My Defiant Hope

As you can see from my "handle", I am angry over the ways in which too many educational institutions, at every level of education, use their sacrosanct status to get away with things that would result in long prison sentences for people who tried similar things in other endeavors.  In that sense, they're not so different from so many store-front churches in inner-city neighborhoods or any number of non-profits I can think of.


And I reserve special contempt for those institutions and organizations that enable such abuses of public trust.  They, along with the educational institutions in question, have been referred to as the Education-Finance Complex in other blogs.


What tempers my anger, though, is my defiant streak.  I do what I can to keep my anger from festering into cynicism, which leads to despair.  When you think about it, the powers-that-be would love to see angry people so consumed by their rage that they simply give up hope.  Such people are putty to the scalpels wielded by the corporate and financial plutocrats who, essentially, are the puppeteers of most politicians.


Every once in a while, someone commits a courageous public act that makes it a little easier for me to keep up my defiant hope.  An example of such an act appeared in yesterday's New York Times op-ed column.  In it, Greg Smith  announced his resignation as a Goldman-Sachs executive director.  It may well be an act of career suicide, at least within that industry, for him.  


However, I have seen enough not to be merely dazzled by the sparks thrown off by Smith's public eclat.  Rather, I feel a renewal, however slight and momentary, when I read his explanation of what motivated him to leave his perch.  In particular, I was taken with this:  "I knew it was time to leave when I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them  what a great place this was to work."


I have pointed the article, and that sentence in particular, to my students.  One advantage to working in a community college in the CUNY system (which I also felt I had when I was at York College) is that many students realize, at least in some way, that the system is not designed for their benefit--or, more precisely, has evolved, through the machinations of those charged with it, into a pit from which the way out is longer, steeper and more fraught with perils than it has been in a very long time.


They do not understand what I've just described in the abstract ways that students in the more "prestigious" private colleges do (at least until they graduate and their loans come due), or in ways that tenured faculty members claim to understand.


Many of my students come from families in which people have worked long and hard and have little or nothing to show for their labors.  Or--particularly in the night classes--they themselves might be the ones who have been working harder and harder but have been just barely getting by--or are not getting by at all.  Those students, at least at some level, know that much of their effort does little more than to help enrich the sorts of people Smith denounces in the editorial in which he announced his resignation.


When you think about it, it's not surprising that someone like Smith would do what he's done at the same time that folks like Paul Campos, C. Cryn Johanssen and "Nando" are exposing the ways in which law schools, professional schools and other kinds of schools have manipulated employment and salary statistics--and how banks profit, and government entities benefit from such deception.  In this context, the Occupy Wall Street movement also shouldn't have surprised anyone, coming as it did in the wake of the exposure of the various kinds of fraud committed by FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate)-related companies.


I do whatever I can to raise my students' awareness of the developments I've described.  Some of them, at least, realize that lasting peace and prosperity, not to mention their own long-term success, cannot be built on fraud, lies, deception and theft--or on assisting or enabling those things.  And there are folks like Greg Smith who know that.