No Good Deed

You checked your messages after arriving home from a week out of town.  The first one hit you like a sucker punch to the solar plexus.

The message was from the dean’s administrative assistant at Snowflake College.  Specifically, it was from the executive dean’s office at the Quartz City campus.  Quartz City up until now had been the unblemished bright spot in your teaching itinerary.  The students are bright and inquisitive, and you get along great with your teaching colleagues and the classified staff. 

You are informed that Dean Stacy would like to meet with you in person to discuss an “incident” involving you several weeks ago while you were an evaluator at the Quartz City early college high school’s senior project presentations.  One of the other judges, a local community member, had made an allegation about you.  Please call back at your earliest convenience to schedule an appointment.

While you were expecting this, your heart sank nonetheless.  It has become the inevitable cost of doing business.  You’re good at your job, and although you are maybe a touch unconventional in your presentation most of your students like or are at least accepting of your teaching style.  You also are well aware that not everyone finds your personality appealing.  It even elicits hostility from a few individuals from time to time.  Your openness tends to leave you vulnerable to those whom you politely refer to as jerks and to people with issues.

Your accuser appears to straddle both categories.  You know what the charges are, since he pulled you aside after the first day’s presentations and told you what he thought.  (You are thankful that at least what he accused you of did not involve a student.)  Unnerved, you got away from the guy as quickly as possible and lay awake in bed most of that night trying to figure out what the hell had happened.  Before leaving campus that day, you made sure the school secretary scheduled you for a panel other than the one this son of a bitch would be participating in during the next day’s session.

You return to Quartz City the next day to find yourself beckoned into the principal’s office.  The principal, a dark, serious young man, informed you that an allegation had been made.  You deny it as a matter of course, a trifle annoyed by the principal’s condescending demeanor.   You have found through experience with your sons’ schoolteachers that many of them not only talk down to kids, but tend to do so with adults as well.  This gentleman seemed to have lost sight of the fact that you and your fellow college instructors are supposed to be the value added by an early college high school. 

The principal stiffly thanked you for volunteering your time after informing you ominously that he had to inform Dean Stacy of the allegation.  The rest of the day went mercifully well in spite of its awkward beginning.  Several of your former students shook your hand afterward, and introduced you to their parents.  They had heard great things about you and were glad to finally meet you.  One mom even told you her son had chosen your field as his major after taking your class. 

All this notwithstanding, the next couple of weeks were clouded by the accusation against you as you wait for the other shoe to drop.  Naturally, as all bad news seems to in your life, it fell when you were not quite at your emotional best.  In this case, the news arrived after you got home near midnight, jetlagged and facing the glum prospect of waiting all the next day for the airline to recover your inevitably lost baggage.

You call Quartz City the following morning, schedule your appointment with Stacy, and then spend the next couple of days rehashing events in your head trying to make sense of it all.  You consider yourself a man of integrity, and you become rattled and indignant whenever someone calls your character into question.  Your task now is to avoid appearing rattled and indignant.  However, your resentment festers.  Your family has had some degree of association with Snowflake College for nearly forty years.  You’ve taught for them for more than ten.  You gave your time freely and this is what happens?  You seriously consider never giving Snowflake another unpaid second of your time again.  You have already resolved privately to exclude the college foundation as a beneficiary of your will when you found out it had taken money from a certain real estate developer who has lobbied and worked to run public schools like private businesses.   Maybe you should just show up and just teach your scheduled classes from now on.

The distraction of your resentment notwithstanding when the day of the meeting arrives, you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.

Stacy, a tall, rather elegant woman around your own age, smiles warmly when you walk into her office, motioning you to a seat at a conference table.  You’ve never had a discussion with her beyond ordinary small talk, so you don’t know quite what to expect.

Stacy opens the discussion by coming right to the point: “So, tell me in your own words what happened.”

You take a deep breath and tell the story as calmly and clearly as you can.  You relate how you were seated next to your accuser at the first day’s panel.  You describe how, upon finding out the man was a former Marine you mentioned you were a veteran yourself.

“Oh, you’re a veteran!” Stacy exclaims.  “Thank you for your service.”  You smile awkwardly in reply. 

You never know how to respond to this, because thanking vets profusely for their service and describing them as “heroes” even if they were cooks or truck drivers or personnel clerks has become a social obligation of late.  You pride yourself on not having become what you call a “professional vet,” someone whose whole existence, like that of the high school football hero who never is able to recapture his past glories, centers upon that one fact in their lives.

Your accuser is just such a guy.  You’re all too familiar with the breed: overfed, loud mouthed, and jockeying constantly to be the alpha male in every situation.   He regaled you during the breaks between presentations with tales of his storied career as GI Joe with a kung fu grip, before his back gave out on him.  (If it isn't their knees, it’s their back.)  He tells you he’s active in the American Legion, AMVETS, the VFW, the DAV, and the rest of the alphabet soup of veteran’s organizations.  He tells you he served on the county veteran’s affairs commission.  He offers to help you upgrade your disability rating, a result that you know is between unlikely and impossible to achieve.  All the while your eyes are darting across the room looking for someone to catch your eye and rescue you from this blowhard’s narcissistic monologue.

Wincing slightly at the unpleasant memory, you continue your account.  You also point out your unblemished teaching record and your excellent classroom evaluations. 

Stacy, her head attentively tilted slightly to one side, pauses a beat before speaking.  “I see.  You know we have to take these allegations seriously, even if they’re unfounded.  Principal Nathan investigated and could not find any evidence against you.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Yes, and when I called the man—”  Stacy laughs slightly, then continues, “and I don’t even remember his name—“

“That’s all right.  I do,” you reply with a wintry smile.

Stacy goes on, “Anyway, he wasn’t very convincing and some of what he said contradicted what Nathan had told me.”

“That’s because it didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry about all this.  In any case, since it occurred while you were off contract no mention of this incident will go into your personnel file.”

“That’s a relief.”

“You know, we really value the efforts of adjuncts like you.  Did you know I started out as an adjunct?”  Yes, you know.

The conversation wends on for a few more minutes before petering out.  At the end comes something you don’t expect.  As Stacy shakes your hand before you leave, she thanks you for coming in.  Then she says,

“Please don’t let this incident discourage you from volunteering with Snowflake College in the future.”

While you reply with a smile and a nod, a solitary thought runs through your mind:

Never again.  No fucking way.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Please Back Off

I’ve just finished watching Won’t Back Down, last year’s movie about parents who defy the odds to improve their kids’ education.

Won’t Back Down, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businessman Philip Anschutz, promoted by Michelle Rhee, and touted by conservative school “reform” advocates, makes its point in a predictably hamfisted fashion so that even the densest teabilly Wal-Mart shopper can figure it out.  I thoroughly hated it, as I expected to.  The story was inspired by a real-life incident a couple of years ago where parents used California’s parent-trigger law to convert a failing public school into a charter institution.

The producers signed a raft of well-known names for the project.  Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the main character, Jamie, while Viola Davis plays Jamie’s ally, Nona.  Clearly the project was well-financed, considering they also brought on Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. 

Despite the strong cast, I was underwhelmed by the acting.  There was very little chemistry among the actors, and I just wasn’t convinced by their performances.  Also, and I can’t explain why, the Gyllenhaal siblings have always rubbed me the wrong way.  And so I couldn’t help but chuckle at thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal, a paragon of liberal smugness, cynically accepting the lead role in a right-wing propaganda flick.  Really, Maggie?  Did you need the money that badly?

Back to the film: Jamie is a plucky single mom who works two jobs while raising a daughter with learning disabilities.  Frustrated by her little girl’s lack of progress in school, she joins up with burned out elementary school teacher Nona after discovering a loophole in the law which allows parents and teachers to take over a school if it is failing.

Gyllenhaal and the scriptwriters self-consciously strive to imbue Jamie with an air of blue collar authenticity.  Jamie speaks in malapropisms while letting her daughter watch TV and munch Snickers bars after school.  She’s awed by Nona’s neatly kept home.  Her sense of boundaries is poor at best as she importunes parents, teachers, and administrators alike to do what’s right for her daughter. 

Won’t Back Down is a mostly conventional buddy film / fight-the-system tale.  Predictably, it concludes with the obligatory corny feel-good scene I remember in every Eighties inspiring teacher movie from Stand and Deliver to The Dead Poets’ Society.  But that’s not its worst sin.  At least twice in the film, Jamie quotes Gandhi’s purported aphorism, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as justification for her efforts.  It’s like when wingnuts such as Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck quote Martin Luther King; it just comes off as vaguely sacrilegious.

At its heart, Won’t Back Down is an odious anti-union, anti-public education screed.  Throughout the movie, Jamie and Nona are stymied at every turn by two-dimensional cardboard cutout foes in the form of a sclerotic school bureaucracy, a do-nothing board of education, and a union which protects incompetent teachers through tenure.  (A “job for life after two years,” as one character puts it, perpetuating a cherished conservative myth.)  Unionized teachers, we’re given to understand, have no incentive to educate beyond collecting their inflated taxpayer underwritten salaries.  

While Won’t Back Down is a poorly made hack piece which will be soon forgotten, I wish I could say the same for the movement that spawned it.  We are on a slippery slope toward school privatization and teacher deprofessionalization because of the moneyed conservative forces working toward this end.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one well-known culprit.  The Walton Family Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation are two others.

But the worst of the rogue’s gallery of charitable foundations, to my mind, is the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.  Mr. Broad, who made his fortune in insurance and by building innumerable subdivisions of tacky tract houses, did what any other egotistical plutocrat would do when faced with the prospect of paying taxes.  He simply donated a fair chunk of his wealth to a charitable foundation he created then devoted himself to doling it out as a means of wielding power.  Among its programs, the Broad Foundation sponsors an “academy” to train school administrators for the new reality of K-12 education, which is that public schools must produce a uniform “product” regardless of students’ widely varying individual aptitudes.  The test will tell: Poor scores equal unemployed teachers.

Eli Broad suffers from the same conceit other wealthy individuals share.  Because he was successful at business, this makes him an expert in every other field of endeavor.  This is especially true when it’s a service provided by the public sector.  As we all know, government’s sole raison d’être is to siphon off the hard earned wealth of job creating entrepreneurs.  Therefore, it can only be made efficient when business people either privatize, or at least apply private sector practices to, government work.  (Never mind the non sequitur underneath this assumption; there’s no moneymaking potential in taking the liberal arts courses where you would learn what one is.)

The Broad Foundation is gradually making inroads into higher education.  My alma mater recently opened a new field house built with money donated by the Broads.  To my deep distaste, the president of the endowment foundation of the college where I work is the CEO of a real estate development company owned by Eli Broad.  I believe these are harbingers of a larger trend.  It won’t be long before pressure is brought to bear on college presidents and boards of trustees to scale back or eliminate general education requirements and non-vocational majors in favor of the University of Phoenix model of workforce training.  It’s never a good idea to encourage the life of the mind when the kind of people you want working for you are narrowly trained technicians who don’t ask a lot of probing questions.

If there is a hell, I hope there is a special corner reserved for Eli Broad.  As it is, the evil he’s done in his lifetime will be perpetuated through his foundation.   And I am not one of those progressives who put their faith in the secular eschatology of revolution.  Sometimes the bad guys win.  The hardest part is when everyone around you is convinced they’re the good guys and are cheering them on to victory.

Just like in Won’t Back Down. 

     

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

There but for the Grace of God… (Or, The Virtues of Keeping a Low Profile)

Scrolling through College Misery (the Greatest…Blog…Ever), I came across an item about a public school teacher in Pennsylvania who was fired for posting derogatory comments about her students online.

Naturally, I was interested because I’ve done the very same thing on my own site…a lot.  The principal difference between Natalie Munroe and me is that I’m sufficiently afraid of my bosses to do so anonymously. 

I do have other reasons for blogging under a pseudonym.  One is that I am a reserved person who doesn’t like to attract attention to himself, even in this age of omnipresent social media and brazen self-promotion.  Using a pen name helps me feel freer to express my views than I might if I used my slave name.

Another reason is that I have a lot of unpopular opinions, so unpopular in fact that they may lead to unemployment and social ostracism if expressed in the wrong place, at the wrong time, to the wrong people.  My little community may be “blue state” in its tastes and avocations, but it’s run by folks with “red state” values.  Sure, my conservative friends like to kid me about my so-called liberal beliefs, but they would probably not be so accepting if they learned just how far to the left I really am.

But mostly it’s because of the apathetic, disengaged, and worst of all entitled majority of students I deal with in the college classroom that I withhold my true identity.  I don’t always have a warm relationship with these students because I believe it’s my job to teach rather than entertain them, stroke their egos, feed their narcissism, or encourage their delusions of adequacy.  

Because my institution is run by administrators who abet bratty behavior, I’m naturally on the defensive.  One result is that I seldom discuss my misgivings with friends and acquaintances.  I almost never share them with colleagues.  I most certainly would never tip my hand in front of my students.    

This is clearly a safe policy: Ms. Munroe was outed by her students.  It didn’t matter that many of her blog posts were about pretty mundane stuff like recipes or being a mom.  All it took was one or two where she described her charges as “dunderheads” and “ratlike” to trigger a pattern of official harassment that culminated in her firing for unsatisfactory performance.  The actions of the Bucks County school board were clearly calculated to create a chilling effect on teachers’ free speech rights. 

Am I chickenshit for saying similarly awful things while hiding behind a nom de guerre?  Yeah, probably.  I'm not always proud of having to skulk behind an assumed name.  But like many of my colleagues in both higher ed and the K-12 system, I am fighting an uphill battle.  I can't afford to unnecessarily expose myself to hostile fire if I want to see it through. 

The crux of the problem is how the public views educators and their work.  The de-professionalization of teaching at all levels is a disservice to teachers and students alike, not to mention the public welfare.  Education is not a commodity to be bought or sold.  It is a personal attribute that must be cultivated in an atmosphere of mutual respect between teacher and student. 

Having said this, you can argue that teachers badmouthing students on the internet is poor form.  Maybe it is.  However, the educational climate has grown harsher of late.  Privatization of postsecondary education, the politicization of science, and criticism of the liberal arts and other non-vocational programs by right-wing politicians hasn’t helped.  The last pretenses of civility have fallen by the wayside thanks to Rate My Professors.com and other websites that allow college students to anonymously backstab faculty who haven’t sufficiently kissed their asses.   In such an environment, it’s natural to want to have your own place to vent occasionally.

So, if I’m unhappy with my job, why don’t I try something else?  My reply: Why should I?  I was here first.  I’ve committed myself to an academic career.  I believe I have something to offer my chosen profession as well as my students.  Moreover, I refuse to compromise my standards and will not change my methods in the hope that the students will like me.  My loyalty is to my profession and not the “customer.”  I’ll stick it out for as long as I can.  To do otherwise is to concede the field to people and ideas that are abhorrent to my sensibilities.  That’s why I don’t do something else.

I wish Natalie Munroe and her family all the best.  She has reminded us that we don’t suffer alone.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar