So while I was driving out to the office yesterday, I was cheered by the sound of a couple of local economists insisting, on the local NPR station, that the economic sun is shining brightly on our state. Foreclosures nationwide, we’re told, are really at only 4 percent, and though they’re a little higher here, they’re not all that bad. Oh, heck—as a matter of fact, things are looking good! Because the price of metals is soaring, what the state’s economy is losing to real estate it’s gaining in the revived mining industry. Besides, plenty of construction jobs remain in the various civic projects still ongoing: the train light rail, the new civic center...and we still have lots of open Sonoran desert to tear up for future seas of houses. Things are just ducky here.

According to this pair, the “recession” is a chimera of the overheated news media.

In the evening after the Lehrer Report, the PBS station’s answer to local news came on. There, the Governor squared off against a skeptic,* repeating the same line and saying the state is not in fiscal trouble.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Well, if that’s so, I wonder why I just lost my second stream of income.

Yes. The divisional director at the branch campus of the Great Desert University where I picked up those two bloated online courses I’m teaching canceled all courses taught by part-timers. Since universities use adjunct (part-time) faculty to staff the courses that tenure-track faculty loathe to teach—those huge, work-intensive monsters required for graduation—this means he canceled classes students must have to complete their degrees. The course I’m willing to teach is required for majors in education, social work, global management, and a writing certificate, and it can be used to fill the general studies literacy(!) requirement. The courses were on the fall schedule and already filling up, and so a lot of kids are about to be even more rudely surprised than were the displaced faculty members.

In a move fairly typical of GDU administrators (they are, after all, academics and not managers either by training or by temperament), they canceled the courses before telling adjunct faculty who were contracted to teach them. One woman, who has a full-time job on that campus so underpaid she must teach a couple of courses on the side to put food on the table, has been doing this for ten years. She found out she’d been given the boot when a friend noticed the courses she normally teaches had disappeared from the class schedule.

Did the director think he could put off telling her until she showed up at the classroom next fall wondering where her students were?

Eventually, they did get around to sending out a mealy-mouthed e-mail notice, using much the same boilerplate they used to inform tenure-track faculty that their workload will increase exponentially. One of my tenured colleagues will teach a writing-intensive freshman discussion-type course with a cap of a hundred students! And no, she does not get a teaching assistant.

LMTY what it’s like to teach a freshman course that is required, whose subject is controversial, and whose students cannot understand why they have to take it. One of the things that makes teaching freshman comp such a misery is that the students resent being there. Frustrated at being herded into a course they imagine is unnecessary, they make it their business to weasel out of work, to plagiarize every word they can download off the net, to text-message (daydream, read comics, snooze) their way through the weary class hours, and to generally make life a nuisance for the instructor. Now imagine facing 100 barely post-adolescent people with an attitude packed into a course designed for 30.

And imagine being one of those students! What chance do you have to learn a thing?

The excuse for this action, we’re told, is that the university has run out of money. “Please understand,” sez the director, “that these cuts were 100% economically driven and we had no degrees of freedom with which to work.”

We shall see. I’ve sent my CV to the chair of the English department at the Main campus. Dollars to donuts they’re funded to hire adjunct to cover the hideous required courses, including the one I’m willing to prostitute myself to teach.

The better-paying West campus still has eight sections of freshman comp that they will farm out to adjunct faculty. These are the only courses the division is funded to teach with adjuncts. However, I will not teach freshman composition for any amount of money.

So, unless this little fiscal frenzy is confined to that campus (possible: it is the university’s red-headed stepchild, the faculty having annoyed our energetic president no end), it looks like I won’t make my savings goal this year. Sigh.

But don’t worry. Be happy. We’re not having a recession here!

personal finance, angst

*The transcript isn’t posted yet, but watch that space.