Our closing wasn’t unexpected, but I didn’t think it would happen for a couple of years. There were stories that the college had asked for help from the local governments, discussion board posts from people saying the college should just up and close because college is just a big scam anyway, so let it all burn down. Gradually then suddenly, after a decade of desperate news, the stress over losing my dream job became part of the job itself.
*
During a recent ophthalmologist appointment, my doctor slid toward me on his stool. Normally, we would have made small talk about Ireland or his kids. Today he asked, “Why do you think your college is doing so bad?”
My eye doctor is a strikingly handsome man, always dressed to the nines, tailored suits and pocket squares. His direct question threw me off.
“My best guess is that nobody wants to be a teacher anymore,” I said, trying to match his self-assuredness. “That was our main draw for years, and that just isn’t the case anymore.”
He shined a bright light at my dilated pupils, a patrolman at a traffic stop. “You don’t think it’s Albany? All the crime?” Albany, the dapper doctor said, is filled with crime and vandalism. People walk out of CVS with cold medicine without paying.
This was not my only interaction about the fate of my college. A short list of others included an Uber driver, a bartender at the local dive bar, a trustee from another local college at a wine reception, a self-described “highly acclaimed” college admissions counselor from Massachusetts over email, and a friend’s wife over dinner at a bad restaurant in Troy, New York. People have felt quite comfortable talking about how my workplace of almost twenty years was doomed, or was not going to make it, or straight-up said it’s going to close, hooray. Each time, my mind went into a fight-or-flight response. I began to think about my future as unemployed, someone whose career has been taken from them.
*
Hanlon’s Razor states that one should never attribute things to malice that can be better explained by stupidity. Over the years, I was Team Hanlon’s Razor when explaining stupid things happening at my college: overextended real estate, inflated predictions of enrollment in the face of declining enrollment, lack of self-awareness in the flush times while building glass-front buildings, failures to share Excel charts with enrollments.
It is my experience that academics—as opposed to, say, a creative writing professor with “just” an MFA—resist easy explanations. Academics problematize. They look to larger systems to explain institutional failures. They think in non–Hanlon’s Razor terms and interrogate abstract forces.
It’s not that Administrator A was bad at their job, for example, or President B was a literal dipshit, or Provost C didn’t have a clue. An academic might explain such details as a teachable moment to demonstrate the United States’ corporatization of higher education, that it posits a failure of imagination and, in so doing, the system creates people like Administrator X, or that we need to free ourselves of governing metaphors for acquiring knowledge.
I’m not saying the academic approach is wrong. I’m saying that, no matter the approach, it gets to be too much, trying to stem the tide of administrators who made whoppingly bad decisions and had such obvious just-back-from-a-conference confidence that no one could match the energy. It was exhausting.
We couldn’t say “circle back” without giggling. We couldn’t drill down and make sure they had their ducks in a row. We couldn’t question core competencies while the admin’s churn rate hockey-sticked. We couldn’t do all this, because we had our jobs to do: teaching classes, planning curricula, designing courses. That was our wheelhouse.
Some dumpster fires go out naturally when it rains. Others explode.
*
After a decade of the same news, I learned to block it out so I could do my job, the job I love. I read students’ essays, stories, poems. I typed up way too much helpful feedback for students who were just trying to get through another class. I focused on those one or two clusters of words from someone’s draft that shined bright, words that were clear and could break through and should be the starting point for the next draft. And the next. And the next. I learned how to say those two words you never want to hear from a writing teacher: Start over.
*
As an undergraduate, I was not a great student. These days, every once in a while, I have to send along my unofficial transcript to various job applications to prove that I have a degree. And I see all my grades from those years when I was an angry young man with jobs and life and bills. And I think about those professors who had to put up with me and still found words that showed rare instances of possible clarity or insight.
We’re all so needy, we writers. In those undergraduate days, I didn’t dare call myself a writer, afraid it would jinx the vision in my head, or delusion, that I was someone who might have original thoughts. Approval from a couple of my professors encouraged me to be a writer, or at least continue writing. Beyond that, I had no clue what I might do with my life.
In my fifth year of college, I started leading workshops at a halfway house in Camden, New Jersey, a few blocks from the Rutgers campus. I don’t think we called it “leading workshops” back then. We called it “outreach.” I would get buzzed in and led to a room with ten or so people soon to leave the New Jersey prison system, and we’d shoot the shit and maybe write a little bit.
One guy, every week, came up with a new concept for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. He had long hair and imagined all the storyboards, standing up while he described his visions. I had no feedback than to say, “That’s really good.”
I’ll never forget his eyes lighting up when I said that.
A couple of years later, I was in New York City, leading a creative writing workshop—that is definitely what they were called—at the Lower East Side Needle Exchange. We were in deep couches in a room a dozen yards from the counter where current and former heroin users got clean needles or methadone. Helping the people who came to the class write things down was part of their “harm reduction” program. I remember writing little fables with them on legal pads, while another instructor, who did acupuncture for everyone, stuck needles in our ears to help with whatever acupuncture does.
Reading our work aloud, we looked like that horror movie guy with all the needles in his face. We clapped after every person read. Some nodded off after they told their story, and the acupuncturist would take the needles out of their ears. Others wanted to know when we were going to do the writing class again. We hugged one another when we said goodbye.
Those were my first teaching experiences. None of them paid. I would buy cookies before classes, maybe apple juice. Every time I smell apple juice, I think I’m about to sit on a couch and ask people to share their writing.
*
The last time my college laid people off—no, scratch that, it was the time before the last time, a dozen years, or four deans, ago—I had a conversation with an administrator. Not a VP-level administrator, but one who ran an office. It was winter. We stood on a patch of grass in front of my office. It was a Thursday night, when I taught a four-hour class until 9:30 p.m. We jingled our car keys in our palms and talked about how terrible it was that all this was happening. The layoffs used the last-hired, first-fired methodology, and colleagues who had just gotten to campus the previous August were now out of a job.
As we said goodbye, the administrator said something I’ll never forget. “On the bright side,” they said, “the faculty knows how we feel. They now know what it’s like to be an at-will employee.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said, jingling my keys more aggressively. “Where are you from?”
The administrator answered with the name of a local town. Near Albany, but not out in the sticks. Rotterdam or Cohoes maybe. If you don’t know the area, I’ll just say that you could commute from wherever they lived.
And here I will break another rule of dialogue I made for myself: Never put long-ass, monologue-length speeches in quotes. It seems cheesy and dishonest. Who remembers what anyone says exactly for that length of time without a tape recorder? But I will provide the monologue-length speech I gave to this administrator, in quotes, for maximum dramatic effect.
“Right,” I began. “So you’re local. Most if not all of the staff of a college come from that college’s area. And if someone in your line of work gets laid off, that’s bad, but you can also find a job doing something like it, right in the area.
“With faculty, it’s different,” I said. “First, we uproot our lives to go to graduate school, away from home. And then we move again to teach at a college that is usually far away from where we live. Even at a place like Saint Rose, we come from all over the place.”
I pointed to various buildings where colleagues had offices.
“One professor who just got laid off came here from Wisconsin. Where do they go now? Another one in my building lived in Massachusetts, and not the western part. And then there’s another professor who has to worry about their visa from, I think, China?
“My point is that it’s way different for faculty, since we work with a national job market and uproot our lives to get the few jobs that exist out there. We sell our homes if we have one. We put our stuff in a truck and put our kids into a different school. And now, some of those people are out of a job. Where do they go?”
I was getting worked up. I jingled my keys a little harder. My South Jersey accent started to return.
“We’re not at-will employees anyway. Not by a long shot. We got contracts. And the younger professors, the ones with the courage and stomach to get back out on the job market, they’re cooked. They have to wait until the job cycle starts again next year. So it’s not like staff or administrator jobs at all.”
Snow began to fall. The administrator looked at me with a blank gaze that some administrators can summon and said nothing. Did they even understand what I just said? Was all that new information?
I just looked the person up. They now work at another local college, doing what they did at our college. Good for them.
*
Call me the canary in the closed-college coal mine when I tell you about the vibes of a campus in the months before it closes. In the days after the announcement that our college was closing, one of my department’s buildings was vandalized. I heard others were, too. Did the provost tell us? The security department? That’s usually how we get news of such things. No, it was another professor who gave us the heads-up.
The night I heard, I drove over to my office. A computer was thrown off its desk. A hand sanitizer dispenser was knocked off the wall, posters torn down. Whoever did it smoked cigarettes, a detail that somehow made it more apocalyptic.
I packed up the valuables I didn’t want any future vandal to touch: a painting a student made as a thank-you gift, literary journals with my own publications, my framed MFA.
Left behind: a box filled with course evaluations. Years and years of getting ranked, rated, scored, appraised.
*
I believe in college. I believe in teaching and being taught. I believe in writing workshops, in people sitting around a classroom talking about our drafts. I went to an entirely underwhelming college eight miles from my house. And it was transformative. If you had told me at fourteen, while my truck driver father was out of work and calling up local companies for jobs in the mornings before I left for school, the pungent kerosene heater warming our house, that I would someday have almost eighteen years as a college professor under my belt, I would have said you were full of it.
But it happened.
*
I once had a student write about a relationship with her boyfriend. My college had an almost 70% female-identifying student body, and I have read many, many boyfriend relationship memoirs. This student’s draft felt like something was missing.
In our workshop, we went over a scene where the author and boyfriend were having an argument. They weren’t having just any conversation, the class decided. These two were having The Talk. You know the one: where the relationship is going, or if it’s a relationship at all.
Someone asked, “What were you two doing while you’re having this Very Important Talk?”
The author waited what seemed like five minutes but was probably ten seconds.
“We were taking a shower,” she said.
I felt my eyes widen, embarrassed, but the class wasn’t scandalized. Instead, they got to work.
“What else were you talking about?” someone asked.
“We were talking about moving in together,” she said. The boyfriend wanted to move to Gloversville, a Rust Belt town up north, while the author, the girlfriend, wanted to stay near Albany.
“Okay,” I said. “Can you think of any other details?”
“I was shaving my armpits,” she offered.
Once she gave us one detail, it seemed, the student was willing to tell us everything.
A quiet student spoke up. “What kind of razor were you using?”
“One of those pink disposable razors,” the student recalled.
“So you’re having this momentous conversation, and all the while you’re in this intimate space, and you’re wielding a pink razor,” I said, trying to summarize, all professor-like.
“Plus,” the quiet student said, “you were holding a friggin’ weapon!”
My student, the author, smiled. She was excited to get those details on paper.
I was a brave teacher once. Fucking fearless, in fact. I found myself in spaces, in classes, in conversations and stories where people opened themselves up, and it was a group effort. Our writing improved because we didn’t just share our drafts as a class—we also shared how the process of how our drafts came into being, the inspirations and contexts behind the writing.
At its best, teaching writing is, or was, one of the most electrifying and self-actualizing things I have ever done. Now that it’s gone, I find myself perpetually grieving.
*
Once you’re on the tenure track as a “probationary hire”—the academy’s term, not mine—once you’re working and teaching, you’re living inside an always-on, always-busy culture, the feeling that it’s never enough: never enough feedback to students, never enough time to come up with new courses or new lessons or new programs or events, never enough slots for meetings or make-work committees, never enough time for research or writing.
The year I got my tenure-track job, there were five position listings in my area of creative writing, creative nonfiction.
Five. In the whole country.
That I got one of those jobs felt like a badge of honor, something to brag about. Then came the stress. Anyone who has a job teaching will tell you that academia means constantly navigating minefields. You’ll find difficult personalities everywhere, but colleges have more than their fair share. Two colleagues in my department were once married and divorced, and I didn’t find this out until my fourth year.