Cover Story

Yes, Virginia, Adjuncts Do Win Guggenheims

by Chris Cumo

Andre Dubus III

The genes for prose run deep in the Dubus family. Like his father, Andre Dubus III writes award-winning fiction. His novel House of Sand and Fog (Norton, 1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction in 1999. The next year Oprah Winfrey made it an Oprah Book Club selection, praised it as her "favorite read this year," and had him on her show. His first two novels sold 10,000 copies combined. House of Sand and Fog has nearly two million copies in print. He went from giving readings to ten or fifteen people to crowds of 500 The Boston Herald announced that "Andre Dubus III has hit pay dirt."

"I was stunned," Dubus admits. "It's a strange experience. It's a good strange, though. I'll take it."

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First Person

Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty: On Comp. Copies

by Oronte Churm, an obvious pseudonym

AT HINTERLAND UNIVERSITY, there are three ways to come by examination or desk copies of textbooks. The first is to email our textbook reps., who are unfailingly polite and prompt in filling requests. The second is to attend one of the “book fairs” that take place monthly in the copy room and ask the reps.—in this case, often just young people standing in for more seasoned reps—for free copies. (Some instructors ask for textbooks just to look legitimate; they’re really after the free pizza the reps. provide.) The third is to go to an administrative office in our building and take any of the hundreds of books organized by course, subject, and approach, on shelves to the ceiling. The textbooks will be examined, or not, but all tend to pile up on our desks, floors, windowsills, and bookcases. And increasingly frequently, buyers drop by offices such as mine—once known as the “adjunct ghetto”—asking for “extra books you’re not using.”

It’s like John McPhee says: “the body of a fish tells you how that fish makes a living.” These men—always men—look tired, rumpled. They tend to chatter with their heads sideways to look at titles. One is a lean kid with bad teeth, who has no business card. Other buyers pull large leather cases on wheels and carry computerized inventory guns, but their heels are as worn as Willy Loman’s. The buyer evaluates the books—you weakly protest that this copy is being used or admit that one is old—then he pulls out a roll of cash. Suddenly you have $5 or $40 you didn’t have before; he loads his books into bags or onto a dolly and is gone.

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Juggling 101

The Hot and Cold of Chili Peppers

Posted: March 6th, 2010

Some days I really love chili peppers. I mean all kinds: habanera, jalapeno, serrano, the band from the 80s and 90s, and also the RateMyProfessor.com chilies. As I get older, the edible chilies become tougher to take in quantities, the band hasn't been active lately, but the RateMyProfessor.com chilies never fail to make me smile.

I definitely know the power of marketing and I use those chilies to full effect. Students comment to me about them at least a few times a semester, and usually it's to say they don't know how they feel about the chili rating, but they love the funness of the idea of them. Back in 2008, John Warner wrote Quién Es Caliente? Getting Your RateMyProfessors.com Chili Pepper, with humorous advice that no one should take. He does note, though, that at that time fewer than 25% of college instructors listed on the RateMyProfessor.com site have any kind of hotness. I wonder what the numbers would be now? Sounds like a conference paper waiting to happen. Also from 2008 (that must have been a troubling year for chili-pepper-seeking profs) are two other pieces that explain that chili hotness is contextual; one is by Craig Willse and the second is by NewSocProf. These insightful bloggers suggest that hotness has less to do with looking like Paris Hilton, put everything to do with how one engages in the subject s/he is teaching. For example, one can be in his or her 60s and still be "hot" because s/he is passionate about her/his subject.

Prior to that, the general talk around the academic water cooler was that the entire site was horrible - allow students to anonymously rate instructors; worse, to assign attractiveness, as if that matters. Not everyone was so grim, though. Many discussions showed the deeper meaning of such soon-to-be iconic structures. In 2005, for example, Alex Golub worried that even mentioning that we instructors knew about the site, let alone to openly discuss the chili peppers, might potentially be considered a violation of the students' privacy. But he concluded that the successful professor would ultimately embrace what the chilies represent - student voice, and faculty needed to understand that.

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