FACCC Conference in Pasadena

October, 2007

 The Faculty Association of California Community Colleges held it's annual get-together at the Pasadena Hilton this year, and Santa Monica had a significant representation. Lantz Simpson, Dennis Frisch, Maria Alvarado, Suzanne McDonald,Mitra Moassessi, Fran Chandler, Becky Curtis,  Roz Kahn – more on her in a moment – were all there, as well as two of our Trustees, Andrew Walzer and Susan Aminoff, and, of course,  FACCC's erstwhile bete noir, moi.

It was a rewarding moment for me, honestly, as I felt both welcomed and appreciated, due to what I feel is a kind of perfect storm of events, personal and political, which seem to be marrying the PT movement with the traditional FT establishment. It's shotgun wedding of sorts, but one, I suspect, destined to last.

In a time when the PT movement is starting to reach critical mass, when we have moved from being ignored or even ridiculed, to being respected and even courted, a proposition that can really change and improve the position of everyone in the Community Colleges in the state of California is going before the voters. The more involved you are with the politics of education in California, the more you realize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment for all of us – and no one knows this more than the people of FACCC, who helped craft the Prop 92 in the first place.

This one we have to win, and it cannot be won if the CC's are divided, as we are now, by deep structural class distinctions  that no one in their right mind can see as fair.   Too expensive to fix, yes, they might say that. But that it needs fixing, no one is arguing anymore. To win it we need to be united, and the PT movement in general is clearly on the same side as the FT establishment on this, with the full understanding that both can gain if the Proposition passes, and movement to parity is one place where we PTers expect those gains to occur.

FACCC gets it, and a blind man could see – and certainly sense -- that the energy and intelligence and skills honed in the battle for PT parity could well be used to help sell Prop 92. In fact, I heard from several sources that FACCC is finally ready to open up its Board to more PTers – again, I feel, because not to do so is to push out some of the best and brightest activists in the state—most of whom are part-timers. We have to be, after all, if we're not to be simply victims.

Finally, one of our own, Rosalyn Kahn of the Communications Department, won the Margaret Quan Award for PT activism -- in good part because she collected nearly 1,000 signatures on her own to help qualify the Proposition. People like that are good to have on your side.

All in all an historic time. We're all in it to win it, and if we do, if we pass Prop 92 – and  especially if we pass it by a significant margin – we become players in the world of educational politics, enough to be able to do our jobs well, the way we want to do them. And if not, we are patsies for the rest of our careers. It's that simple.