FoundSF

"I was there..."

"Foundsf.org is republishing a series of "Tales of Toil" that appeared in Processed World magazine between 1981 and 2004. As first-hand accounts of what it was like working at various jobs during those years, these accounts provide a unique view into an aspect of labor history rarely archived, or shared.

by Sophia Fury

—from Processed World #19, published in April 1987.

I work as a part-time instructor at a San Francisco Bay Area community college. The California public university system, which includes universities, state universities and community colleges, was designed in the 1960s (when there was lots of money kicking around) to enable any young Californian who wanted one to get a college degree, regardless of economic level. I myself was a product of the education boom. Thanks to the largesse of financial aid, I armed myself (along with the rest of the hordes) with my liberal arts degree, ready to tackle the world. I'm still tethered to the public university system, but now I'm looking at it from the inside as an employee, and, along with my fellow part­ time instructors, watching it disintegrate.

Nowhere do you see the insidious undoing of the promise of equal opportunity as in the current California community college system. With the passage of the tax­ cutting Proposition 13 and the election of a short-sighted, "bottom-line" governor, the California community colleges had begun their slow decline. Government funds have been reduced to a trickle over the last few years. Administrators moan and groan over the restrictions imposed on them. Classes have been cut. Tuition is raised yearly. Attendance is down. Low­income teenagers have proven to be a completely expendable commodity in the highly competitive, high-tech job market of the 1980s, and the California system of education has remorselessly abandoned them.

The university system is also abandoning the very graduates it spawned-the new crop of mainly extraneous teachers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. In the community colleges, the teaching profession is slowly but surely going the route of two-tiered polarization, just like the thousands of traditional, skilled jobs that are currently being degraded. On the top, you have the twenty-year veterans protected by the American Federation of Teachers and an antiquated tenure system in which incompetence, egotism and banality unfortunately run rampant. On the bottom, you have people like me-people who want to teach and therefore accept low-rung jobs working as temporaries in the colleges.

Budget-minded administrators knew it would be impossible to disturb the sanctity of the "ivory tower," so they found a way to screw the new teachers-by simply not letting them in. In California, whenever a college-level teacher retires, he or she is increasingly replaced by a disposable, cheap, part-time teacher. More than half of the faculty at the college where I work is part-time and temporary. The ratio is even higher at other schools. The "teaching temp" is paid an hourly wage for class­ room time only. There is no vacation pay, holiday pay, or health or retirement bene­ fits. Months like December and April are total hell. While the old-timers bask "in the luxury of periodic paid weeks off, part­ timers get stuck with paychecks about half their normally miserable size. Nor is there compensation for classroom preparation time or "office hours," the customary time in which the teacher and student can talk one-on-one. At the end of the semester they “1et you go”—unless, that is, they keep you on for the next semester... and keep you on for the next summer... and the next... and the next.

The result is that at the college level these days, half the faculty are walking zombies who are disillusioned, insecure... and tired. Part-timers spend their off-hours scrambling for other part-time jobs that can support their teaching habit. I work as a part-time word processor; an acquaintance of mine tutors high school kids. Many part-timers have families that rely on their income. It's not unusual for them to dash off after class, in a mad race to make a decent living. Most likely they jump in the car, get on the freeway, and drive 45 minutes or an hour to their next class at another school, or else they run home to grade piles of exams and papers, a grueling activity for which they don't get paid.

As a consequence, part-timers hardly ever see one another. I only know two other part-timers at my school, and I see them very infrequently. The implications are obvious: we are too alienated, isolated and enervated to develop the camaraderie required for serious job organization. The AFT reps encourage us to attend their meetings, but we know they don't really represent us. We know we're going to have to organize ourselves if we want change, yet we're overcome with a paralyzing malaise, underneath which rage battles bum-out. But from day to day we mainly accept things, silently praying that enough of the old-timers will die so that we can get their jobs.

It's not just the part-timers who are suffering here: it's the whole system of education that's going down the tubes. Part­timers, generally speaking, do not participate in departmental affairs. Curriculum and policy are decided by the twenty­year veterans (the full-timers) who have generally given in to their apathy. A more cynical and beaten bunch you'd be hard­pressed to find. For the most part they're appalled at the degradation of education, yet they're overcome by inertia. They shrug apologetically when they see you in the halls, stopping to chat about "how the teaching's going," yet their primary goal is to reduce the amount of work they have to do themselves. Decision-making by the discouraged is a dreary business. Policy is either nondescript or totally inconsistent. Passing the buck has become elevated to an art.

In addition many full-timers strike me as having completely lost touch with student needs. Wracked by insecurity at being low­ level professoriate, and despairing at the shrinking level of esteem society affords them, faculty members unconsciously vent frustration on their students. I've been ap­ palled at the disparaging words exchanged among teachers in reference to the declining abilities of the students. That the students try their best, given inadequate intellectual preparation in high school and at home, isn't much considered. Nor does it strike the full-timers that perhaps building intellectual skills in the classroom first requires recognizing the validity of ignorance and understanding some of its origins.

It's funny, the community college teachers seem to think that the professors at the university level have it made because students there are "so much more intellectually motivated." But having just arrived at the community college from the university, I know better. Faculty alienation from students—and vice versa—is omnipresent in the university system. Students arrive at college less trained for critical analysis than for stifling obedience from which they understandably long to escape. Oversized classrooms and psychologically insensitive teaching methods have made instruction in the public schools a matter of power and submission. Professors at the college level interpret the younger student's indifference as '1ack of academic ability and interest" rather than a healthy response to bullshit drudgery. Professional egos get bruised ("why should I have to teach incompetents?"), and students are punished for it.

The academy gets its steam from intellectual self-hatred. Professors rush to the library in their off-hours for research, to convince scrutinizing administrators and fellow academicians they are worthy of tenure. The competition is fierce, the work ethic unbounded. Professors then carry this weak-kneed egotism into the classroom, where they try to impress their poor students with what scholarly hot shit they are. Students are then blamed for not being smart enough to understand abstruse, self-obsessive, disorganized academic mumbo-jumbo. If they give up trying, as so many students have, then they're totally ignored by the education system. Many students have become "bottom-line" thinkers—the value of the intellectual effort is measured by its cost effectiveness ("what’ll this effort get me?").

The whole milieu for mind expansion and personal growth has become warped beyond belief. Used to be, a professor would hang out in office hours and students would drift in to discuss intellectual issues, learning problems or personal dilemmas. A good teacher could really make a difference in somebody's life. Students often looked to a teacher for encouragement and advice and attention, stuff the student probably wasn't getting a lot of at home. But today, neither full-time nor part-time teachers have the psychic energy required to reach out and inspire. And students often seem more interested in their economic futures than in ideas or abstractions.

Nevertheless, many of my students strike me as starved for positive feedback, kind words, and strong role models. They're also hungry for something interesting that they can relate to. I myself am torn between my desire to provide them sympathetic guidance and adult friendship, which is so lacking for young people these days, and my unwillingness to donate too many hours of my already busy week. I usually volunteer three or four hours to office time, and I'm glad I do it, but it's not really enough. The sad truth is, with the majority of teachers on the run, the student who is slower or less confident will probably get overlooked. Students with learning disabilities or family problems often drop out.

Something pretty tragic's going on here: with a few minor exceptions, the personal relationship between student and teacher is becoming a thing of the past. Enrollments are declining as a result, creating more cutbacks, more substandard teaching, and less intellectually capable students. It's a bureaucratic vicious circle that's completely out of control, and virtually paralyzing education. And it's the kind of organizational dysfunction you see everywhere these days.

The decline of education in America offends me to the core for a couple of different reasons. First of all, it represents the arrival of a new socio-economic line­up here in the richest country in the world. Today, even the myth of America as a "nation of middle-class people" is dying a rapid death. Social classes are polarized and the growing numbers of poor, without access to better opportunities, are mercilessly shut out of the system, Life in the eighties has become a survival-of-the-fittest aerobic scramble to the top, in order to join the closing ranks of the “boomoisie.” The majority is undeniably being left behind.

But the decline of education has other ramifications that I find equally frightening. Critical thinking and the thirst for knowledge are becoming rare. Mass media has chipped away at intelligent reasoning by offering fluff packages as "information." People are increasingly rendered passive by their ignorance. The old myths have made a comeback. Americans today are accepting responsibility for their own "failure," instead of lashing out at the appropriate instigators who value money over lives. We're at a dangerous crossroads. It'd be easy at this point to give in to fear or despair. I sense that tendency in me on the one hand—but I'm also too fucking angry to give up.