Hear You Been To College?
I’ve been hiding a secret. I applied to grad school. When I graduated from Queens College, I was pretty sure that I was done with school. I felt like the higher up you go in higher education, the less actual education there is and the more image-conscious bullshit there is (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Ward Churchill). Besides you can only “study” the labor movement for so long before you become an armchair academic critic. It’s much more of an education to go to work for a union. Get in there and get your hands dirty. You’ll do some amazing work, but you won’t stay ideologically pure, and you’ll be better off for it.
I’ve counseled lots of people to stay away from grad school. Hell, I’ve counseled people to drop out of college if the right gig came along. “Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna be different this time?” I’m frustrated that too many people go from high school to undergrad to grad, all in succession, and find themselves in their mid-to-late-twenties, deeply in debt and knowing lots about little.
Given my attitude, which is well-known among friends and family, you can understand why I decided to keep this under my hat. I applied to the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, but I didn’t just apply to any old grad school program. Through my comrade Matt Andrews, I learned about a special program of the university’s Labor Center, its Union Leadership and Administration Master’s of Science in Labor. It’s a limited residency program for active union staff. The idea is to go through the program while continuing your full-time (and then some) job in labor. You do the assigned readings during your own time, go to Amherst for ten days of instruction a semester and then return home to write your papers. That’s a workable schedule.
The UMass Labor Studies department has a great reputation for being hard-working, down-to-earth and pro-labor. The course listing looks awesome. Besides the core required courses in law, history and research, it looks like there’s some really nitty-gritty administration training in here, like “Union Financial Analysis” and “Human Resources Management for Union Leaders” (a lot of us could use that course!).
One thing that I’ve missed the last few years is a feeling of connection to a broader movement for social change. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in one’s work and miss for the forest for the trees. I think I need to make this sort of commitment to myself in order to maintain links between my work and my union and the larger movement.
Of course, I’m not currently “active union staff,” though I’m working on it. I hesitated before applying. I do so hate rejection. Well, today I officially received the good news that I’ve known for two weeks. I’ve been accepted to the program. My reading assignments come in April, and my classes begin in July. I promise you will hear more about my experience in this program in the coming months and years.
Shit In, Shit Out
Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as good as men at math and science. The controversy hasn’t let up, and as Summer’s character has been debated in the national press have come repeated complaints of his bullying and autocratic style, and constant reminders of how he chased Cornell West away to Princeton. It’s over for Summers. I’ve seen this movie before.
In my Junior year at Queens College, we brought down our president. Allen Lee Sessoms was appointed in 1995. He was Queens College’s first black president, one of the minority administrators appointed by Giuliani and Pataki in order to dismantle the hallmarks of the CUNY system and kick out thousands of minority students.
Sessoms wanted to break Queens College away from CUNY and make the college its own university, catering to middle class students from Long Island and out of state. He wanted to build dormitories in order to attract these students. He staked his reputation on a state-of-the-art AIDS research center. And he was a vocal supporter of Guiliani’s campaign to repeal CUNY’s 150-year tradition of open admissions (which meant that high school graduates from New York City’s public schools were guaranteed admission to CUNY; if they didn’t meet academic standards, they would have to take remedial courses to catch up, but could study at the university anyway).
When the Bar Association released a study on the open admissions debate in October of 1999, it included this passage:
New York State Education Law 6201, of course, does place a limit on the mission autonomy of the constituent institutions of CUNY. We were,
therefore, somewhat surprised to hear Dr. Allen Lee Sessoms, the President of Queens College, say that Queens is really more of a SUNY college, a “regional” university, than a part of CUNY, with almost half of its undergraduate student body coming from Nassau and Suffolk Counties rather than from the City of New York. Indeed, Queens College draws more heavily from Long Island than from the four boroughs other than Queens. Whatever the merits such an institution might have, this clearly does not fit within the statutory mission of CUNY to serve the New York City urban community and to give access to those who might otherwise be denied a higher education. Dr. Sessoms, however, believes that the key to increased funding is to build a strong connection with the middle class. He said that “the only people who benefit from open admissions are poor people and poor people don’t vote.”With respect to raising standards, Dr. Sessoms was quite blunt in stating his view that excellence is largely to be measured by the achievement levels of the incoming students rather than a value added measure of raising the achievement of those less prepared at the outset: “[Expletive] in, [expletive] out. If you take in [expletive] and turnout [expletive] that is slightly more literate, you’re still left with [expletive].” He said that he was out to build Queens into a great University and the concept of “value-added” as a measure of excellence would not indicate to him that Queens is a great University. Dr. Sessoms has thus made explicit what may well be a large part of the unspoken reasoning behind the proposed Amendment, at least by some of its more vocal proponents in the political arena, i.e. , that standards and excellence can only be raised by reducing access to the urban population for whom CUNY was created and maintained.
The expletive was “shit.” He was calling us “shit.” It took a few weeks after the report’s publication for it to get circulated much on campus, but when it did, boy, was Sessoms in trouble. The teacher’s union was after him. The student groups were after him.
This is from a pamphlet that my own Young People’s Socialist League distributed:
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As the controversy raged, Sessoms sealed his fate by publicly guaranteeing that he had secured funding for his AIDS center. When the deadline for producing the money came and went, he had to admit that he was bluffing. His reputation couldn’t recover, and he announced that he would not seek re-appointment at the end of his first five-year term. Sessoms was gone by the end of the semester.
Summers, like Sessoms, is attempting to change the structure of the university he leads, seeking greater centralization of the university’s mostly-autonomous schools. This means that he came in to the university facing powerful, entrenched opposition. Such arrogance as he displayed is so unwise, it betrays a greater character flaw. Summers better start thinking of how he will finesse his exit, since it seems doubtful that he can change his ways and win back his campus. Allen Sessoms never tried to apologize for the “Shit in, shit out” controversy. He could read the writing on the wall. It was time to leave.