Introduction

"The next time someone asks, tell them you've been beta-testing at Guantanamo."

I'd gone to a conference for the first time in 10 years to read a paper a colleague and I wrote about agency, diversity and Cognitive Grammar, two of which are dead horses being mercilessly flogged in the academic arena to this day, the last of which only a handful of people have ever heard of, but have managed to wage a war over on the scale of Lord of the Rings, with the advocates in the role of Frodo and its opponents playing a mad group of Saurons. I'd been horribly nervous, out of practice by a decade, my theory muscles withered down to spare strings you could pluck a banjo tune on. I had visions of academic catastrophes, spilling wine on some highly revered theory rock star at the requisite graze-fest that opened these dealies, throwing up on the podium, forgetting everything I'd ever learned in my life, or answering someone's question about Cognitive Grammar with, "What's Cognitive Grammar?" Or I'd end up saying "Cognitive Grammar, is, like, so fucking cool!"

I did spill wine at the wine and cheeser, but only on the purse belonging to a secretary I wasn't particularly fond of at the time, my cheese following suit once it saw that it's partner had jumped ship. But no one really saw it, and I didn't draw attention to myself by going, "Oh my God!" and swooping down on said purse with an arsenal of cocktail napkins, like I did the last time I was at one of these things. Once I'd gotten my party-foul out of the way, I was fine for the rest of the evening, and the hyperventilating the next day didn't really bother me that much. I took advantage of the heavy breathing to speed-smoke some cigarettes and make some obscene phone calls.

Between phone calls and choking down cigarettes, I gave myself a little pep talk: Don't be stupid. It's just a paper. It does not define you as a person. You never have to see these people again as long as you live. You could take a dump in the center of the floor and smear your feces all over the wall if you wanted to. It'd be just as good as the blockage being cleared from some of the mental colons inside. They don't pay your rent. You don't have to impress them.

Bullshit. The truth of the matter was, I needed to feel like I hadn't wasted almost six years of my life sitting in an ivory tower with some truly unpleasant people, waiting for my glorious PhD Prince to finally arrive and whisk me away from the perdition of theory-wankers. I needed to be able to say that I could run with the big dogs and pee in the tall grass. As much as I knew that the division between professor and lecturer is a flexible one at the least, I still needed these assholes to admit that I was just as good as they were. And I hated them even more for it. But instead of bolting and finding a nice bar and an even nicer Sidecar, I ground out my cigarette and returned to the conference.

And when my time came, I rocked it. After the first few shaky sentences, I found my groove, flicked the teacher switch on, and did what I have been doing for the last 14 years. I made people laugh, smile, nod, understand, appreciate what I was saying and how I was saying it. And it all made sense. I felt, at the end of my talk, that I had finally arrived, that the applause was genuine, that I was just as good. If I got run over by a bus right now, I said to myself, it would be all right with me.

Too bad there were no buses around.

Afterwards, when we were herding towards the vans that would whisk us off to our lavish feast at the local Mexican chain restaurant in the shopping center in town, someone I'd seen earlier, someone I thought I knew but for the life of me couldn't place, came up to me and re-introduced himself. He'd been guest-lecturing at Stanford when I was a graduate student there. He was now tenured in the German department at the university where the conference was and had been happily working away. He asked me how I'd been, and I told him I'd been doing well, that I was now teaching part-time at a U.C. and really enjoying it. I left out the fact that I'd gained and lost about 80 pounds in between, had started fencing again, had started a dessert business, had moved back to Germany and lived there for a year, that I was writing again and had the best social calendar of anyone I knew. "So where have you been keeping yourself all these years? Did you go on the job market?"

Then came my spiel, my partner hadn't wanted to move after I graduated, the statement that I didn't have to move and look for a job because he made enough money for both of us. We were just fine staying in San Francisco. So I stayed in The City and began teaching English at a State University. And then he left. And that was that.

"You know, that's exactly what I'm always telling my graduate students. They can't sit on their degrees forever. They've got to get on the market! That degree has a shelf life, and you have to use it as soon as possible." He gave me his condolences with his eyes, mourning the premature death of my illustrious academic career almost more than I did. He finished me off with a sad smile. In less than five minutes, I lost the good feeling I'd received after 3 months of writing and working with my colleague.

Dinner that night only gave me more opportunities to knock things over and blot up spilled wine, beer and salt for the Margarita's everyone else was polishing off. I excused myself to the bathroom and then rushed out the front door, lit a cigarette, and called Phoebe. I told her about the encounter with the tenured guy. And she suggested the Guantanamo come-back.

"It's not far from the truth."

"I know, sweetie. I'm sorry."

"Me too."

How is it that I failed to tell that guy the other stuff, that I'd been teaching German off and on for the last 14 years, that I'd been teaching English for the last 10, that I'd had over 2,000 students, graded 8,000 papers, had excellent reviews and evaluations from my students, that I'd been nominated for excellence in teaching awards, that students waited for me to teach a class they had to take, that I had my own little cult following no matter what school I taught at. How come I hadn't told him that I'd been offered full-time work at two different schools in Germany based on one or two observations? Hell, I've even received a couple of chili peppers on ratemyprofessor. Why didn't I tell him that I was damn good at what I do and there are literally thousands of people who would attest to that? Why did I feel like such a failure for not having a tenure track job? Why does he think that's such a horrible state of being?

In academia, no one ever asks a professor to explain their 10-year absence from the classroom, excepting the odd seminar or upper-division course they get yoked with. No one ever pities them for choosing research over teaching. No one ever advises their graduate students to wait a little bit before becoming a wine-guzzling, pontificating, theorizing, committee-forming, open-letter writing condescending sack of crap. tenured professors are congratulated for having "dodged the bullet" of leading the life of a lecturer, escaping the clutches of down and dirty undergraduate involvement. No. In academia, the tenure-track job is the golden calf, and those who don't have it are to be pitied and, all too often, treated like entities undeserving of decent pay and a manageable workload.

But has anyone noticed, just maybe, that lecturers, those adjuncts who spend half their lives in their car, chugging coffee and Red Bull while hauling ass down the freeway to the next campus, and the other half of their lives choking on stacks of homework that litter their homes and play active roles in their nightmares, are the people who actually do the bulk of the teaching at the post-secondary level, that they are the people who make the comfortable lives of the tenured few possible? Academia, much like the feudal system from which it stems, privileges the elite few and grinds the unwashed under its heels. The only thing that has changed to make it truly horrific is a good healthy dose of capitalism and free market enterprise.

Am I bitter? You bet your boots I am.

But it's not that simple, as you'll soon see.