It happened on an ordinary morning at St. Thomas, the kind of morning when the university’s administrative machinery is already grinding in the background — missing paperwork, vanished Paycom records, forwarded emails with no explanation, and the weekly absurdity of tracking athlete absences across half the state. I was moving around the classroom, talking with students, drawing questions out of them the way you coax a flame from damp wood. The room was alive, the way it gets when they forget to be self conscious and remember to be human. Then the door opened.

 

A woman stood there — mid thirties, professional, purposeful — and she introduced herself as part of the student advising support system. Behind her was one of my students, a young Black athlete from the football team, recovering from a concussion that had shaken him more deeply than he let on. He’s one of those kids who lights up a room: a joker, a charmer, the kind of student who initiates the fun before you even know it’s happening. But that morning, he looked at me with a kind of forlorn vulnerability that told me the injury had taken something out of him.

 

I asked if he was all right. He didn’t answer with his usual grin. He just looked at me — and that look said everything. Before I could say more, the advisor stepped in with a burst of enthusiasm. “I’ve heard good things about you,” she said.

 

I was taken aback. “From whom?”

 

“The students,” she said. “They like you.”

 

It was such a simple sentence, but it landed with the weight of something larger. Because in the adjunct world — the world of missing Personnel Action Forms, late pay, athlete absence chaos, and the endless administrative noise that universities generate without ever taking responsibility for — you rarely hear what actually matters. You hear from payroll analysts, HR liaisons, deans’ assistants, and automated systems that don’t know you exist. But you almost never hear from the people who sit in your classroom and decide, quietly and collectively, whether you matter. And here was someone telling me that I did.

 

It struck me that this moment — this small human exchange at the classroom door — was more real than anything the university had done all semester. The institution couldn’t even manage to submit the paperwork that would allow me to be paid. It couldn’t coordinate athlete absences. It couldn’t keep track of its own adjuncts. It couldn’t show up for an unemployment hearing. But the students? They knew exactly who was showing up for them.

 

In the end, that’s the heartland I keep writing about — not a place on a map, but a place in the human landscape where people still recognize sincerity, still respond to presence, still value the small acts of attention that institutions have long forgotten how to give. The university may not know I’m here. But the students do. And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.