Writer-in-Hesitance
By Steve Salerno

Allentown, Pennsylvania—Midway through last semester, word began filtering back to the pooh-bahs at Allentown’s Muhlenberg College, where I served as an adjunct professor of writing, that despite my lack of a terminal degree, perhaps I wasn’t such an unqualified disaster in the classroom after all. A horrific glitch in the registrar’s computer had placed some of the English department’s top students under my supervision, and apparently they were now singing the praises of their new favorite professor—yours truly. They emphasized in particular what a magnificent job I did of introducing them to “writing as it’s practiced out in the real world.”

 

Normally, this is the point at which I would have been fired on the spot. But, like many liberal-arts colleges these days, Muhlenberg finds itself dealing with a sudden, inexplicable phenomenon: a surge in the number of writing students who’ve come to realize that not too many magazines or book publishers need trenchant works pertaining to Beowulf, or even Virginia Woolf. Students have begun demanding coursework with a more pragmatic tilt. Thus, after undertaking a broad inquiry intended to ensure that I was neither molesting the coeds nor—worse—promoting a classroom climate that tolerated sociopolitical views to the right of Che Guevara, my department chairman approached me one day. “You know, we really like you, Steve,” he said. “You think you’d be able to teach two courses next semester instead of just one?” For this, he offered me twice my pay—the low salary of an adjunct professor.

 

It occurred to me that Muhlenberg’s actual objective here might be to add a faculty member at wages more appropriate to jobs that require the holder to ask questions like “paper or plastic?” So a few days later I found my way to my chairman’s office and told him I’d be delighted to teach two classes for the school, but that I wanted a visiting professorship, at commensurate professorial remuneration. I assume that his laughter subsided in time.

 

The following day he returned, grimacing, to my dank end of the hall, to inform me that although he had no visiting professorships, the school might conceivably make me its writer-in-residence. He was careful to point out that this posed problems of some delicacy, for I was not exactly the prototypical author imagined in such august academic arrangements.

 

Colleges tend to bestow writer-in-residence appointments upon the sorts of litterateurs who are forever in danger of having the heat in their cat-laden garrets shut off, or are under investigation by John Ashcroft for links to groups plotting the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Every decade or so, they produce some impenetrable poetry or fiction for publications with names like Zephyr of the Ephemeral Consciousness. As part of their duties, they’re expected to host semi-regular public readings of their work, which, for many of them, may be the only time that work is experienced by anyone other than family members or fellow terrorist-sympathizers. I had written books people could order on Amazon, and sometimes even did. I wondered how the department could justify giving so prominent a platform to a writer whose work could be understood without the aid of mind-altering substances.

 

My mind swirling in such deep concerns, I asked my department chair the obvious, all-important question.

 

“So how much would you pay me to be your writer-in-residence?”

 

We went back and forth on the matter of salary for several days. At week’s end the dean of faculty himself e-mailed me with the school’s final offer—three times the usual adjunct rate. Or about half the rate for bona fide professors. In return for this largesse, my chairman later informed me, I would have to “find something” to do to justify my existence.

 

I took the deal. After some discussion, we settled on my giving talks to local high-school seniors about how writing skills can enrich one’s life. I can only assume the English department sought to avoid the certain embarrassment of parading its lowly journalist-cum-writer-in-residence before more culturally aware factions, like, say, the adult population of Allentown.

 

But I’m not going to feel glum about such things tonight. No. Tonight, I shall break out the bubbly and revel in my writer-in-residency, secure in the knowledge that that, plus the usual 50 cents, will get me a cup of coffee in the school’s vending machines.

 

Steve Salerno writes without hesitation for The American Enterprise.