game they neither respect nor understand. They see, not clearly, but in glimpses, what contentment and security higher education has provided for us. Intuitively at least, they recognize our frustrations and no longer think of professors as pacing their libraries, pondering the mysteries great and small, but see many of us for what we are—harried and insecure people racing from one place to the next to keep a stride ahead of the credit bureau, hoping to God our husband or wife will hold on to the job that provides our medical insurance, trying to keep the faith and pass along the news that knowledge is a blessing for its own sake, though it might not buy us a five-year-old Hyundai Excel.

A friend about my age, the principal of a middle school, expressed her chagrin at a statement of mine that implied that universities weren’t little domains over which professors benevolently reign, spreading peace, goodwill, and objectivity. That’s what we used to think.

Now, I suspect, the prevailing sentiment is closer to “Why should I listen to some guy who went to college for seven years so he could get a crummy part-time job?”

Such is my tentative answer to why I have to waste a half-semester convincing students that 25 years obsessing over a subject has provided me with a few insights. I could be dead wrong. Everybody who steps into a classroom might look at the issue from a different angle. A friend of mine has a simpler answer to why the students are more argumentative than responsive. He says, “Overall, they’re not as smart as they used to be. So they’re antagonistic because they just don’t get it. The problem is, the admission standards have slipped.”

I think, “Naw. I can’t believe these students are any stupider than I was.” Or than I am, criticizing the hand that feeds me.