I feel that I am in good company.   I am now, well, partially unemployed.   I lost a job that I really loved doing, and after all the ranting and paranoia and sadness, I can in reality say, it’s the economy, stupid.   It’s funny because I, in this job, had been advising and counseling so many people who were coming back to school because they had lost their jobs.   Now I know what it feels like – a quick jab to the spot where the air that was there is quickly expelled and then a slow and sullen shock that envelops you like Peter Pan’s shadow that he keeps trying to sew back on.  Only you want it to be ripped off and shoved back in that drawer in Wendy’s room…forever.  I’ve been fired so seldom in my life.  One time I lost an acting job because I didn’t know enough of what “Uta said.”  Luckily the next day I got the best job of my life …then.  So I know…I do know that a door closes and another opens.   I do know to be still and wait.   Well, these are also the wonderful bits of advice I had been giving my advisees, till I lost them.   I think they’ll survive without my gems.

There is an unfortunate culture afoot at my school – Lehman College, and please forgive my blatant naivete, but I still believe that schools are about serving students.   It doesn’t look that way when you dig a bit.  Oh, on the surface, there are the usual glossy magazines and pretend kowtowing to the student government, as if they were all little Einsteins.   In reality, students at Lehman are generally treated very poorly by administrators.  I can’t speak for the teachers; the ones I have worked with have really cared and given their best to their teaching.  It seems so obvious to me that if you create a culture where students are commodities, where everything is about money, the bottom line and all that, you create something that produces less than spectacular results.    Over the years that I have been at Lehman, I have experienced it all.  I started as a transfer student back in the 1980’s and ultimately graduated in 1999 and then went on to the Master’s program in English Lit.    When I say I was treated shabbily, you will just have to believe me.   Petty bureaucrats were rude and heartless.   Part of the reason I took the job that I was just let go of, was to be kind to the students, because when I had been an undergrad in that program I had been treated like scum.   I have heard so many tales from other students as well of them being treated so very badly when they went for advisement to this or that department.    It’s reached levels that are unconscionable.   Fat cat administrators sit and collect big salaries (at least from where I stand) and  are not available to the students.   They have layers of admin assistants, college assistants, work-study students forming barriers to their inner sanctums.

It’s a joke when I hear talk of upgrading the standards at Lehman for admittance.  Lehman needs to clean its own house before it even dreams of getting better students.  They don’t treat the ones they have very well.  Physician, heal thyself. Or maybe better … is there a doctor in the house?   because we sure need one or more.