A Conservative Alone on Campus and Then at Home

Mark Steyn writes about the case of the now deceased (by his own hand) Professor Mike Adams, a conservative who fought a decade long battle against the left at UNC Wilmington.

This puts us in mind of our own battle with academia in this case Raritan Valley Community College.

We draw attention to two bits of insight from Steyn, 'Pushing back can be initially exhilarating - and then just awfully wearing and soul-crushing,' and 'It's a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile.'

Below are links describing our own battle with the RVCC Humanities Department. We wrote these not long after the fight, and agonized for more than a year about publishing them. Screw it, we finally decided.
Le Affair de Adjunct
Le Affair de Adjunct Part Deux 
Le Affair de Adjunct d'Nuclear

You're goddamn right we were pissed off. And we still pissed off. We achieved some revenge, literary, and went to enormous effort to do so.

Those bastards are awfully pleased with themselves, a google search will reveal. We're glad they are. We're glad we know this about them. We hope Professor Adams has found peace.

The Friday Final

While rooting around our flash-drives for magazine articles, we found our Raritan Valley Community College files. So we're adding a new feature: The Friday Final.

In the coming months we'll be posting our old tests for reader(s) education and general betterment. Let's get things off properly:

US I

Professor Stroock

Civil War Test

1: Describe Lincoln and his cabinet
2: What was Grant’s art of war? What were his strategy and tactics?
3: Describe Sherman’s March. What was his goal? How did he accomplish his goal? How did his way of war differ from Grant’s?
4: Describe, in detail, one battle of the Civil War.
5: Why do you think the North won the Civil War?

Where's my Cash Stuffed Envelope?

By now you've all heard about the college admissions bribery scandal in which rich parents spent tens of thousands, hundreds thousands of dollars just to get their kid into a fancy school.

We hope the arrest by the Feds at gunpoint was worth it.

We assure the readership that the profs at these so-called prestigious schools weren't getting envelopes marked -300.

At Raritan Valley Community College the humanities department usually had one or two full time profs in each sub department, History, English, Sociology, etc etc. More than half the workload was born by adjuncts, paid by the class, usually about $2400 per. The gig came without benefits.

So where is all the money going? Diversity coordinators, minority outreach specialists, state-of-the-art facilities, housing more like fancy apartments than dorms. The reader(s) will get the idea.

Federal loan guarantees, student debt, administrative bloat, rising cost, what a scam. The college system not the bribery.

Le Affair de Adjunct: The Smoldering Crater

And so summer 2015 was the last time we set foot in a classroom, World Civ I. It was a nice semester.

After that there was some bureaucratic rigmarole and one titanic but pointless clash with another dean, just becuase we weren't going to let them get rid of us without a fight. We went down guns blazing.

The night we knew it was over we got good and drunk.

We told ourselves we'd write more and we have.

That September was the beginning of our now chronic heart problems. Nice stent, there.

Mrs. Stroock, for one, is glad we're no longer at RVCC. Too much stress. She's right, of course.

Still we drive past RVCC every day and look on wistfully. We whisper, 'RVCC....RVCC...'

Le Affair de Adjunct

This blog is a bit over three years old now.

Ironically one of the things we wanted to blog about was teaching.

It has also been nearly three years since we set foot inside a classroom.

How's that for irony?

Long time reader(s) will recall we used to be an adjunct professor of history at Raritan Valley Community College.

The important term there is 'adjunct'.

Basically adjuncts are brought on to teach as many as three courses. We very often had three classes to teach becuase we were very good at what we did. We have the student evaluations and departmental observations to prove it.

Back to the adjunct part. To save costs most colleges use adjuncts to teach, but have a few full time tenured and tenure track profs. These can cherry pick any classes they want, even those already assigned to adjuncts.

And so our story begins. Many Adjuncts are downtrodden and put-upon, teaching two classes here, two classes there, barely making a living, bemoaning their situation, and insisting they have a right to earn a living teaching about, say, Medieval Basque Poetry, or Lesbian Labor organizers in Pre-Revolutionary Mexico.

Not us. We sent our CV to Raritan Valley a decade ago on a lark and were sorely tempted to list our name as 'Guillermo' just to prove a point.

[What exactly is your point?-Ed]

Our point Ed, is that our bag is writing, and teaching was just a side gig we did for kicks.

Anyhoo, one afternoon in the fall of 2014 we received a rather apologetic call for the chair of the RVCC humanities department, who was very sorry but she was going to have to take one of our two classes and give it to this sod. We expressed our own disappointment but the chair gave us another class so it was really no biggie.

We always liked that department head. Tough and serious she put up with a few of the minor annoyances we naturally create, didn't give a damn about our politics, even though we are diametrically opposed, and said she really enjoyed our lecture on part 1 of American Civil War.

Well just before the beginning of the new semester we got another phone call, this one from the new chair saying he was taking THAT class away and giving it to the above mentioned sod. This time we were pretty pissed and let the new chair know. Didn't he understand that this class was already given as compensation? Did he also not know that we had already done the syllabus, the class schedule and made day care arrangements.

The new chair knew none of these things. This was just the first act showing the new chairs extreme incompetence and later, weakness, both as an administrator and as a man.

Our conversations ended with the new chair assuring us, 'I'll take care of you.'

Well the fall semester was winding down and on came the time to do class assignments for the spring. As the list went out we got nothing. Not a class, despite the new chair's assurances 'I'll take care of you.'

There were a couple of weeks left in the semester. We called the chair, frankly in a huff. he stammered on, most incompetently so. That was when he began casting about for excuses. First he tried to argue that we wasn't getting classes because we taught too much military history. We pointed out that when one hires a military historian, one is going to get a lot of military history. That said, a close reading of our syllabus shows we were using things like the Punic Wars to show the strength of Roman society, government, culture, etc. and not as pure military history per-se. He then cast about for another excuse, this time pointing out that we had turned World Civ I into Plato-NATO Western Civ. We replied that we had been doing that for several semesters and this hadn't been a problem until he needed an excuse. He himself admitted we should have been consulted about this weeks ago.

The above exchange took place over a few phone calls and emails. After giving the matter further thought, and considering the way we had been treated, we submitted a letter of resignation, effective immediately, with about 3 weeks left in the semester.

We don't think they expected that...

What Would you say you do Here?

Professor David Graeber presents his findings on the most useless jobs in America. These are:

Compliance Workers
Student Paper Writers
Middle Management
Corporate Lawyer
Telemarketer
Movie Exec
College Admin

We have some experience with that last one, and Herr Professor's description is worth quoting in full:

Over the last several decades, university administration has ballooned insanely — even while the number of teachers and students remain pretty much the same. There are hosts of new provosts, vice chancellors, deans and deanlets and even more, who all now have to be provided with tiny armies of assistants to make them feel important. First they hire them, then they decide what they’re going to do — which is mostly, make up new paperwork to give to teachers and students. As one complained: “Every dean needs his vice dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.”

At Raritan Valley Community College we had a post called Dean of Multicultural Affairs. A colleague of mine, my crazy Australian professor friend, once speculated about what the dean actually did all day. I mean, how does one be a Dean of Multicultural Affairs?

Adjuncts? Well, we show up at the adjunct dungeon. Log in, check regular and email, chit chat with colleagues, grade papers, enter grades, prep for class, take a few notes, etc etc. Any questions?

In which Will Stroock gets in a John C McGinley clip for the second day in a row

Report From the Leonard Lance Protest

So last night my Congressman, Leonard Lance  held a town hall at my former place of employment, Raritan Valley Community College.

I didn't have tickets to the actual town hall but there was a big protest outside so I decided to check things out.

The crowd is gathered behind a temporary fence in front of the college. There is great turnout. At least a couple hundred people have showed up. These are the usual combination of professional Democrats, the SEIU and Sierra Club is here as are at least a few other local groups. A good half of the protesters are young people, it's at a college campus after all. A lot of older women are present, skinny vegans, crazy cat lady types, gals who have been doing this sort of thing since at least the Nuclear Freeze movement. I didn't see one woman I actually wanted to schtup. There are a lot of gray bearded liberal men, a few professional crazies. To my disappointment there were no black masked thugs. I didn't see one man that I thought stood a decent chance against me in a fight.

The protesters hold a eclectic and varied array of printed and homemade signs. There must have been a hundred of them. A fair amount of pink 'pussy hats' too. Many insist they are not paid protesters. Maybe, but this is a well organized and planned event as evidenced by the banners and printer signs.

The crowd is overwhelmingly white, whiter than the newsroom at MSNBC.

There are lots of cops. Branchburg, Bridgewater, Somerset County Sheriff. These were professional and friendly. There will be no trouble at this event. Lots of press too. Local, ABC, CNN, and curiously Agence Presse France. What's up with that?

Clad in a red MAGA hat I eventually settled in with half a dozen other Trump people. We stand out even with no hats. Large men. Solid looking men. One was with his beautiful blonde wife. We stood in front of the protest, watching and chatting. The crowd was boisterous, excited and loud. They were having a good time. They were also well behaved. No one gave me any trouble.When a woman dropped her sign over the temporary fence she asked if I could get it for her. I obliged.  At once point a woman with a home made 'No Wall' sign began bashing Melania to our little gaggle of Trumpiness. She was  skinny with short gray hair and glasses and a dead ringer for that coot that was thrown off a plane last month for harassing a Trump supporter. We mock her out of existence.

One by one the leaders of the various liberal groups there make short speeches. These were of the usual boilerplate and thoroughly uninteresting.

Video at this link,guys. Do watch it all the way though.