Often, the choices of young professors and scholars are limited by career concerns and limited time. If a young, recently minted classics or history Ph.D., lucky enough to land a temporary lectureship, had to make an either/or choice between tutoring all his struggling students in Latin 1A, along with giving community lectures on Spartacus or Thermopylae at the local Rotary Club and junior high, or writing a journal article on the perspectives of ethnic, gender, and race relations and their empirical referents in Roman cults in Asia Minor, or even another scholarly note on abnormal uses of the optative mood in Diodorus, choosing politicization and specialization would be the far wiser career move — even as participating in broad community and undergraduate outreach, in this endangered climate, would be the wiser investment to save an entire discipline.
From an academic standpoint we did normal things like teach World Civ I in the Plato-to-NATO style and write magazine articles in popular publications on subjects people were interested in. Examples of these are on the right hand side of this page.
I was strange and unique to them.
When one walked into the RVCC humanities department, one might as well have walked into the Mos Eisley Cantina. It was an intersectional freak show of weirdos, self-hating whites, radical feminists, communists; one guy named his kid 'Justice'. Writing this just now we sort of regret we weren't still on staff during the election so we could enjoy their pain.
Our militant normalcy (thanks Kurt Schlichter!-there's that attribution thing again) was no problem at all for the department until the new adjunct coordinator decided they wanted to get rid of us.* They thought we were like all the other adjuncts who just have to smile an take it becuase we needed the gig.
They thought wrong.
*We thank you literary revenge. We thank you very much.
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