Thirty-five autumns: A valediction

I recently retired from teaching English at Butte College. None of the four colleges I taught for over a 35-year career was particularly supportive of good teaching, and the last was the least in that regard.

Administrators there seemed much more engaged with their own little coteries and conspiracies than they were with actually providing leadership to the staff. Though I worked under the stewardship of current President Diana van der Ploeg for three years, I never laid eyes on her. I never met the first president I worked for at Butte, either, though I served under his supervision for three years, too. Like most college presidents, his time was largely spent with local businessmen, politicians, Rotary Clubbers, and with the members of the Board of Trustees who have the power to hire and fire top administrators, and who have the even more immediate task of approving pay and perks for top managers.

In fairness, one of the reasons I never met Dr. van der Ploeg is because, for the last four or five years I worked there, I boycotted the twice-yearly meetings held to kick off each new semester. Those were the occasions when most faculty had a rare glimpse of the president, but over a long career I had come to find those meetings completely wasteful of time and energy.

Summoned together, the faculty served as a captive audience for administrators who used the time to a) congratulate themselves on all they had done under very difficult circumstances, and b) to praise the faculty faintly for the job they were doing just before introducing some outside expert who would then tell the assembled teachers how to do it better. Like the administrators who led us, most of these “experts” had left the classroom years earlier for more well-paid careers in management or consulting.

Through three decades of such meetings, I cannot remember a single useful thing that ever transpired during those administratively concocted sessions, and I always thought the 10 days of “institute” time would be much more productively used if it were merely returned to the schedule as part of the time devoted to instruction. Administrators love the mantra that we’re all there to serve students, after all, and five more days a semester with students would be a boon to good teaching and learning. Any well-taught class could benefit from more time for the exchange between students and their teachers.

Most academic management people are themselves simply former classroom teachers—often the worst of the lot—who fled the classroom because they didn’t like teaching much, and wanted the much higher salaries offered to those who disdain teaching in favor of the role of managing people who lacked the ambition to get out of the classroom.

Many of those people who remain in the classroom are brilliant teachers, but more than a few are dullards, time-servers, and/or just plain bad. Anyone who has ever taken classes anywhere knows that the ratio is roughly 10-80-10. Ten percent of teachers are truly gifted, memorable, energized and in love with their work. Eighty percent fit somewhere on the spectrum of competent. Students can learn from them, but they are seldom inspiring. And, on the other end of that spectrum are the truly bad teachers, those who are lazy, indifferent or mal-educated themselves.

It is the job of administrators to keep the worst of these people from doing harm to students, and in my experience, it is precisely that job they would rather not do. They will fritter away their time in eternities of useless meetings, but they will not take on the hard challenge of protecting students from bad teachers.

Beyond the tenure protections, teachers also have the shield of their unions, and unions have, all too often, forsaken allegiance to standards in favor of support for the worst in their ranks. The unions representing teachers are never willing to ring in on the matter of bad teachers. In a too-cozy relationship with administrators, teachers’ unions have also overseen a gradual erosion of faculty perks and power, a yearly chiseling away at benefits and an exponential growth in exposed and largely unprotected part-time staff used by administration as an cheap and inexhaustible pool of scab workers.

The community college system is a microcosm of the structural failures of our major institutions, failures more and more obvious to any sentient observer during the Bush administration. Companies, agencies and bureaucracies are often headed by politically connected cronies of people farther up the line, and many of those people are incompetent. Should that incompetence come to light, the offending top boss is usually removed, but then rehired in another position at the same or better pay. One of the college presidents I worked for was such a complete disaster that he was removed from his post. His “punishment?” He was returned to the classroom at full administrative salary, making him the highest-paid faculty member on staff.

That college president brings to mind the saga of Michael Brown, clueless head of FEMA, who was removed from his post, then immediately re-hired by the government to serve as “consultant” to the agency he had been found incapable of running. For $148,000 per year. That’s his salary. You pay. I pay.

The new century has begun with most of our institutions in serious dysfunction. Far too often, the institutions are functioning to serve the people who are paid to serve the institution’s purpose, rather than the other way around.

Inadvertently, the Bush administration may have provided the nation as a whole with the lesson that things cannot go on as they have gone on, that we can no longer afford business as usual, and that includes the business of running our schools. We can no longer afford the inefficiency, the stagnation of talents, the stultifying atmosphere created by a system that promotes stagnation and stultification.

Thirty-five autumns from now, this year’s crop of students will have made their own ways toward the gates of retirement. Those years clip by quickly, as everyone knows who has made that journey. I would not have wanted to spend my own years any other way, but I could have done better work in a better system, and now is as good a time as any to begin looking at changing the system young teachers are entering on the first of their own 35 autumns.