How a trucker and adjunct professor learned a few lessons on country roads
Long before the gig economy was a thing, there were adjunct university professors — itinerant teachers with all the credentials of full-time instructors but paid about one-quarter as much with none of the benefits.
To rein in costs, universities and colleges rely heavily on these lowwage, non-tenure track employees. The adjunct professors themselves depend on the goodwill of department chairs and their own passion for teaching to make ends meet while jumping between part-time jobs.
Chuck Heir is one of these people.
Mr. Heir, 73, a Bartlesville, Okla., native who lives in Swisshelm Park, has a doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh and his specialty is the collectivization of Soviet farms, which was ordered by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Slippery Rock University, Duquesne University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania are among the places where he has taught over the years.
He also drives a tractor-trailer. After one class at the University of Akron — where he taught a course on Russian peasants — Mr. Heir asked a student to give him a lift back to his rig parked at a nearby Walmart, where he was spending the night.
“I like driving the damn truck, it’s fun for me,” said Mr. Heir. “But not too much because it’s a little bit aggravating.”
What follows is an interview with Mr. Heir, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How did you decide to become a trucker?
A. We have one son, who’s now 30, and when he was at Temple University, he wasn’t doing good. He partied. It seemed to us, it would go longer than four years for him to graduate and it was. He dropped out for a while and went back.
I saw an article — I think it was in the Post-Gazette — and it just said they needed 100,000 drivers. Being from Oklahoma, I’ve always liked to drive — I got a car at 16 — and I thought I could do this. I called that week and enrolled in a truck driving class. It was like $6,000 for a one-month class. And I still like driving.
Q. What was your first trucking job?
A. I got a job with Schneider. They’re a big one and one of the few companies that would hire new people. A lot of other companies want you to have two years’ experience. I was teaching at the time at the University of Akron, two classes, so I could drive five or six days a week and they would give me Mondays off.
Q. What kind of problems did you run into?
A. I got so lost that first week. Every day, I’d say I’m going to get royally screwed today. A couple times, I called my wife and asked her to get an atlas to try to help me. They didn’t teach me how to use the truck navigation system. I’d heard it had one, but I didn’t know how to use it. I just didn’t know there was something to know. I asked them, ‘Don’t you have a Rand McNally map?’ It was kind of a good learning experience. Later, I
learned to use the navigation system.
Q. Have you had any accidents?
A. I hit two poles, kind of early on. The second one was in Marietta, Ohio. It was like driving rain, dark, I can’t see crap. I said whoa, this is dangerous. I didn’t know you should go into these special entrances just for trucks because no one told me, so I used the ones cars use. And that’s just fraught with danger.
I go around to the back to unload, I back in and it looks like the wheel was kind of bent. I thought, what, how could that happen? The tire was twisted. I had knocked down the pole and hadn’t known it. After the second one, they had this big meeting and they told me, ‘We’re going to keep you.’ They could’ve easily fired me. Those things are real expensive.
Q. What’s a typical shift like for you?
A. When things are going right, I’ll spend Saturday night in the truck and bring it back in the morning. You usually have two or three loads for people and these round trips take eight or nine hours. Erie,
West Virginia, Summersville, Grafton, Vienna, Parkersburg, but most are in Ohio. We’re taking stuff to Walmarts — groceries, canned stuff, cereal. You have frozen and dairy, then at night, after the frozen and dairy, there’s meat and produce.
Q. Where do you sleep when you’re on the road?
A. Big tractors have beds in the back, so the truck has a sleeper. It’s comfortable. There’s not much to do but sleep well. You have 10 hours, so you have enough time to get a good sleep. I sleep better there than at home.
Q. What’s the appeal of teaching?
A. I realized how happy it made me. After one course on collectivization at Carnegie Mellon University, I felt heartened to see these people that like this stuff. I get to do my thing. It’s always been adjunct work, never had a tenure track, or assistant professor. It was always adjunct.
Q. Some historians say the Soviet collectivization of farms in the 1930s was a disaster, resulting in widespread hunger and death. Is this true?
A. The standard view is that agriculture in Russia was terribly backward. The Russian leadership knew it, so they were just going to push them into collectivization whether they wanted it or not.
In my region, a flax producing region near Moscow, that story just doesn’t hold up. They were a lot more productive. They made whole new industries. They outproduced the Germans. It’s a different story.
Q. How has trucking changed you?
A. I’m kind of a middle class person — my father was a geophysicist — so I was always standoffish toward country people. I guess I had a kind of standoffishness.
Then I would get lost and these country people would help me. They understood trucks, their brothers, their cousins drove trucks, and I was in a situation where I had to accept their generosity.
And I didn’t know that when I started. I had to change a liberal mindset. I had to be not looking down at them. I was driving and I felt kind of protected by these people.
I was one of them.