Giving in the Holiday Season

by

Barry Pomeroy

Since it is that time of year again, when kindness runs through everyone's bloodstream as readily as their blood, now is the moment to think of others. In this holiday season some people have not been as fortunate. Although they have leapt through the various hoops, all the while keeping their eye on the fundament of those before them, some are still trapped into low paying menial work without an end in sight. They often live below the poverty line and only you can change that by, Giving to a Starving Professor.
     
Speaking of low-paying contract labour, Lary and Young argue that "between 40 and 50% of teaching of undergraduates was done by contract faculty and by graduate students working as TAs" (Reflections on the CAUT Conference on Contract Academic Staff, Ottawa, Jan. 20 - Feb. 1, 2004). But you have it in your hands to change this terrible situation. Many desperate professors live in substandard housing, often in a parent's basement, and here, below the frost and poverty line, they suffer the humiliation of never knowing if their last minute contracts with no hope of seniority are going to thrust them onto the street this Christmas season or the next.

Our organization is going to be compiling a list of needy professors, whose Christmas stockings are empty of all except their goose-bumped flesh and hundreds of first-year papers waiting to be marked. When this list is posted, it is hoped that the other faculty dig deep. They earn easily four times as much as their colleagues-a word they are increasingly loathe to use-for the same or less work, and they will no doubt recall that when giving is asked for.

Remember your fellow instructors as you are reaching for your Gucci wallet. Remember that the starving professor also has a PhD, and therefore is deserving of a few dimes. Remember that the starving professor teaches the voluminous undergraduate courses and thus leaves you free to sing and dance your way through honours courses, with students well tutored in imitating your voice and temperament. Remember also, that regardless of appearances and bank accounts, that the starving professor is a human too, and as much deserving of a wage as any other on campus.

If you are unwilling to support their struggle to get fulltime positions, if you are unwilling to share the department's travel funding and grants, if you cannot honour their labour financially by more secure contracts, if you cannot give them their own office space, so they needn't share their cubicle with twenty others, if you refuse to have cookies and coffee at the meetings or invite them to your parties, then at least give them your used bus transfer so that when they ask students waiting at the bus stop for change they have something to offer.

Give Generously. Both Santa and Jesus would want it that way.

Barry Pomeroy received his PhD. from the University of Manitoba in 2000, although he refuses to let that be a limitation. He is an itinerant English professor, boat designer and builder, traveller, carver, sometimes mechanic, carpenter, and web designer. As a writer he is responsible for Multiple Personality Disorder, a long poem in dialogue, and the novel Naked in the Road and a collection of satirical biblical stories called A Bloody History of the Fertile Crescent.