Cogs, Heart and Soul
We were comp/rhet PhDs (the newer cohorts) and literature MAs (the lifers), plus a handful of nervous MFAs forever running two steps behind but making up for it with skillful mimicry and lucky ears for language. We’d written theses on writing program administration and assessment and integrating multimodal, on Indigenous rhetorics and translingualism and community literacies in conversation.
Each year we reached 10,000 students across 350 sections of first-year composition, first-year composition honors, and preparation for first-year composition, which is what we called the sections that some of us were old enough to have once called remedial. We were the heart and soul of the university, or else we were cogs in the great machine of it. We outnumbered the department’s tenured and tenure-track faculty six-to-one, and they feared us not in the slightest; our only power, which we gleefully abused, lay in airing our grievances at detailed length during monthly faculty meetings.
Some of us had once been something else: a handful of musicians, for whom even contingent academia seemed comparatively stable, an always-overdressed former lawyer whose eyes gleamed as though she’d gotten away with something. Some of us had trust funds or rich spouses. Some of us had spent years bartending, waitering, housecleaning, construction apprenticing. We had thoughts about the devaluation of labor, about the commodification of the individual, thoughts we shared, from-home mug in hand, back when we could still run into each other by the coffee machine in the common room. We had our alliances and factions, our back-stabbings and intrigues. We liked our work, mostly. We loved our students, tolerated each other. We got up every morning fully expecting the Spanish Inquisition; as it turned out, this was a profound failure of imagination.
For us, it started with Connie, just a few minutes after she assigned the opening writing exercise to her T/Th 9am (a writing exercise! we whispered afterward, such arbitrary busywork, and how typical of Connie, good-hearted but deadweight, who’d not updated her lesson plans even once since her hiring—seventeen years ago now). But anyway, with Connie, the virus wasn’t even in our state yet, officially, and so the thinking was that Connie had been a heart thing, or maybe a brain thing, until the poor janitor her freaked-out students had dragged into the classroom to deal with the body (and then seven of the freaked-out students) came down with it too. They were fine, the students, so young and barely sick at all, and the janitor belonged to a more powerful union than ours, with good health coverage, and so we assumed he too was fine, though he didn’t come back to work, which, we considered, may have been a mental health accommodation; maybe he’d been reassigned to a different building. It must have been traumatizing to come upon Connie like that, her gray waves hanging limp, her hazel eyes open, we imagined. Accusatory. We took up a collection, all of us handing crumpled fives to Chrissy, the department secretary, who sent flowers to the funeral home.
Connie wasn’t that long ago, in the historical sense, but she was eons ago in terms of language evolution. No one had then heard of community spread; large indoor gatherings went unrestricted. Connie had a daughter who drove up from downstate, held a viewing and a service, and though many of us had sort of vaguely wanted to go, had thought very seriously for several minutes about going, most of us didn’t, we had class preps, we had visual text analyses to grade, and the selfish among us were lucky, it turned out, since the six members of the old guard who did attend were the next to fall. We were shocked, of course, and grieved for our stalwarts, who’d been close, some of them, to achieving retirement. The more engaged of us considered a memorial, a potluck, maybe something outdoors? But the planning fell off our plates, as the scope of the work ahead became clear. In addition to six more department collections—“Maybe Venmo, this time?” a new hire suggested to the listserv and was quickly shut down by Davi, who made every effort to minimize the government tracking of her expenditures, thanks—we now had to figure out who would take over not only Connie’s classes (somehow, she’d gotten permission to teach an overload of five courses) but also the classes that had been taught by the fallen six, which made for close to thirty newly unstaffed sections, each populated by thirty freaked-out, unhappy students, each student wondering what was going to happen with their grade now that their teacher and presumably the password that protected their teacher’s gradebook was gone? Also, by the way, they were noticing that a lot of the teachers seemed to be sick, and they were wondering if this was maybe something they should be worried about?
Fortunately, we’d been prepared for just this line of questioning with an email just that morning from the provost. Teaching faculty were instructed to warmly reassure students that the university’s number one concern was keeping them safe, that a university physician carefully monitored all the latest news, and that, if we held that news up to the light and turned it, prism-like, perhaps we could refract the teacher absences into something positive, such as the university’s newly generous sick leave policy, a policy which we were highly encouraged to consider implementing. So we revised our syllabi to permit unlimited absences, and we smiled at our students, and stepped back when they stepped close, and used hand sanitizer at our desks after class and then washed our hands after using the bathroom and used hand sanitizer again. This worked for a while, a week, maybe ten days, until some of the students, the internationals, honestly, the ones from virus-experienced countries, started wearing face masks and vinyl gloves to class, and other students, the domestics, honestly, the ones from north and east and mid-state, started freaking out and rolling their chairs six feet away from their personally-protected classmates. On the listserv we pondered: Was the domestics’ behavior xenophobic or cautious or both, might we be wise to follow the internationals’ lead and purchase some surgical masks for ourselves, and had anyone seen Chrissy lately? Not like her to just stop showing up.
An emergency all-staff meeting was scheduled after those of us who taught the 9ams were startled to discover the facilities people installing plastic barriers around the tech lecterns, and it was at this meeting that Michael, our departmental union rep—sweet, long-haired, metal-artist Michael, who was in recovery, cried easily, gazed at us with soft eyes, and spoke about love as a pedagogical tool—basically cracked, because what, exactly, he asked no one in particular, were we being asked to do here? Why were we teaching our students from inside a little plastic box? If it was not safe to teach our students in person, then why were we still holding classes? For God’s sake, why were we not shutting everything down? His eyes welled up, and he looked at us, pleading, searching for allies, and we looked down at our hands, our desks. There were jokes to be made, tough, sardonic jokes about dancing for our dollars, perhaps, which, if we were going to be honest (no! why start now?), was all that we really did here anyway. Everyone knew this. Was it possible that Michael did not know this? Unrelated, was Michael, perhaps, looking a little sweatier than usual? Was he feeling okay? Why on earth were we holding this meeting in person, indoors? Also, had anyone texted Veronica, who had trouble with dates and schedules and room numbers even under the best of circumstances? Open some windows, circulate the air. Sonia, old radical, white-braided peace activist (she would fill Veronica in later—they were close), raised a hand, tentative. “Has anyone considered,” she asked, “bringing up to the administration the possibility of hazard pay?” And she smiled at us and Michael sat down and it felt good to laugh, but we realized even in the moment that laughter (confined space, forceful expulsion, droplets) might not have been the best idea.
The university went online a few days later, online asynchronous a few days after that, and this was when our rosters really began to swell with unfamiliar names, names belonging to Michael’s students and Nancy’s students and Barb’s students and Linda’s students and Del’s students and Sue’s students and Anahita’s students and Sonia’s students (Sonia, poor Sonia, stuck around to comfort Michael after the disastrous department meeting; we took up a nice collection for her wife, currently sheltering at home with mild symptoms) and Jackson’s students, all split up and parceled out to our classes, and we beamed unconditional positive regard at our laptops’ built-in cameras during our open drop-in office hours, squinted later at the student images on our class lists, tried to connect the grinning headshots to our memories of their poorly lit faces and pajama-clad bodies or their animated avatars and Times New Roman names, and at the start of each Zoom class we shared the PowerPoint slide promising, for anyone who’s just joining us today, that everyone will be treated fairly, that no student’s grade will suffer because they had the misfortune to attend college during the virus, and the students (we were pretty sure) found this reassuring, but they still had many, many, very specific questions about their particular situation and how we would be applying their former instructor’s attendance policy (and by the way did we happen to have access to their old teacher’s attendance records? Because there were some disputed days that they had emailed about but never got an answer?) and also they were waiting for an update on their participation grade and there was absolutely nothing that we had to say to these students because no, we didn’t have access to Connie’s or Jackson’s or Anahita’s or Michael’s attendance records because we didn’t have access to Connie or Jackson or Anahita or even to Michael anymore, as he had dedicated himself to homeschooling his sister’s twins while she worked double shifts at the hospital.
Our new students realized that our only option was to 4.0 them at roughly the same point in the semester that we did, and even as more names were added to our rosters (Choi’s students and Deborah’s and Natasha’s and Ginny’s and Suzette’s—but, wait, though, she was just about to have a baby, maybe she’s fine?—and Margaret Z.’s and Margaret K.’s and dear God, who even was Eugene, all of these poor faces we’d smiled at in the hallways, hurriedly peed next to in the awkward bathroom stalls, passed a paper plate to during an end-of-semester potluck, gone, gone, gone, leaving behind 240 new names each concerned about their grades, and, my God, how long was this semester, anyway?), the assignments stopped coming in, our Zooms stopped chiming during our designated drop-in hours, and we used the freed-up time to add extra visual appeal (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) to next week’s PowerPoints, because the most we could do was give anyone who did show up something nice to look at.
It was around this time that Veronica, poor dotty Veronica, onetime poet-champion of the working class, Veronica who could never keep track of how many zeroes to input at the beginning of the copier code, emailed the listserv: Could someone please, perhaps, remind her what week of the semester this was? The problem, she went on to explain, was that she felt as though her entire brain had been swaddled in thin cotton gauze, and each day ran into the next, so that, even though she was technically aware that a given day might have been, say, Tuesday, April 14, that fact had been stripped for her of whatever meaning a person might typically assign to said date and so who was she to say that Tuesday, April 14 came before or after Sunday, May 17? How much time elapsed between a Tuesday and a Friday? When it was Saturday, wasn’t it, really, pretty much almost Friday again?
Years later, on his radical unschooling podcast, Michael would interview Veronica, and together they would make the case that this kind of disorienting liminality, when introduced with intention, could be a site of tremendous generative potential in the education space. While most of us had by then pivoted to library science or social work, caregiving or AI training—even the lawyer, we’d heard, now worked in real estate—this was a particularly controversial take for those who remained. Suzette left a comment, under her real name, calling out Michael’s privilege as a kinship educator who designed bespoke adventures for two attentive nephews. Perhaps, she suggested, in their optimism he and Veronica had failed to consider the position of the contingent, expected to repeat identical, high-touch hybrid class experiences for hundreds of increasingly distrustful freshmen. Michael, we knew, could be relied upon to smooth this over with one of his generous calling-ins, and those of us watching the comment space felt something close to our old camaraderie as we waited, and waited, for his reply.
But that first, terrible, spring, it was Scout (they/them Scout, who was Scout S. and kind, not she/her, thanks! Scout, who was Scout W. and testy) who finally responded, Hi Veronica! It is April 30, and the semester closes in ten days, and do be sure to check your bank deposits, because there have been some reports that payroll is a bit wonky this period, and while we were checking, the university president bcc’d an email: First, a deep and sincere thank you to each and every one of us who’d pulled together over these last tumultuous weeks to seamlessly deliver the kind of student-first, impactful learning experience that our institution was known for. Then: Please do not set foot on campus. Please continue to monitor for updates about the coming salary cuts, the non-renewals, the furloughs, and so we clicked out of our email and began inputting the 4.0s—our students would not suffer—until the semester reached its end, at which point we shut down our programs and walked away, and the world just kept right on spinning forward, not bothering to ask any of us, even once, how we felt about it.
Carol M. Quinn’s short stories and flash have recently appeared in Lost Balloon, Grist, and The Tusculum Review, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in New York with her family.