Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> All I can say, Carrol, is that it appears you know very very little about
> how libraries, public works, local and county parks, environmental
> regulatory agencies, social work and beyond actually work - all of which are
O.K. I was focused on the federal and statre governments. Some of what you list here _can_ be appropriately compated to the schools, and my posts on the school are partly relevant to seome. Public libraries are an obvious instance. They are often under attack in similar ways to the schools, and leftists need to think carefully before merely kvetching at them. Social work is offers complications as well. Near the end of the '60s there was some activity aimed at uniting the interests of social workers and their 'clients' (i.e. -- transforming a relationship that usually resembled all to much the relationship of cop to felon). And so forth. Even at the federal level, one needs to exercise a bit of care re Social-Security 'bureaucracy.' Criticism there can get confused with rightist attacks on the whole service.
But after making all these allowances, Schools DO have a rather special place in U.S. political history, and I think my argument holds there with particular force. I think it especially important, as a matter of fact, to defend _bad_ tachers and _bad_ professors! University Administrations _are_ to a great extent "the enemy" (but Eric's post on this is important), and merit systems (formal ones or informal ones as in lbo-talk kvetching) will _not_ be used to 'improve' the faculty but to serve Administration interests. A Thorstein Veblen is far more apt to be screwed by a merit system that whatever miserable professor you have in mind when criticizing faculty. At a high school in Michigan whre my younger brother taught, a really superb teacher there was given all study-halls by the principal because he was a smartass. Then the teacher who replaced him in his courses offended the principal, he got his classes back, and the other teacher given study halls. The faculty was strong enough there to prevent smartasses from being fired but not from being abused. Two of the better teachers and scholars in the ISU English Department back in the '80s were refused tenure (probably because the idiot of a Dept. Chair we had then was afraid of them). They were a husband/wife team, & the wife had been one of the applicants for headship a couple years before, but the woman who got it was a special buddy of the Dean. (More complicated, but that was roughly it.) You should have plenty of stories of your own of this sort.
In the public schools, the important alliance has to be between teachers and parents; in universities it has to be between students & faculty AND staff. I know most professors don't know that -- but that doesn't affect the centrality of the principle.
I see all of this from the perspective of eliciting and organizing mass political activity.
Carol