Calling myself a Latin Americanist is a spin job. UCLA is funding me to study Latin America, but I’ve taken more classes outside my discipline than within it, as Hercules never fails to remind me. My transcript looks like a departmental train wreck — World Studies, Ethnomusicology, East Asian History, African Literature, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Social Thought, International Relations, Art History. Everything but Basket Weaving, basically.

Truth is, I’m interdisciplinary by nature. I bore easily. I pick wide over narrow, shallow over deep. I believe wherever you aren’t is probably more interesting than wherever you are. That’s why I oscillate between Latin Americanist and something else. Right now I’m in a something else phase. Studying how the Old World compares to the New World. Daydreaming about the French Revolution and Weimar Germany. Wishing I was a Europeanist with a fieldwork year in France or England or Italy, instead of Mexico. But the closest I can get is teaching assistant for “Introduction to European History”.

Tuesday-Thursday lectures for the class are held in Smith Hall, an aircraft hangar disguised as a lyceum. The 500 students barely make a dent in the empty orange seats. I’ve seen U2 play in smaller venues. Professor Grantberg’s shiny pate is barely visible above the lectern as he blathers into the microphone. His disembodied voice resonates overhead like a nasally god preoccupied with the Hapsburgs. Every now and then he pauses to flip from one yellowing slide to the next, the canned lectures passed down from visiting instructor to visiting instructor like sacred talismans that might lead to a tenure-track position someday, but never do.

Once Grantberg stops droning, the cavern erupts into the usual mania associated with deadlines. Students swamp their teaching assistants in a tide of product marketing — Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy, Nike. Most are turning in their research papers and racing into the afternoon sunshine. The rest are pleading for extensions. Their excuses are rarely legit, but UCLA encourages disciplinary forbearance. Here “the dog ate my homework” isn’t an excuse, it’s a way of life.

Afterward Grantberg leads us through the gauntlet of student groups that line Bruin Walk. Fliers are thrust into our path, petitions to sign, fundraising crap. The solicitations are wasted on us. Together we’re a poor, cynical, and hurrying crowd. Our destination is Jimmy’s, a coffee shop built around the ultimate southern California conceit — a fireplace. Time for our weekly meeting.

“Did I reach them today?” Grantberg asks, hunching over a quad venti mocha. “I feel like I didn’t reach them today.”

Condemnatory silence from the European History grad students, who comprise the entire body of teaching assistants for this class — except for me, the lone Latin Americanist.

“You’re doing a great job, Professor,” I finally lie, since nobody else will. “The syllabus was just against you today. The Hapsburgs on a sunny afternoon?”

That seems to mollify Grantberg, whose beady eyes roam the table behind tiny wire-rimmed glasses. “How do the research papers look?”

“Judge for yourself.” Erik, a former pro wakeboarder, tosses some stapled pages at him. “That’s my best student right there.”

“Typo in the title,” the professor notes, biting off the words in his clipped Harvard accent.

“Yep,” says Erik.

Grantberg drops the paper like its spelling is contagious and slides it back across the table. “What about you, Patrice?”

The ever-disorganized Belgian woman looks up from her mess of papers like a shined deer.

“Never mind,” he sighs. Then he reaches over and grabs a bunch of papers off the top of my pile. “Hey. This one is in Spanish.” His bony fingers riffle through the rest. “This one too. And this one.”

Kelli carefully presses a coffee cup against her multiply-pierced bottom lip. “We send all the students who want to write in Spanish to Nick.”

Grantberg cocks an eyebrow at me. “Is that true?” When I shrug noncommittally, he wags his Van Dyke in disapproving surprise. “Don’t you realize that’s against policy?”

A reference to the University of California’s monolingual policy. Unless you’re taking a foreign language, all instruction and coursework must be in English. I could get called on the dean’s carpet for letting students write exams and papers in Spanish. Not like that’ll ever happen. UCLA’s Hispanic enrollment is embarrassingly low, the dropout rate embarrassingly high. The dean would probably thank me.

I reach over and reclaim my papers. “Next time I’ll tell those Hispanic students this is America and they should write in American.”

Grantberg sets his glasses on the table and massages the brow of his nose. “This isn’t a decision in our power to revisit, Nick. As professional educators, we have to uphold university policy. Right, people?”

Only Patrice bothers to nod. Erik and Kelli keep flipping through their papers, comparing funny manglings of European history. “Astro-Hungry Empire!” Erik blurts, and they dissolve into giggles.

Fuck you the professor mouths in my general direction, remounting his glasses. That’s it for pushback. Grantberg is a lot of adjectives, but quixotic isn’t one of them. He knows the score. UCLA didn’t hire him, it hired his Harvard doctorate — and only for the academic year. Those contracts are never renewed. Next year he’ll be lecturing at a different institution. Someplace urban with gay bathhouses, if he’s lucky. In homophobic flyover country, if he’s not. He’s on the visiting instructor merry-go-round until he falls off.

Someday we’ll be in his tasseled loafers and elbow patches and pasty skin. Assuming we even get a contract. UCLA isn’t much of an academic brand compared to Harvard. Get your Ph.D. from UCLA and all you’ve proven is that you couldn’t get your Ph.D. from someplace like Harvard.

Afterward we file out in a discontented line, Grantberg because he’s unemployed at the conclusion of this academic year, my colleagues because they’ve got papers to grade, me because the weekend awaits. Another one. Usually it’s places to go, people to see — even if it’s just the library and Phoebe again. Except I don’t have Phoebe anymore. She’s doing her ex-girlfriend impression, which means I’m on intimate terms with her voicemail instead of her anatomy. This weekend will be a lot of library and a little wanking, as if I’m an undergrad at Iowa State again.