Category Archives: Carnegie Mellon University

Intermittent Starvation

22 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Empty fruit and vegetable section shelves, Asda store, London, UK, March 14, 2020. (Yui Mok/PA via AP; https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/15/trump-tells-people-stop-hoarding-and-buy-normal-am/).

A fair number of people I know have gotten into this trend we collectively call intermittent fasting. It’s the idea that you reduce your caloric intake by either reducing you total number of meals per day or take a set of days to not eat at all. When combined with rest, sleep, and exercise, one can become healthier, lose weight, and roll one’s body back to the days of normal blood pressure and glucose numbers. In the somewhat Apocalyptic times in which we live, some have said that intermittent fasting may be the new normal. Especially if or when stores and supermarkets begin to run out of foodstuffs. We will see what we will see come May, June, and the summer.

In the department of limited food intake, I have years of experience. Between the fall of 1980 and the winter of 1999, there isn’t a year where I didn’t have to scramble for scraps. I unknowingly made the lack of food at 616 part of my escapism in those earlier years, especially in Peanuts Land, where I used empty styrofoam McDonald’s and Burger King containers to construct the eatery sections of my imaginary capital city. It was partly why I liked it when my father would show up every third Saturday between April 1979 and April 1981 to take me and my brother Darren out for a few hours or even the whole weekend, sober or drunk. It didn’t really matter to me. Being able to eat fast food was a godsend this time four decades ago. Arthur Treacher’s Chicken and Chips, Mickey D’s, Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream, Papaya’s hot dogs, Wakefield’s brownies and greasy-spoon diners. Once, I even ordered and ate three Big Macs in one sitting at the one-time McDonald’s on the Avenue in South Side Mount Vernon. I was ten in 1980! Ah, those were great days!

But those days came after many days of well-balanced but often meager food options that Mom provided. Chicken and dumplings, pinto beans or black-eyed peas with rice, pork neck bones, and corn bread, and cabbage, cabbage, cabbage! By the end of 1980, cereal was no longer a regular household staple, and snacks were a rarity. Heck, when Mom and my idiot stepfather Maurice separated for six months that October, he cleaned out weeks’ worth of pork chops, lamb shanks, chicken, ground beef, and steaks on his way out of our apartment.

Then, the Hebrew-Israelite years came, and with it, intermittent fasting. That is, with extreme urban poverty. With the start of middle school in September 1981 came days at a time where I didn’t eat or ate very little. Our conservative take on Judaism meant that we would all have to fast for three days prior to Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Since Darren and I weren’t adults, we were supposed to fruit and juice fast. That would have worked if there had been fruit juice and fruit in the house regularly! Our first Rosh Hashanah was the only time in those three years where I ate oranges, apples, grapes, and bananas for all three days. But with my family’s economic decline came days where I simply went to school and did not eat at all, upcoming high-holy day or otherwise.

So many days I watched my classmates eat full lunches while my stomach growled from drinking water. Pride and watching the older students clown others for being on free and reduced lunch kept me from picking up and filling out the application. And even if I hadn’t been raised to not expect handouts and to not see free-lunch as a sign of familial failure, the Hebrew-Israelite years complicated matters for me. Most Fridays at school, the cafeteria served grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches with French fries.

It got way worse before it got better. From October 1981 through April 1984, we went between seven and 10 days every single month with little or no food at 616. After the 20th of any given month, I knew I’d miss meals, or it would be cabbage and corn bread or Great Northern beans and rice again. Keep in mind, Mom worked at Mount Vernon Hospital for most of that time as a dietary supervisor, so she worked around food while often hungry herself. One weekend in October 1982, all we had in the kitchen was some dried up cabbage, sugar, a little bit of flour, and a one-year-old box of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food cake mix. Things were so bad the summer and fall of 1982 that Mom was bringing home scraps from her job for us to eat. I got sick of days’ old Boston Creme Pie, hospital version.

Life improved slightly when Mom went on welfare after my late sister Sarai’s birth in 1983. But the food shortages continued into 1985, when Darren and I began working with my father regularly, and then began getting our own jobs. But while the malnourishment and starvation left me scarred, they also left me prepared for future crises that for many would have been calamities. Homelessness, malnourishment, and no money while at Pitt in 1988. Difficulties with rent, bills, and food in 1990 and 1991, when I graduated from Pitt. Summers looking for work and living off fumes in 1992, 1993, and 1997, when I was in grad school and after I finished my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. The beginning of 1999, when me and soon-to-be-wife stretched $20 over ten days, eating makeshift gravy with instant mashed potatoes while teaching nearly every day for a week at Duquesne.

Maybe that explains why I once thought about becoming a chef while growing up. Maybe that’s why I took so quickly to cooking family-sized meals when I was 14. Maybe that’s the reason I made a point of cleaning off every plate of food I fixed or someone else put in front of me until I was 31. It’s certainly the reason behind my OCD around shopping, cooking, storing, and giving food, for myself, my family, and for others, for so many of my 50 years. It very well could explain my G-I tract issues and IBS for much of my adult life.

But with this COVID-19 pandemic could come food and other shortages. The land of endless plenty could have pockets of starvation if millions get sick and stay sick for too long. I have thought for years about buying a composite bow and some arrows with which I could shoot a deer in the neck. I already know I can do it, having killed two dozen mice and rats over the years — some with a broom handle, a hammer, and my bare hands. I have beheaded and gutted fish, chickens, and turkeys. I have eaten venison and rabbit stew before. Or, I could hop on down to Home Depot and buy some seeds to grow snap peas, green beans, maybe even squash or potatoes. We do have a back yard!

Maybe this is all overblown. Maybe this isn’t the Apocalypse. We still have electricity, cable, and wi-fi, after all. Yet the Romans still had gladiatorial games at the Coliseum during two years of siege and starvation at the Visigoths’ hands before it fell in 410 CE. Thousands and perhaps a few million could go without food, even if the power plants and Comcast and Verizon never shut down.

So, intermittent fasting may well work for many. As for me, I’ve tried it, and I still do it from time to time. But you cannot fast your way out of a crisis. You can hunt and grow your way out of one, though.

My Whole Self At 50

27 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Selfie of me at 50, December 27, 2019. (Donald Earl Collins)

The title could just as easily be, “Confessions From an Educated Fool.” After all, I am highly educated, and have done more than my share of dumb-ass bullshit over the years to avoid certain truths about myself.

I have no idea what turning 50 really means. For Black men, the average life expectancy of 64.5 years makes me worry about every ache and every anomaly. Based on my family genetics, I have at least 30 years where my age will in no way be reflected in my height, weight, athleticism, sex drive, or other general health issues. My mind should remain sharp until I am in my late-80s or early 90s, if not longer. As of now, I know I am in better overall shape than I was this time 10 years ago, but lack the running stamina I developed during most of my 40s. On the other hand, my knees have been thanking me for the past 17 months since I stopped running 300-plus miles a year.

Depending on how I look at my life, I am a scrambler who has turned an Olympic-size swimming pool full of diarrhea with turd chunks into two kilos of gold. Or, I am a once brilliant and talented young Black man whose temper and impatience fucked up his future. Two things can be true, sometimes equally so, and at the same time. That is, if I don’t account for upbringing, systemic racism, extreme poverty, the violence of misogynoir and toxic masculinity, and a host of other burdens that my differential equation mind could not factor into my life’s calculus. Much less control or counteract with respectability or kindness or the Golden Rules of Christianity.

Some context. When I was 11, I participated in my first writing contest and came in second place among the dozens of K-12 students who submitted to the local newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. By then, I had long buried the sexual assault I endured and the subsequent suicide attempt from five years earlier. I graduated 14th in a class of 509 in 1987, only to spend my last days of high school and the year after my enrollment at Pitt treated as if I were an invisible ghost by many of my former classmates. At 25, I earned a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. But the entire time I was in commune with “my fellow Fellows,” as I used to say, I was ambivalent about my prospects, in and out of academia. At 26, in part because of the Spencer fellowship, I completed my dissertation. Yet my advisor’s petty jealousies and psychological abuse burned me out, just as my dissertation committee’s subsequent abandonment of me once I graduated left me feeling burned.

I was a young prospect with a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon, but with little in financial support or connections to continue to spin shit into gold. After two years, I left the wonderful world of adjunct teaching for a civic education job with the center-right organization Presidential Classroom. My boss was both extremely paranoia about terrorist attacks on DC and openly racist, referring to Asians as “Orientals” and making comments like “Slavery was a hoax.” After seven job interviews for academic positions over three years, Howard University offered me a tenure-stream assistant professorship in June 2000. I said no. At the time, I told my significant other, two months into our marriage, “I do not like working for racists, but at least I know where I stand. With Howard’s constant elitism, I’d likely lose it and pop one of my colleagues in the mouth for saying something elitist and stupid.” I was averaging 100-to-110 hours of work per week and about five hours of broken sleep at night when I made this decision.

Sometimes I think it’s the dumbest adult decision I ever made. Most of time, though, I think about the broom closet that they offered me as an office. I remember the urinals in the Founders Library that dated back to the tenure of Mordecai Johnson (1926-1960). I ruminate on rough attitudes of my one-time colleagues (I eventually taught there as an adjunct in 2007). And through all this, I remind myself that it was okay to say no. Especially to colorism, respectability politics, and a campus that has been in need of a total gutting and a top-down renovation at least since I began visiting in 1993.

My career has been one of wandering by necessity. I have never been a complete fit anywhere. Damn sure not in academia. Definitely not in the nonprofit world. Certainly not in consulting. And not quite as a freelance writer and author. I have had to bend and break so many rules and norms, just to survive, that to mold and shape myself like a shapeshifter would nearly always lead to me feeling at constant war, with myself and my work.

Selfie of me post-workout, December 24, 2019. (Donald Earl Collins).

Especially since so much of this war was over who I am. I am a writer, damn it! I love teaching — most of the time. I like managing projects, and was fairly good at raising money. I am an excellent cook (just ask anyone other than my Mom). I am a pretty good basketball player even now, and could’ve made a D1 college squad back in the day. I once considered stripping to make ends meet after finishing my doctorate (my eventual wife talked me out of it, a lot, while I gunned for a six-pack). But since at least the spring of 1981 (maybe, with Peanuts Land, the spring of 1979), I have been a storytelling, introspective, imagining-of-alternative-worlds-and-lives, mixing-fictional-techniques-with-my-real-life writer. It took me 21 years to admit that I was a writer, another decade to see myself as a writer first and foremost. That no matter the job or my roles in that job, that I was, am, and will always be a writer.

That was what motivated me to write Fear of a “Black” America and Boy @ The Window and then self-publish them, even as the process of researching and writing Boy @ The Window led me to uncover so many uncomfortable truths about me, my family, and the people I grew up around. Including the truth about my greatest failure, my refusal to dig out the splinter in my mind. The dual decision to not see myself as a writer and then to not dedicate myself spirit, soul, and body to my craft and calling until after turning 45. That’s my biggest regret, my daily frustration, my constant companion, buried just a few millimeters between my flesh and my bones.

Even when I finally push through, break through, blow up, and have any modest level of success as an author of x-number of books — and I will, because, me — I will continue to carry this deep well of what coulda and shoulda been. My need to credential myself, to make up for the loss of my childhood to poverty and domestic violence and child abuse, my desire for worth and work, my simple arrogance of youth. It nearly squeezed out the divine voice of purpose in my mind. More than once, it all drove me to the edge of the galaxy, where rage against the world, a lust for lust and self-destruction, and the sheer drop into the abyss of depression all intersect into a nebula of desperate insanity.

This is precisely why it is so important to have a crew, a group of folx who will not jump into the void with you, but instead will support you with critique and encouragement, and yes, love. Of course, I could not have transitioned from the burnout of the nonprofit world and the constant search for money to “change the world” into the constant search for income through freelance writer and teaching social justice through history and education without my wife. After years of watching bosses and co-workers get down on their knees to beg for money while they morphed the grassroots and systemic social justice work they really wanted to do into inchworm-paced “social change” models, I wanted out. I figured, consulting, occasionally teaching, and doing the work I truly wanted to do would be better.

Then, the Great Recession hit, and did a number on my permanent job prospects and consulting work. If someone had told me on verge of my 40th birthday that I would spend the next decade primarily working as contingent faculty at not one but two universities, I would have laughed until I cried. I would’ve also predicted that my wife would’ve handed me divorce papers. I didn’t die from woeful laughter, and my beloved did not demand that I move on.

But we did argue. One of those arguments led me to a “Fuck It” realization at the end of 2014. No one would ever offer me a permanent position at a university as faculty, not without offering me an administrator position first. And since the unofficial rules of the academy have never really applied to me and my writing, I had the right to publish anywhere, on any topic, even if and when other academicians — including some whom I had trained — looked at me like I was some tragic figure.

Along with some counterintuitive thinking about my eclectic writing skills and queer approaches to understanding the application of history and education in mainstream journalism, this new truth has been my resurrection and insurrection as a writer. Between The Guardian and Seven Scribes, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and The Washington Post, and especially Al Jazeera English, I have come closest to being my truest and whole self outside of marriage, friendship, parenting, and my many moments in prayer.

I owe my wife for allowing me the space necessary to finally access my calling. But I also owe my small inner circle of folx who may not have always understood my journey and the decisions I made that led me to where I am at half-century. They’ve read my horrific drafts, heard my most hare-brained ideas, smiled through my most ludicrous of plans both before and during this bitter slog of a rollercoaster ride. I’m more than sure that some in my circle still don’t understand my end game. Mostly because there is some aspect of my whole self that I haven’t shared with them. Not only my desire as a writer. But my general desire to be excellent at everything, my quest to know everything, and my contradictory default of being scared of nearly everything, especially of whatever good moments I have had. Too many times, I have seen the anvil drop on or near me all too soon after drilling a three.

I think I have one more big run in me left. The proverbial they say that life is a marathon and not a sprint. They are wrong. Life is like a continuous basketball game, where one can be overmatched, but can take timeouts and make a series of 12-0 or 30-13 runs to tie the game or take the lead. I am in the midst of a run right now, as unexpected as living past the age of 30 was for me when I almost jumped off a bridge on my 14th birthday, 36 years ago.

I need the crew I have, and I could use some help from a few more folx who may want to join me on my journey into decade six. I’m gunning for a book contract for my American narcissism and American racism work. I’m looking for some career stability that takes advantage of my work in academia, in nonprofits, and in freelance writing. I’m looking to make sure that my son becomes the whole person he needs to be without spending the next 20 or 30 years kvetching about everything in the universe. I’m looking forward to spending more time traveling outside the US with him, with my wife, with others, and with myself. It’s time. It’s been time for 50 years.

My Thoughts on Cut-Throat Finals Week

17 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Death Race (2008) Dreadnought scene screen shot, December 17, 2019. (https://youtube.com).

I have seen some shady shit as a student and educator over the years. Between my middle school and high school magnet programs in Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon, my four years as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, my three years of grad school course work at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon, and my years of contingent teaching, I have seen students do everything short of killing me or killing their classmates for a higher grade.

This semester provided some new wrinkles (really, old wrinkles I haven’t seen since my Humanities days in the 1980s) that actually shocked me. All as I taught my 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th classes in my roller-coaster of a teaching career. I have felt a certain way toward some of my most demanding, hold-my-hand-for-an-A, spoiled-brat students over the years. This semester, I found myself actually despising three in particular across two universities and four classes. By no means does my grading reflect what I think of them, as I assigned each of them the grades they earned. But really, there is no letter in the alphabet low enough for them that I could assign. At least, one in which I would ever feel fully satisfied. And that is all because they all made the decision to be cut-throat, toward me and toward their peers.

I fully understand the compulsion. Six years in a magnet program that was one part Benetton commercial and three parts Death Race — the Jason Statham version from 2008 — showed me George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a live-action drama set from 1981 to 1987. Students giving each other incorrect notes from which to study. Classmates telling each other they were going to fail a final, or that they didn’t belong in Humanities. One Class of ’87 star making sure to say to another that they were only getting into an elite school because they were Black.

Hazing, bullying, torture, ostracism, denigration were all part of my experience, and that was before we started taking AP courses! I even snickered when our valedictorian received a 67 on an English essay in 11th grade because she failed to underline the title of a James Baldwin book (either Go Tell It on the Mountain or The Fire Next Time, who can remember such mundanity nearly 34 years later). We became good friends for a while after high school — go figure!

So, it’s not like I couldn’t conceive of setting up a classmate to fail, using someone else’s better words to substitute for my gross and imperfect writing, or spending money to hire a tutor to study for an AP exam. I could’ve really done it, if I had the will and/or the wealth. I just wouldn’t do it. You know, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It’s in Matthews, the first book of the Gospels in the New Testament. It’s one of the few tenets that I have tried hard to follow in all my years as a human being and as a Christian. (The tenets I follow consistently are universal ones, so please do not get your atheistic drawers all twisted.)

But not always. During finals week my second semester at Pitt, at the end of April 1988, I put that Golden Rule aside, and for good reason. During our two-hour, multiple-choice final exam in Roman History, I noticed him. A skinny, geeky White yinzer with dirty blond hair sitting behind me in the Cathedral of Learning lecture hall on the ground floor. I noticed him because I heard him, somewhere around the question 70 mark. The only time his pencil made a noise was after I had filled in a bubble with an answer. By question 75, I knew the dumb mf was cheating off my answer sheet.

Denzel Washington’s character putting corkscrew to throw/soft palate/brain cavity, The Equalizer (2014), December 17, 2019. (https://imdb.com).

So I did what my years in Mount Vernon and in Humanities had trained me for. I proceeded to answer the next 25 questions on this 100-question exam incorrectly on purpose. It was rich and dripping with caramel-chocolate-on-ripe-strawberries revenge! I knew every correct answer and just kept bubbling in one wrong one after another. And as sure as dog-shit peppering dirty snow piles on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in February, Mr. Yinzer bubbled in his answers right after mine.

Then, I stopped. I paused for a half-minute after bubbling in question 100. I picked up my big eraser, and frantically rubbed out my incorrect answers to each of those last 25 questions. Then I turned around, and gave the yinzer a “Gotcha!” look. He was pissed and scared, his face the pale color of white pastel paint mixed with water. I turned back around, and carefully bubbled in my correct answers for the last quarter of the exam.

After I got up to submit my exam to the professor, I walked up the steps toward the back of the lecture hall, passing Mr. Yinzer along the way. He shot me a look, one where he knew he was caught, like a rat in an old-style trap, about to die from the pain of asphyxiation and a broken neck. I rolled my eyes with the thought, That’s what you get, dumb muthafucka!

I am not proud of that moment. Sure, the yinzer deserved it. But, I could’ve reported it to the professor. I could have just covered my answer sheet up better. I could have confronted the student directly. I could have even let the student ride my coattails toward an A on his final exam. Instead, I went all cut-throat and ensured that this student failed his final. In what way am I really better than him when I helped an academically drowning classmate swallow more water while holding his head down?

I know. What I did may seem milquetoast on the scale between blatant cheating and the viral slut-shaming of a peer with whom you are in academic competition. But that’s the point. None of this should be acceptable. My A in the course would not have changed, and Mr. Yinzer would still have struggled academically even if had succeeded at cheating on this one exam.

At just 10 days before I turn 50, I have figured out what I hate, actually hate, about other humans. I hate habitual liars, especially the ones who regularly lie to themselves while telling me their lies. I hate elitist assholery, even from those whom I admire, even from among my friends. I hate cheating, and those who think they can get away with it. I hate brown-nosing, as I smell this shit from a mile away. Now, I despise those who would eat A’s and A-‘s for their three squares a day before recognizing that education is about much more than a high grade an a job to pay off their student loans. Education is about freedom, having and making good choices, and finding yourself a crew that you can rely on and can rely on you long after graduation. Those who think otherwise are as lost as Dr. Manhattan caught in a quantum vortex.

The Unbearable Elitism of This World (Especially Academia)

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Gated community, Houston, TX area [but virtual gates in education for years], February 13, 2012. (Chelsea Lameira via http://www.houstonagentmagazine.com)

This is my 1,000th blog, folks! It took me 12 years and three months to reach this milestone — yay, me!

But it’s on the exact day/date that I began grad school, specifically, the master’s program in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, 28 years ago. Although that day and that semester were great times for me, my professional lifecycle has been almost as full of failures and setbacks as it has been one of triumph and overcoming. Unfortunately, the microaggressions of racism, ageism (too young and too old), and elitism have all been a central part of my experiences in academia, in the nonprofit world, in writing books, in freelance writing, and in consulting in the nearly three decades since.

In contrast to 2019, that day in 1991 was the first of many in which I heard from professors and colleagues, “You’re too young to do…” and “What? You’re just 21? You know the average age of a history grad student’s 28, right?” Now, when I say to people that I’m a fledgling writer, they ignore me or say, “but you’re too old to be a writer.”

If it were just Millennials or Baby Boomers discounting me, my successes, and my outlook on the world because of my age, I might have been able to live that down. But throw in the occasional, “Wow! You’re a program officer? I thought you only played basketball!” (this happened to me in one of my nonprofit jobs back in 2003), and, “You know what we call a Black guy with a PhD…,” and the rage that reminds me of everyday racism rises up. James Baldwin said as much as part of a 1961 conversation Nat Hentoff between him, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Alfred Kasin, on “The Negro in American Culture.”  “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” Baldwin famously quipped.

But mostly, it has been others’ attempts to demean me by offering ashes as opportunities, whether for publishing a book, finding an agent, getting a consulting gig, or teaching a course. Or, rather, to expect me to perform free labor for a so-called opportunity at some middling job. Only to realize later on that the job was a mirage. And they really expected me to drink sand and glass shards while they mocked me by pouring cold water down their throats!

I had a reminder of the layers of professional elitism and the cruelty that it engenders in April. For nearly two years, I had been in contact with a colleague of mine at Georgetown about the prospect of teaching undergraduate education courses there. Even with my two teaching gigs (which combined make me slightly more than full-time, contingent, but not nearly as tenuous as life had been back in 2010), I still wanted to teach education foundations/policy courses. Because, well, I’m still me, eclectic and still wanting courses that fit my experiences working in multiple worlds.

Out of the blue, Douglas Reed, a professor in a related department, contacted me about the possibility of teaching a summer course. “I now direct a graduate level program that just launched two years ago and have a possible last-minute opening to teach a summer course entitled ‘Social Justice in Education’ to our incoming cohort of MA level students in Educational Transformation. Would you have time to meet over the next week or two to talk about that possibility?,” he emailed.

Now, as someone who has done this with seven universities since 1997, of course I wanted to meet! It’s a grad-level course, combining social justice and education, something that I had taught before, I thought. I hadn’t taught grad students in more than a decade, but at least I already knew how to. I figured that this was a legitimate chance at a third part-time teaching gig.

I was wrong. Instead of the informal meeting/interview process, it seemed more like a one-on-one interrogation. Reed asked questions that would have been easily answered by my cv, by our mutual colleague, by literally anyone in my classrooms that semester. I brought samples from my relevant courses, while Reed never produced a copy of his Social Justice in Education syllabus. When I assumed that I was brought in to teach this course, he mused, “Maybe there might be others involved,” a wishy-washy answer at best.

Five weeks later, after I prompted Reed several times, I got this response:

Our situation has changed a bit since we last spoke. We have extended an offer for a three year position to a candidate and that candidate has accepted our offer and she will also be teaching the course we discussed. We will definitely keep our CV in our files and be sure to reach out if we have any new opportunities.

Un-effing-believable. Unless I consider the truth. I am a 49-year-old Black guy with a salt-and-pepper beard who has never held a tenure-stream position, and one who never attended or has formally taught at an Ivy League school (I did two summers at Princeton, working with high school students, but that doesn’t count in the eyes of the elite gatekeepers). I had the nerve to leave contingent academia behind for nearly a decade, working at nonprofit entities. I made the decision three years ago to no longer pursue publishing scholarly articles, because of, well, the elitism of such publications. And, I eat friend chicken with my bare hands to boot — I’m sure that’s been a dealbreaker some time in the past twenty-something years!

The following is part of what I wrote in response to Reed:

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Thanks for your email and for letting me know. I am miffed. Not because I was not ultimately offered a teaching opportunity. Rejection is a heavy part of being an adjunct, as one doesn’t have a true home. No, what has left distaste in my proverbial mouth is the reality that this was never an opportunity for a summer teaching position to begin with, and that you were not an honest broker in discussion this teaching opportunity with me.
Let me be more specific. There are several ways in which anyone with no opinion on the matter could see that this was not an honest opportunity.
1. You never sent me a copy of the Syllabus for the Social Justice in Education course, nor did you ever provide a copy, before, during, or after our meeting on Friday, April 5. When I inquired about it on April 5, you seemed hesitant about sharing it with me.
3. You never quite said it, but you sort of implied that there was someone else who was vying for teaching the Social Justice in Education course this summer. When I asked specifically if there was another person you were considering for teaching this course, you implied “maybe” at best. You left the context for our meeting and the purpose of our meeting murky.
7. Specifically, the fact that another person was offered a three-year teaching position (one that included this summer course) in the four weeks between our meeting and yesterday afternoon is proof of 5. Since positions generally do not develop spontaneously, I can only assume that you knew about this possibility at the time you met with me, and chose not to disclose it, either because you did not want me to apply for it or because you simply felt I wasn’t qualified for whatever reason.
All of these add up to a clear example of bad faith on your part. I had to clear my schedule to set up a meet with you on Friday, April 5, in the middle of a four-course semester. I came prepared to talk about a teaching opportunity, while you didn’t even provide a Syllabus for the course you purportedly wanted me to teach. You had me travel across DC to Georgetown for a meeting that was really an interview, and one that could have been conducted by phone or videoconferencing at that. While you may have been meeting with me out of courtesy to X, it was not a courtesy to me, at least not in the ways you handled it.
I learned something from this experience. As an adjunct with a non-linear academic, nonprofit, and writing background, I know full well the snarky elitism of many of my so-called colleagues already. Now I have confirmed that in times of hiring, I have nothing to offer as an itinerant minister of education in the eyes of faculty like you.

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I ended with, “You already hold all cards. There was never a need to hide half the deck.”

Most of the time, I am okay with the idea that I can make the combination of mainstream freelance writing and full-time equivalent teaching work, for me, my wife and son, and for our future. It’s been working for almost a decade, after all. But I know that as I approach the big 5-0, that combination better become semi-successful author and term faculty pretty soon. Because I’m too young and too broke to retire, and too old and too good at what I do to try much of anything else. I have considered janitorial work or the Steve Salaita route, though.

On Arrogance and Opinions

18 Saturday May 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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“No, fear and arrogance, you hayseed.” Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins characters in Bull Durham (1988), screenshot, May 18, 2019. (https://getyarn.io).

I received my latest evaluations from my AU students this spring. Really, I shouldn’t complain. Overall, my scores met or exceeded most metrics in all three of my courses this semester, even as some students thought there was “too much reading” or that I needed to “provide more guidance” on the readings I assigned. As an instructor, I have to sort of compartmentalize or even mentally toss out the personal attacks in such surveys. From students thinking I’m sexist because I used “#TimesUp” to get their attention after saying “Time’s up” multiple times during a small group discussion, to students saying I lack “emotional intelligence” because of email miscommunications (mostly on their part, though I took the blame) over a dramatic event. I’m hardly perfect, have never claimed to be, and expect that in dealing with human beings, especially young adults, that these things and their sometimes petty responses are bound to occur.

But some responses have been consistent across time and institution since my TAing days at the University of Pittsburgh. At some point since Fall 1992, a student or two will decide that I’m “arrogant” and that “[I] only care about [my] opinions,” that somehow, I never gave them room to express their opinions or somehow failed to validate their opinions. I don’t think I’ll ever overcome these critiques, nor should I try, especially after so many years of teaching. As the research has indicated for at least a decade, student evaluations of faculty are not reliable sources of data. Barely four out of 10 students at most colleges and universities will actually take the 10 to 20 minutes to complete one. Most negative evaluations correlate to an actual or an anticipated grade that is lower than what the student wanted for themselves in the course.

But the data for faculty of color, especially women faculty of color, and even more especially for Black women faculty, shows measurable racial and gender biases. Complaints about language, how one dresses, speech patterns, and other ticks and foibles become heightened. And not just among White students. Students of color, and Black students in particular, hold the Black faculty who have served as their instructors to a standard that could only be met by a parent of a newborn baby, something akin to perfection. I have felt this last bit during classes and other times at AU this semester more than others.

Still, on the broader issue of arrogance, I have changed my lecture style, the amount I lecture, the kinds of discussions I have run, the tactics for getting students to bond in the classroom, and (where I could) the types of readings I have assigned, just so students are more comfortable and willing to learn. None of this has mattered for the students who expect me to validate every idea they express in the classroom. None of this matters when I go in front of the classroom and lecture and facilitate discussion to this small but very vocal minority.

I used to think it was my age back in the 1990s. So I tried to be more objective, less animated, and gave up some degree of authority in the classroom. That worked for a couple of semesters at Duquesne College of Education and at GW. Mostly. But, even there, one student who told me day one she “hated history” and two students at GW wrote about my so-called classroom arrogance in their evals.

In teaching undergrads for a couple of semesters at the University of the District of Columbia and at Howard in 2006 and 2007, though, not one student had that issue with me. They didn’t complain when I poked holes in their analysis, or when I asked them to back up their opinions with evidence. It was refreshing, actually, to have students who didn’t assume that their opinions and that my years of interpreting and writing about history were equal in weight. Could it be that the racial dynamics of UDC and Howard made for a different interpretation of my demeanor and conveying of knowledge in the classroom (as one is a predominantly Black institution and the other is a flagship HBCU)? Probably.

Since my second year of teaching at UMUC, though, and with this first year at AU, this allegation of arrogance via my opinions has been constant with my evaluations, no matter how well students did and how positive my evaluations were otherwise. At this point, I have figured out a few tendencies of students who lodge this complaint. They are typically not comfortable with the material or with me as their instructor. I am frequently sarcastic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and gesticulate while using some of the skills I picked up from acting-as-public-speaking classes to lecture. In other words, lecturing with skill for me is a performance, one that conveys information, and it must be done with a high degree of confidence and seriousness, balanced with levity. That I have also decided to not treat history in a truly objective manner was deliberate, because history is a living subject, and thus cannot be taught objectively. Fairness and truth are far more important. That doesn’t make me arrogant. That makes me a confident instructor, but one with humanity and empathy.

As for opinions, I have sometimes said to my students, “As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes — nearly everyone has one.” That has usually gotten a few laughs (you gotta read the room before saying something like this — my AU students are too serious on the use of colorful language from what I’ve found so far). But even when I say that “this particular interpretation comes from me,” I am still expressing more than a personal opinion or insight. I am expressing an idea or interpretation based on years of study, observation, reading, and writing, for scholarly and mainstream publications. So when I insist on students backing up their opinions with evidence, or literally have to say, “No, that not correct,” and then explain why it isn’t, this is me doing the job of an instructor with years of knowledge and even expertise on a wide variety of topics, not just some random person on the Red Line train to Shady Grove.

Even with all of these caveats about the differences between opinion and interpretation, about my level of expertise, and about my approach to the classroom, there are some small number of students who will say, “He’s arrogant,” “He doesn’t value my opinion.” Or, as one student emailed me four years ago, “Sir, you are a dickhead.” I realize that these specific comments, like the ones I wrote about for The Washington Post last year about the rejection of Black history and racism as central parts of US history, were about my difference, not my indifference. Being a Black man teaching mostly White students, or teaching Black students who expect me to consistently validate their unsubstantiated opinions, does not have its privileges. Especially on a student evaluation form.

My Life as a Scrambler

10 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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I wish I could say that it was different. I wish I could say that the key to success in my life was crafting plans, developing rubrics, and building out scale models of every step, move, and smile toward achieving Points A, B, and Z on my life-sized to-do list. I wish that life was like being Tom Brady (not really). Or really, like being every White male statue that’s ever stood behind a bruising, blocking, dynamic offensive line in American professional football. One where even a mediocre quarterback like Trent Dilfer or Jim McMahon could stand behind and take as many as ten seconds to find an open receiver for a first down or a long touchdown on their way to a Super Bowl championship.

But, with some notable exceptions, my life, and the successes I’ve garnered in my life, have come from scrambling out of the pocket, usually because my proverbial offensive line couldn’t block the pass rushers in my life. It’s hustlin’ really, but not the kind of hustlin’ that would bring me notoriety. My life has been mostly Joe Montana and Russell Wilson, with occasional periods of Warren Moon half-standing in the pocket and half-scrambling in between.

Graduate school was the one exception that almost ruined me. I took the lesson I learned about keeping my schedule of work, social life (however ill-defined in 1991), and classes and transferred it to my five and a half years of working toward a doctorate. After a straight-A first semester and finishing my master’s in two semesters, I took it as a sign that this drawing up plans and executing them with brutal efficiency was the best way for me.

Keep in mind, I scrambled all through middle school and high school, for all six years I was in my Humanities Program. I scrambled because I had to. I couldn’t make concrete plans to study at 616, to read books by a specific date, to just have a day to myself just to work on me. Not with my abusive ass, idiot stepfather Maurice/Judah/Maurice there. Not with my younger siblings running around. Not with my Mom going through welfare and depression. Not with having to track down my alcoholic father on weekends for work and money.

San Francisco 49er QB Joe Montana scrambling to make a throw, Super Bowl XIX, Stanford Stadium, Palo Alto, CA, January 20, 1985. (http://youtube.com).

And yet with all that, I finished 14th in my graduating class of White, Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Latinx hyperachievers. I received scholarship offers from every school I got into (with Columbia withholding only because they couldn’t believe I came from a family of eight with a $16,600 per year income in New York). Scrambling worked, even though it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Which was why I went the other way. And so, for my graduate school years, and the baker’s dozen of years that followed, I stayed in the pocket. I drew up plans like an architect for my career and life, and followed those plans as if I’d gotten them from God him/herself. And the truth was, most of my plans worked to perfection. I earned a two-year master’s degree in one, earned a big-time dissertation fellowship without overwhelming support from my advisor and committee, published articles, presented at conferences, and, once fully immersed in nonprofit work, job after job, promotion after promotion, more publications and teaching opportunities.

Or so I thought. I hadn’t realized that while my 150-PowerPoint-slide gameplan seemed to be working, that I was still scrambling every chance I got, and hustlin’ myself in the process. I only completed my doctorate in November 1996 because I scrambled, and left my advisor little choice but to approve my dissertation. This after lobbying my other committee members, documenting every comment from my advisor on my dissertation going back a full year, and otherwise turning the academic politics of Carnegie Mellon to my favor that summer and fall. That, and having a complete, 505-page manuscript, sealed the deal.

I scrambled for work all the while, went the summer of 1997 without work before hustlin’ my way into nonprofit work by lying about only having a master’s degree that year. I scrambled into my jobs at Presidential Classroom, both of my positions at Academy for Educational Development, and every single teaching position I’ve held since 1998, AU included.

It just took me until 2008 to realize that I wasn’t the figurative pocket passer. I ran myself and those who’ve been there to catch my publishing, teaching, and working passes open. I’ve never had a good offensive line, because America stacks their lines for privileged White men and White women first, second, and third. Sometimes I’ve had to take the proverbial ball to the end zone or for a first down myself, because there hasn’t been anyone else who can help. Sometimes, too, I have to take the hit, also because I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’ve fought against the mantra “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” for most of my 49-plus years on this Earth.

I’ve come to accept that this is my life. I don’t have to like that despite all the article publications, conference and public presentations, grant money raised, students taught, students now in prominent positions themselves, book manuscripts produced, friends made, and so many other measurables, I am a bad six months away from career collapse. And with that, maybe my marriage, my status as a dad, and  my health and life would be at risk as well.

But I do not intend to be a contingent faculty member and an older man pretending to be a youngish freelance writer with fresh ideas (with the rare consulting opportunity) for the rest of my most productive working days. Either all this works out, somehow, or I’m driving as the Uber professor/Trader Joe’s stock boy/MCPS bus driver (ala Steven Salaita) down the line. Anyway, Red from Shawshank Redemption put it best. “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” My mantra for the past four and a half years.

What If You’ve Never Really Had a Crew?

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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My copy of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s #ThickTheBook, January 12, 2019 (Donald Earl Collins)

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book Thick: And Other Essays, like so many of the books I’ve chosen to read over the past six years, will stay with me a while. She is brilliant, period. I feel blessed having been on the journey of reading about her experiences, her views of the world, and her Blackness and Black feminism. There are so many nuggets and witticisms in Cottom’s Thick that I should sit down and plan out a way to mine her book for actual gold and platinum. It’s rich and thick like hot chocolate with hits of cinnamon and nutmeg, something to imbibe while taking a bite of a New York-style blondie (which I specialize in cooking-wise) or slice of chocolate torte cake here and there.

But there was one sentence that stood out, before I even began reading the book in earnest. As I randomly flipped through the pages after first getting Thick, this sentence hit me hard, dazing me like the day my one-time stepfather punched me in the jaw for the first time. “Everybody needs a crew,” Cottom wrote to start her “The Price of Fabulousness” essay, adding that she has “many because I am extremely fortunate.” Yeah, no kidding!, I thought immediately after reading that sentence. For a moment, maybe even 0.68 seconds, I was envious. Not like, “Oh my God, the arrogance of this one here!” kind of jealous. Nor was I the “I wish I was her!” green-eyed monster, either. I realized that since the last weeks of sixth grade and the beginning of three and a half years as a Hebrew-Israelite, I hadn’t really had a crew as Cottom defined it at all. That was the spring of 1981, when I was eleven years old, nearly 38 years ago, by the way.

From the day I let my one-time best friend Starling beat me in a fight over my alleged decision to join the Hebrew-Israelite cult and walk into William H. Holmes ES with a white kufi on my head, I had no crew. There’s a reason I consistently refer to my middle school and high school Humanities classmates as either “classmates” or “acquaintances.” They weren’t my friends, some were genuine bullies and assholes to me and to each other, and lacked in most forms of what grown folk would call social graces. They were my academic and (sometimes) athletic competitors, they were friends with each other, but only to a point. But one thing they could never, ever be was my crew or posse or homies or anything close to what Cottom meant. That Wu-Tang Clan-level of professional collaboration and possibly personal friendship didn’t exist in the cauldron that was that magnet program within an even more hostile public school system in Mount Vernon, New York.

College at the University of Pittsburgh was where I’d find friendships again, and maybe at times, the primordial beginnings of a crew. But these proto-crews never quite came together for more than a night on the town here or there. Quite frankly, the other thing my eclectic groups of friends and acquaintances had in common was knowing me. At least, the parts of me I was willing to show folks at the time. I knew most of them weren’t ready for the real me, because I wasn’t ready for the real me. Not at nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one.

Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellows Retreat, Berkeley, CA, February 17, 1996. (Donald Earl Collins)

Graduate school me, though, was more ready. My times at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon earning my doctorate were the closest I got to having a crew. At one point in 1994-95, I probably knew at least half of the Blacks, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Latinxs on Pitt’s campus, and all of the Black diaspora students at CMU (the latter because there were so few of us there). But despite the common interests around campus climate, student and faculty diversity, mistreatment on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, the fact remained that my crews were eclectic and transitory ones. Masters students would be gone in two or three years. My warp-drive, single-minded race toward the doctorate made certain that any bonds I forged during those years wouldn’t last. There would be no collaborations or calls for career help or advice with these disparate groups. Not even when I lived off the fumes of my last grad school stipend check the summer of 1997.

Working in the nonprofit world and as contingent faculty has often meant being on the inside, but still feeling like an outsider, anyway. Or really, a fraud, because I never fully embraced the norms of nonprofit capitalism or academia as intellectual capitalism and exploitation. I became friends with a fairly eclectic bunch in these spaces, too. But none of them shared my passion for creative nonfiction writing, or have wanted an alignment between career goals and social justice fights, or even, have had a taste for basketball as a spectator or player.

I guess one could say that my wife and son and two of my closest friends are my crew, but that’s not how a crew works. They are family, a very supportive family to be sure, but family is muck thicker than blood or a crew.

So, maybe Cottom is right. I really, really, really need a crew. I’ve made it pretty far in parts of my life without one. I’m not sure how much more Sisyphus I can do on my own, though.