A Justice Site
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Created: November 13, 2001
Latest Update: November 27, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Chapter 10: This Is Bureaucracy? The Bra?
Copyright: Jeanne Curran, November 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.
Now, this must be when things started to get hairy. One group was pursuing prestigious academic research. We had more work than we could manage comfortably, but most of the work was fun. Connie, from the League of Women Voters, was an old friend. She was applying for a grant to provide job-training for women. She needed data collected, and she came to us with her small grant to collect it. Couldn't begin to pay a real research outfit on that grant, but she needed to evaluate her program if it were to grow. Connie knew us. She came to visit, and we dove into her project. For at least $15,000.Sound like a lot? Well, she wanted telephone interviewing. We had to figure out how to get the telephone banks installed (in our onw big room, of course), pay something to the school for overhead (wasn't really so much in those days), pay the phone bills, get the interview schedule printed up, train students in telephone interviewing, figure out quality control, get someone to keep the records, collect the data, analyze it and write up the final report. Yeah, sure, we could get that done while teaching a regular load of courses. And we had $15,000 dollars.
You know, this is fiction. I'm making it up as I go, as a good narrator should. But I really remember doing that dad-blamed study for $15, 000. I must have been certifiable. But I was younger then, lots younger.
Nobody in their right mind would have tried to do that. Most certainly not as a teaching model. Our students arranged their times around their schedules. That was part of the attraction of the center. It provided students with some flexibility in an institution that was increasingly inflexible. Teachers were angry if a student was late, yet the freeways already made traffic uncertain. It wasn't socially acceptable to berate minorities. These were the Civil Rights years. But that didn't mean that there wasn't a whole lot of arrogance going on about the ability toread and write standard English.
I never quite understood why that was such a buzz word kind of thing. We had known of inequality of education for a long time. Dillard was but one small example. So why were teachers in Los Angeles in the early 70s, still surprised at the need to overcome those deficiencies with those who had been locked out of the educational system by means of them? Why did we expect those who had been excluded to overcome the obstacles and deficiencies on their own?
Connie's phone survey didn't take rocket science. Percentages and some cross tabs - that was basically it. We didn't have time to be fancy. People had promised before to do the study and then couldn't follow through. So things were running behind schedule when we picked it up. Connie was anxious. We were overloaded. And the last thing we needed was dramatization. Every time someone threw a hissy fit over what wasn't done, or over what wasn't done perfectly, we lost energy and spirit. We desperately needed good interpersonal relations as we had never needed them so much before.
I guess that's what I'm beginning to understand about us as I recall all those memories, embellished as they undoubtedly are. Surely you don't expect me to remember things from someone else's perspective. I'm just a narrator.
Why did the concern over dramatization pop up? That is in fact what I recall. Soap opera. There was a lot of that in our department, or I guess, more accurately, in the school. There was the lovely young Barbie secretary. She looked like Barbie. Of course, I was jealous. I had a model's figure. Skinny. Chicken legs. No boobs. She was, well, Barbie. We had a regular Peyton Place with all the guys trying to date her at once. They got into overly dramatic scenes in which they fought over her. It was rumored that one of them went around telling all the others who she was also dating. And then he wondered why she wouldn't talk to him when he went over to see her! We should've been into film. We could've invented a long-running soap opera.
So it was a season of drama. I would have been content to play, but there wasn't time, not while conducting surveys on $15,000. The drama that cropped up in our center was less appealing as an afternoon soap opera. It was the drama of concern for "standards." One of the standards by which we were all judged was the ability to read and speak and write "standard" English. Gee, that's a touchy one. Even though we know what Bantu education is, and even though we know how it came to be in our own country and in South Africa, we tend to dismiss all that and judge people on the status characteristic of grammar, accent, dress, and ability to pass for middle class.
One of the first things I noticed about Ambassador was that we were openly complicit in denying any "differences" amongst us. The general assumption seemed to be that we are all middle class. Well, no, it was more than that. The assumption was that we all aspired to middle class, and that consequently middle class norms and expectations prevailed. That hadn't bothered us much when we lived in the upstairs offices. We didn't make those kinds of assumptions, and we didn't tolerate too well the arrogance they engendered.
I once came in my office to answer a phone call from the FBI. Lois had decided she wanted to be an FBI agent, and had left my office number for reference. And Lois, you will recall, was doing her research on hookers. Hard to be seriously middle class with those kinds of antics going on.
One afternoon a former student returned. He had been student body president a couple of years back. He found me standing on my desk, painting one office wall barn red. We had decided barn red would have a calming effect, and it did. As he gestured and emoted with his hands, he gradually got me to understand that his jaw was wired together. I collapsed in laughter. Not kind, no. But he was the fastest talking con I'd ever known. Talk about poetic justice. The trouble was he burst out laughing, too, and I'm sorry to think that must have hurt him.
We laughed and played a lot. And we pretty much called puffed up bull froggery. Now, you see, that's what was missing in the new center. No one of the new group would have picked up a can of barn red paint and a roller and jumped on top of the desk to paint the wall red. And a former student would never have come in and burst into laughter over a wired jaw. But those effects were a part of our strength. We trusted who we were. We didn't need to puff up.
Until the innuendos about our "standards" or lack thereof began to subtly fill the air. We hired a director for Connie's study. That wonderful $15,000 again. And soon I found that she had more say about the project than I did. Wow! I didn't really think she knew diddly squat. But the director's meetings at the big table discussed her ideas quite seriously.
I don't think any of us really cared all that much. We had to get the silly study done. And for that we needed all the 70 or so students we had in the center. So I guess I didn't really notice until we almost had the work done. By then, there were festering rumors that the "directors" were being paid, and the students who did the work were not. Yo, guys, that's not social justice. We used to call it exploitation. The "directors" didn't know a whole bunch other than what Aging Wolf and I had taught theme. I squawked. And spouted some pretty sensational purple prose on behalf of sharing pittances fairly. And then, assuming I had been heard in good faith, I went off to get the rest of the work done.
They held directors' meetings to work out the "budget." On $15,000 you don't have a budget. You pray, and you volunteer, and you are grateful for the life experience your students bring.
The report writing team was at work on the final report. And we were asked by another community group to meet with them. There were kind of offhand suggestions that I shouldn't meet them in my old navy blue sweater and jeans. I wasn't sure what was wrong with my navy blue sweater. So finally the grumbling got a little louder. It was heard that I should wear a bra. I kid you not. Someone actually said I should do so.
Now, this is where Weber is right. Bureaucracy kills us. It kills the human spirit in us as we begin to treat each other as fungible.
We didn't have any protection in those days for disabled Americans, so you didn't freely acknowledge that you were disabled. By the age of 17 I suffered such excruciating spasms whenever I wore anything tight. Bras tend to be tight. I had gone through every type of bra my mother could find, including awful lace-up corsets. By the time I was a sophomore in college, I had to give up wearing bras. Not that I had anything to wear in them. No boobs, remember? But in those days, the 50s, it simply wasn't done.
So I sat right down for a while. Didn't think. Just sat. There had to be an appropriate way to handle this. I guess I could have explained my predicament, but, you know, it just felt like colonization, and I didn't want to explain it.
The next morning there appeared on one of the bulleltin boards in the center a lovely pink lace bra, skewered to the board with a push pin. Someone did eventually ask about it.
"Oh, that's my bra, for when the community people come to consult."
Word Count:
xxxx words. Former word count: 18420. Total word count: 18420 + xxxx = xxxxx