Article: Free Speech at Sonoma State University: Practice What You Teach!

[Shepherd]

By Shepherd Bliss
WaccoBB.net

The creation of the Mario Savio Speakers’ Corner this semester was my favorite event during my five years at Sonoma State University. It was a good example of what is taught in SSU’s Foundations of Leadership course, UNIV. 238, which I taught for three years.

I applied to teach the Leadership course again next semester. I was disappointed when informed in a terse email (anything but “relational,” which is what the course’s text teaches) that I would not be offered one of the nine sections. Perhaps the administrator has not read the text about the importance of relationships with those whom one manages, empathy, the appropriate use of power, and good communications.

Mario Savio

The dynamic Savio was a beloved teacher at SSU from 1990-1996. He is best known as a leader of the sixties Free Speech Movement while a student at the UC Berkeley. That movement galvanized students around the U.S. against the American War in Vietnam.

Savio helped convince me to resign my commission as a young military officer and dedicate my life to the study, teaching, and practice of social justice. I wonder how Mario would be treated at SSU today, in spite of being recently honored.

It remains to be seen if SSU’s administration will improve its respect for free speech, even for free press. One example last year was when the student newspaper published articles on the ShameOnSSU protest against banker Sandy Weill buying an honorary doctorate by giving $12 million to the Green Music Center. The newspaper suspiciously disappeared from newsstands, which SSU staff were seen taking away. I helped organize the protest and then wrote about it.

The decision not to re-hire me does not appear to be an academic decision but a political one. I have asked for the reasons for my rejection, to which I have received no real response. I deserve an explanation of why I was not re-hired, which would be the relational way to communicate. This is not the only time this part-time instructor--as well as others of us--has received an unfair or

Sandy Weill

disrespectful communication from a SSU administrator, which seems to be a pattern.

I wonder what selection criteria were used for Leadership faculty. It is usual to consider things such as having a doctorate, especially from a prominent university, experience teaching the particular course and teaching in general, rank, publishing, and student evaluations, in which I score high. Those chosen teachers did not all have better academic qualifications than mine, especially since the deadline, which I met, was extended to get enough applications.

Public higher education in the U.S. today, especially in California, is a mess, for a variety of reasons. Student fees continue to rise, as do class sizes. Students who do graduate have huge debts. It is being further privatized and corporatized to meet the financial goals of the super-rich 1%, rather than the needs of students and the society as a whole.

SSU’s Leadership course is well designed. Its excellent text, “Exploring Leadership,” teaches the Relational Leadership Model. It advocates being inclusive and ethical, empowerment, and diversity. SSU administrators would do well to read and practice these principles, rather than violate them. Being a college administrator is not easy, which I know from being one at Harvard for a decade.

I appreciate SSU’s student publication, the Star, for publishing my account of not being re-hired. They also published a long letter to the editor by one of my former students with his point of few. A recent graduate whom I worked with each of her three years at SSU also wrote an opinion piece that was published. Both are available at www.sonomastatestar.com.

Education in the U.S. changed with the Industrial Revolution and became based on a factory model of obedience to bosses. The military’s “command and control” top-down approach to leadership prevails in colleges, producing corporate cultures that discriminate, especially against part-time instructors. Higher education tends to be organized around a rigid class system, with part-timers at the bottom of the teaching peck order.

I may be gone as a teacher of the Leadership course, but not as a member of the SSU community. I plan to speak out at Mario’s Corner. I welcome others to join me there and exercise free speech at SSU, even as it becomes more corporatized by the likes of banker Weill and MasterCard, prostrating public higher education to meet the financial goals of corporations, rather than the needs of students and our society.

(Shepherd Bliss {[email protected]} teaches college, has contributed to two-dozen books, and continues the organic farming that he has done for the last 20 years.

[Abraham Entin]

Mario was a close friend of Rachael and Myself. We met in 1974, after he was out of the media spotlight and before he found his place as a teacher. He was one of the smartest and most compassionate people I have known. He also had a highly developed sense of irony, and I know he would have been amused at the Mario Savio Cafe at Berkeley and the Speakers' Corner at SSU. I would be honored to speak there with you if you put something together.
abraham

[ronliskey]

...The decision not to re-hire me does not appear to be an academic decision but a political one. ...

Having learned much from Shepherd at the other university (Occupy), and seen firsthand the quality he brings to his work, there's no way this decision was academic. Once again a higher institution of state-mandated mediocrity ejects a gifted educator.

I suppose Socrates' foolish detractors must be smiling ghoulishly from the Gates of Heck at SSU's uniformly gray and mediocre bureaucrats. I have to go with Einstein on this:
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”