Exclusive! Wit & Wisdom of Sample Pitman See P. 6

VOL. 1, NO. 2

/
Last Spring, Robert Lipsyte, the man many people on the Times
considered the paper’s best analytical reporter, got together with
Howie Jones, the man many people consider the country’s best

small-college basketball coach. The reason for their meeting was the ,

national publicity aroused by the confessions of a number of athletes
about the use of drugs in competitive sports. The result of their
meeting was a Lipsyte column on the sports pages of the Times.

Jones comes through as the man we know: honest, intelligent,
warm and dedicated. The players too are familiar figures: talented
people struggling to find themselves amid the frustrations of a racist
society that would exploit their athletic ability and then cast them
aside.

But the column, for all its integrity and good sense, created a
storm in the administration. Taken together with the press
conference called by the Puerto Rican faculty, a lot of public
attention focused on the drug problem at MCC.

The administration reacted in angry panic. In public it denied the
existence of a problem. Despite evidence to the contrary, it asserted
that stories of widespread drug use at the college were lies invented
by “hard-core revolutionaries” (read “Student Government”) and
vindictive Puerto Rican faculty trying to get even for their dismissals.

There were, the administration claimed, only 15 drug addicts at
MCC. It developed later, by Dean Pittman’s own admission, that the
information, originally attributed to “careful investigation by reliable
sources,” came as a result of bribes to campus drug pushers. The fact
that the administration now cooperates in a broad and expensive
drug education program is itself an admission that drugs pose a more
serious problem than it will concede publicly.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the administration acted to punish
the “guilty” and to create the kind of tight central control that could
smother unfavorable publicity before it leaked out.

e The administration refused to accept Puerto Rican Studies’ own
choice for Coordinator unless j candidate was accepted ag
Co-coordiniot

e The administration removed the Coordinator of Black Studies
and tried unsuccessfully to dismiss him from the faculty.

e The administration sabotaged the Student Government
elections in the Spring and Fall. To this day the administration
maintains that the Student Government Association is illegal
and functions only so long as the administration sees fit to
permit it to do so, a hostage to the administration’s ideas of
“good behavior.”

e The administration harassed and then blackmailed Coach Howie
Jones.

After the Times interview, Dean Pittman attempted to place
derogatory material in Jones’ personal file. This Fall, when the
Faculty - Council elected Howie and Pete Fazio as its two
representatives on the BMCC Association, the administration
pressured Professor Mayer Rossabi, who had originally nominated
them and was their department chairman, to get them to resign. The

GER PAPER|

FEBRUARY, 1972

Prez Fouls Coach

administration advanced the argument that the two coaches were
party to a “conflict of interest” since the Association paid a small
part of their salaries and provided the entire athletic budget.

Since neither before nor after has the administration worried
about the “conflict of interest” inherent in its awn participation on
the Association, and since it chooses to ignore the “conflict of
interest” involved in student participation (both groups receive
money from the Association in various ways), it seems clear that the
effort to single out the coaches stemmed from a desire to warn
others about speaking out without first getting administration
clearance.

When this tactic failed, Draper, without prior consultation with
the Association, simply withheld Jones’ letter of appointment as
coach and, therefore, his coaching salary. This, despite the fact that
the basketball season was half over and Jones had led the Panthers to
a 12-1 record.

At this point the Association met and decided that, according to
its right to be the first interpreter of its own Bylaws and according to
its own sense of their meaning, the conduct of Jones and Fazio had
been correct and that no “conflict of interest” existed. If Draper
disagreed, the Association declared, he had the right to take the
matter to. court. The Association would abide by the decision of the
judiciary.

But the administration continued to withhold Jones’ letter of
appointment. And to top things off, Pittman began coming to
basketball games and leaving with piles of notes, presumably
evidence of Howie’s “lack of concern for the well-being of students
and the reputation of the school.” When Jones refused to crumble,
and when it became clear that the BMCC Association and Third
World Coalition would back him up, the administration changed
tactics. On January 5, at a meeting of the faculty to examine plans
for the new campus, Draper suddenly tried to call-a meeting of the

Coung he sole purpose of the meeting was to browbeat

presen to the BMCC Association. Nl eg nt
Unfortunately for the administration, members of the Association
showed up to contest Draper’s interpretation of the situation, and
Professor Norman Horowitz arose to announce that the Legislative
Conference was filing a grievance over the refusal to pay Jones his
salary. The administration was saved from a stunning defeat when it
was “‘discovered” that a quorum of the Faculty Council was not
present and no vote could legally be taken.

Since then the administration has partially retreated: Jones’ letter
of appointment has come through, and with it his back-pay. But
rumor has it that the administration still hopes to manage the
removal of Jones and Fazio from the Association. They have called a
Faculty Council meeting for February_16, at which the matter is
expected to come up. The meeting will be at 12 Noon in room A393.
The Tiger Paper urges all members of the Faculty and student body
to attend.

Chamber Of Horrors

—Maybe one out of three students got correct
grades for the Fall. The computer fouled all
the others up. People were notified of aca-
demic dismissal or probation whose grades in
fact were fine.

—Hundreds of people completed their mail
registration but were never notified by the
school that they had in fact been registered.
They received no bursar’s receipt, no nothing.

—At least half the people supposedly regis-
tered through the mail found out that in fact
they were not registered or only partially
registered.

—“Schedules of Classes” were sent out late or
not at all.

—“Schedule of Classes” was printed with in-
correct rooms, incorrect times, and courses—
like Comp I—omitted altogether.

—Classes were scheduled at night for the “D”

—Hundreds of students were told by mail to
come and register at 7:30 PM on Friday,
January 28. At 7:00 PM they locke; the
doors.

—Black woman, mother, works full time: I'd
like to register.

White Secretary: It’s much too late dear.
Registration was last week.

Woman: I was here last week. Every day.
They told me since I didn’t have the $47 I'd
have to get financial aid before they’d let me
register. They told nie in Financial Aid that
they couldn’t give me any till I registered.
They sent me back and forth all day. Every
day. All last week.

Secretary: I’m sorry dear. You get everything
straightened out now, and everything will be
fine in September. You can register then.

—‘You want an English course? Sorry, all the
English courses are closed. Why did they tell
you to register so late if all the courses were
going to be closed? You have to understand
that registration is very complicated. We’re

and the “M” Buildings. But these buildings
are not open at night. Students and teachers
arrived the first day of classes to find the
doors locked and the lights off.

—The English Department was forced to can-
cel 40 sections of Comp II. No students. Dis-
appeared. But other courses had more than 50
students jammed into each classroom.

only human. Mistakes are occasionally made.
You’re human too? Oh, well, yes, of course.
Why don’t you register for ‘Social Welfare
Programs and Policies’? You'll love it!”


PAGE TWO

TWC Wins

All eighteen candidates of Third World Co-
alition swept to victory in the student govern-
ment elections of November 1, 2 and-3.

In taking every seat but one on the fifteen-
member Student Government Association,
and capturing 70% of the total vote, TWC
compiled majorities ranging from three-to-
one to five-to-one. Four TWC candidates,
running unopposed, won seats on the Stu-
dent-Faculty Disciplinary Court.

Third World Coalition’s election victory
brought to an end six months of uncertainty
as to whether students would have any voice
at all on campus. The closing of Prometheus
the scheduling of last spring’s regular SGA
elections after classes ended, the, constant
postponement of new elections this fall, and
their final scheduling to coincide with Black
Solidarity Day and a College Discovery pay-
ay, made it seem that the administration was
determined to rule student affairs by itself.

In the end, the administration proved in-
capable of preventing the thirty percent vote
required to legalize the election. The election
turnout at Manhattan was the third highest of
any branch of the City University in the past
year.

Phe Children’s Center Has Room

The Manhattan. Community College
Children’s Center at 1595 Broadway and
48th Street, 2nd Floor, has room for
more children. The center is open from 8
a.m. to 10 p.m. If you want to bring
your children (any toilet-trained child is
eligible), come to the center immedi-
ately.

. e€ Ol tic Me ataepault WY ULKerd
Action Committee, which is a militant caucus
within the Communications Workers of
America.

GOES T' WORK EVERY DAY,
BUSY ALL HIS LIFE, WORK,

we ~— 4 doub
annual ~ profit to the
banks: 1) their profit on running the
subways, and 2) the interest from the bonds.

So the fare is up again on the subway. And
they are blaming it on the transit workers
again. So what’s new? the con game goes on, a
few bankers get richer while the working
people of New York get poorer and blame
other working people. Here is how it works.

When the subways were first built, the city
spent $355 million to dig the tunnels, 60% of
the total cost. The city raised the money to
do this by selling tax-free bonds, which were
bought by the big.banks. These same banks
then formed the private subway companies
(for example, the IRT was run by Rockefeller
banks). The agreement was that the
companies were guaranteed a profit before
any money would go to the city to repay the
debt, But the city never got anything, every
year the money taken in was always just
enough to cover operating costs, maintenance
and profit. (Strange coincidence). That meant
that the taxpayers had to pay the interest on

But this deal wasn’t good enough. During
the Depression the subway companies cut
maintenance to maintain their profits. By
1940, the subways were ready to fall apart, so
the companies sold them to the city. To raise
money to buy and rebuild the subways, the
city again sc’ bonds to the same banks. The
banks no longer had the headache of running
the subways, but they were still guaranteed a
profit. By 1940 the city had spent almost
$1.5 billion to buy and rebuild the subways.
To do this bonds were sold which committed
the taxpayer to pay $1,853,000,000 in
interest alone.

And it didn’t stop there. In 1951 a $500
million bond issue for a Second Ave. subway
was passed by the voters. But after the bonds
were sold (to the same banks) the city
decided not to build the new line.

In 1953 the city handed management of
the buses and subways over to the Transit

TIGER PAPER

NOTICE NOTICE

ALL NON-MATRICULATED STUDENTS

Any non-matriculated student who regis-

’ tered for English Composition I and paid

four credits, four contact hours, or $60
tuition for the course, please note:
English Composition I is correctly 3
credits, 3 contact hours; you were incor-
rectly overcharged at registration and
should have received a $15 refund.

Similarly, any non-matriculated student
who registered. for the following
EVENING Secretarial Science courses:
Stenography I Gregg; Typewriting 1;
Stenography I Pittman; Stenography Il
Gregg: or Stenography II Pittman, and
paid five contact hours or $75 tuition
for the course, please note: all the above
courses are correctly four contact hours
in the EVENING; you were incorrectly
overcharged at registration and should
have received a $15 refund.

ALL STUDENTS

Any student who paid the $47 general
fee to register for Fall 1971 and then
through no fault of his own either could
not register for 12 or more credits or
who, after registering for 12 or more cre-
dits, had his credit load reduced to less
than 12 credits because of class cancel-
lations or schedule or scheduling errors,
please note: you are entitled to a $30
refund, the difference in the general fee
between those considered full time (12
or more credits) and those considered
part time (11 or fewer credits).

OBBERY

rity. This was.supposed to make transit
— ‘eta Or stares and to economize
through business-like management. In reality,
the subways never have been and aren’t now
self-sustaining—paying interest on the huge
debt makes that impossible. The city pays for
all transit bond debts out of our taxes. It also
pays for capital costs, that is, new cars, and
building new tracks and stations all through
taxes or new bonds. Because of this the
Transit Authority lets equipment deteriorate.
The TA saves money and the city has to
replace equipment that much _ sooner.
Meanwhile, New York’s subways are probably
the worst and most dangerous in the world. It
all adds up to an expensive and dangerous ride
for us and lots of money for a few bankers.

The TA and the city try to cover up this
robbery by blaming deficits, fare hikes, and
bad equipment on the transit workers. (Ma
Bell does the same thing to us.) Like the rest
of us, they are struggling to keep ahead of
inflation and also like the rest of us, they are
losing. In real wages (what their pay can
actually’ buy) they have lost 8% since
December, 1967. It is unlikely that their
current contract will cover inflation in the
next two years. But in any case, it is not the
raise in transit workers wages which causes
the problem. The fare has gone up 700%,
from 5¢ to 35¢ in the last 25 years, but wages
haven’t gone up that much.

It’s time we stopped paying for the
subway—we’ve bought it several times over
already. The subways should be run as a
public service.

The recent 29% rate increase that New
York Telephone got is a similar situation.
None of the new money is to be used for
wages, no matter what kind of contract we
get. The money is all to be used to maintain
the company’s rate of profit so the company
will have a higher credit rating and will be
able to borrow more money. And of course,
later there will be another rate increase to
help pay that loan back. And of course it will
all be blamed on us and our strike.

We, together with all workers, should
oppose the phone company’s rate increase, as
well as the subway fare increase, and all other
attempts by big business to keep up their
profits at our expense. In the long run, they
will have to answer to us!



TIGER PAPER

The Women’s Union

Sisterhood
Is Powerful

No one, not even MCC’s administration,
denies that the function of a community col-
lege is to meet the needs of the City Fathers
for hard-working, low-prestige, low-paid in-~
dustrial and civil servants.

So it is not surprising that MCC dutifully
meets governmental and industrial needs for
data processors and medical emergency tech-
nologists, nurses and secretaries, while ig-
noring the needs of people—its own students,
staff and faculty members.

It is for this reason that we struggled for
more than a year for a children’s center. And
it is for this reason that a Women’s Union
exists at MCC. As women, we must try to
recognize and define our own needs which
have been so grossly distorted for us by the
media and the educational system, and we
must come together to struggle with the ad-
ministration to meet the special needs of MCC
women. :

First we must sit down together and make
friends with one another. We must examine
and dispel the piles of myths which have been
heaped upon our heads by men (and women)
from every institution in America, the myths
that split us from our men, from ourselves
and from one another: the myth of the
blessedness of self-annihilating servitude; the
myth of thé joys and rewards of passive
obedience to husband, boss, priest and presi-
dent; the myth of the castrating Black matri-
arch joining the white man in oppression of
the Black—a myth exploded by Angela Davis
in her examination of the role of the Black
woman ‘under slavery (The Black Scholar,
Vol. 3, No. 4, Dec. ’71). These are the myths
which still pervade our lives and corrode our
effectiveness as human beings and as parti-
cipants in all liberation struggles.

But the Women’s Union exists not simply
for self-examination, but for action: Thus far
we have defined three areas of need. The first,
most far-reaching and important of the
Women’s Union projects is the establishment
of a Health Information Center at MCC where
women and men can get on-the-spot, accurate
and comprehensive information about birth
control, abortion, attempts at genocidal steri-
lization by gynecologists and obstetricians on
Third World Women, venereal disease preven-
tion and cure, drugs, and other health-related
problems. :

What, it will be asked, has health care to do
with education? It is a very narrow view of
education that says “learn to type but learn
about your body elsewhere.” (Ne one ever
says where). Even wealthy women in this
country have been misinformed and badly
taken by the medical profession, but the
health information and health care available
for poor and Third World people has been
abysmal. We are women and we are here: we
demand that our need for health information
be met by what calls itself an educational
institution.

The MCC Health Information Center will,
of course, be for men and women, but it is a
primary struggle for the Women’s Union

Around The Colleg

PAGE THREE

a

Left to Right: Secretaries Doris Freedman, Mollie Schindle, Betty Harris. Linda Grosso,
and Ruth Rudnick.

because the need for this information is most
urgent among women. The burden of misin-
formation or no information about contracep-
tion, abortion and sterilization practices very
obviously falls on women, But there are
subtler concerns: a woman may have VD for
years without knowing it, resulting in con-
tamination of others as well as irreparable ana
extremely serious physical damage to herself.
Furthermore, women annually spend millions
and millions of dollars for doctors (male) and
pharmacists (male) to handle minor, easily
detected and easily treated vaginal infections.

er_maj concern of the Women’s

ment of the women’s movement in America,
especially in colleges around the country, has
focussed on getting more jobs, more money
and more promotions for professional
women. Often, too often, these women have
ignored the extreme plight of their working-
class sisters. But working-class women must
struggle for secretaries’ rights to take courses
at school during lunch or in other hours, for a
place where they can go to relax for a coffee-
break or lunch hour away from the chaos of
MCC offices, and for a cafeteria where they
(as well as all students, staff and faculty) can
find healthful food at tolerable prices. And
we will in every way possible promote and
support their struggles to increase their
meager salaries.

The third area of immediate concern is

' course and curriculum content. Both racist

and sexist attitudes still prevail in the courses
MCC gives: the Women’s Union has, for

example, begun to struggle with the Health
Ed department about the content and form of
its courses. We want a Women’s Studies Pro-
gram. It is time that a working-class feminist
perspective replaced the white, male, middle-
class value system foisted on us in every class,
under the name of “scholarship.”

So it is the function of the Women’s Union
to help us recognize and define our own needs
and to struggle with the MCC administration
and faculty to see that they are met. Until we,
as women,. become full-fledged members of
our community, there will never be a true
struggle for liberation. As Angela Davis puts:

—_

“According to a time-honored principle,

advanced by Marx, Lenin, Fanon and
numerous other theorists, the status of
women in any given society is a baro-
meter measuring the overall level of
social development. As Fanon has mas-
terfully shown, the strength and efficacy
of social struggle—and espetially revolu-
tionary movements—bear an immediate
relationship to the range and quality of
female participation.”

: (The Black Scholar, pp. 14-15)

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT
THE WOMEN’S UNION
CONTACT
NAOMI WORONOV D 209, 262-2210/18

WOMEN’S UNION MEETING
WED., FEB. 23
12-2, A226

Pittman Victimized
by Early Tenure

Misfortune has its rewards, but-only if you
have friends in high places who have a need
for the kind of work you do.

Last semester, the Personnel and Budget
Committee of the Student Life Department,
by unanimous decision, denied reappointment
to Dean Sample N. Pittman. However, upon
appeal to the College-wide Personnel and Bud-
get Committee, a body comprised of depart-
mental chairmen, deans and the president, the
decision was reversed. Professor Irving
Wechsler, chairman of the Business Depart-
ment, assumed the leading role in Pittman’s
defense.

In an unusual expression of concern, Presi-
dent Edgar Draper bestowed early tenure
upon Dean Pittman so that in the future he
would not have to suffer such anguish and
uncertainty. Normally, Dean Pittman would
not be eligible for tenure until 1975.

As a further gesture of his confidence in
Pittman, Draper subsequently promoted him
to the position of Acting Dean of Administra-

tion.

In a taped interview with a reporter from
the Tiger Paper, Dean Pittman said, “I am
opposed ‘to tenure.” Asked if he would turn
down tenure should it be granted to him, he
replied, “I suppose you would say that | ama
victim of the system.”

The moral of all this is that nothing suc-
ceeds like adversity, particularly if you are a
dean. :

[As we go to press, we learn that President
Draper has vetoed the promotion of Mike
Rosenbaum, a member of the Tiger Paper col-
lective. Rosenbaum had been_ approved by
both his departmental and the College-wide
Personnel and Budget Committee. The re-
versal of unanimous departmental recommen-
dations in both the cases of Rosenbaum and
Pittman dramatizes only too clearly that ad-
vancement in the college is not determined so
much by ability and the judgement of your
peers as it is by political considerations and
who you know. |


‘PAGE FOUR

TIGER PAPER

Nursing Education: ‘Teaching

The young woman just entering nursing
school faces her education with great appre-
hension. Her most pressing questions are: Will
I be able to learn how to give the best possible
care for the sick? Will I be able to learn how
to work most effectively with the doctor; my
fellow nurses and the non-professional
workers? Will I be able to learn how to be “a
good nurse” and help change nursing to be
better? After only a few short months in
nursing school, however, the student nurse no
longer sees these questions as relevant. In-
stead, the most important questions for her
have become: Will I do everything exactly the
“Sight” way, i.e., the way the supervisor
wants them done? If I make any changes will
I be doing something so hideously wr6ng that
the patient will die? Will I express the right
attitude toward my work so that I can stay in
school?

The student nurse and the young nursing
graduate have been molded through their
education to see themselves not as important
workers or decision makers in the health
world but as minor cogs in the health system
wheel. They can only do what they are told
and cannot make decisions because that is not
their assigned task. Though the elite in
nursing like to think that nurses have major
responsibility for patient care, this is largely
illusion. For the most important message
communicated to potential nurses and nursing
students is “don’t rock the boat.’’ Even in the
most limited sense, individual imagination and
initiative in providing nursing care is out of
line. And any nurse who challenges the basic
structures and relationships in the health
system is considered a heretic by,the women
who dominate nursing leadership: the edu-
cators, the supervisors and the administrators.

The roots of this conformity, this passivity,
this fear of change stretch back as far as the
recruiting programs for potential nurses and
continue through the whole educational
process. This article will try to trace that
development.

The recruiting process-must steer women

waewe MAES AJR AAMPOU ALM ve wo ae R ORS

program: the baccalaureate (B.A.) or four-
year college degree programs; the Associate
Degree (A.D.) or junior college program; the
Diploma or hospital school program (a three
year course granting a certificate in nursing).
Even though nurse educators say there are
differences in the various programs (academic
emphasis in the baccalaureate programs and
technical emphasis in the other programs), in
practical terms there is not really that much
difference. Nurses from ‘all three programs
perform identical duties (although oppor-
tunities for specialization and advancement
vary with the program) and relate to doctors,
patients, and the health system in similar
ways.

Very few women who decide to become
nurses know .the differences among the
various programs. They are subject to seem-
ingly haphazard recruiting techniques. The
messages=about nursing come from many
different sources: books, magazines, high
school guidance counselors and advertise-
ments. Haphazard though it may seem, how-
ever, there are several underlying purposes of
the recruiting that serve the interests of the
leaders of the existing health care system. The
task of the recruiting is to procure enough
women to be trained for each of the types of

S5E THAT DUDE
OVER THERE 7
HES CALLED THE

DOGCATCHER ?

nursing, and to ensure that they will be
women who can be appropriately molded in
personality as well as properly trained tech-
nically.

Perhaps the most blatant examples of
recruiting for self-serving interests originate
from hospitals and hospital schools. They try
to draw women into hospital-based ‘“‘diploma
schools.”” One advantage of this to the hos-
pitals is that students trained in hospital
schools are directly “educated” to serve the
hospital’s needs, which, however, frequently
conflict with the indiyidual’s expectations
that nursing will be a way of helping people.
Hospital nursing ‘schools are also a convenient
mechanism for insuring an adequate supply of
nurses for hospitals: The student nurses them-
selves provide nursing care for patients during
their education. And they often remain at the
hospital at which they were trained after
graduation.

At hospital schools, a prospective student is
frequently told that she will be taking some
courses for which she will receive college
credit. This is sometimes true; more schools
are linking up with colleges so that their
students can go on for their bachelor’s degree.
But in most cases this is a lie; the courses may
be given by college teachers but the students
receive no college credit for the course,
making it impossible to go on to higher
educational levels without starting all over
again. Hospital schools are closing down
rapidly, in part because of the growing unpop-
ularity of such dead end education, and some
schools seem to feel forced to use any. method
they can to attract students.

The recruiting for A.D. programs is very
similar to the misleading recruiting used for

PLACE CALLED
THE POUND...

}

Diploma Schools. The prospective students
are told that they will have two years of
college work which they can then use to
transfer to a regular school for nursing.
However, this is often not true. For example,
the New York University catalog states:
“Courses in the baccalaureate degree nursing
major are at the upper division levei and have
substantial prerequisites in the arts and
sciences for admission to them. Courses in
nursing taken in associate degree and hospital
schools are not equivalent in level or com-
plexity of these requirements and may not be
accepted for advanced standing credit.”

Another mechanism for selecting women
for the various types of nursing programs is
the high school guidance counselor. One nurse
who was interviewed related the fact that her
guidance counselor told her that she was too
smart to be a nurse. This is a typical state-
ment which is often repeated to white mid-
dle-class students. If such a student does
persist in choosing nursing, invariably she will
be shepherded into a collegiate program.
Black or poor white students by contrast are
typically guided into diploma schools or A.D.
programs, even though there has been a great
deal of money available for scholarships to
collegiate nursing programs. Often guidance
counselors brief visiting nurses about the
programs they should stress when talking to a
particular group of prospective students. If
the counselor determines that the group of
students is not “college material,” the nurse is
told to gear her talk to Associate Degree and
practical nursing (P.N.) programs. Typically,
when there are many black students in the
group, the A.D. and P.N. programs are
stressed.

ws AND THEY PUT
IT in A CHAMBER
AND GAS (T Yo DEATH?

The conception that nursing is a woman’s
task has led to sexist and sex-biased recruit-
ment for the field. Guidance counselors never
suggest a nursing career for men. Any boy
who might consider nursing is frequently
frightened away by the oft-made association
of homosexuality with the male nurse. One
way in which men do get into nursing is via
the army medical corps. Some black men
enter nursing, especially practical nursing,
because it is a relatively secure, fairly high
paying job for blacks who are excluded from
many other skilled jobs. However, few men
consider nursing itself as a career; rather it is
often seen as a stepping stone to some other
job, such as hospital administration. Nursing
educators contribute to the perpetuation of
the sex-biased image of nursing. As one nurse
so coyly stated, “Many students lighted the
lamp in adolescence when the feminine con-
sciousness began to awaken.”

The Armed Forces, in their nurse re-
cruiting, also take advantage of the fact that
nursing is mainly a women’s profession. They

ot overtty—sexis i

women into the service. Their

allude to the availability of marriageable men
and illustrate their point with alluring pictures
of nattily uniformed officers embracing at-
tractive blue eyed, blond nurses. These pam-
phlets also describe the excitement and
glamour that await the prospective military
nurse. To make their programs even more
attractive, the various programs, whether they
are sponsored by the Army, Navy or Air
Force, offer to pay for two years of schooling
in return for two years of service.

Traditionally, the registered nurse has been
white and the practical nurse has been black.
But now, nursing manpower needs require
recruiting more black women for registered
nursing to staff inner city hospitals. Since this
recruiting campaign has been waged by the
white, professionally oriented nursing leader-
ship, there are often racist notions behind
their recruiting drives. Major campaigns have
been started in urban high schools to get
black and brown women to train in A.D.
programs. Besides school visits by nurse re-
cruiters who explain the opportunities for
black women in nursing, pamphlets and bro-
chures have been prepared to circulate in
inner city high schools.

One such pamphlet, printed by Ex-Lax
Corporation and prepared with the co-
operation of the American Nurses Asso-
ciation, features many pictures of black
nurses and nursing students in the hospital
setting. On the surface the pamphlet seems to
be an honest attempt to recruit black women
into nursing. But the thematic undercurrent
of the pamphlet is that nursing is a good way
to make it in the white world and to fit into
the value system of white middle class
America. To appeal to the image of the black
women as perceived by recruiters, the text of
the pamphlet is supposedly hip: “Think about
being a nurse. It’s really where the supercool
action is. You'll wear a smashy dress.”” The
conclusion is clear: “When you become a
‘R.N.’"—you’re somebody.” Become a nurse
and get out of the rut of being black.

But nursing recruiting serves more func-
tions than just producing enough bodies for
the various programs. The chosen women
must also have a personality that can be


TIGER‘PAPER

#1) ‘(PAGE FIVE

Women To Know Their Place

me?

molded into the traditional role of a nurse:
self-effacing, subservient, and willing to take
orders without asking questions, In part, this
personality screening is the recruiter’s job.
But self-selection also plays a role. Only
women who identify with the mass image of
nursing portrayed by the media are likely to
want to become nurses. The prevalent image
of the nurse is gleaned from books, movies,
television programs that depict her in the
most traditional roles. For the pre-teen there
are heroines like Cherry Ames, Student Nurse,
who is depicted as the self-sacrificing, hard-
working, dedicated angel. For the older girl,
there are the thousands of pocket books
about seductive nurses and their sexual ex-
ploits. On TV, the doctor stories show the
nurse as a beautiful, dedicated, handmaiden
to the masterful (and sexy) doctor. The
“good” nurse is the silent helper who gets her
reward by marrying the doctor.

Often the expectations of nurses-in-training
still do not jibe with the needs of the medical
profession. Surveys show that many women
enter nursing because they want to help

— people. Students think of nursing in terms of

dedicated service, care and concern and im-
proving health care. But what the incoming
nursing student thinks is of little importance.
What matters is whether she can be fitted into
the mold prepared by the decision makers in
nursing. For them the important values are
order and routine, meticulousness, hard work,
emotional control and restraint.

The education of the student nurse,
whether it be in a.diploma, associate degree,
or baccalaureate nursing program, is essen-
tially a “‘desocialization” process. Throughout
her nursing education, the student is exposed
to a multiplicity of experiences which evoke
fear, guilt, and humiliation and which ulti-
mately undermine her personal value system,
alienate her from her common sense, and
stifle her desire to create and experiment.
These experiences in effect program the stu-
dent who will later, as a graduate nurse, be
expected to fit smoothly into the existing
health care system without rocking the boat.

One of the first things the nursing student
learns is that there is a “right way” of doing
things. There is a “right way”’ to do trivial
things such as making a bed, and a “right
way” to do critical things such as treating a
patient who is hemorrhaging. “If you make a
mistake,’ the student is told, “the patient
might die.” When evaluating the student’s
performance, the nursing instructor fails to
consider the relative importance of various
tasks. The student is taught to think that
deviating from what has been taught, no
matter how unimportant the task, will have
serious consequences. One graduate nurse,
considering her experiences during her fresh-
man year, recalled: “‘My instructor came into
the room to inspect a bed I had made. She
was angry and disgusted because the sheet was
wrinkled. I felt like I had done something
really horrible ... like I had done something
that might really hurt the patient.’’ Another
student tells of being severely disciplined for
failing to wake a patient in order to change
his bed linen. Her explanation that the patient
had not slept for several nights and that he
needed undisturbed sleep more than clean
linen was judged irrelevant.

It is certainly true that mistakes could
cause injury or death to a patient; there are

‘

many procedures for which there is indeed a
“right way.” Many other tasks performed by
nurses, however, could be improved with
imagination, innovation, and flexibility. But
the use of personal judgement is discouraged
in nursing school because the function of
nursing education is to produce a nurse with
predictable, unimaginative behavior that can
always be molded to fit the needs of the
medical profession. :

The “right way” is a theme which per-
meates all of the student’s classroom and
clinical experiences. Its roots, of course, lie in
the many medical tasks for which the “right
way” may indeed be a life-or-death matter.
But the use of this theme to stifle individu-
ality in less critical tasks originates, in part, in
the nursing educator’s desire to standardize
the kind, quality and level of patient care the
nurse will later provide. The “right way” is
also rooted in the educator’s fear that the
young student is lacking in common sense.
Often the educator assumes that the student
has had little life experience and few personal
values, or perhaps the wrong kinds of ex-
perience and values. Consequently, the edu-
cators see their task as an enormous one.
They must first inculcate values and then
show the student how to perceive, interpret,
and respond to each and every situation,
keeping these values in mind.

Most students diligently attempt to follow
the instructors’ orders and. values, however
absurd. It may not ensure or even be relevant
to patient care, but it certainly is necessary to
her own survival as a student. In time, she
internalizes the rigidity she has been taught.

Having been taught that the patient is a
person and that every person has dignity and

YOURE JoKinG! THAT
COULDNT HAPPEN
HERE IN AMERICAS

worth, the nursing student proceeds to learn
how to do things to him. She is drilled in the
arts of making his bed, taking his tempera-
ture, bathing and bandaging him. In labora-
tory settings which are simulated hospital
rooms, the student performs these functions
over and over again until she “gets them
right.”” Only then does she move on to the
“real patient,” who now, for the student,
begins to take on the appearance of the
dummy she practiced on in the nursing
laboratory. One student explained: “I had
heard so nfuch about the ‘patient’—what he
likes, what he needs, how he feels—that when
I was confronted with him, somehow he
didn’t seem quite real.”

The effect of this kind of education is
destructive to both student and patient. A
recent study of nursing students’ experiences
in a nursing program reveals that “students
reported having symptoms of anxiety, ner-
vousness, depression and restlessness, very
often.” Another study reveals that “students
do not appear to value independence of
action to a great extent.” A third study
demonstrated that in the course of their
education, students, who originally saw them-

selves as providers of care, came to envision .

their roles as those of supervisor, adminis-
trator, or nursing educator.

From these findings one might infer that
for survival, one of the student’s. primary
needs is that of keeping safe, i.e., reducing her
own anxiety and ‘making it’ through the
educational system. She can accomplish this
through strict adherence to the rules, engaging
in ritualistic behavior, and by avoiding am-
biguous: situations which ‘necessitate creative
thinking. When the young nurse leaves school

she will find that she must behave in exactly
the same way to “make it” in the health
system.

One way in which the student can combat
her feelings of powerlessness is by allying
herself with her oppressors: the nursing edu-
cator and the physician. One study revealed
that bonds between nurses and doctors were
stronger than patient-nurse bonds. Feelings of
powerlessness. are also reduced ,by exerting
power over ancillary staffs—practical nurses,
nurses aides, and the like. One student recalls
being told by her instructor: ‘The warkers
under you are the bottom of the barrel and
it’s your duty to teach them.”

The attitudes and work habits the student
learns in school, the allegiance to the doctors
and the supervisors, the exploitation of non-
professional personnel are all the things neces-
sary to maintain: the health system as it now
exists. Baccalaureate nurses see’ themselves at
the top of the heap in relation to other
nurses. A.D. and Diploma nurses in turn see
themselves as separate from and more impor-
tant than the pnon-professional staff but still
subservient ton nursing leaders.

The process of nursing education fails to
prepare young men and women to challenge
what they will later, experience. when they
enter the health care system as full-time
workers. They learn that it is safer to per-
petuate the existing health care system than
to challenge it. For the student, any intention
of being the patient’s advocate is lost some-
where during the beginning of his or her
education. Having had little opportunity to
explore her own values and ideas or the
discrepancies between the ideals she had
about nursing and what really goes on in the
ward, the student loses. contact with her
personal values. She loses confidence in her
own judgment and common sense. Com-
pliance, dependence and lack of initiative and
creativity insure her survival.

Despite the elaborate efforts made to
ensure their docility, more and more young
nurses and nursing students are beginning to

nurses. Recently there have been several
events that point to a new direction for
insurgent nurses. At the American Nurses
Association 1970 convention, nurses from all
over the country formed the ‘Society in
Crisis Committee” which challenged the direc-
tion of the A.N.A. as a professional organiza-
tion. They demanded that nurses begin to
take an active role in re-shaping the health
system. They also demanded that nurses take
part in finding solutions to the more general
social problems in America and the world.
Their demands dominated the discussion and
business of the entire convention. Several of
their resolutions were adopted, and they
intend to continue their activity.

Nursing students are also beginning to stir,

Many nursing schools participated in the
national student strike following the Kent
State killings. For the first. time, nursing
students joined with other students in protest
around a social issue. One- such protest ac-
tivity was sponsored by “Nurses for Peace” in
New York, which staged’a march of some one
thousand nurses and nursing students to
protest the expansion of the war into Cam-
bodia. In a number of nursing schools, groups
are forming to work to change the nursing
educational system, aswell. Although the
actions and critiques have thus far come from
only a minority of nursing students and
nurses, it is clear that-thédissatisfaction is
growing.
—Vicki Cooper, Paula’ Balber and Judy
Ackerhalt. Paula Balber and Judy Ackerhalt
are nurses who have both experienced the
training process and worked in various nursing
settings.

This article originally appeared in the Health
Pac Bulletin.

Thin
About


PAGE SIX

TIGER PAPER

The Wit and Wisdom of Sample Pittman

Through the. medium of a ninety-minute
taped interview and a four-page statement
written specially for Tiger Paper we have col-
lected the wit and wisdom of Sample N. Pitt-
man, associate dean of students and currently
acting dean of administration. Since both the
interview and the statement are much too
long to reprint in their entirety, we have
taken the liberty of excerpting assorted gems
from both.

ON LAST SPRING’S ARRESTS

Dean Pittman was questioned about the
events of last Spring. He claimed that a
number of students were trying to “destroy”
the school. What follows are his replies to a
number of questions on the subject:

TIGER PAPER: Were you ready to deal with
this ‘‘threat”” by any means?
PITTMAN: The question was, was I willing
to deal with this threat by any means. Yes,
absolutely yes!
TIGER PAPER: Were you willing to arrest
students even though the charges might be
shaky?
PITTMAN: Yes!

oe * * *

TIGER PAPER: The whole business of
criminal trespass, at least as it applies to the
school, is rather vague. At least the definition
of it is rather vague. And this leaves you with
rather extensive discretionary powers. I
assume that you were willing to use these
discretionary powers if necessary to have
radical students arrested, to get them off the
campus.

PITTMAN: Yes!

TIGER PAPER: So you could say that while
the charges certainly were not fabricated,
they did not necessarily apply directly to
crimes committed by the students.
PITTMAN: Yes, I agree with you on that

point....
ON HIS SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

WITH THE COURTS

TIGER PAPER: . Is it true that in a num-
ber of cases you tried to intervene to get the
judge to assign high bail?

PITTMAN: In all cases—in all cases—in
which I participated in the criminal court, I
recommended that the maximum penalty be
handed out to students and I was lucky

enough to get a conditional discharge on all of
the students that were brought before the
court, which simply means that any of the
students now who are picked up for any rea-
son—for infringing on the rights of other
students or disrupting the college in any way,
the conditional discharges stand and not only
will they be given a sentence . .. I mean they
will not be carried to trial, they will be given a
sentence right away. As a matter of fact, the
judge said, if they are brought before him, in
which I must bring all students—Judge Klein I
believe it is—he would not have a trial. He
would sentence them right to Rikers
Island—any of the students who are currently
under the conditional discharge and I am
pleased with that.

ON THE RIGHT OF FREE ASSEMBLY

TIGER PAPER: As I remember it, a number
of the students who were arrested were not
disrupting the activities of the school. They
were simply standing in the hallway. Now it
seems to me that you made an assumption,
the assumption being that they were going to
cause trouble. On that basis you told them to
move on and they didn’t. It seems to me that
this raises some questions. You can assume
that most any student is going to cause trou-
ble and ask him to. move on. What restraint is
there on your power?
PITTMAN: That’s a fair question. Whenever
students congregate in masses, as many of
them did, there was a danger and a hazard to
not only the students themselves, but to
others around. Often times mob action can
trigger off behavior which under circum-
stances, if they weren’t congregated around,
would not endanger. the life and limbs of stu-
dents or endanger the life and limbs of faculty
people. I think that a person in a position
which I occupy and faculty people have a
responsibility to the young people by saying
lly where they congregate and
Se ee wangeretiat they must disperse
and in that sense, not only are you dispersing
them for reasons of security, but to also safe-
guard their rights as students. What I mean by
that is that sometimes students are sugges-
tible. If other students do things, they will
follow without thinking. If you can disperse
that, you have a better chance to improve the
situation. .*. .

ON DOUBLE JEOPARDY

Dean Pittman was asked whether or not he
was subjecting students to double jeopardy by
seeking to deny them work-study funds
through a federal technicality whereby the
college can withdraw funds from recipients
who have arrest records. Since Dean Pittman
was responsible for signing the complaints
upon which these students were arrested, it

“was suggested that he was exercising unusual

zeal in punishing them, particularly since he
was assuming direct responsibility for cutting
off their funds.

In response, he said, “The answer to that
question—putting the students in double
jeopardy—appears to be true. I think that if
they were arrested and then we seek out a
way in which these people would be denied
federal funds, it seems to me does not con-
tradict the pattern of stabilizing the institu-
tion—it is part and parcel of it... .”

“It would be my sole purpose to remove
those persons from this institution who are
committed to destroying it and I would use
every weapon at my command... .”

“I felt very strongly that if the activist stu-
dents who had voiced an opinion that they
wanted to destroy the college, if they were
given work-study programs in strategic posi-
tions in the-college, then they could in fact
destroy, because there would not be a system.
And I felt that by denying the radical stu-
dents strategic positions then we would in
some way safeguard the position of the
college.”

Pittman cautioned, however, that he
“would only use the withdrawal of funds in
instances where there is persistent aggressive
behavior on the part of students who will-
fully, with malice, attempt to engage in an
effort to destroy the college.”

ON THE THREAT OF TWC

. today I don’t believe that there is a
threat [from radical students] at all. I think
that we have sufficiently demonstrated to the
students that we do not have horns growing
out of our head and that there is a channel for
communication and I feel perfectly at ease
and really I think that it is commendable to
the students, even the activist students, that
they have come around now, and they see for
themselves that they can communicate, that
they can address themselves to some of the
indifferences which they feel the adminis-
tration and faculty have toward them. They
serve on committees now, they are involved
more and I am looking for a beautiful suc-
cessful school year from here on in.”

* * * *

“Their whole purpose is to destroy the
American system, the capitalist system, to
overthrow the government and I suppose
they’re using the community college as a
training base.”

ON IMAGINARY THREATS

Dean Pittman made it clear that he was not
constructing imaginary scenarios of radical
students destroying property, disrupting the
school and in general wreaking havoc. “If I
had this visionary thing in my mind,” he
stated, “‘I think that I would ask the president
to call the nearest nuthouse and put me in
fast. I think that it is improper for any person
to impose an imaginary threat upon other
people... .”

At different points during the interview,
however, Pittman said that certain students
“want to bomb the college” and that they
had been guilty of “burning up”’ the school,
“stomp[ing] faculty,’ “turn[ing] on the
water hoses” and “kicking the president’s
door down.”

When pressed, he backed down on several
of these accusations. He admitted that “they
have not really attempted to bomb the college
in any way. I don’t think that they are
capable of doing that. Matter of fact, I think

they 2re nice young people. . . .” He also con-
ceded that no faculty had been physically
assaulted and that the president’s door had
not been knocked down. He still maintains,
however, that there are students who are
trying to burn up the school and who have
turned or fire hoses. We have not been able to
find any corroborating witnesses to these inci-
dents.

ON HIS MISSION

PITTMAN: ...in my position as a dean, if I
can safeguard this precious item called edu-
cation in face of adversity, at the risk of being
thrown out of the college myself, at the risk


‘TIGER PAPER

of not having tenure [he does have tenure], at
the risk of being disliked, if I can safeguard
education which I conceive to be a precious
thing, then I would do anything in my power
to see that it stands and I would do it whether
it was activist students who were out to
destroy it, whether there were activist faculty
out to destroy it—I would be equally aggres-
sive to block the ways of either one of these
groups if it appeared that they were going to
destroy education for hundreds of thousands
of young Black and minority group
people....

TIGER PAPER: Would you say that you're”
prompted by a sense of mission?

PITTMAN: Mission, yes: I would say a
mission...

ON RADICAL STUDENTS

At various points during the interview he
characterized the Third World Coalition as
“mob action students,” “‘radical outlaws,”
“the Third World Coalition mob,” “little
revolutionary activists,’ “‘little activist stu-
dent[s],” “children—irrational and im-
mature,” “vicious and violent,” “beautiful
people,” and ‘nice young people.”

ADVICE TO RADICAL STUDENTS

“IT say to them, do this for me—tear down
the damn school if you like and I'll help you
tear it down, but before you embark on this
destruction project, put an AA degree in your
hip pocket and if your ideology fails and if
you fall back, you'll fall back on a cushion
and there will be an AA degree. . . .”

“That’s why Angela Davis, I believe, is such
a model for the activists. I believe that she is a
Ph.D. If Angela Davis’ ideology fails and she
cannot get her revolution moving she can say,
I am no longer a communist, I’m a straight
person and with that Ph.D. she can go any-

where in the country with it. Amen to
that..."
“She ... can put that Ph.D. in front of her

chest and march to any university in the
country and she will be a $20,000 or $25,000
wage earner.”

Asked,if. this was-the case, did he think
*“BMCC would be ready to hire her,’ he
replied, “If Angela Davis would reverse her

communist ideology [laughing] and confess
that she was in error, | don’t see any reason
why BMCC should not consider that
applicant.”

When questioned about how radical stu-
dents would acquire an AA degree if he per-
sisted in arresting and suspending them, he
did not respond directly to the point, but said
“I feel that I have the responsibility to chal-
lenge their ideology if I feel it is going to
endanger their lives. And I think that I have
the responsibility to say to these young
people, at this point your salvation is the AA
degree first. Your ideology is later in life be-
cause at 18 or 19 I feel that they do not have
the experience to make that decision and they
can throw away a magical life if they make
that decision now.” ;

ON THE GRIEVANCES OF RADICALS

“If they had legitimate complaints about
the educational institution, of course we
could work with that, but that isn’t their
purpose... .”

* * * *

“In many instances I agree with a lot of

things that they would like to see done... .”
* * * *

“I think they have been influenced by
some of the frustrations that they have been
accustomed to and some of the inept opera-
tions with lack of organization which they
have been exposed to at the college and be-
cause of this they want to redress these grie-
vances, but they want to do it. right
away....”

* * * xe

“Tm for the things these radicals are

fon...

ON SELF HATRED

“In the deepest sense, the Manhattan Com-
munity College radical student is clearly
psychologically in trouble in several com’
ponents of his personality; one being self-
hatred. Being a member of a downtrodden
reference group, he tends to despise other
Blacks and.also hatéshimself for being a mem-
ber of the Black group. This self-hatred has
resulted in hostility toward associate dean of

PAGE SEVEN

a , es RAS Gilbot

students | Pittman] and the president. It can
be seen that psychologically these Black radi-
cals aré in conflict with themselves.”

ON REASONING TOGETHER

Throughout the interview, Dean Pittman
maintained that the problem with the Third
World Coalition was essentially one in com-
munication. If only the students would sit “in
some conference room-and. hammer this out
to a reasonable conclusion,” he argued, all the
parties could resolve their differences. It was
pointed out, however, that maybe they could
not sit down and bargain as equals, because he
had the power to arrest and suspend them
when he thought they were acting unreason-
ably. He was asked if the students have the
same recourse. “ ;.. Do you think that they
have the same working relationship with the
18th precinct that you do? [He claimed that
he had an excellent working relationship with
not only the 18th precinct, but the fifth pre-
cinct, federal authorities and the district at-
torney’s office].-Do you think that they can
simply call the 18th precinct and say, ‘Hey
look, Pittman is misbehaving and we want
him arrested.’”’ In reply, he said, “‘No, they
don’t have that recourse, and maybe that’s
unfortunate..1.don’}know what the answer is,
but by George maybe we can sit down and
come*up with an answer.”

Notes ‘on Madhatter Community College

WHAT

Now,
PEOPLE?

Worser and Worser

At York College students and teachers get
free bus transportation between their widely
separated buildings. What about us?

Somebody should offer a $1,000 reward for
any student who received an accurate grade
transcript for last semester.

Alice hears that on Dean Pittman’s desk are
100 single dollar bills entombed in lucite, a
Christmas present to Sam from Dean Lester
Weinberger.

Budget Crisis note: the administration had
walls built in the, A building auditorium so
that students couldn’t hold rallies there . , .
Now they pay fortunes to New York’s fancy
hotels like the Americana and the City Squire
to hold student conferences and faculty
meetings.

These days faculty members must fill out a
special form and have it signed by their chair-
man in order to have something stapled in the
mailroom.

The biggest scandal of last semester might be
the drop-out rate.

by Alice

The Sample Pittman Award for Vigilance goes
to (surprise!) Sample Pittman for tippy-toeing
around the “B” Building until 4 a.m. so that
he could spy on maintenance men. He claims
to have found three catnapping, and he had
them all suspended for five days without pay.

Freudian slip of the month, overheard at an
English’ Department meeting: “We are all
destructors of English.”

Let’s have faculty and student evaluations of
administrators.

sats :
——— +, ay)

RE

HAPPENING?

VERSUS VERSES

Solomon Grundy

Smiled on Monday,

Registered on Tuesday,

Class cancelled on Wednesday,
Hours changed Thursday

and buildings on Friday,

Was teacherless Saturday,

Wept all day Sunday.

Is there a class for Solomon Grundy?

A letter to Harry Hope, Assistant Registrar,
Assistant to Nobody (Since There Is No
Registrar), from the students, staff and
faculty of M.C.C.

Ah, think, Harry Hope,

As we fumble and grope

Through this spring registration chaotic
That you're getting ahead

And you’re making good bread—

And it’s we who are driven psychotic.

«


PAGE EIGHT

Tiger Paper

VOLUME 1, NUMBER TWO FEBRUARY, 1972

Tiger Paper is published whenever possible by an editorial collective
of Manhattan Community College faculty.

Tenured members of the editorial collective: Kathy Chamberlain, Bill
Friedheim, Jim Perlstein, Mike Rosenbaum, Naomi Woronov.

Untenured Members: anonymous to protect them against adminis-
trative harassment.

Staff Photographer: Robert Churchill (all photographs are his, except
where otherwise indicated. )

Typeset at O. B. U., member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Printed by union labor.

The staff of the Tiger Paper wishes to thank
the staff. and faculty of Manhattan Com-
munity College whose generous contributions
made this issue possible.

Editorial

DRAPER SPILLS THE BEANS

Unless otherwise noted, every quotation in what follows comes di-
rectly from the President’s inaugural address.

A lot of people got upset about Draper’s inauguration. Once again,
the ich played and the poor payed. But that was months ago. The

money’s been spent. Why bring the subject up now, Because fewo~

people heard, and fewer still have read, the President’s inaugural
address. It tells us more about wifat we can expect from this adminis-
tration than anything else we have available.

First of all, we know that Draper is a mouthpiece for the Board of
Higher Education. He doesn’t even consider himself an educator, but
rather an “educational manager,” to use his own unhappy phrase, or
a bureaucrat, to use a more honest one. He has never been an advo-
cate of our needs; he has always been an enforcer of the Board’s will.
So when he speaks you’re hearing not only the President of Man-
hattan Community College but the Board of Higher Education too.

And what are they saying? That the students at M.C.C. are
enemies of society who must be pacified before they make big
trouble. The value of the college resides in its ability to do the job.
Let Draper tell you in his own words:

“It is... significant that thousands of young people who would
have been on welfare, in prison, or in organized revenge against
what they view as a hostile society, are gainfully employed.
Herein lies the great value of the urban community college. .

If we do our job well, ‘there will be fewer welfare recipients, ‘far

less unemployment, and the need for prisons will greatly

diminish.” °

Now, criminals and terrorists may not be the people you see when
you come to school, but these are the people Draper sees. Last year,
at a meeting in his office he told us, “Quite frankly, I fear for my life
when I walk the halls.”

Draper thinks he knows the reason why. ‘“‘They (the students) do
not have the cultural sophistication and the technological skills to be
integrated into the economic stream of an industrial society.”
Lacking Draper’s eloquence, Archie Bunker might have said it more
directly: ‘“‘M.C.C. is full of crazy, dumb Niggers, Spics and Polaks.”
Different from the establishment and alienated to boot, they are a
threat to the status quo.

‘But M.C.C. is way out:

In addition to being employed, out of prison and off the wel-

fare rolls, the college graduate can contribute to the tax reve-

nues of the city. As the community college expands its en-
rollment toward the lower level of achievement among high

voT THINK HE
1S KING AND

TIGER PAPER

Letter To The Editor

EVALUATIONS

Where are they? Some time ago, the colleges in the City University
were directed to establish a method by which students could add
input to the process of “constructive criticism” of teachers so that
teaching effectiveness could be improved. Students as well as faculty
were to have a voice in the preparation of forms to be used toward
this end. I wonder if such a form is in preparation at M.C.C. There
were rumors of it during the spring semester (1971) but nothing so
far this year. A task force for evaluating teacher effectiveness was
created, but rumor has it that the group was far from effective itself,
and despite efforts to actually find out, rumor is all that can be
turned up.

Is this another case where student and faculty prerogatives have
been usurped by the Administration? Will some form dictated by the
Board of Higher Education be sprung upon us at the last minute with
no chance for consideration or comment by the faculty at large, or
are we to accept a form devised by some other unit of City Univer-
sity, or is the entire question being ignored completely at M.C.C.?

I have little argument with the-idea of ‘‘constructive criticism.” I
would like to pose a question to all members of the M.C.C. com-
munity. Is a student evaluation of teachers the only type of ‘“‘con-
structive criticism” needed at our institution? Would not other mem-
bers of the college community profit equally from evaluation of their
performance? Could not members of the Administration be evalu-
ated by students and members of the instructional staff? Why not
allow student majors and instructional staff within each department
to evaluate Department Chairmen and Division heads. The entire
college experience is a learning process for teachers and students:
why exempt the Administration from this experience? Shouldn’t
those who make decisions affecting others i the community ulti-
mately be responsible to those whom their actions affect? Wouldn’t
this type of process help establish the kind of communication des-
perately needed at M.C.C.?

Carol Brandon
LC Grievance Chairman, M.C.C. Unit

school graduates, it is bringing into the inner society the young
people and the disadvantaged who have been on the periphery.
. This will reduce the area of ideological conflict and help
institutionalize democratic progress.
Graduates will be more ‘‘ ‘liberal’ and tolerant in their attitudes,”
and “‘more satisfied with their jobs.”

Now what does all this mean? pda the point of view of Draper
and-the Board: ———
—Thousands of people are fed up, Sehiatelined and nay: They
end up in prison, on welfare, or in “organized revenge.”
They’re not consumers, they're not producers, they’re be-

coming revolutionaries. That’s dangerous. So. . .

—We open up community colleges. We establish a phony ‘“‘open
admissions” policy. We cram their heads full of upper-class,
white, anglo-saxon protestant values.

—We train them for meaningless, unsatisfying jobs that will
hook them into a materialist culture and will keep the cor-
porations happy.

—We pay the bills by gouging them with taxes.

The President and the Board have it all down pat. There’s nothing
wrong with America, there’s something wrong with people who are
poor. Draper does talk in his inaugural about individual ‘‘fulfillment”
and the value of a “satisfying life,” but you know he’s not talking
about the poor controlling their own destinies. What he’s saying is
that bureaucrats know better what’s good for people than the people
do themselves. And what’s good for people is to swallow the idea of
their own inferiority, of the superiority of an elitist, W.A.S.P. culture
and an exploitive economy. Accept it. Applaud it. Live in it. Rein-
force it.

Intentionally or not, the President’s inaugural typifies the racism
of the entire educational system. The people who run it see them-
selves as missionaries bringing ““The Word” to the heathen. And the
word they bring is that there’s a little something for you if you’re
humble enough.

Once upon a time, a lot of oppressed people did believe that if
they “behaved” they would no longer be excluded from the capi-
talist harvest. But now they know better. There cannot be a capitalist
harvest unless the oppressed are excluded.

And s0, if people are in prison, on welfare, on the street, if they’re
inclined to take what Draper calls ‘‘organized revenge,”’ it’s because
they’ve heard too many speeches like the President’s. And their ex-
perience tells them that these pious speeches reek of fraud. People
are not seeking “organized revenge.”’ They have the hope and the will
to create a new society. Draper and the Board, at best, want to patch
the old one. The contradiction is fundamental. The conflict is inten-
sifying.


TIGER PAPER

PAGE NINE

Rapping With Sonia Sanchez

The poet Sonia Sanchez is an Assistant Pro-
fessor of English in the Black Studies Program
at Manhattan Community College. She has
published three books of poetry: Home-
coming (1969), We a BaddDDD People
(1970), and /t’s a New Day (1971). A fourth
book, a long narrative poem, is coming out in
March of this year—A Blues Book for Blue
Black Magical Women. Another book she’s
very proud of is Three Hundred and Sixty
Degrees of Blackness Comin at You, an antho-
logy of the Sonia Sanchez writers’ workshop
at Countee Cullen Library. Tapes of the poet
reading from her own books are available
from Broadside Voices. Folkways just re-
leased her first record called ‘Sonia Sanchez:
A Sun Lady for all seasons reads her poetry.”

In view of this varied experience as a
writer, her reputation as a poet, and her dedi-
cation as a teacher, it is astonishing that there
should have been so much hassle and delay
recently over Sonia Sanchez’ reappointment
on the part of the College-Wide Personneland
Budget Committee. The Tiger Paper staff
made inquiries about the committee’s reluc-
tance to rehire Manhattan Community Col-
lege’s most famous poet. Reliable sources told
us that the trouble was caused by misunder-
standings about her methods of handling the
material she was teaching (“too emotional’’!)
and ignorance about her work as a writer.
“Most of us didn’t know anything about her
poetry. Or even who she was,”’ confessed one
member of the august committee. Fortu-
nately two Black members of the P. and B.
Committee did know who she was and argued
in her favor. Sonia Sanchez was finally reap-
pointed by a vote of 10 to 6.

The following interview was taped between
telephone calls and conferenges with students
in the poet’s busy office in December, 1971.

ce eee ee eee ee eS ee

TIGER PAPER: One thing that I just heard a
student say that has been on my mind to ask
you about is that your books are very unavail-
able. Some students of mine wanted to read
them for a course and we ended up last semes-
ter having to mimeograph some of your
poems that we used in our class. I just won-
dered why you think this is?

PROF. SONIA SANCHEZ: | don’t know.
Many book stores on the college campuses
don’t order books’ by Black people unless
they come from the big publishing companies.
I’m at Broadside Press, which is a Black press,
and my books got out to students all over the
country through my traveling and selling, be-
cause after reading you sell your books; you
know, Langston Hughes used to do that. He
traveled from state to state, from place to
place, and after reading and selling his books
he got more money to go on.

But a lot has to do with messages. For in-
stance, my book was banned by the New
York Public Library last year, the first book,
Homecoming—they haven’t even dealt with
We A BaddDDD People—and that was simply
because someone down: there didn’t approve
of it.

This little old white-haired woman got
up and said she wasn’t going to have my book
in her library. Period. Because she didn’t want
the young adult reading it. You see, because
the majority of the people would be young
adults in this country. And so they banned it.
They didn’t put an ad in the New York Times
that they were going to ban one of Broad-
side’s books: they just did it quietly, they
didn’t buy the book’ for the whole library
%ystem. Someone happened to have been
there who told me, and we got Conrad Lynn
to write the library a letter saying, “My

client’s book has been banned by the New
York Public Library and we want to know,
why would you do this? Answer, please.”

- And they didn’t answer for a while and then

Conrad called me and he said, “Sonia, we've
heard from the New York Public Library.”
This was some months later. They said, “Of
course, we have her book.” But they had
ordered the book in the meantime because,
you see, they didn’t want any publicity on it.

TIGER: So when they got the letter they did
go out and buy the book for the library? To
avoid bad publicity?

SANCHEZ: Right. You see, America does
that. But America does nothing if she can
keep it quiet. Or if you say, “Well, I can’t
buck the system,” America says, ‘‘Well, that’s
good; keep thinking that, fool.” And so she
continues on her merry way.

Reading is very: important, and books are
very important. And if you can control the
books that young people read, you've got a
whole lot going for you. That’s what this
whole school system is about: control. And
that’s why Black studies is not a wanted
thing. No one can say that Black studies
teaches hatred; all it’s about is keeping a pro-
per perspective: Black literature, Black his-

' tory courses, things that relate, since we’ve -

got all white history courses in these places
and everything else is white.

TIGER: Another question I wanted to ask
was about your writing in dialect. The stu-
dents who read the poetry last semester really
loved it and responded to it very favorably,
very strongly, afd it really spurred them on to

Sonia Sanchez reads
FEB. 18, 10 p.m. at the Apollo
Benefit for the families
of Attica prisoners

try writing a lot of poetry of their own. How-
ever, I’ve heard some English teachers say that
teaching poetry written in dialect is a very
bad idea because we’re supposed to ‘be teach-
ing our students standard, correct, gram-
matical English. And a lot of students did ask
about the dialect—what your reasons were for
writing that way.

SANCHEZ: Some of us call it writing the
way we used to speak before we got educated.
What that’s about is, we spoke a certain way
in our neighborhood and as we went to
school, we were told that was incorrect
speaking. And so we changed up—actuallv
changed up as to how we were talking. By
high school the final change came; we spoke
very proper English and we were very happy
about that and we always made a point to
speak properly and no one ever said anything
that was improper. And going on to college
was the same thing. You see, what I’m really
saying is that every people who have come to
this country have had dialects or different lan-
guages. You know, this is a melting pot, so
they say, though the only people who have
been melted are Black people. And so we
were not able to keep our language, you
know, we lost our language. But when they
taught us English as such in the schools, they
didn’t teach it well. They taught it like, here’s
a word, and we didn’t even hear it properly,
so we said it incorrectly—and they laughed at
us. And then it was passed on. This whole
thing went down so we ended up with some-
thing called dialect, supposedly. But a lot of
that dialect has a whole lot of Africanisms in
it; a lot of the words we have, like the simple
word “Okay,” have been traced back to an
African word. That’s a pure American word

now, as American as—what is it?—apple pie
and ice cream? Right. We probably cut things
down, shortened things; we left out words be-
cause we didn’t hear them sometimes: you
see, it has a whole lot to do with patterns—of
how we speak and what we hear—which are
African also. But also, in many ways, we were
never “taught properly.” We didn’t go to any
schools. In slavery times it was against the law
to teach anybody how to read, or write.

Like, if you play a simple game with three
or four people in a circle and you say some-
thing in the center, when it comes back it’s

Mi. .
going to be different, right? Well, you can
imagine what happened to Black people then.
But those differences stayed with us. And we
said things like “be.” You know, we never
conjugated that verb “to be’’ properly. And
that’s funny because now we use it dif-
ferently, like “I be.” Every educated person
knows you don’t say “‘I be.” But except for
those who might be educated today, we will
still say “I be.” Not because we’re trying to
be funny or smart, but because, you see, we
recognize there’s nothing wrong with it; that
the correct people who speak correct English
are not correct. There’s nothing shameful
about that history, that was part of us, and so
therefore if you say it in the classroom there’s
nothing incorrect about it.

I write this way because a lot of people still
speak certain ways. Some people say I write
in slang. But that slang as such is in the Black
community. The slang that we have phrased,
or the slang language, or the Black language
that we have used has filtered into the white
language. And it’s been a powerful language.
So therefore you have a verb like “rapping.”
That’s deep. You have it all on television now.
That’s very real. So people don’t warit to deal
with the importance of the so-called dialect
that we be talking or this so-called language
that we be speaking. They’d want to call it
inferior language. It’s just something Black
people have done out of necessity. And a lot
of us still do it now to show the kind of heri-
tage that’s gone behind us. Not that we don’t
know how to speak properly or write pro-
perly.

You see, the reason the students respond to
it is that they have heard it. So therefore it’s
very real to them. And a lot of them still
speak it. Those who don’t speak it heard it at
some time or they still hear it today. So they
respond to it. That's very real. It’s funny that
people don’t say anything about many Jewish
writers who write in terms of what they be, in
their own patterns. You’re talking about your
culture when you do that. That’s all that’s
about, you see. English departments, to me,
are one of the most racist departments going.
Always will be. Because, you see, they think
we from the so-called ghetto can’t speak pro-
perly. And if you don’t believe that, just take
some of the young children in elementary
school, who are told that they talk incor-
rectly. You know, they’re going to teach
them how to speak properly—and they do it
and it’s really weird.

I coined something in San Francisco called
“Black English.” I used to teach what I call
Black English. And one of the things that the
English department said was, there’s no such
thing as Black English. But now, today, in this
year 1971, they’re teaching elementary school
teachers, white teachers now, Black English so
they can deal with the Black children. And
you understand what America ‘.c avuut just
from that. -

TIGER: I was wondering how you view your-
self as a poet and as a teacher and as a poli-
tical and religious person. Do you see these as
separate categories or is it all one?


PAGE TEN

SANCHEZ: It’s all one package. You can’t
separate your life. You can’t separate your
politics from your life style, from being a
woman. You can’t separate being a woman
from your religion, if you have a religion. You
can’t separate the cultural thing from being a
woman or from being a religious person. It’s
all one package. I teach Black Lit here, quite
often I teach creative writing and English
comp (it’s something to teach that, with all
those papers you mark every weekend,
right?). Anyhow, I was trying to say that I’m
not just a teacher. Or I’m not just a poet, or
just a playwright. But the first thing, you see
me coming as a woman. And then you find
out all those other things about me. And
they’re all part of me.

TIGER: I noticed that you just kept saying
“woman” instead of “Black woman” or
“being Black.” And I wondered if you were
making that emphasis on purpose.

SANCHEZ: No, no, no. I was just talking
that way since most people would know how
it was coming out. I most of the time say that
I’m a Black woman first. And then all those
other things, you know, follow.

I think that’s very important, because, you
see, Black women have never had strong
images to emulate. People don’t understand
why some of us go through deep kinds of
pains and problems and troubles and some-
times sacrifice and a lot of work to give a
positive Black woman image because America
is constantly refuting that. The only time you
saw someone_halfway positive maybe was
someone in a Hollywood movie, and then you
know what they did with that. Most Black
women in ‘movies were whores, or they were
the good mammy who took care of all the
kids and was constantly saying, ‘Yes, Miss
Lucy, like you know you done have a nervous
breakdown and your husband’s left you and
you're poor now and I got ten kids at home
but I’m gonna take care of your six and then
[ll go home to my ten at 11 o’clock at
night.” You know, that was us. Not even
talking about the Black men, just talking
about us, the Black women there at that time.
And so you can imagine what it is to try to
give out a strong positive image today, espe-
cially when again the movies are giving out
such negative images of Black women. And
the TV screen does it constantly.

One has to give out a positive image be-
cause we have to raise positive people. We’re
talking about trying to effect change in a very
unrighteous world at this time. And you can’t
do it with negative images. Flicks like Sweet-
back just wiped out, in a sense, anything posi-
tive that might have been said in the 60’s, and
it was a very successful flick. And in that flick
it says Black men have no power except in
terms of being in bed with somebody. That’s
the only power, you know. And Black women
were whores because anybody who ran in
contact with Sweetback tried to take him
right to bed.

TIGER: It surprised me that that movie con-
centrated on an individual man, when so
much of the Black movement had recently
been about groups of people fighting toge-
ther—I mean, away from the Panthers’ super-
man image.

SANCHEZ: Not many people mentioned
that, you see. It was Sweetback coming back
—what he was going to do. Sweetback can’t
do anything. It was the complete line that was
told about Sweetback’s escaping to Mexico. If
you khow anything about Mexico, it’s a
Fascist country and the moment he put his
foot in there he’d be sent back. you know,
one hour later, if you really know where I’m
coming from. I mean, the lies that were told
in that film! And yet people say Sweetback

was a revolutionary film because it told peo-
ple to wipe out some cops. Right? That’s not
a revolutionary act; I mean, people been
wiping out cops for years, you know, and it
didn’t effect any change. They just brought
bigger and better ones up. Right? And what’s
the difference? A cop is a cop, right? You
know, long hair, no long hair. Although I have
met some Black policemen recently because I
have that poem in Homecoming about police-
men and some people made a point to meet
me. These policemen had a job but they re-
fused to do underhanded stuff like spy, be-
cause you can refuse to do that.

But we’ve been trained to believe at this
point in our life that Mod Squad is correct.
You know, they’re the stoolies, all of them.
They might be modern but all three of them
in Mod Squad—that gal and that dude and
that brother—they were all stool-pigeons if
you're really ready for it. It started back in
Bill Cosby’s J Spy, you know, which was a
fun kind of thing, but they were still CIA
people. But see, America didn’t start that by
chance. America started a whole series to pro-
gram people to do things like that. So this was
the early 60’s when we had / Spy, right? But

watch that. It was the first; it was a Black
man doing that. But see, we don’t take the
total picture: that they were CIA people! The
possibility of a CIA agent being a Black man
was started. Planted. Voom, voom, voom!
That’s deep, you see. And then along came
Mod Squad in the middle 60’s, right? And
that was great because it was a brother
playing again, but they were stool-pigeons,
which told brothers, ‘You can be glorified
cops,” or, rather, glorified stool-pigeons.

And then you get all kinds of super-flicks
like Shaft, unreal pictures of Shaft, and, if
you're ready for it, the Black superstar detec-
tive, fantasy. The unreal picture. But we tried
to deal with reality all through the 60’s, right?
Then the non-reality came out with pictures
like Shaft. 1 mean, the 70’s usher in non-
reality on purpose, you see.

TIGER: Do you think there have been any
very good Black movies recently?

SANCHEZ: I’m not really a moviegoer, you
know. Because I teach, sometimes I have to
make myself go. But I come in knowing that
it will not be a good flick for Black people.
The only good flick I saw during the 60’s was
The Battle of Algiers, which we used to show
a lot in colleges. They talk about making good
films but successful films are made to make
bread.

TIGER: Did you happen to see the movie
called Burn with Marlon Brando?

SANCHEZ: No. Some people have told me
about that flick and I never saw it. They said
they thought it was a very good film; I'll try
to catch it one day. '

TIGER: It’s probably no accident you
haven’t seen it. United Artists tried to sup-
press it in subtle ways after it had come out
and they found out what they had made and
what they’d financed.

I wanted to ask you why, of all schools,

TIGER PAPER

you chose to come to Manhattan Community
College, and also how you find teaching here,
what you think about the students, what re-
sponse you're getting, and so forth.

SANCHEZ: I came to M.C.C. because I was
invited by some of the professors. I had been
here for a couple of poetry readings and stu-
dents responded to that. People said, you
might be interested in coming here, firstly as a
writer-in-residence. But I was turned down on
that, you know.

TIGER: That’s what I was going to say. It’s a
much more human job for a poet.

SANCHEZ: Right. But you see, they won't
do that. They still say, “produce, fool,” but
you have to work four classes. I was going to
be free to start things like a theater group
here, because I’m a playwright too, or set up
cultural things that should be here, or just be
available to talk—like sitting here is different
than being up in a class. Because if you try to
be a good teacher, you give your all for a class
and you go home and you're whipped. You’re
exhausted. And I teach a writers’ workshop
uptown in Countee Cullen Library. You see,
the reality of being a Black woman and then a
teacher and then a poet afterwards is that you
have to deal with the fact that we have a tra-
diiton of Black writing in this country since
the time of Phillis Wheatley, and we must
keep it going. But they make us write against
odds. I don’t get grants to sit down and just
write for a year. | write a book in between
semesters. Or you write them on planes, or
you just write them the best way you can, or
late at night. And so you get tired and you get
sick quite often. But the juices inside have to
flow.

So I believe as a teacher I still have to
teach. Creative writing is the thing I love to
teach. | wasn*t allowed to teach it here. They
turned down a writing course, which is weird.
I don’t know why. They say now they’re
going to let me teach it next semester (spring
*72), but they limit me now to just Black
Literature. Their not allowing me to teach
writing tells me a whole lot about the school.
Because, you see, they’re the people who
think they can write, you know. | took
writing at Hunter College and I'll never forget
it because every time I wrote about myself I
had all kinds of peculiar red marks on my
paper. The person who was teaching the
course used to say I was too sensitive. That
was real. It turned me against-writing for a
long time. I just stopped writing at Hunter. I
just stopped. Because when I wrote something
that was stupid to me or some kind of crap
that really wasn’t about me, then they ac-
cepted it and said, “Oh yes, that’s good!”
—because they didn’t have to deal with me,
you see.

To-teach a Black writing course, it’s impor-
tant for Black students to have someone there
who understands where they’re coming from.
People don’t ever deal with this. That’s very
real. And a person who writes should teach
writing. I mean, that’s what they know, if
they’re performing, if they’re writing, right?
Turning out books. But you tell them they
can’t have a course, it’s unacceptable. I never
was told why my writing workshop course
was unacceptable.

Many people,/rom training in high school
and junior high school, many Black people,
don’t really believe they can write. Period.
And they’re reluctant to put it down on
paper, so it’s a real hard session, each session,
you know. I mean, like wow, freshman comp
is unbelievable! They’v been pulled down in
that high school training; they can’t write. So
they’re quite unable to put things down; you
have to almost in a sense release them to do
this. And it’s really hard. It’s the whole pro-
gram, essentially, the educational system,
which is what that is about.

TIGER: I want to ask you a big, heavy ques-
tion. What directions do you see America
going in, what kinds of changes would you
like to see? I guess I’m asking, what is your
dream for the next decade or so in America?

SANCHEZ: Well, I don’t think America is
going to do anything here in this country. I
think that what’s going to happen in this
country is that Black people here will just
have to deal with what has to be dealt xith:
that is, the time coming up will be a time for


TIGER PAPER

many Black people to begin the long process
of disciplining themselves and their lives and
what they be about, their direction, you
know. To move away from the jive that is
being thrown out there for us. You know, the
jive on TV, the jive in the movies, the jive in
schools and in the colleges. They have to
begin to deal with what they really feel about.
Now, I feel that many Black people will have
to get serious about their lives. They have to
make serious decisions about what direction
thev’re going to go in, about their studying.
You can’t any longer come to a college and
just play cards in the lounge. You can’t any
longer come to any college and have a room
for getting high in, smoke pot in; you just
can’t.do this anymore. America’s no: playing.
If you understand all the TV programs, you
know, if you understand the school system, if
you understand the English department and
the history department, if you understand all
this, America is not kidaing around. She’s
very serious about keeping the status quo.
And she intends to support the people who
are no threat to her. That’s what she’s doing
at this time; she’s supporting the Black people
who are no threat to her, she’s out-and-out
supporting them. You understand the depres-
sion we’re living in; America has pourec a lot
of money into Vietnam, to suppress Vietnam,
and a lot of money into America among Black
people to keep them treading water. [ mean,
she’s done that on purpose, she’s invested
money. But like we still stay where we are, we
don’t. move. That’s very real.

And so what we have to do at this time is
understand that, you know, put that in some
kind of perspective. Recognize that the school
system perpetuates white racism. I didn’t say
it; the Kerner Report said it: America’s racist
and therefore all her institutions be racist.
You know, like in the 60’s we said, loud and
clear, this is a racist country. America said,
“No I’m not, no ’'m not, no I’m not!” That’s
what the whole dialogue was between Black
America and white America, right? And then
finally, if you remember correctly, at the end
of the 60’s, when the Kerner Report came
out, America says, ‘‘Yes I am racist!”—right?
—“and therefore all my institutions be racist”
—right? But the underlying question America

CAMPUS

asked is what are you going to do about it,
nigguhs? And we haven’t answered that ques-
tion. We who try to educate people are about
answering,the question “what are we going to
do about it?” But we’re not out there, you
know, preaching hatred to the people. We are
about educating Black people to who they be.
Knowledge of self. Giving positive direction.

See, it’s very important for America that
we Black people don’t know our history, But
most people in this country know their his-
tory and understand it fully. Right? And they
learn it in the schools. We don’t learn any-
thing about ourselves, so therefore we’re just
like Topsy, we just grow. So when we study
our history to know the kinds of people we’ve
been, the kinds of people we can be, it be-
comes automatic, you see. A people who
don’t know their history can never become
just anything. They have to be the something
of the past, if you know what I’m talking
about.

TIGER: In some ways I might—I’m teaching

‘a women’s studies course here and some of

the things that are being published now are
biographies of women, like some of the
women who have been famous throughout

history, and the sense that I’ve gotten from
that has been really very helpful in my own
identity. I think I have some degree of sym-
pathy because of that.

SANCHEZ: Well, you see, America is funny
in that she rules the planet, right? And then
she calls people racist who do what she’s done
to get that rule. You know, she had to per-

PAGE ELEVEN

petuate herself to end up being the ruler. I

mean, you have to talk about yourself, believe
in yourself and love yourself to get to that
kind of power. And that’s all we’re saying at
this time. You know, we’re merely saying in
the Black studies course or in any organi-
zation of Black people—the most important
organization today being the Nation of Islam
—all we’re saying very simply is not that we’re
hating you, we’re just saying, “Okay, look,
you proved your point. You are the ruler at
this time, and we just want to rule ourselves.”
That’s not hatred. That’s what’s so funny
about that. You know, whites rely on Black
people for what they do and this is the rela-
tionship that goes down between Black peo-
ple and white people in this country. They
don’t want you but they can’t do without
you. If we said, “‘Leave me alone,” they’d say
like “Wow, what’s wrong with you? Don’t
you love us anymore?” It has nothing to do
with that.

I give out newspapers to my students be-
cause you see most of the papers we have in
the Black communities are very negative
papers. And even though they try to update
them, they’re still negative. I give out Sobu
—it’s now called African World—and the Black
Panther paper if it’s available, and Muhammad
Speaks. Those three papers give different
ideologies but they’re trying to speak to
young Black people as to what they’re about
and the core of all the papers is about them-
selves, about Black people. The students get
the other papers outside, they read all those
other papers. So wherever I teach I always get
a subscription to those three for about two or
three months to in a sense get them accus-
tomed. I give out African World, the Black
Panther, and Muhammad Speaks, and say
“Look here, here it is. Read it. Take it home
and read it: Form some opinions, different
opinions, Like what is the Daily News going
to give you, right? What is even.the New York
Times going to give you?—although they only
print the news that’s fit to be printed, so they
say.” But now read about yourselves and
begin to love yourselves, because you have
BEEN and will BE again!

MISSIONARIES THE LAYING ON OF CULTURE

I

About a year ago I accepted an invitation
to speak ‘‘against the war,”’ at, let’s call it, the
University of Dexter. It is located in the city
of that name, one of the major manufacturing
towns of the Midwestern industrial belt. Since
Dexter is somewhat off the main circuit for
anti-war speech-making, I read up on the
university and the town, and what I found
made me look forward to my visit.

The university tended to draw most of its
students from the town itself. They came
heavily from working-class families and were
often the first in their families to attend
college. Frequently English was not the only
language spoken at home. More significant
‘was the fact that the city itself had at one
time considerable fame for working-class mili-
tancy. One of the great early strikes of the
depression was fought in Dexter, and the issue
was not settled in the workers’ favor until
they had fought the National Guard to a draw
in pitched street battles. Before that the city
had been a center of Socialist Party activity,
and still earlier, a stronghold of [WW senti-
ment. Thus I looked forward to my visit as an
opportunity to talk to the kind of students
seldom reached by Movement speakers.

It wasn’t. Attendance at the well-publicized
meeting was spotty; those who came tended
to be about evenly divided between faculty
and graduate students, almost all of whom
were from outside the state. And there were
no students at the party to which I was taken
later in the evening, though they had helped
plan the meeting, for student segregation is
the campus rule at Dexter, no less within the
Movement than outside it. Perhaps it was that
or perhaps my disappointment at the absence

John McDermott

of: “normal” students at the evening’s
meeting: anyhow, I deliberately forced the
party to become a meeting. It had taken no
great powers of observation to note that the
anti-war movement at Dexter, and, by exten-
sion, its Left, was largely a preserve of the
faculty and some fellow-traveling graduate
students, and I was interested to discover why
that was so. In particular, I wanted to explore
the role these teachers had adopted to their
“normal” students and to examine with them
the contradiction between that professional
role and their wider political aspirations. I
have taught in several universities, I’ve suf-
fered the same contradiction and was unable
to overcome it.

The most prominent feature of the dis-
cussion which followed, and of all the sub-
sequent ones I’ve started on the same subject
in similar situations, was that the faculty, to a
man, still aspired to teach in elite schools.
Dexter, after all, is what is popularly known
as a “cow” college. A state school, it gets
those students who, for lack of skill or money

“T asked a man in prison once ho
he happened to be there, and h
said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I
told him if he had stolen a railroa
he would be a United State
Senator.”

or interest, don’t go to the main state
university and couldn’t “‘make” the liberal
arts colleges in the area, even if they wanted
to. Its students are very much vocationally
oriented and still tied to their families. Most
of them live at home. ;

Dexter is frequently under nuisance attack
by some right-wing faction or other. It pays
rather badly and is not in an attractive
metropolitan area. Its library is inferior, it
provides little research money, and the
teaching loads are heavy. The administration
is fusty and conservative, as is much of the
faculty.

My faculty friends, obviously talented men
and women, had not reconciled themselves to
this exile. They deprecated the region, the
town, the university and, especially, the stu-
dents, even the graduate students. Loyalty
and affection they reserved for the graduate
schools from which they had come, and they
reflected this feeling in their teaching and
counseling by relating only to that one
student in a hundred who might go on to one
of those prestigious graduate schools. Those
were the students who shared with them the
culture of books and civility—and scorn for
Dexter; who might by their success at a
“good” graduate school justify the faculty’s
exile in Dexter.

Of course they didn’t put it that way, and
neither did I when I taught in similar places.
They saw themselves as embattled mission-
aries to the culturally Philistine. Tey worked
hard and creatively with the students who
merited hope. As for the others, these men
and women, in spite of their expressed scorn,
nourished a vision, hesitantly expressed, of a
society in which no student would be op-
pressed by cultural bondage to ignorance,
vocationalism, anti-intellectualism and provin-


+ PAGE TWELVE

.., CULTURE

cialism. In fact, that attitude and hope gave
rise to and was expressed in their left-wing
politics.

The guests at the party were woefully
ignorant of the background of their “normal”
students. They were vaguely aware that most
of them came from working-class families,
though what that might mean aside from
greater resistance to formal education they
had no idea. They had no knowledge either of
Dexter’s militant labor traditions. This was
sad, for it penalized the faculty in a number
of ways. To cite an apparently trivial instance,
most of the faculty present were concerned
over attacks made on the university by the
right wingers in town. Respect for free speech
and expression had an important place in
their scale of values, and they tried ,to convey
it to their classes, using all the familiar
academic examples, from HUAC_ witch
hunting and Joe McCarthy, to Stuart Mill,
Milton and Sophocles.

Yet that they might relate the principle of
free expression to the problems of Wobbly
agitators in the 1910s or of CIO organizers in
the 1930s (or of white-collar workers in the
1970s)—in short, relate it to the actual cul-
tural history (or future) of their own stu-
dents—never occurred to them. Instead, they
were put off when the students responded to
the alien and seemingly irrelevant world of
HUAC and Milton and academic freedom
with either passive unconcern or active
hostility.

I believe this example successfully char-
acterizes how the great majority of faculty
behave in schools like Dexter, including,
especially, the left wing of the faculty.
Socialized like all their fellows into a rigid
professional role by their university, graduate
school and early professional experiences,
they have neither the information nor the
inclination to break out of that role and relate
openly and positively to the majority of their
students who cannot accept the culture of the
university world as their own.

University professors as a group seem ex-
ceptionally uncritical of the limited yalue—
and values—of a university education and the
acculturation it represents. In their view, a
student who is really open to his classroom
and other cultural experiences at the univer-
sity will, as a rule, turn out to be more
sophisticated, more interested in good litera-
ture, more sensitive morally than one who is
less open or who has not had the benefit of
college. The student will also be free of the
more provincial ties of home, home town,
region and class. In short, most academics
take it as an article of faith that a student
benefits by exchanging his own culture for
that of the university. It is by far the most
common campus prejudice.

And it would be harmless enough if it were
limited in its sanction to those students who
allow their university education to “take,”
who do well at university work and will go on
to graduate school and then to a place within
the university world“or, perhaps, into some
other related profession. University attitudes
and values are appropriate to that world. But
what about the others, the cultural rednecks,
the “normal” boy and girl at a place like
Dexter? Do they really profit from acquiring
the attitudes, values, life style, and so forth of
the peculiar culture whose institutional base is
the university? One way of attacking this
question is to ask to what extent those values,
attitudes and life style may be usefully
transferred to other institutional settings—to
little towns and big cities, to industrial or
agricultural life, to life in a corporation or in
government.

That was about as far as we went at that
party a year ago. We agreed that we were part
of a university system which was- actively
engaged at its Dexters in destroying whatever
indigenous culture might remain among the
American working class. We recognized that,
consciously or not, we had assumed an
invidious clerical relationship to our student
laity. Like medieval priests or missionaries to
the heathen, we dispensed a culture to all our
students, despite the fact that a scant few
could participate in it. For the others, the
language of that culture, like Latin to the
colloquial, was grasped largely in rote phrases,
its symbols and doctrines recognized but only
dimly: understood. To the extent that this

majority of students acquired the external
trappings of the university, they seemed both
culturally pacified and made culturally
passive. Pacified because they, were accul-
turated away from their own historical values
and traditions; passive because they could at
best be spectators of a culture whose home
remained an alien institution... .
Il

The most obvious political characterization
of university culture is that it lives by, and
presents to its students, the values and atti-
tudes appropriate to its own upper-middle-
class life style—a style that is part of the
older,
classes. As indicated above, a university edu-
cation did once promise membership in the
professional classes. This meant that uni-
versity graduates could ordinarily expect a life
of considerable social and economic indepen-
dence, some measure of personal influence in
local business and political communities, sig-
nificant autonomy and initiative in carrying
out their daily work, and thus the possibility
of enjoying the pride that follows from
personal accomplishment and craftsmanship.

Could it-be clearer that no such life awaits
the graduates of the nation’s Dexters? Today
a degree from a second-or third-line institu-
tion is.a passport to a life style of high
consumption and of reasonable job security.
But it will probably be an industrial life style,
characterized by social and economic depen-

dence on a large institution, by little or no
political or social influence, and by partici-
pation in rationalized work processes wherein
one must try merely “to get by and not step
on anybody’s toes.’ Consider, therefore, how
the professionally oriented values of the
university’s culture might function in such an
industrial environment. High on the scale of
university values, now and in the past, stands
the virtue of tolerance—not only personal
tolerance in the face of new or differing ideas,
attitudes and values but the belief that toler-
ance itself is of greater personal and social
value than the substance of almost any set of
creeds. Such a value was useful in the profes-
sional worlds of the past, for it would
normally help diminish conflict in a middle
class made up of highly autonomous indi-
viduals. And in elite circles even today it
diminishes the weight assigned to ideological
differences and helps to harmonize the social
and political relations of our pluralistic, semi-
autonomous industrial, educational, govern-
ment and other managers. It carries the
advantage, too, that it opens managers to the
merits of technological and organizational
novelty in a_ political economy strongly
oriented to such innovations.

But how does this belief function for the
young men and women of Dexter, who will
normally occupy the lower and middle levels
of great institutional bureaucracies, and who
may have reason to resist those very same
innovations: speed-up, compulsory overtime,
more and more alienating work processes,
forced transfer to another city or region,
institutional propaganda, Muzak and the
other normal tyrannies of personnel mana-
gers? Is it a value that helps them to initiate

now declining, professional middle

TIGER PAPER

or.continue those collective struggles which
are necessary to defend or enhance their
interests; or does it rob them of the moral and
ideological assurance which must support the
beliefs of people who challenge the social
legitimacy and retributive power of author-
ity?

A second political aspect of university
culture is its almost uniform hostility to the
institutions of local and community life.
Many churches, fraternities, veterans’ associa-
tions, councils and boards upon which local
and community life in America is built are
havens of the narrowest sorts of provin-
cialism, racism, intellectual baiting, babbittry
and jingoism. For these reasons, and for
reasons having to do with the demands of the
national economy for college-trained persons,
the tendency of university experience is to
propel the young away from local and com-
munity life and toward national life and its
institutions. A result of the university’s lib-
eralism, cosmopolitanism and technologism,
this tendency is supported by the national
culture, by the students themselves, and by
their parents.

But it should be combated by those, like
my friends at Dexter, who are interested in
building mass resistance to the prevailing
currents of American life. A young person
from Dexter, unless extraordinarily gifted or
fortunate, has almost no means of gaining
influence in national politics. And to the
extent that university culture directs great
masses of lower- and lower-middle-class young
people into the institutions of national rather
than local and community life, it assists in
disenfranchising them from political influ-
ence. Of course, the conventional representa-
tives of university culture argue that the
decline of local politics and local institutions
is inevitable, given the institutional needs of
20th-century industry and government, the
gradual nationalization of American life, and
the march of technology—i.e., liberalism, cés-
mopolitanism and technologism. But we
should begin to question whether this inevita-
bility amounts to more than advantageous
prejudice. For the kind of society which these
university spokesmen describe as inevitable
appears to be coincidentally one in which the
Ph.D. takes its place with property and birth
as a means to political influence and social
status.

Similarly, the ignorance, racism and the
like which characterize so much of local life
should not put us off. Given the preoccupa-
tion of the Left, over the past epoch, with
national rather than local concerns and insti-
tutions, it is not surprising that local America
has become a playpen of unchallenged right-
wing attitudes, persons and organizations. Of
course, one could not expect, even under the
best conditions, that the life style of local
America will rival the faculty club in gentility,
civility, humanist learning and other carica-
tures of university life. But that is not its test,
any more than the theological elegance of the
Dissenting Churches was the test of their
usefulness to a struggling movement of ordi-
nary Englishmen. Those who are today con-
cerned about a different kind of economic
barbarism and a similar kind of world-wide
crusade should draw the appropriate lessons.

A third political aspect of university cul-
ture is its latent hostility to two of the more
valuable and humane realities in current popu-
lar culture. One cannot move around this
country without being impressed by its egali-
tarianism, that is the depth and vitality of the
ordinary American’s feeling that he is as good
as the next fellow. And the other reality so
important in our popular culture is the
well-nigh universal belief among our people
that they possess an extraordinary range and
variety of substantive rights. Like the belief in
“the freeborn Englishmen,” the belief in
substantive rights is often vague and contra-
dictory. Nevertheless, the history of popular
political movements is the history of ordinary
people acting in behalf of what they believe
to be their substantive rights.

It would be too much to say that the
university’s culture is uniformly hostile to
these popular realities, for the situation is
ambiguous. However, it is not difficult to
identify important hostile tendencies. Thus in
contrast to the normal American acceptance
of the principle of equality, the professoriat
strongly values formalized differences of age,
academic’ rank, scholarly reputation and, it
may even be, accomplishment. The effect of ~


*

TIGER' PAPER

.. . CULTURE

this sort of deference is somewhat difficult to
gauge and it may be tendentious on my part
to believe that it influences student attitudes
on legitimacy, authority and equality. Perhaps
the issue is instead that university men and
women, by failing to provide a living example
of egalitarian relationships, merely fail to
make common cause with the American
people in their resistance to the hierarchic
tendencies implicit in the social and economic
system.

A more secure case can be made against the
disposition in the university world to identify
-right not with substantive but with procedural
matters. Peter Gay expressed this position in
the Summer 1968 issue of Partisan Review:
“.. democracy is essentially procedural and
what matters is not so much (important
though it may be) what a given policy is as
how it is arrived at....’’ Persons as fortun-
ately placed as Professor Gay, whose substan-
tive rights are well established in easily avail-
able procedures, have an _ understandable
tendency to overlook the fact that, for
example, tenure, sabbaticals, choice of hours,
and freedom of expression on the job—are
virtually unknown outside the academic
world. Obviously there are other, important
and thorny issues here as well. Without going
into them at any length, note that the test of
Professor Gay’s remark is its fidelity to
historical fact. From that point of view, it
tends to obscure the fact that the great
libertarian and democratic turning point in
postwar American political history, a turning
point with great promise still, came not from
the narrow defense of procedural rights by
academic and other liberals against Joe
McCarthy in the 1950s but from the assertion
of substantive rights in the 1960s by mass
movements of students, blacks, professors and
ordinary Americans.

The students at Dexter, and a great part of
their countrymen, rightly view the liberal and
academic preference for procedural right as a
defense of privileges which they themselves
are denied. Many view the principle of aca-

demic freedom, for example, as they view

some of the laws of property. It is a tricky
device which enables professors to do things,
like criticize the dean or the country, for
which ordinary people can be fired; just as the
law of property is a tricky device which
enables installment houses and loan com-
panies to do things for which ordinary people
can be sent to jail. The goal is not to do away
with academic freedom, or any other hard-
won libertarian procedure. A better approach
would be to shape a university culture which
would help to extend Professor Gay’s tenure,
sabbaticals, and freedom of expression on the
job to everyone, on.campus and off.

The existence of hostile tendencies toward
egalitarianism and the primacy of substantive
right is very much related to still a fourth
political aspect of university culture. Even
though the university is the home and source
of much of the libertarian ideology within our
culture, it is often the source of authoritarian
ideology as well. I have two cases in mind.
The first has to do with the extensive commit-
ment to technologism found among many fa-

~ culty members. A considerable body of uni-
versity opinion believes with Zbigniew Brze-
.zinski that the promises of modern techno-
logy demand for their social realization a
society characterized by ‘“‘equal opportunity
for all but . . . special opportunity for the sin-
gularly talented few.” The evasiveness of the
formula should not be allowed to obscure the
authoritarian social and political processes
which are envisioned and justified by it—
processes today best exemplified in the area
of national security, where the equal voting
opportunities of all are’nullified by the special
bureaucratic opportunities open to a sin-
gularly talented few. The second of the uni-
versity’s authoritarian ideologies I call cleri-
cism. To borrow from Brzezinski’s formula, it
is the claim to “‘eqyal cultural rights for all,
but special cultural authority for a singularly
scholarly few.’ I refer to the still widespread
(but declining) academic belief that, whatever
else culture may include, it also includes the

Western Heritage, the Western Tradition, the _

Literary Tradition, the traditions of reason
and civility, etc., and that these are-most fully
embodied in the profession of academe and

the written treasures of which academe is
priestly custodian and inspired interpreter.

This principle underlies faculty sovereignty
over curricular matters, justifies any and every
required course, oppresses first-year graduate
students, and received its ost prosaic formu-
lation in the observation by Columbia’s vice
dean of the graduate facilities that “. .. whe-
ther students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on an issue is
like telling me they like strawberries.”’ Cleri-
cism and technologism have their good points;
no one wishes seriously to derogate either the
social or the moral value of good scholarship
or competent technology. But as principles
under which to organize cultural or political
life they are distinctly hostile to the interests
of great numbers of non-elite students, the
social classes from which they are drawn, and
especially the social classes they will consti-
tute when they leave the university. For cleri-
cism and technologism, like the doctrines of
apostolic succession and of property which
they tend to replace, transpose major areas of
social concern from the purview of all to the
treasure house of the few. Culture, no less
than politics, is a critical factor in the nature
of social organization; in the distribution of
power, reward and status; in the infliction of
powerlessness, oppression and despair. This is
becoming increasingly understood with regard
to politics, where ten years of war, urban
decay and increasing social chaos seem to
have been the fruit of the same decade’s
obeisance to technology’s claims. But I am
not persuaded that clericist depredations on
culture are similarly recognized.

As I think was made clear at the start of
this essay, the faculty at Dexter did not feel
called upon to know the specific cultural his-
tory and experiences of the students they
taught. Neither they nor anyone in the aca-
demic profession consider it their task to use
their own superior symbolic gifts and wider
historical perspective to identify the specific
historical culture of their students, to clarify

its ambiguities, to criticize it, purging it of its
moral (not geographical) provincialism, and
thus to assist the students to develop a culture
which is at once personally ennobling and
politically self-conscious. On the contrary, at
Dexter and elsewhere the faculty assume that
it is their duty to replace the students’ actual
culture with an alien culture. Missionaries
from these graduate schools, like clergy from
colonial empires everywhere and in every
time, feel confident that what they bring is
good for the natives and will improve them in
the long run. In culture, as elsewhere, this is
manifestly not so.

Consider the matter of historical traditions.
No acculturation worth the name should be
permitted to block the transmission of Dex-
ter’s militant working-class traditions. Even
granting, as is probably the case, that only a
small minority of the Dexter students are
children of depression workers or the earlier
Wobblies, to assist, even if only negatively, in
destroying these traditions is to minimize for
most of the students the opportunity to dis-
cover the reasons for their attitudes on a score
of moral and social questions, the reality of
their social lives, and the possibility of re-
building a more humane culture in Dexter for
their own advantage. White intelligentsia re-
cognize this danger when they peer across cul-
tural lines at blacks or Vietnamese; why are
they so blinded by the class lines of their own
society? It should come as no surprise, there-
fore, that the anti-intellectualism of the stu-
dents is often as deep and as bitter as the
hatred exhibited by other colonial peoples

PAGE THIRTEEN

toward foreigners and their works.

A university culture which related posi-
tively and creatively to the traditions and his-
tory of the working classes, blue collar and
white collar, would find allies not only among
the hippies and the leftists of Smith and
Williams but from the squares of Dexter as
well.

What is particularly disturbing about cul-
tural pacification in the university is that it is
not entirely an accidental phenomenon. At
least since Herbert Croly’s Promise of Ameri-
can Life (1909), America’s dominant his-
torians have been strongly nationalist, more
interested in discovering and celebrating the
American essence or character, the national
mainstream, consensus or moral epic, or the
peculiar quality of our national integration,
than in emphasizing its divisions, especially
those based on class. It has often crossed my
mind that when liberal historians two decades
hence write the chronicle of the Southern
freedom movement of the early 1960s or of
the anti-Vietnamese War movement of today,
they will find imaginative and persuasive rea-
sons to show that the first was really part of
the New Frontier and the second of the Great
Society. It was thus that their predecessors
have managed to reduce the richness and vari-
ety of popular revolt in the 1930s to the
bureaucratic dimensions of a Washington-
based “‘New Deal.”

Fortunately, some of the younger his-
torians, such as Staughton Lynd and Jesse
Lemisch; have begun to undermine the epic
poetry of the Crolyites by reviving interest in
the history of popular insurgency in America.
Thus they have created the possibility that at

‘least at some universities young people will be

reacquainted with the real diversity and con-
flict of their past. More than that, and with-
out exaggerating its importance or extent, this
new scholarship provides a point of departure
for a fundamentally different university cul-
ture than the one I have been describing.

I

Faced with the vast social diversity of
America and in opposition to the variety and
strength of its Populist traditions, the thrust
of university culture is to pacify its working-
class “natives” and thus, I believe, to help pre-
clude any fundamental change in national
politics and priorities. Because of the surge of
rebellion on campus since last spring, it is
likely that this is understood better now
among faculty than it was at the time I visited
Dexter. But many university men and women,
comparing the university’s cultural values to
those of industry, the mass media and the
military, or to the restless hostility of lower-
and working-class America, remain partisans
and priests of academe, convinced that for all
its faults it is, at least minimally, a humane
alternative to its rivals.

The analogy I began earlier to the work of
Edward Thompson points in a more hopeful
and, I think, more realistic direction. A survey
of recent campus rebellions would show that
it is no longer only the Harvards and the
Berkeleys which suffer serious student unrest;
some. of the most interesting and militant acti-
vity occurs at the non-elite schools. In addi-
tion, scores of young men and women con-
tinue to be exiled by their elite graduate
schools into & lifetime of work in the non-
elite universities. The narrowest interests of
these teachers and their most lofty profes-
sional and political aspirations lie in the same
direction. It is to take up the task, in common
with their students, of rebuilding the vitality
of a popular resistance culture—that is, of a
culture which will “enhance the capacity of
ordinary Americans to identify their social
interests and to struggle successfully in their
behalf.”

This is not a task which individuals can suc-
cessfully undertake in isolation, nor one
whose champions will be free of serious re-
prisal at the hands of university and political
authorities. Nevertheless, there are already a
handful of campuses where the work has
begun, in critical universities, liberation
courses, seminars in local and working-class
history, student-taught courses for faculty,
and research projects on local and campus
decision making. It remains for others to add
to these hopeful beginnings.

This article originally appeared in The Nation
and is reprinted with- the author’s permission.


PAGE FOURTEEN

Essay on Black Culture

The A

(continued from the last issue)

Shucking, jiving, capping, coping, standing,
kneeling, singing, screaming, we are, we are
told/tell ourselves, soul people. But what has
that meant as we have tried to move toward
freedom?

Many scholars have tried to get at the
question by writing about the importance of
the Christian Church and religion in the lives
of black people in the United States.
E..Franklin Frazier, for example, has said that
“an organized religious life became the chief
means by which a structured or organized
social life came into existence among the
Negro masses.”! LeRoi Jones has gone fur-
ther, to point out that the Christian Church
was also the house where the illusion of
privilege in the midst of our oppression was
made concrete:

The house Servants .. . were the first to

accept the master’s religion, and were

the first black ministers and proselytizers
for the new God. The Christian Church

in slave times represented not only a

limited way into America, but as it came

to be the center of most of the slaves’

limited social activities, it also produced

a new ruling class among the slaves: the

officials of the church.

The church officials, the house ser-
vants, and the freedmen were the be-
ginnings of the black middle class, which
represented (and represents) . . . Negroes
who thought that the best way for the
black man to survive was to cease being
black ... and wanted more than any-
thing in life to become citizens.”

We know from this and other writing that
whatever the quality of religious life in Africa
before the diaspora, “christianizing the
heathens” was a popular activity during
slavery. Religious instruction was the ac-
cepted cultural method our masters used to
teach us enough English to take orders and
enough fear_of the-conqueror’s god to~en-
courage obedience, to channel our emotions
and frustrations, and put off our dreams of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness until
after death. But we also know that in spite of
our colonizer’s intent and the schemes of the
Negro middle class, the black masses have
tried to give a shape to black spirituality that
would serve our needs as an oppressed people
seeking liberation in this world. That would

TIGER PAPER

rt of Self Defense

help us survive as we defined ourselves against
the American reality. That would save our
souls from extinction and imitation. And we
used any tools that were at hand.

If it was to our slavemaster’s benefit to
teach us to sing “Didn’t My Lord Deliver
Daniel” and convince us to celebrate that
“My Lord’s writin’ all de time/He sees all you
do, hears all you say,” fine. Once we learned .
his language, we also had a very practical

motive in identifying the promised land of
Canaan as Canada when we began to “Steal
Away to Freedom” and “‘Follow the Drinking
Gourd” ’cause we were “So Tired O’ Dis
Mess.”’ In the ante-bellum South, vocabulary
didn’t compromise us. Our enslaved condition
made both the message and the objective
‘clear, no matter what the medium was for
conveying the Word to one another. We knew
we had to find a better way to live. But we
couldn’t act on our knowledge very often.
Today, we sometimes forget this. We are used
to thinking of the way our people sang for
our freedom over a hundred years ago in
spectacular ways. We tend to evaluate our
political use of Christian spirituals in terms of
how intimately they were tied to inciting or
masking specific acts of insurgency. We recall,
for instance, the woman who became the
Moses of our people, Harriet Tubman, who
partially explained her success as a conductor
on. the underground railroad by telling how
she used spirituals on the “middle passage.”
10 alert parties ready to be taken North of
her arrival, she would sing:

Hail, oh hail, ye happy spirits,

Death no more shall make you fear,

Grief nor sorrow, pain nor anguish

Shall no more distress you here.

Around you are ten thousand angels,

, Always ready to obey command.
They are always hovering around you,
Till you reach the heavenly land.

Dark and thorny is the desert,

Through the pilgrim makes his way,

Yet beyond this vale of sorrow

Lie the fields of endless day.
If she sang these verses twice, they knew it
was safe to come out of hiding; if there was
danger, she would insert the following stanza
in a slower tempo:

Moses, go down in Egypt,

Tell old Pharoah, let me go;

Hadn’t been for Adam’s fall,

Shouldn’t have to have died at all.
Her tactics were useful because they re-
inforced the myth of the happy, child-like,
singing slave who our masters thought was
incapable of organized rebellion and then
immediately moved us beyond that myth in
action. Thousands of black people were
literally carried to freedom by these methods.

However, our deliberate application of
colonial religion as subterfuge, as code, as
cover for revolt, was only typical of the Civil
War period. Before and after that time,
totemic spirituality became the basis of our
most sustained and elemental attempts to use
religion to free ourselves from the Westerner’s
world. In the long stretches of our history
where there was little or no opportunity for
mass action against our rulers on the scale of
the Civil War, we channelled our survival
energies by becoming absorbed in the met-
aphors reality contained. We devoted our-
selves to creating a self-defensive spiritual
culture which allowed us to step to a different
drummer in another country. We tried to deal
with our captivity in part by interpreting our
experience through signs, by immersing our-
selves in a metaphysical harmony to counter-

act the social order constraining and bru-
talizing us. And though the defensive con-
sciousness we developed hasn’t led us all the
way to liberation, it did take us way beyond
the original boundaries of religion as it was
taught to us in the New World.

Slavery made us a people uprooted and
dispossessed. It defined us as domesticated
beasts. It put us at the mercy of the irrational
greed, lust, and cruelty of rulers from an alien
culture and country. Severed from our land,
with death always imminent and no possi-
bility of sustaining the institutions that
strengthen free people in times of crisis or of
appealing to a human justice which included
us, we were in a situation where survival
meant enduring violence and dehumanization:
struggling against them while appearing
docile. We were caught between needing to
lighten the yoke of captivity to live and
realizing that open rebellion meant death.
Under these conditions, the choices we had
often involved the way we would supplicate
diyine powers for the justice that men denied
us. We decided to sing out our grief, intone
our desire for a return to harmony in the
universe, our need to merge once again with
nature as free spirits. And remembering our
old culture, we sought deliverance through
incantation.

I got a home in dat rock,

don’t you see?

I gota home in dat rock,

Don’t you see?

Between de earth an’ sky,

Thought I heard my Saviour cry,

You got a home in dat rock,

Don’t you see?

We chose to stress the fusion of ourselves
with the world. Not only did we want to
become part of it, but to make the spiritual
force animating the world manifest through
ourselves. We wanted penetration and acti-
vation, too. Deprived of the forms and arti-
facts of African religion, we tried to retain its
essence. Early spirituals had an almost hyp-
notic effect. Our affirmations of “happy
days” and “‘gwine away” took on the quality
of command rather than refrain, as if, through
concentrated will and repeated desire, reality
would, in fact, be altered. Being possessed, we
worked the stuff of our oppression out
through our own bodily systems. We meant to
exorcise it and thus free ourselves, at least
psychologically. To get relief. We chanted:

God’s gonna set dis world on fire,

God’s gonna set dis world on fire,

Some o’ dese days . . . God knows it!

God’s gonna set dis world on fire,

Some o’ dese days.

I'm gonna drink that healin’ water
I’m gonna drink that healin’ water,
Some o’ dese days . . . God knows it!
I’m gonna drink that healin’ water
Some 0’ dese days.

I’m gonna drink and never git thirsty,
I’m gonna drink and never git thristy,
Some o’ dese days . . --God knows it!
I’m gonna drink and never git thirsty
Some o’ dese days.


TIGER PAPER

Cults and all forms of recognizable tribal
worship were outlawed, but as long as we
were physically contained in the house of the
Christian’ God, the Anglo-European didn’t
seem to care what we did. Less sophisticated
than his French counterpart, he thought
controlling our physical surroundings and our
bodies would be sufficient to control our
minds and souls. If he had witnessed what we
made of his religion, he would have found
himself in the midst of a scene where the only
command obeyed was the one to “break
down and let it all out.’’ And he probably
would have reacted with the same awe ex-
pressed by folklorist Clifton Furness during a
visit he paid to a South Carolina plantation in
1926. The peak of a clack prayer meeting is
approaching and:

Gradually moaning became audible in
the shadowy corners where the women
sat. Some patted their bundled babies in
time to the flow of the words, and began
swaying backward and forward.. Several
men moved their feet alternately, in
strange syncopation. A rhythm’ was
born, almost without reference to the
words that were being spoken by the
preacher. It seemed to take shape almost
visibly, and grow. I was gripped with the
feeling of, a mass-intelligence, a self-

conscious entity, gradually informing the
crowd and taking possession of every
mind there, including my own.

In the midst of this increasing inten-
sity, a black man suddenly cried out :Gid
right—sodger! Git right—sodger! Git
tight—wit Gawd!

Instantly the crowd took it up,
moulding a melody out of half-formed
familiar phrases based upon a spiritual
tune, hummed here and there among the
crowd. A distinct-melodic outline be-
came more and more prominent, shaping
itself around the central theme of the
words, ‘Git right, sodger!”

Scraps of other words and tunes were
flung into the medly of sound by indi-
vidual singers from time to time, but the
general trend was carried on by a deep
undercurrent, which appeared to be
stronger than the mind of any individual
present, for it bore the mass of im-
provised harmony and rhythms into the
most effective climax of incremental
repetition that I have ever heard. I felt as
if some conscious plan or purpose were
carrying us along, call it mob-mind,
communal composition, or what you
will.

However, the ‘“‘purpose carrying us along”

PAGE FIFTEEN

cannot be understood through its medium
(communal composition) the way Furness
suggests. The command is in the content. To
“git right wit Gawd” prescribed that our
people purge themselves, that evil had to be
driven from the midst of the congregation;
and a belief in ourselves as conscious and
active receptacles (even reservoirs) of divine
power dictated that those assembled use their
collectivity and “get the spirit” as a means of
liberating positive spiritual force in the world.
It was called “getting happy.”

Looking back on these times, contempo-
rary black writers like Robert MacBeth con-
tend that the only thing about these incanta-
tions that retarded our struggle for freedgm is
that we were praying to “‘git right” with the
wrong God and that if we could have focussed
those same spiritual energies and perceptions
on the spirits of our ancestors and the Black
Gods of Africa, our ability to break coloni-
alism’s mental bonds on us would have been
greater. Actually, we tried to do just this by
extending our totemic reading of the world to
all activities of life. and adapting African
rituals to New World contexts.

To Be Continued

in the Next Issue

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PAGE SIXTEEN

TIGER PAPER

Cutting The Faculty Down to Size

In December, the departmental and
college-wide Personnel and Budget
committees completed ‘their annual pruning
of the faculty tree. If in past years the process
seemed a bit haphazard, a _ kind of
chop-and-lop operation, this time the pruners
aimed to be more scientific. They’ve
introduced what Dean of Faculty Eric James,
at a recent English Department meeting,
described as a “‘more objective”’ basis of class
visitation and teacher evaluation—namely,
new observation and evaluation forms that list
several dozen “fair, reliable, and valid”
criteria to measure the strength or weakness
of the untenured faculty.

Dean James admitted that precise
‘definitions of what constitutes superior, good,
average, or poor teaching have not yet been
developed, but he is confident the matter of
definition is in good hands. ‘Persons skilled in
personnel management,” he told questioners
in the English Department, ‘‘a group of
persons experienced in this sort of
thing’—can he mean Top Administrators?—
are mulling over these delicate questions. Dean
James and the rest of the personnel managers
won’t object if the faculty does a little
mulling of its own; teaching is, after all, our
“business,” as Dean James might say. Are the
new faculty observation and evaluation forms
a solid objective basis for assessing ability to
teach and to carry out general responsibilities
in the College?

The MCC forms are based on sample forms
sent out by the central CUNY administration.
The several dozen items cover “personal
traits” (e.g., appearance, manners, energy,
enthusiasm, adaptability, willingness to accept
direction), “‘classroom management” (e.g.,
punctuality, student discipline, atmosphere
conducive to learning), ‘‘subject matter and
teaching ability” (e.g., knowledge and
organization of subject matter, voice and
language, attitude toward bright and slow
students, encouragement to thinking),
“teaching methods and techniques” (e.g., use
of lectures, student participation § in
discussion, use of visual aids, homework
assignments, quizzes and exams, plus other
categories duplicating items under “subject
matter and teaching ability”). For each item
the observer checks one of six boxes:
Unsatisfactory, Average, Above Average,
Superior, Not Observed, Not Applicable.
(Note that “Average,” being the
next-to-lowest of the four qualitative
evaluations, actually amounts to a negative
judgment.) At a few poipts, the observer is
asked to leap out of the little boxes and write
a sentence or two.

The use of the forms assures that all the
criteria are not only relevant to the quality of
teaching but concrete enough to be measured
on a 4-point scale. Now, maybe personal
appearance, manners, voice, willingness to
accept direction, and relationship with the
Administration are relevant to good teaching,
though we doubt it; but it’s impossible to say
for sure without knowing what these bland
phrases actually mean. Some of the other
criteria, superficially more pertinent, are just
as puzzling, particularly when coupled with a
quality-control rating.

What, for example, is an ‘‘average” amount
of “tolerance of disagreement”? How much
“opportunity to question” is “above
average”? Under “encouragement to
thinking,” does inviting questions about
details while rejecting challenges to basic
assumptions of the course or to the teacher’s
social outlook rate “unsatisfactory,” or
“superior”? '

What does a check-mark under “superior”
for “student — discipline” signify: flexible
response to the style and mood of the
students, or total teacher control over the
dynamic of the class? And how does all of
this relate to “atmosphere conducive to
learning”? (The conduciveness to learning of
traffic and construction noise, overcrowding,
overheated or freezing classrooms, lack of
equipment, inadequate study space is not
measured on these forms. Maybe a teacher
should be rated superior simply for
overcoming any or all of these obstacles. One
begins to see how “voice” and “‘manners”

might figure in teaching ability at MCC: if
you can’t shout in a dignified and unterrifying
way you may be unable to teach effectively in
the B or L buildings.)

No need to belabor the obvious. Dean
James’s “fair, reliable, and valid” criteria are
almost all contentless, empty; judgments based
on them, far from being objective, public, chal-
lengeable, are in fact deeply subjective, reflect-
ing the observer’s own attitudes, abilities, and
preferences for which the observer is not held
accountable. One example should suffice:
observer damns an observee with faint praise
by marking him/her “average” for

“knowledge of subject matter,” he does not

have to explain what that judgment means, let
along demonstrate his competence to make it
in the first place. (And everybody knows how
much dead wood has accumulated at the top
of the faculty tree.)

But supposing the forms were as objective
as Dean James claims they are: what then?
The whole process of evaluation is still a
bureaucratic farce. Evaluation of a teacher’s
performance is almost invariably made on the
basis of one class visit per semester. (Some
observers don’t even stay for the whole hour.)
Most observers walk into a classroom cold,
not knowing what’s happened in the course
prior to the visit, or what will follow. How,
then, can the observer judge the lesson’s
“continuity with course material in other
class sessions” or the ‘“‘organization of subject
matter”? How can he rate “reasonable
assignment of homework” or “‘encouragement
to thinking”? Not knowing the specific needs
of the students in a particular class, or the
dynamic of that class (and every class is
different, especially in a school so diverse as
MCC), how can the observer evaluate the
quality of student participation, the teacher’s
use of materials, his/her ‘ability to explain,”
his/her use of language? (Yes, ‘“‘use of
language” gets graded, too. Dean Pittman,
MCC’s very own protector of decorum, is no
doubt gratified.) To be honest, an observer
who hasn’t bothered to confer with the
teacher about the course would have to check
many items in the “not observed”? column.
But since no observer mindful of his
reputation (though unworried about his job)
is going to be that candid, the fiction is
officially perpetuated that a _ cursory,
50-minute-or-less, twice-a-year. out-of-context
observation is an adequate basis for deciding
whether a teacher deserves to be retained,
promoted, or fired.

Unofficially, of course, cynicism is rampant
among tenured observers and untenured
observees alike, for there are few who are too
naive not to recognize that reappointment,

promotion, and firing at MCC are at best
haphazard and at worst downright punitive,
an exercise of power. One important use of
"the observation/evaluation forms, in fact, is to
protect that power against appeal, e.g., by the
unions. This point was glaringly clear in Dean
James’s September 16th letter to “Chairmen
of Departments and Coordinators of
Programs” where he suggested use of the
forms as a means of “performance
measurement” that could stand as legal
evidence and _ sufficient reason for
nonreappointment in union — grievance
proceedings before arbitration boards or in
the courts.

According to the rhetoric, however,
observation and evaluation are supposed to be
used to improve the quality of teaching at
MGC. Thus, both forms contain space for the
observer to indicate “areas of need for
development and _ suggested means of
development.” In practice, thodgh, the
observation is almost never the occasion for a
serious discussion of an observee’s teaching.
The observee isn’t even permitted to see the
evaluation; he/she has a conference with the
department chairman or his deputy, who
reports what the evaluation says; the
chairman then summarizes the content of the
conference on another form, which the
observee must countersign. It’s rare that this
report-to-the-observee is any less of a ritual
than the observation itself was. More
important, this kind of secrecy about the
evaluation is clearly open to manipulation:
while the observee can note dissent from the
evaluation as the chairman reported it to
him/her, he/she has no protection against the
possibility that there may be statements on
the form which the chairman does nof report
and which therefore cannot be challenged.

The point to be drawn from all this is not
simply that we need more meaningful
observation and evaluation. forms,..but. that
the whole process of evaluation needs to
changed. As long as administrators and
tenured faculty have sole control of the
process while remaining immune to it
themselves, the process will be irrelevant to
teaching. Were good teaching—and good
administration—really important at MCC, or
in CUNY generally, all college staff, not just
untenured people,’ would be evaluated and
advised of their weaknesses, and students and
untenured staff would sit on all personnel and
budget committees (CUNY by-laws presently
forbid them to do so). Instead; as a sop,
student “opinion” about untenured teachers
will eventually be sought at MCC, probably
via a form as meaningless and open to
manipulative use as the faculty-observer
forms. (Just when student evaluations will
begin is hidden in the bosom of the tenured
and administrative untouchables. Dean James,
questioned by the English Department in
December, said that “chances are that the
next time the Faculty Council meets, this
matter will probably be on the agenda”—his
emphasis—and it’s “likely” that student
opinion will be solicited this semester.)

As teachers, we'll welcome — having
some feedback from our students. But
we don’t delude ourselves that student
opinion will’ make much difference in
personnel-and-budget decisions under the
present system of school rule. What we do
expect, rather, is that once students begin to
experience how little their “opinions” matter
when divorced from the power to make them
count, they may begin to demand that power.

The majority of the faculty, meanwhile,
has not even the fig leaf of consultation with
which to cover its powerlessness over
personnel decisions. As the economic
recession continues and perhaps deepens, we
can anticipate that observation-and-evaluation
will become less a harmless-seeming garden
exercise for the administrative pruners and
more blatantly a means to cut the faculty to
the system’s measure. The “groves of
Academe” will be thick with dangerous
yes-men like Dean Pittman, whom President
Draper has just regrafted onto the faculty
tree, and autocrats like Dean James. It won’t
be an atmosphere conducive to learning.

But the personnel managers will love it.