The Subaru Forester is a 2014, blue, 187,000 miles on the odometer. The passenger seat has a tote bag with a 1973 edition of Marc Bloch's Feudal Society, a thermos, and a folder of bluebook midterms.
Dr. Helene Costa is forty-seven. She has a PhD in medieval history from Yale, granted in 2011. Her dissertation was on monastic record-keeping in twelfth-century Catalonia. She speaks reading Latin, Catalan, French, and Spanish.
On a Tuesday in April she teaches a 09:30 at a Catholic college in Worcester, a 13:00 at a state university in Westfield, and a 18:00 at a private liberal arts college in the Pioneer Valley.
She is paid 4,800 dollars per three-credit course at the Catholic college, 4,200 at the state, and 5,600 at the liberal arts college. None of the three provides health insurance. She is teaching eight courses this academic year.
Her gross income from teaching last year was 38,400 dollars. She also tutors high school students for the AP European History exam at 65 dollars an hour. That brought her to about 51,000.
Her husband, Ben, is a high school orchestra teacher. They have one son, fourteen. Health insurance is through Ben's job.
"I have the PhD," she says, "and Ben's insurance card. It is a humbling sentence to say out loud."
“"I have the PhD," she says, "and Ben's insurance card.”
She left the Worcester apartment at 07:55. The 09:30 class is on the early medieval church, twenty-eight undergraduates, mostly nursing and pre-law majors fulfilling a distribution requirement.
She teaches without slides today. She writes on the board. Charlemagne. 800. Aachen. She draws a map of Carolingian division of inheritance with three colors of dry-erase marker.
After class she answers email in her car. She does not have an office at the Catholic college. Adjuncts share a desk in a basement room with a printer that jams.
She eats a peanut butter sandwich on the Mass Pike between Worcester and Westfield. She has eaten this sandwich, or its sibling, every Tuesday for nine years.
The 13:00 in Westfield is a survey, History of the Middle Ages 500 to 1500, forty-two students. She loves this course. She has taught it twenty-seven times.
Today they are doing the Investiture Controversy. She tells the story of Henry IV at Canossa standing in the snow as if it happened last week to a man she knows.
A student stays after to ask about graduate school. She tells him the truth, gently. The job market for medievalists is what it is. She tells him to consider law school, which is also what it is.
She drives east to the Pioneer Valley college. She arrives at 17:20, enough time to print a handout in the adjunct workroom and drink the last of the thermos.
The 18:00 class is a small seminar on monasticism. Twelve students. They read primary sources in translation. Tonight: the Rule of Benedict.
She gets home at 22:40. Ben has saved her dinner. Their son is asleep. She grades for an hour at the kitchen table.
She has applied for tenure-track positions every year since 2012. She is on a search committee this year, ironically, at the Catholic college, for a contingent line.
"I love this work," she says. "I am angry about the conditions. Both things are true."
She will be in the car by 07:55 again on Thursday. Two more colleges. The same thermos. The same book on the seat.
