power

Paying Homage to Community Colleges: Thank You, Dr. Jill Biden

What the Heart Holds

I was aware of the prejudices in ‘elite’ circles against community colleges before I sent my daughter off to one, but got a fresh taste of that sort of judgment – from people across the political spectrum – over the last couple of years. One (ahem) friend literally laughed in my face when she learned where my young’un was going to school.

Yet it was a wonderful space of learning for my bright, intrepid child – different than if she’d completed those 2 years at a public university or small liberal arts college, but different in its own valuable way, not different-as-lesser.

In the more distant past, I worked with immigrant students in ESL in a program through Houston Community College. I have friends who teach in community colleges in Alabama or around the country – and others who have attended them for useful professional skills or for the beginning or shifting point of a postsecondary academic career.

Community colleges make space for 1st generation college students, for returning college students, for the curious, the professionally ambitious, the poor, the intimidated, the unconventional, the cost-conscious, the brilliant, and the struggling.

They have technical career programs that will train young (and not so young) people to make more money with a 2-year degree than I’ll ever earn with multiple graduate degrees.

They have liberal arts courses that introduce students to critical thinking and the breadth of human knowledge.

They prepare students – many of whom have been underprepared by their high schools – for work, for further education, and for life.

In an age of the ridiculous (and I mean ridiculous) explosion of college costs*, they remain relatively affordable (and ought to be even more so, but that’s  a discussion for another day).

*(through the ongoing neoliberal commodification of higher education – but that’s also a discussion for another day)

They can be found in remote rural areas, downtown urban areas, and smack in the middle of suburban office parks — and online.

Community colleges get far fewer resources than they deserve – and are burdened by arcane higher-level institutional bureaucratic decisions that come with devaluing and disrespect. They are often political footballs in the larger context of public postsecondary power struggles.

That’s a shame. We as a society ought to give them not only our full respect, but stellar resources, and should prioritize nurturing learning environments over institutional inertia, political power games, and our misguided stigmas.

Dr. Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation – Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs – is exactly the kind of useful research we need in this world – and the knowledge and commitment of her and people like her represent a great hope for this country.

If you meet someone who tells you they attend a community college, say to them “Awesome! [and mean it – and not in a condescending way] What are you studying?”

If you meet someone who teaches or has a staff position in a community college, say to them “What meaningful work! I bet it’s really interesting to teach such a wide range of students.” [and mean it – and not in a condescending way]

Advocate for community colleges in the political arena. Let’s make sure they get the funding and support they need.

And most of all: respect community colleges and their students and their faculty and staff. Real respect. Seriously. Please. Especially if life has sent you through higher education in ‘elite institutions.’

Because few things are more contemptible than privilege having contempt for gritty, real, human, everyday, beautiful effort.

The 2020 Election and the Day After

What the Heart Holds

In setting our expectations of what has happened and what is to come, it’s helpful to understand that the Trump governing cadre (which enfolds an entire infrastructure) has an interest in democratic institutions only to the extent that it can manipulate them to consolidate power on behalf of itself (private global-scale corporate interests).

It has no morality, in that any appeal to any ethic is solely for the purpose of manipulating the voting blocs that constitute an electoral college and legislative majority.

It has no interest in public service. Its guiding principle is not civic engagement, care for the broader good, or the needs of the country and its people.

It has no compassion for the vulnerable. It despises those who are not wealthy and powerful – and is unconcerned with their welfare. Their lives (our lives) are disposable.

It rejects critique and human growth because it considers these to be vulnerabilities.

It regards the Earth solely as a marketable commodity and takes pride in dismantling any protections for natural ecosystems.

It has no interest in truth, only in producing and selling narratives that will get it what it wants.

It’s a manipulative, carefully-crafted scam – a very successful one – that is rapidly eroding the vestiges of civil society and the democratic norms of American governance.

It’s a deliberate response to hard-won early- and mid-20th century advancements in ensuring that civil society and democratic norms actually include everybody, not just property-owning white men.

The more that we can understand it for what it is – the more we grapple with its realities, the better we can decide how to act in the face of it.

Joe Biden is essentially a moderate Republican, as were most of the Senate candidates on whom Democrats pinned their hopes. Electing them would barely budge the needle on this country’s unchecked sprint not only to the right, but to neoliberal-capital authoritarianism over the last 40 years (though it would nonetheless be a significantly less harmful outcome).

It’s a bleak assessment, but it’s a realistic one. That’s where we start from. And – no matter what happens – if we are to figure out (1) how best to protect ourselves and other vulnerable people and the Earth and (2) how to devise new strategies of effective resistance to evil’s harms, as well as new strategies for human and ecosystem flourishing, we do well to work from a realistic picture.

Our equanimity must come in part from our capacity to face this reality.

Amen

On Interconnected Political Debacles: the City of Birmingham, the State of Alabama, and our never-particularly United States of America

What the Heart Holds

As a rule, I have low expectations of those in political office – at every level. This country’s systems – at every level – have been biased from the outset toward the affluent, so that the pursuit of power, property, and profit frame public policy and public discourse.

That system of power often circumscribes and circumvents even the best efforts, intentions, and characters. 

Nonetheless, a spirit of public interest has managed to survive for a long time, kindled by uneven bits and pieces of a democratic and practical commitment to the greater good – including in some part to those disadvantaged by the system and the very Earth itself. 

The calculated withdrawal from that commitment to public good – and especially from the needs of marginalized people and the planet – traces most immediately back to the Reagan era 1980s, with specific roots in the would-be oligarchy’s opposition to 1860s-70s Reconstruction, 1900s Progressive Era, 1930s New Deal, and 1960s Great Society reformist public policies, as well as the broader enfranchisement represented by Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement. 

(and, while embodying specific forms of progress, the reforms of those eras still never went far enough in inclusion and avoidance of harm to vulnerable people and the planet – but that’s a discussion for a different day)

Make no mistake – this autocratic neoliberalism is deliberate and it is comprehensive in its approach. And it has become much more efficient, skillfully manipulative, and technologically adept in its reach. 

At a national level, what we witness in the current president is jaw-dropping in its awfulness, but it is an unsurprising outcome of the trajectory of this country since the Reagan era (and that trajectory has been advanced by both parties, though to different degrees. The Democratic party under both B. Clinton and Obama has also been actively complicit, though Republican abdication of public interest has been of an entire different magnitude. Both are problematic, but one is clearly worse). 

It is wholesale capitulation to the mechanisms of concentrated private profit and ownership – at the expense of everything else, even human life, in a wholesale philosophy of commodification. 

Trump is more unprincipled – and louder – in his manipulation of identity politics to secure his power, but he’s just an unvarnished, unrestrained, accelerated embodiment of that whole agenda. 

On the state level, Alabama’s government has always leaned this way. Such tenets are obviously well-enshrined in the 1901 Constitution. But the Powers-that-Were-&-Are did a clever end run on us 2010-2012. Those forces now maintain an effective stranglehold on power in Montgomery, which ensures that Montgomery continues to have a stranglehold on the rest of the state. That Governor Ivey has maintained a mask ordinance in the actual public interest is a wholesale minor miracle.

And as for this city: those same forces of white-supremacy-entrenched, resource-extraction-based capitalism have also long held sway in Birmingham. But there has also been a long tradition of a public sector structured to at least ensure essential public spaces and institutions (libraries, neighborhood associations, public works, parks and rec, schools, and so on). 

It also provided for a civil service sector to run that infrastructure. That essential sector provided economic mobility for those employed and a significant degree of economic stability for their extended networks. The positive effects permeated the entire community for decades.

Here, as elsewhere, that sector has been the subject of political patronage – and some folks ascend and others take a hit as the top of the municipal tickets change. But on the whole, it’s an infrastructure that provides meaningful services, often through longstanding relationships, to the whole of the city – not just those who can pay for perks and private delights and comforts. 

And if properly directed, it’s a structure that could address issues of widespread poverty and the need for a scaffolding of affordable housing, public transit, food security, accessible healthcare, and quality education. 

If properly directed. 

Birmingham municipal leadership has ebbed and flowed in how well it engaged the public sector and the public platform to tend to the needs of ALL its people. That has been a matter of variable commitment, variable integrity, and variable competence at navigating through civic inertias, possibilities, and external constraints. 

What’s going on now is an entirely different game.

Over the last couple of years, Birmingham has fallen fully into line with this orienting principle of neoliberal privatization that we see at work nationally and globally. 

It is premised upon the dismantling of the public sector (other than increasingly militarized mechanisms of social control) in favor of privatization, which can be outright or through ‘public-private partnerships.’

While these forces have long been one part of the equation, the comparatively recent complete embrace represents a paradigm shift in local politics – and it will benefit the affluent, both of this city and of the surrounding suburbs, at the expense of poor and working-class folks (who in this city are overwhelming Black – this is a narrative of institutional white supremacy, regardless of who advances it). 

The direction and intent has been clear for a while now, but the COVID era has offered opportunities to accelerate the process.

The current budget debacle has been a clear illustration. We will see more of such maneuvers in the weeks and months to come, I fear. Last night’s City Council meeting, which ultimately passed that budget, was raw theater for this manipulative power. 

So – the combined forces of the Mayor’s office and a (at least) 5-person lockstep voting bloc of the City Council provides all that the Local Powers That Be need to move the agenda of neoliberal privatization on along full apace.  

The current occupants of those offices are apparently willing to ride that heady mix of power’s endorsement and opportunity. It may continue to get them somewhere, especially if they are willing to resurrect ethics only for superficial viewing in campaign promises. Yet they should be aware that the system they’ve pledged into also regards them as disposable. 

That this paradigm shift took hold by manipulating grassroots electoral methods and promises is a particular sin. When some of you pledged a vow of servant leadership, you certainly did not make clear who and whose interests you intended to serve. 

Things will get complicated as we move on along. The 2021 local elections are already kicking in. Some of the critiques we are hearing now and in the time to come are motivated by the speaker’s own political ambitions and opportunism. Let us listen for that – and ask questions. There may be true and honest leaders – and we need those leaders with wisdom and integrity – mixed among those folks, but we will have to discern carefully. Nothing and no one is a given.  

There will also continue to be people who genuinely believe in actual equity, care, and justice for people and the planet – enacted with skill and with a dedicated concern for civic and common good. There are people with real integrity speaking into this struggle. I do my best to count among that number. My own personal interests might be better served by being quiet, but the ethical imperatives of my faith compel me to speak out. This is pastoral work and this is a Christian commitment for me.

On the national level, the choices are pretty clear, if less than we might have hoped for. 

Closer to home, we’ll have to keep paying attention, keep asking questions, keep making demands on the system that it be more genuinely accountable, equitable, and just in service of the public interest, and keep taking it to the streets when the interests of the commons are unheard and unheeded.

Let us never cease to ask the questions: “who benefits from this” “whom is this intended for?” “who may be harmed by this, whether it’s intentional or not?” And if the answer comes at the expense of marginalized people or the planet for the sake of the Affluent Class or the powers of patriarchy and white supremacy, we have to be ready to speak back and push back. 

Many thanks to all who have worked so hard to create structures for participatory budgeting and people’s power, liberated from political manipulation. Your expertise, dedication, witness, and example are a great gift to us all – and it is my joy to journey with you in this work.

Amen