It was a comfortable, old Brogan

So…I had a teaching job, just a bottom rung adjunct position that paid LESS than I was making for doing exactly the same work that I did in graduate school 30 years ago.

I got fired.

Some student and their family googled me. Perhaps. It’s my understanding that the father is a law enforcement officer, so he may have used his access to those databases. They complained to the college that an ex-felon is teaching the class..and this after a single hour in the classroom in which nothing untoward could have possibly happened.

The college, to their great discredit, called me to see if this is true. Of course it’s true. But I’m also not violating terms of probation or anything like that. Moreover, I filled out accurately and completely their request for a criminal background check before I was even hired there. What they did with that, I can’t tell you. I’m not HR. They went ahead and hired me, so I figured it was all good, that they were an institution that didn’t believe in scarlet letters. Turns out that such faith is, as I intuited deep within me, deeply misplaced. They say they did run a background check, but that the results didn’t turn me up. For that, I have to pay. I’m fired.

The twist is, however, that they fired me on the basis of not being “honest” on my resume. That is to say, I literally didn’t have a line on my c.v. saying “I was an inmate in a federal prison.” This is new to me as being a requirement for resumes. It’s also, as anybody with any reason will easily surmise, patently absurd; it should be filed under “how not to write a resume,” as any resume professional will tell you. But it’s a terrific example of the post-prison life of eternal Catch-22. Can’t get a job if you check the “convicted felon” box, but then get fired, even after doing good work, if you turn out to have been in prison. Keep flying this missions, Yossarian.

And here is another thing: If this particular student objected to my presence, the student could have easily been moved into another section of the same class. If the college objected to my physical presence in the classroom, the class could have been moved to a virtual class. This is, after all, the age of COVID and making that switch is not a challenge. But neither of these ideas even crossed their minds. They simply thought, “Ick!” And once they thought “Ick!” they needed to blame someone for their discomfort. This is the work of the scarlet letter.

I’ll just mention the irony of me being the most experienced person that this college had when it came to teaching this class. But who needs a real education when you can judge everything on a superficial level? What a shame that I wasn’t in a position to assign Hawthorne as a reading in that class, or as the common reading for the entire school. That would likely be of no avail anyway. I’m not sure that 21st century America has the mental or moral acumen to digest what a 19th century American wrote about 17th century America. Just cancel my classes and sweep me under the rug. Good luck to all those students I could have been helping who now have to scramble to get an “appropriate” educator.

Just one more irony: I have in my possession a letter written by a first year student at this very same school in 1931. Here’s what she has to say about homecoming:

It was home coming [sic], and a lot of alumnae were here. Some of the boys (and I regret to add, girls) were drunk, and one boy got expelled. That is a scandel [sic], and the authorities are trying to keep it out of the papers.

Ah, the moral propriety of Prohibition Era America. Plus ça change.