Writer-in-hesitance.(In real life: first-person America)

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 ...