Copyright © 1998 by PJ
An architect once passed off the look of the campus as industrial. Echoing the grinding of gears and occasional agonies of brakes, the stolid post-and-beam buildings parallel the freeway.
The college got its start a few years after World War II when such institutions were labeled junior colleges, not community colleges. Although a lake of dubious clarity lay at the western boundary of the property, initial planning laid out arrangements for classes beside the proposed freeway and areas for parking toward the lake. Nobody worried much about growth until the 1960s when parking places got scarce and some new construction became essential.
At the beginning, we've all heard, most of the instructors, bloody but unbowed, came from the local high schools, though a few had had some experience in college teaching as graduate students. In those days they timed in every morning in the administration offices which used to be in what is now the Liberal Arts Building. Every morning some kind of patriotic exercise transpired then, according to the oldtimers, the last of whom retired in 1985. During the first few years a bugler sounded out the "Star-Spangled Banner" while the flag was being run up the flag pole. Everybody stopped, even students driving cars around to the designated parking, and put hands over hearts. But after the completion of that freeway all the cars whizzed by whether or not a bugle sounded. Opinion shelved the bugle. Eight o'clock classes stood to recite the "Pledge of Allegiance." Every classroom had a flag at least until about 1968 or so, but by now it takes an older faculty member like myself to remember the flags. The last time anyone can recall the pledge actually being heard from a classroom door occurred when the college president, who retired after the security officers armed themselves, visited the classroom of an hourly instructor in 1971. We've had two other presidents and an acting president since then and seldom see any of the administrators in the Liberal Arts Building any more. Administrators these days are out looking around for funding and worrying about the budget.
We faculty members, for the most part, belong to the generation that bought homes in the '50s and '60s, and with the annual raises we received during the early '80s consider ourselves reasonably well off. But we notice things. The price of one of those small cartons of milk in the cafeteria has risen to fifty cents, and the salad bar stuff goes at twenty cents an ounce. But not many of us around these days even talk about when the faculty had their own dining room and could get a satisfactory lunch for little more than a dollar. Those of us who care to look back groan about high cholesterol; we don't enjoy fiber and fat-free but survive. Not many of us even eat in the dining room anymore, a tableful of eight at the most.
We get a few meager rumors, a disgruntled prediction, and a little gossip while we chew our lettuce and sprouts. Rowland from counseling talks the most: "Definitely, the board will put a retirement incentive on the table, at least ten thousand."
Hankins in business counters, "That won't do anything for us. We need a better inflation factor."
Lawrence in music adds: "I'd retire in June if I could be sure of some part-time work."
Hankins never got along with anybody: "Why would you do the same work for less money? You'd get paid a part-timer's wages."
"Oh, I wouldn't work at all in the spring. I'd use my savings for at least a month or so in Italy during the opera season. What's it all for, I ask myself?"
Hankins has never asked himself, "What's it all for?"
But we all sit there knowing anybody over fifty-five could give the predicted monthly income from his state teacher's pension and his annuity at almost any given moment. The times are uncertain at best.
Only five people were around the table the day Bell walked in. Gene Bell has an office with those of us in Liberal Arts and keeps at his desk for hours, working in the margins of student essays, writing almost as much as the students themselves have put down. He brown bags lunch and buys an occasional cup of coffee at the cafeteria. Suddenly he asked us, "Whatever happened to all the flags in the classrooms?"
His brown bag shook and rattled in his hand. "There haven't been any flags in our classrooms for a long time."
Hankins pulled his chair back from the table, got up, and took his recycled cardboard tray over to the trash container. After he disposed of the tray, he folded his copy of the Wall Street Journal under his arm. In parting, he smiled. "Whatever happened to those nice plastic trays we used to have?" When the door was closing behind him, we heard, "Whatever happened to the stainless eating utensils?"
Bell gripped his brown bag. "Something has to be done."
The rest of us looked at Rowland. We knew right away that Bell was beyond our help.
Disregarding all nutritional advice for a man of his weight and years, Rowland, our paunchy counselor, forked another bite of pistachio cake into his mouth and smiled distantly. We waited for him to be able to speak. He tried to reassure Bell. "There's a flag on the flag pole isn't there?"
We followed his lead. "There must be a flag in the administration building somewhere."
"I think I saw a flag over in the natural history exhibit once."
"Doesn't somebody carry a big flag for the convocations?"
But after Rowland finished his cake, we all said we had to get back to work or check our mailboxes or meet a class and got out of the cafeteria.
Bell was still standing beside the door after we left.
A week later it was a one-issue campus: Did we or did we not need to restore flags to the classrooms? Even the English as a Second Language students wanted to discuss the matter. Some of us patiently explained about the Pledge and wrote down all the words for them. We talked about when "under God" used to be controversial. We never know just how much the ESL people understand.
But here and there they'd nod as if we'd made the matter clearer. "Yes, yes."
We seize any opportunity at conversation. In one class all the flags of the countries those students came from had their day. Flags crowded the chalkboard as everybody had a turn: Iranian, Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian, Japanese, Taiwanese.... We reviewed colors and design and exhausted ourselves.
"Werry nice."
"Berry nice."
"Very, very. Take hold of your lower lip." But we knew the lessons on flags proved a big success.
Under pressure from the academic senate, the college president refused to take a stand. We know that last row with the citizens' committee against parking lot sales--the college parking lot is used for a swap meet over most week-ends--almost finished him. All he'd say on this one is "The budget."
The union president leads the anti-flag faction. "Listen," she warns, "we need a lot of other things first. This place is falling apart. The last flag story I heard was from the biology department that tries to keep that little natural history exhibit going. One day the bracket that held their flag came off the wall. The flag fell down and barely missed Benny Reed. He was furious."
"You mean there isn't even a flag in that room anymore."
"Hell no."
But the pro-flag people don't plan to sit back and let the union leadership walk all over them. About a third of the faculty turns out to be pro-flag, and most of security have jumped on that bandwagon. Maintenance people are about equally divided.
It's hard to assess campus opinion properly. First a neo-Nazi and then another budget deficit decimated the campus paper. That was almost three years ago. Student body elections turn out a trickle to the polls; the last figures we remember were that two hundred and eighteen out of some eight thousand voted. We hold out for soap in the lavatory dispensers and reams of paper for reproduction of syllabi and test materials. We've been at bottom line so long. It would take scrolling the governor's priorities for about ten minutes to arrive at community colleges.
Bell gets out of his office more with all the attention paid to his position on flags. He's not been too well known around campus before the controversy erupted, but now he's man of the moment. We heard Millwood, who teaches accounting, stop by his door one day and ask, "What do you think about the falling dollar?"
I decided last week to look around in my garage for the flag my younger son used to hang in the bracket on the garage roof when we still had the house. Why not bring it to school and put it in the classroom I use for the ESL students? The young man from Viet Nam helped me get it up in the old bracket. I'd brought a new screw and screwdriver to be sure things stayed in place. While we were at it Yon helped me straighten some of the chair arms that were askew. We couldn't bolt the ones that had fallen off completely back on the chairs and still have two or three arms stacked in one corner.
My expertise is in American literature, and I can still get a class together for Twain and Steinbeck and the community provides enrollment for night classes. But so many of our students need to learn the language that last year I put my work in linguistics to use devising an approach for the ESL students who have already learned some vocabulary and oral skills in the adult education programs. The district provided some training in working with our students who originally spoke Spanish or Japanese or one of the Chinese languages. I can't think of any of the countries of the world that hasn't been represented in our classes, a pretty heady environment for a Midwesterner who went all the way through school with classmates who had Western European names.
"For tomorrow tell about your favorite holiday in your country," I say to start them thinking.
Or following a suggestion from the text, I inquire, "If you could bring only two things with you from your country when you came to California what would you bring?"
"Rugs," said the wealthy man from Iran.
"My mother's statue of the virgin," said the woman from Central Mexico.
Yon blurted out, "We couldn't take anything with us when we left Viet Nam."
"I am just visiting," put in the young woman from Norway. "I go home in June." Then she corrected herself, "In next June."
"Next June," her friend from Colombia hissed.
"Everything is to buy here," observed the Iranian.
But the Mexican woman countered, "If you have money."
I certainly don't know what I'd grab if I had to leave for Iran and I know I'd have trouble with Persian, to say nothing of the social role of the women in that country.
Around us the flag controversy grew heated. Clerical services had mounted a protest against any move to buy new flags. They had managed for far too long with only three telephones in all of admissions. "Spend some money for more phones."
In the Liberal Arts Building the roof leaks in several of the classrooms when it rains. The most pitiable leak is in the hallway in front of the Communications Office. We put a large wastebasket under the leak, but someday somebody will slip in all the wetness. "It's time to put some money into roofing."
Equipment in the computer lab needs replacing. The mats in physical education have lost their stuffing. No copies of the videocassettes in the instructional media center have been made, and many of the films have had holes burned in them. "Can't something be done?"
We could put the answer on a broken record, "There'll be more budget cuts next year."
Bell was nominated for a special award made by one of the community organizations to recognize patriotism. Bell had been a veteran of World War II and devoted all his class time to narrating his experiences on New Guinea. Only one of his students complained to the vice president of instruction.
His colleagues, myself included, murmured, "Something's got to be done."
We voted on new texts, contributed privately to restoration of the Scantron machine, cried out for custodial services to provide us with soap in the restrooms.
At last it was all over for another year. Biology bought a new flag and mounted it with monies from a contingency fund that had been set aside for frozen corpses of cats. Bell always wore red, white and blue ties.
In the ESL classroom our flag had lasted. The last day of class everybody brought a special food to share. A rose-flavored dessert from the Iranian woman. Posole from Michoacan. That sort of thing. The man from Iran said he did not cook but would take us all to lunch at a Persian restaurant. So the year ended cheerfully. We had to clean up the room and get all the paper plates in the trash before we left, of course.
Yon looked at the flag proudly as we left the room. He was to ride with me. I had two or three others meeting me in the parking lot.
He tried to convince me. "Is important."