Len Crug, Ab, Rh+

I am a pre-tenured faculty member who teaches at a small liberal arts university in the greater mid-South. The university was founded by the elders of the Society of the Universal Congregation of Kibbutz’s. We call it SUCKU. The clever student body adopted the leech as its mascot. I’m not sure what others see in the school mascot, but to me, it looks like a giant penis with teeth. I did my undergraduate drinking at a prestigious private university out East. Following graduation, I was positive that I did not want to leave the warm, comfortable womb of parent-paid education and meet the cold, cruel (and expensive) real world head on, so, I continued my drinking at the friendly confines of a large public university located out West. My terminal degree is in Business Marketing.

I landed my current teaching gig following a not-so-successful career in marketing at a now-failed major retailer. (Not my fault, really). Pre-tenured means administration can fire you for pretty much anything, while tenured faculty would have to commit an illegal act involving an administrator’s minor child before they MIGHT get fired. Firing would depend on whether you were teaching in the liberal arts or the practical arts. The liberal arts professors (you know, the ones who teach majors that require a student to get an advanced degree to get any kind of meaningful job, or any major that ends in “Studies,” e.g. Gender and Women’s Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, etc.) can always use the “Academic Freedom” argument as their get-out-of-jail-free card for just about any infraction, while those professors teaching the practical arts (you know, the majors that prepare the student for a real job) can get fired for using the wrong pronoun. By the way, the liberal arts professors really despise the term “practical arts” and the professors who teach them.

So, I have been teaching at SUCKU for three years, and I am up for my third year review. Third year review is sort of a dry run for your tenure application, which gets voted on by the Rank and Tenure Committee during your sixth year. If you do not receive tenure, and promotion to Associate Professor (from Assistant Professor), you are effectively fired and have two semesters to find other employment. The purpose of the third year review is for the pre-tenured professor to get a sense of what the Rank and Tenure Committee thinks about their body of work so far. Generally, the committee looks at three areas of competence: Teaching, Scholarship (Research), and Service to Community. I will devote a chapter of this book to each. In practice, however, the faculty member’s submission to the Rank and Tenure Committee is simply used as an excuse to fire you if they don’t like you. Your accomplishments will never be enough to gain tenure if someone on the committee has it in for you.

Finally, just like JK Rowling, I outlined the skeleton of this book a few years before I actually put pen to paper, adding a note or a word here and there through the years to jog my memory about something I found to be humorous. However, unlike JK Rowling, I have neither her talent nor success, and my notes are so cryptic that I no longer remember why I wrote them. So here goes…

Oops! Before you get started, I need to offer this

Statement on Continuity

You see, I have read that great authors labor over their work. They read and reread what was written, write and rewrite sentences, paragraphs, and even whole chapters. They look for repetitions of plot dynamics, continuity in time and space, and just a bunch of other stuff that could be better communicated. Well, for one, I’m not a great author. I’m not even a mediocre author. For another, I’m pretty lazy. I did start to approach writing this book the way great authors do, but that was time consuming and tedious. As the manuscript got longer and longer, I found myself wasting my time looking for something that was repetitive or that did not make sense, when I realized, heck, the whole book doesn’t make sense. Then, I came upon the brilliant concept that would absolve me from all the goody-two-shoe, everything-has-to-be-perfect nitpickers out there that have nothing better to do than find something nasty to write about a fellow author: the Statement on Continuity! So here is my statement on continuity, dedicated to all the aforementioned assholes:

WHATEVER!