My Career Hit the Second Tower

It is a fact well-known that I am obsessed with the cultural phenomenon that is Nine-Eleven. I didn’t see it, I was two years old somewhere in the American Southwest, far from any towers or planes or polyhedral institutions of war. I don’t remember a pre-9/11 world, but I do remember decades of state propaganda fed to me every year at school as I was educated in the post-9/11 world. I remember the flag ceremonies, the theatre productions, the victim testimonies, the videos and phone calls and documentaries and conspiracy theories and teachers tired of repeating their “9/11” story to a class of students who pretend to have never heard anything like that before.

The United States told me, through my childhood, that I should be obsessed with 11 September 2001. The United States is under the impression that this means I shall forever find them to be the ultimate victim of an unprovoked act of terror and any and all state actions taken in the wake of 9/11 are justified and morally correct.

Fuck that.

The United States spent decades devastating the Middle East while funding and arming the very groups that they would later call terrorists. 9/11 did not emerge from a vacuum, but from a roasting spit the U.S. set up and then left to burn while carving off meat that was never meant to belong to them.

The tragedy extends beyond the 3000 victims that died on the eleventh. Not once, in all of the years of propagandising on the tragedy of 11 September, did I learn about the indefinite death that came after. Not from additional terrorists, but from the negligence of the country that loves to beat its chest and posture about the solemn promise it makes to the victims of 9/11. No where, in any of those history courses, where they excused the “War of Terror” and every atrocity the United States has been responsible for in the decades since, has there been any mention of several administrations that intentionally withheld the medical aide, information, and compensation due to the victims of the ecological fallout of the attacks. For all of the silhouettes of saluting first responders blazed across posters and videos you’d think the United States would take care of them and their families.

Jon Stewart had to campaign for years to draw congressional attention to them, and yet they were still denied compensation for decades. Most of them died before any aide could reach them. A short jaunt through the known cover-ups and lies should reveal just how much the United States actually cares about its victims. For they are, at this point, victims of the U.S.

Shakespeare blushes at a tragedy of this scale. The global superpower of the post-World War Two era commits what amounts to genocide in a region for decades. They get (and these are the words that got me fired) love tapped by some of those countries which kills thousands. American inaction and corruption kills tens of thousands more, a number that is still clicking up. The Untied States declares a war on terrorism and sends countless bodies to die. Not just American bodies, but British, Afghan, Irish, Canadian, French, German, Mexican, bodies and bodies and bodies all piled in burning heaps, blood and flesh turned soot and smoke to leech into the lungs of the starved living who come home and are so unbelievably traumatised by the entire affair that they overwhelm the meagre resources provided by the military, leading to shootings, suicides, rapes, and countless more death. Those are just the bodies from the countries we’re told to cheer for. The bodies of the “enemy,” ranging from fetus to geriatric, are stacked as numbers in folders labelled “success.”

It’s enough to radicalise a stone.

I do love Nine Eleven. As a holiday and a pedagogical tool and a cultural obsession. I was taught to love it and celebrate it via desperate brainwashing to coerce me into shitting red, white, and blue at the mere mention of geographically intimate towers. Maybe if they’d spent more time exploring the complexities of 9/11, in the same way they tried very hard to explore the complexities of chattel slavery, I’d have come out the other end with an appreciation for the history and an understanding that the reactionary politics of the Bush administration are over, if not forgiven. That puts too much faith in the Untied States to reconcile with its own history though. It constructs the platform upon which people like me are made to hate this country and everything it actually stands for, not the bullshit about freedom and justice they slap on the postcards.

I teach writing, typically introductory courses, not history, but holistic writing is founded on rigorous reading and critical thinking (course outcomes that are also prescribed in the standards set forth by every university I have taught at). In the year of our lord twenty twenty-six, it is not enough to just teach students how to read a book. Students are reading and writing in complex interconnected societies that are ripe with context and subtext and rhetorical situations that change with the breezes. The ability to deeply read history is a necessary skill.

Conspiracy theories plague our every step, and deciphering them is a rhetorical situation that everyone has to face at some point, usually just to vote. What better staging group for navigating conspiracy theories than 9/11?

Every year of my, admittedly short, teaching career I have done a variation of the same lesson. I give the history and context leading up to 9/11, walk through the myriad tragedies lurking in the fall out (I didn’t even get to mention the Patriot Act above), and then explore some of the more popular conspiracy theories. Then, I lead us through why they develop, what it means to recognise “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” and how to try and get to the core of a conspiracy theory with critical thinking and nuance.

I have never had a student complain.

This year I had a student complain.

It shot up through department chair, academic affairs, interim dean, then trickled down to department chair, email, meeting, me. At first I, a 27 year old with a master’s degree, had to attend bi-weekly meetings and justify my pedagogy. My pedagogy successfully justified and the first meeting under my belt I wonder how long I am going to be treated like a child.

Then I get fired.

Let’s roll out a few crumbs of additional context.

Immediately after the lecture, a student not in my class, but familiar with the one who reported me, threatened me by shouting, “You’d better keep walking!” as I returned to my office. Nothing was done about this after I brought it to my chair’s attention.

The thirty other students who witnessed the lecture had no complaints and many of them frequently cite me as their favourite teacher.

I had no other record of anything even approaching “misbehaviour” at that school. I did tell tales about some shenanigans I got up to at a previous college I taught at, but last I checked you don’t typically get fired from a job because of something you did at another job. Especially when those somethings weren’t illegal and could be laughed about by both me and my chair at said school.

The department chair that fired me, probably at the request of administration, has commended my teaching’s quality and frequently commented on my effective style.

I am very excited to be able to say that I got fired because of Nine Eleven, but the entire situation is deeply emblematic of a handful of issues facing academia. I am an adjunct, which means I beg and hope for my job every five months, get paid pennies, and have no benefits. I am unprotected, overworked, underpaid, and frequently ostracised by the tenured faculty and treated with something akin to a cold shoulder. Which I understand, I am a threat to their career in my own way. Universities want cheap labour, like most arms of capitalism, and willingly trade the careers and salaries of tenured faculty with the impermanence and exploitation of adjuncts.

Tenured professors have protection that adjuncts can only dream of. Their contracts stipulate teaching loads and sabbaticals and firing someone with tenure requires approval from a rotating board of their peers. Good for situations involving academic freedom and the general tendency for professors to disrupt the cultural status quo of many students, but terrible when there is a genuinely awful professor who just can’t get fired. I have heard and been witness to horror stories of professors who harass students, re-traumatise survivors, create hostile learning environments, and just generally should be given the boot.

Adjuncts have no protection and can be fired on a whim. I indirectly challenged a student’s nationalism and that got me fired. One student had the power to derail my career. And yet, while I feel sorry for him, I can’t wholly blame him.

He felt uncomfortable and went to seek solace, I always encourage students to do exactly that. I do think he will struggle if his first reaction to something of this nature is to run to his proverbial mommy, but I am proud of him, in a way, for standing up for himself. Though I can’t commend the avenue he used.When I was a student, I would talk to my professors and ask questions and get into polite debate and arguments. I’ve had heaps of teachers that I ideologically despised, but I always learned something from them and many opened my mind to a way of thinking I’d never considered. I would be a worse feminist if I hadn’t foolishly tried to debate Dr. Kerry Fine. I would be a worse teacher if I hadn’t questioned the pedagogical wisdom of Miranda Egger. I would be a worse disability advocate if I wasn’t forced into confronting Andy (though I did actually report him to the department chair because I didn’t want the onus of educating a tenured professor to fall, once again, upon the disabled student and it is kinda bullshit that I had to be responsible for that but silver linings yannow).

Administration should have had my back. My department chair should have had my back. My expertise and experience should have had my back. Well, it did, but not in the way it needed to. My administration valued the sensitive nationalism of one student over my experience as a teacher and the goals of my pedagogy.

Students are no longer students; attending school to be challenged and pushed to further heights by teachers that will create environments where their knowledge is solidified, challenged, transformed. They are now customers; walking dollar signs who must have their whims catered to so as to better squeeze every drop of capital out of their experience. Their money is more important than their education and while firing me hurts me like a plane flying into a tower, it ultimately hurts them like a second plane crashing in to make true history.