NEWS & EVENTS (BenOrtiz.com)

We're still picketing...

...and this teacher looks how I feel...

Now I officially feel bad about striking. Why? My dad must have read my site and mailed me some money to help with rent. Since bills are coming due and my health benefits will soon be cancelled, I suppose I should hold onto this check, but somehow I can't bring myself to cash it just yet.

Now, for those of you who do NOT know my dad, believe you me: My own dad would NEVER help me with cash if he thought I was striking for an $80,000 salary and only 12 hours of work per week. Receiving this check, to me, is an undeniable endorsement of the justness of the strike, but I keep hoping to hear from more students, as the local press has crucified the Union with its editorials that seem to just repeat the admin line without any more depth of research or insight.

Consider the Sun-Times claim that "a City College professor earns close to $80,000" -- this is exactly the kind of factoid without context or qualification that the Board wants our media to repeat acritically, because repeated enough it amounts to a total distortion of the issues at hand. I have yet to see this factoid put in a real context of how many teachers at the City Colleges earn anywhere near that amount, and the further details of the professional development (a PhD, which takes years) and seniority (decades of commitment) it might take to reach that level.

Remember: The Chancellor gets a considerable yearly salary, has mortgage and car payments taken care of, and has health benefits for life for himself and dependents. I'd like to see the Sun-Times write a fair editorial that seeks to justify disparities between downtown administrators and teachers, especially since downtown administrators essentially flow from political appointments and exist only because teachers do the actual work of educating.

Moreover, why does the Board/district office downtown have a greater budget than most of the City Colleges themselves? Where are the investigative reporters when you need them? Is there any reporter out there who can just take a look at the downtown office and any of the City Colleges to ask a simple question of "does this add up?"

It's also disingenuous to see the Sun-Times opine about the "American dream" and how City Colleges are a doorway for immigrants. Let's follow their editorials and coverage for a few weeks to see how pro-education and pro-immigrant they really are. They call the City Colleges a "dream factory" but obviously, just like the Board, seem to lack any true knowledge of what it's like to teach in this system.

I fail to understand how anyone who would claim to care about education would think to fault the teachers first, rather than look to bolster our position as frontline contributors to democracy. One online writer posted a comment to this site suggesting that the students sue City College teachers for breach of contract. It surely is unfair to break a contract, but this suggestion totally ignores the justice of a prior contract, one that the Union has been trying to negotiate with the Board since last spring.

Finally, the Sun-Times editorial cites "every government agency strapped for cash," which is a legitimate concern only if you consider education just one more area for a bit of appropriation. As Benjamin Barber states in a look at the significance of education for revolutionary democracy, "Colleges and universities had to be committed above all to the constituting of citizens."

This is something I've been arguing about at Truman for some time now, especially in refutation of the idea that students are customers. I despise that model of education as a vending machine of credits. Rather, "democracy, citizenship, and education [form] the triangle on which the freedom of America depended." But "today we have witnessed the professionalization, the bureaucratization, the privatization, the commercialization, and the individualization of education" (Barber).

In sum, it's a sorry state of affairs when we see teachers as vending machines and students as consumers, the equivalent of a diabetic, obese kid pulling yet another Snickers bar out of the vendor for a snack.

Lastly, I promise you, my friends, that with my education and bearing I could have been anything and applied myself to any trade or career, including that of patronage and political appointment, but I chose instead to be a writer and a teacher, to engage those two cornerstones of democracy: journalism and education.

Maybe you can tell me why, because I'm starting to think I should've looked into the basketball program at Stanford -- yes, I always wanted to be an NBA coach, too, so maybe there's still hope if the strike is crushed.

ENDNOTE:
Student Rally at City Hall (121 N. LaSalle Street), this Thursday, October 28, 2004: You have a voice in this whole matter, and I urge you to exercise it.
A bus will pick up Truman students on Wilson Avenue for the downtown rally at 10am.

Posted by Benjamin at October 26, 2004 06:37 PM