Adjunctivitis & Ethics

“School is necessary to produce the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society.”
-- Ivan Illich

I suppose any good fiction about academic skullduggery should include some high seriousness, some vague nod to moral scruple and such. Why would a teacher abandon his ethical principles and stoop to write someone else’s dissertation? Filthy lucre, money you say?

Consider the plight of the adjunct, those academic nomads who man the oars of the research barges that fund the social apparatus’ that masquerade as institutes of higher learning. Those same overseers (tenured professors) who are closer to touching the sun than consorting with the barely literate freshmen that fund the cash cow, pass their distracted judgment on we peons who dole out the necessary remediation that allows them to gloat and fawn over how remarkable indeed their students are. They who hold court on how we should best impart an imagined pedagogical (theoretical) sophistication totally foreign to the fledgling undergrad. They who labor under the illusion that teaching is something more than a last desperate attempt to stamp out ignorance at the twilight of a decadent culture. They whose brilliance and erudition are irreconcilable with the idea that their colleague could be Nancy, and make no mistake about it, every university has its Nancies. Praise God!

Would that we could live on 35 to 40 grand a year, and shame on us for seeking to pick up side jobs editing bad writing. After all, the privilege of working at an esteemed university like BSU should be enough to inoculate us from the temptation of taking profit in a less honorable way. I suppose I should have explored male stripping rather than exposing (excuse the pun) myself to the perils of Nancy. Now that I think about it, there were times when she reminded me of a coiled reptile, a boa constrictor that had just swallowed one, perhaps two, suckling pigs.

Yes, I took the money, and much like Hardy’s “Ruined Maid,” consoled myself with the fact that being rich and ruined was better than lighting myself on fire, jumping off an overpass, and being hit by a car.

That poor woman, you say. How could you take her spanking new, ATM disbursed, Ben Franklins and not feel a twinge of guilt? It was easy. I should have charged more. Working with her was akin to spraying-agent orange over the jungles of Viet Nam. I still have an uncontrollable tic that began shortly after our time was finished. Psychically bruised and battered, I licked my cerebral wounds and resigned myself to kind of never ending Nancy induced post-traumatic stress syndrome. Oh how she owes me!

Poor woman, yeah right! She was an only child, and heir to a fortune amassed by her father, who was the chief leasing agent, globally, for Studebaker Truck Division. I remember her carrying her pecuniary wads in a kinder garden pencil case from which she dispensed my measly pittance, just as I recall tossing Petronian journals in such a way that I could raid her pouch of crayolas. Never taking much, mind you. I’m no golden goose killer. Only enough to pay my faithful therapist Joe Micheals, and to quench the alcoholic fires lit by this cognitive arsonist intent on sapping me of my vital cognitive fluids.

If only this weren’t a fiction. I might then resort to extortion, and spend the rest of my days tempting the Ivory Towered high and mighty with Spitzerian call girls and exotic intellectual canards.