BY DESIREE ZERQUERA

I am often home alone in the evening with our two young children, carrying the weight of after school activities, dinner, bathtime all alone, holding our lives together while my husband, the professor, teaches late at another lecture or event or seminar or student meeting. I’m often up alone in the mornings, preparing the kids to go to school, preparing breakfast and packing lunches, and fighting them into the car while he sleeps in.

You see, in many ways, the tropes are true here. I am a professor’s wife, and with that the flood of fictional stories of men in tweed blazers come to mind. But the trope is a little different than what is often portrayed in shows like Rooster and The Chair. You see, I am a professor too. But my husband and I have very different paths as academics.

Whereas I—a tenured faculty member—have first pick at the teaching schedule, can opt out of meetings, and can shape my schedule so that I can pick up our kids from school and spend our evenings with them, he—a contracted lecturer—is consistently relegated to poorer schedules, picking up course offering blocks that no other faculty in his department want to teach. While I pick and choose which events at my university to attend, he has to be intentionally visible to students, faculty, department chairs and deans, all to make sure that they know his face. The impact he makes can be connected to a face that shows Look, I am here. Look, I support you. Look, despite teaching twice as many courses as my faculty colleagues at a fraction of the salary, I am committed to knowledge production. He holds twice the number of office hours than any faculty member I know. He is up late, grading to turn over papers quickly because he knows that his teaching evaluations are closely tied to the evaluation of students’ work, evaluations that he knows one day can be weaponized against him despite so many faculty colleagues who don’t even look at their own. He has an undergraduate research team that has led community-engaged research, where, without pay or institutional recognition, he has mentored individuals and groups of students, formulated connections between the university and community, and conducted meaningful research to preserve the legacy of Latine community activists in the city he’s in.

And even despite these efforts, even despite a contract position that still had one year left on it, he was abruptly terminated. Marginalized within marginalization, a contract lecturer within the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, the budget crisis compounded on him. The university has replicated the violence of our social conditions, with extreme budget cuts putting ethnic studies on the chopping block, signaling ideologically whose histories and whose labor matters. Within the department itself, these ideological markers are mirrored. It’s financially advantageous to release lecturers with contractual obligations for courses and redistribute those courses to part-time faculty adjuncts who the institution can hold no obligation to from semester to semester. It’s advantageous, too, to keep lecturers pigeonholed into high teaching loads, denigrate scholarly contributions, and redistribute the time-intensive labor of supporting students throughout their experience to these precariously situated faculty, while tenured colleagues denigrate the obligation of teaching, mentoring, and supporting students. This student-focused work is not the most celebrated, rewarded, or structurally recognized in the modern research university.

There have been many articles written to university administrators about this phenomenon that brilliantly analyze and chastise institutional decision-making failures in these circumstances. Instead, I write this with a focus on my colleagues, who, like me, sometimes take for granted the deep responsibility and privileges we have. We directly and indirectly make decisions about who is dispensable and whose contributions matter. Our relegation of certain tasks to our colleagues while simultaneously devaluing that work sends clear messages to our administrators and decision makers about who is of value, and who isn’t.

So, I sit here as a professor’s wife, holding the reality of how many brilliant scholars receive similar termination notices each year at the hands of our own colleagues, and I call on us to do better. We need to think about our shared responsibility to our profession and to each other. We must challenge the myths manufactured through elitism and oppression in higher education that shape what and who we show up for. We must hold the fullness of the privilege it is to create and disseminate knowledge, the privilege of shaping what the university is in the lives of our students and communities, and the honor it is to work alongside colleagues who model teaching, service, and research in holistic ways. And we must channel that into decision-making—individually for ourselves as we determine our own workloads, collectively for our programs and departments as we distribute responsibilities, and ethically as a profession as we navigate the continued threats and challenges onto the work we do.

Tangibly, this call for moral resonance translates into reevaluating our schedule preference practices, reshaping who is afforded preferential treatment in schedule accommodations. It looks like revisiting our evaluative practices to strengthen how we value scholarship production and the types of scholarship that address the real conditions of communities harmed by social ills. It means we focus on real shaping of the importance placed on teaching and mentoring—the work that keeps students and develops them. This should translate into job security and inclusion in the merit structures that retain and reward faculty.

So, I sit here as a disposed professor’s wife, weighing together the implications of his termination notice. While the university has disposed of his contributions and labor, it cannot redistribute the soul of his work and the impact he has had on hundreds of students. I sit here mourning a career role that, despite its precarious demands, enriched our lives and communities. More so, I mourn for students who have lost a teacher who saw and invested in them when the university itself pushed them away.

Desiree D. Zerquera is associate professor in the School of Education at the University of San Francisco. Her scholarship examines the structuring of inequity in higher education. Among many things, she is wife of a brilliant, community-engaged scholar who is currently on the market for a position that values his work.