Volume 18, Issue 4                                April 2004

Leap of Faith

By Andrew Walzer

    For some reason I decided to go to the community college job fair this year for the first time.  Call it prurient interest.  I haven’t gone in the past because I have always been aware that there are way too many applicants for the too few jobs that are out there, plus I get notification of job openings through the community college registry.  But this year, for some reason, I suspended disbelief as the existentialists might say, and decided to go.  I told myself that I would go in my “sociological” mode, and remain a cool, detached observer.  Of course, things didn’t turn out as planned.

    So off I went one bright and sunny Saturday morning.  I naively embarked on my quest, navigating the freeways down to LAX.  I hit my first traffic jam on Sepulveda Blvd right outside the hotel where the job convention was located.  The right hand lane was jammed up.  Not a problem, I thought.  Tight security, people trying to make flights out of LAX.  So I deftly moved over a lane, and made a swift cut in front of a car, and zoomed into the hotel parking lot (yes, I am one of those drivers).  Then it dawned on me: the traffic jam was to get into the parking lot!!!  I suddenly had a premonition of what was to come.

    I parked, wandered into the hotel and went downstairs into a large room with tables set up for the various community colleges.  The place was absolutely packed!  Mobs of people dressed up in their job seeking clothes, crowding around tables for what I was not sure.  I looked at these people, and wondered, where did they all come from? The few human resource people that I approached seemed embarrassed by the whole spectacle, and rather sheepishly talked about state budget shortfalls, and the possibility of applying for part time positions.  They knew what we should have known: the dice are loaded, the cards are stacked.  But what about all these job seekers?   Where did they come from?  What were they thinking?

    In any case, I did what everyone else was doing.  I milled around and picked up some brochures, but my heart wasn’t in it.  I had one of those moments when the everyday rationales that we use to function on a normal basis suddenly collapse.  I realized and saw in all its glorious horror the predicament that we part-timers are in; that there are simply not anywhere near enough full time jobs opening up in community colleges to meet the demand.  I felt hopeless and demoralized.  So after leaving the airport, I did what any good sociologist might do, I made a report.  I called up our esteemed faculty association president at home on a Saturday morning, and reported what I had been through. (He wasn’t there, but I left a long distressed message on his home phone machine).

    I think it was the existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that wrote that the unique character of despair is that it is unaware of itself.  Many of us have given up hope that we can change our situation.  So what can propel us into action?  What can we do to make change?  Kierkegaard in his book Fear and Trembling said that in order to believe you have simply got to take a “leap of faith.”  I believe this is true of political action as well.  We need to take a leap of faith into collective action and union activism.    Once I was able to do this, the way I viewed the world changed.  Because I was no longer so individualized in my perspective, I began to see greater possibilities and have a stronger sense of my ability to make change.  It is only through collective action that we can make change; by putting pressure on the state we can improve the funding of community colleges, and keep the pressure on to do more full time hiring.  In the mean time, we need to work to improve the conditions of part timers, especially in terms of pay equity and job security.  It can be done if we think it can.  That’s our leap of faith.