three universities. Kate will log fewer miles, but will have taught as much, and will have spent more hours on the state ferries. You can correct a lot of student papers while riding on a ferry. We commute between piles of brick. “My man,” the guy says, “ you juggin’ me around.” He is black, 33, a graduate of ‘Nam combat company and the New York City police where he could read, but could not write traffic tickets. The guy is street. The guy is jive. Name of Darrell. He is learning computers. In IBM 360 Pascal he is a hotdog. With the English language , a flop. He unders tands GOSUB, has not the vaguest notion of a prepositional phrase; and—real as the mountains of West Virginia from which he hails (juggin’ is a catfishing term)— does not understand how to write a sentence. He is a member of my remedial class held earlier in the day. By the end o f the week /7/ hove driven 700 miles and taught five classes at three universities. Kate will log fewer miles, but will have spent more hours on the state ferries. We commute between piles o f brick. “You can’t learn it if you don’t do it,” I tell him. “Write it bad until you can write it good. This is one time when you get burned if you don’t get in.” Jive is what he understands. A lot of ‘Nam vets are that way. Black or white, they start jiving even when they are only a little uncomfortable. It was that kind of war. “ Because, ” as one of them explained, “ it was always all crazy. Nobody ever knew what was happening. You made it up.”' “You talk all right,” I tell Darrell. “Just talk yourself a sentence, then write it down the same way you said it. And have it ready Wednesday.” “ It don’t go.” He is suddenly sincere, sincere and troubled. This is a good man. He deserves the best shot I can give. Anyone trapped by language is trapped in hot misery. We all have nigh inexpressible feelings, but to. be trapped in language is to leave all feelings inexpressible except by mouth or fist. “ Don’t crap me around, West Virginia. I’m from down home, the original Kentucky babe. Tell it to the city folks.” Life has not gone easy with him. Ever. If I go easy with him he will not understand. He stands. Cusses. Smiles. Gets it. f he road to Tacoma is wet and slick, I but nearly empty after the commuter rush. The pragmatist James, writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience, concludes that people will create and worship those gods which they believe best serve them. The U.S. Navy, as insubstantial as God, claims that one Trident submarine packs more explosive energy than has been collectively discharged by all the navies in all of history. By the time I reach the far side of Tacoma, Kate faces a class at Seattle Central Community College. A snazz in English composition, she is also an expert in 19th century British and European literature, should anyone ever ask. No one does. Part timers in English are almost always hired to teach comp or technical writing. If she catches the 10:35 ferry, she will arrive home a little after midnight. Part-time facu lty are essential to higher education. Without new people and new ideas streaming through, colleges and universities grow rotund and sanctimonious. In community colleges, part-time faculty members are required to teach many nonacademic courses. It is not practical to appoint a professor of landscape maintenance. American education is taking an otherwise good idea to the butcher shop. In colleges such as Olympic, money is found to spend on administrators, but little to spend on faculty. Part-time faculty earn a third of regular staff salary. Kate will teach twelve courses at three colleges in twelve months. She will not net nine thousand dollars. She must teach at three separate colleges, because if she teaches more than five courses at any given college, that college would have to pay her half-time wages, in addition to having to offer medical insurance, partial retirement, even a place to park her car. In Washington, only 11 percent of part timers receive those fringes. Kate is one of those part timers who keeps circling the action, doing a good job, waiting for the job that rarely or never opens. Most such part timers eventually become discouraged, sometimes bitter. They take high paid and terrible jobs with corporations where they teach businessmen how to write letters. Heads of college departments are in perpetual struggle to find and retain capable part- time teachers. Not all part timers have to dash. Some are retired teachers living near the college, teachers for whom the idea of not teaching is inconceivable. They are teachers for life. Other part timers live locally, hold full time jobs, teach to supplement their incomes. The gypsy is almost always one of those ‘teachers for life’ who cannot find a campus on which to build a permanent nest. There are bad features in the arrangement, but it is exciting to deal with three separate types of students. We juggle, constantly on stage beneath lights as we alter class plans in mid-sentence. Maybe William James is attractive because life becomes a search for that precise combination which works. Maybe we slip over the hill when we turn to Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarianism. Tacoma. Blue collar town. I roll onto the campus of Pacific Lutheran University. The departments of English, History, Languages, Theology and Philosophy nest in the same building. John Cardinal Henry Newman thought of this sort of place as ideal. The campus is quiet, to my mind serene. This is not an ivory tower. This is a citadel. There is tolerance here, mutual support, mutual respect and mutual dedication to teaching. The students are young, sometimes over protected. When I first read The Idea of a University it seemed impossible for such a place to exist. Here in Tacoma, beside McCord Air Force Base with flying weapons overhead, it exists. The faculty does not make nearly the wages paid by state universities. No one is spraining an ankle in an attempt to move on. When I reached my office the next morning, a freshman, Denise, is sitting there. She is small, not much beyond her baby fat, and absolutely determined. Her outfit is completely color coordinated, jogging suit, shoes, socks, ear rings and scarf. “ I want,” says Denise, “ to do only one thing. I want to be a missionary and smuggle Bibles into Russia.” “ By the time you leave here,” I say, “ you will have encountered some other books that you will also want to smuggle into Russia— and Iowa C ity—and Seattle.” She does not get it. This is a university and not a Bible college. Later, before the class is complete, I reckon she will get it. “ I want,” says Gerald, my next student visitor—tall and skinny and wonderfully indignant—” to know why in the hell I can’t use ‘snizwit’ in a story. It’s about the brilliance of dreaming. Snooze. Wit. Snizwit. Joyce could of done it.” “ Because you misspelled it,” I con him kindly. “ The proper spelling is ‘snezwit,’ from ancient Hebrew.” He blinks. I blink. - ' “ It is a fine thing to invent words,” I tell him, “ but use rare words in a context which allows your reader to feel the pleasure of the word.” He doesn’t get it, yet. All last year he wrote, trying to beat James Joyce at Joyce’s own word games. He may keep it up for another year. That is dandy. It will make him a better writer. Most places are ill-served by the part timer system. But here it’s different. Universities do a better job. It is largely a matter of attitude. At this university part timers are welcomed at department meetings. If—the philosophy goes—a part timer works with this English department, -then he or she is a member of this department. A member of the English department must have an office, must be paid a bit extra for office hours. Pacific Lutheran is a place where the president or the provost may stop you on campus just to ask how things are going. I ime to head out. The freeway north f to Seattle is slick and in plaqes at least as badly worn as any over used system. I shove books across the front seat and A Contemporary Rhetoric shuffles to the top. Its author Maxine Hairston is concerned about the misuse of part- time faculty. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education she points out that the American education is taking an otherwise good idea to the butcher shop. Money is found to spend on administrators, but little to spend on faculty. latest nationwide report (1980) shows that 41 percent of all faculty are part time. With the job situation so bleak, she reports that nationwide the numbers of freshmen who plan on college teaching have dropped from 1.8 percent of student body in 1966 to 0.2 percent in 1982. The State of Washington’s Commission on Community Colleges actually recommends a 60/40 mix, plus a 9 percent pay raise for part time teachers. In every other aspect it endorses the status quo. And this is being called the ‘ information age.’ It seems unlikely that it will come to much if people cannot read and understand the information which they can so readily transmit. Process and analysis, comparison and contrast are where composition teachers live; and the inability of others to understand these processes may well be the glitch on which the information revolution fades like the transient memory of a switched off computer. As I drive past the Boeing Company, Kate is up and flying in front of her second class in Tacoma. The Boeing airfield is stacked with large airliners which sit waiting for delivery to airlines around the world. No business and occupation tax will be paid on those deliveries. Because the state has no income tax, with its military and starwars operation, Boeing processes tens of billions in protected money. Meanwhile the community colleges languish. I roll onto the campus of The University of Washington. Immense buildings are lighted in the night, gleam in the rain like signals of civilized hope. This is not a university in Newman’s terms. It is a large for-profit institution owned by the State of Washington, with the revenues going into the s ta te ’s general fund. In conseq u e n t , this is a collection of colleges which compete with each other for funding and power and political influence. Power on this campus now derives from funding by the military, and by large corporations. Undergraduates are not particularly welcomed, not by an administration drugged with the idea of turning this beloved university into the MIT of the west. Yet there are echoes. Voices. The building in which I teach used to house the English department. Now it is a catch-all, but the writers and poets who come to this campus still insist that they meet their classes in Parrington Hall. Vernon Louis Parrington served here, even though members of his department tried to fire him. Theodore Roethke served here, even though members of his department tried to fire him. Poets, writers, historians, theologians, other dreamers have walked this sacred place. The poet Nelson Bentley is here, in the classroom next door to my own in Parrington Hall. Bentley, who—if.he offered a class which met at 2 a.m. on Sunday mornings— would walk into a full classroom. This is a night class in adult education, a class in writing the personal essay. The class members are professionals: physicians, attorneys, CPAs, and others, who claim to be playing with ‘a full bag of marbles.’ Come Thursday night the subject will be ‘writing about the sciences’ and the classroom will be littered with Ph.D.s, mostly microbiologists. Attrition is high in these classes. People come, and some of them are lonesome. Some are looking for new forms of expression. Some are compelled; pressed forward by James Joyce’s aginbite of inwit. When the lonesome feelings do not disappear, or the class demands get in the way of their jobs, a lot of them make excuses to themselves. And a lot of fine and publishing w rite rs have come from these classes. The educational cycle completes its turn. The teacher learns as much or more than do the students. “ Relativity,” one says, “ is simply simple. You put one space here, one space there, and then you watch what doesn’t happen.” She is American of Japanese ancestry, small and somehow poignant, an attorney. Dark hair worn in the manner that Kate wears her hair, but this woman is not rushing. By now Kate will have finished her class, will be driving fifty miles to home. 34 Clinton St. Quarterly
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