Students Swell Faculty’s Fight Against Layoffs : Lemons Help ‘Put the Squeeze’ on Trustees Before Crucial Vote

Sherri Bebee is a single mother and high school dropout who says her job history includes cleaning toilets and washing dishes. She notes she once was arrested for drug possession. Currently, Bebee is on welfare and she and her 4-year-old son Mark share a one-bedroom apartment with her parents.

The 25-year-old woman is also a campus activist.

Bebee has taken this unexpected role during her first semester at Los Angeles City College, one of nine junior colleges within the Los Angeles Community College District. Currently studying occupational therapy, Bebee is one of hundreds of students and faculty who have escalated a winter of discontent into a spring of protest.

Tenured Teachers to Go

The reason: the first-ever layoffs of tenured faculty within the district, voted by the board of trustees in February and reaffirmed this week. The layoffs were decided on as part of a shift in curriculum emphasis at the community colleges. Among the subject areas most affected by the cuts are nursing, psychology, physical education, history and a number of job-training areas.

Originally, about 142 notices of possible layoffs were issued to a faculty that totals slightly more than 1,800. For a variety of reasons, the number of full-time teaching layoffs was scaled back to 48, the final number of dismissals approved by the board Wednesday. And that number may be further reduced, particularly among the hard-hit coaching and physical education staffs. But the rollback apparently did little to quiet the campuses, where protest meetings and rallies have punctuated the last three months.

For example, Bebee said she initially joined the protests because it looked as if her subject area--which promises a job that will get her off welfare--would be eliminated before she had finished her studies. Now, even though she has been assured she’ll be able to complete the two-year program before her department is dropped, Bebee continues to show up at board meetings with student and faculty groups. Last month she even found herself addressing a campus rally of several hundred at City College, an event she recalls with some amazement.

Bebee said she has maintained her support for the protest movement because she has seen enough of the low side of life and believes the opportunity to escape should be available to others. In fact, she credits enrolling at City College with bringing her out of a years-long torpor. “I could never see myself getting off welfare,” she said. “Going to school is like a high. I love school.”

Bebee has plenty of peers who share that sentiment, including Robin Rice, 42, a nursing student at City College who has worked as a florist and vacuum cleaner salesperson, and Angerita Wright, 36, who has worked 16 years as a nurse’s aide and now is in her first semester of the nursing program. Both Rice and Wright, who are single parents, have joined the protest movement because nursing is one of the programs most affected by the faculty cutbacks, which include elimination of nursing programs at City College and West Los Angeles College. Like many others interviewed, they say that problems of money, child care and transportation would make a move to another campus difficult.

The grass-roots rebellion against cutbacks has mobilized an unlikely coalition of students and faculty against the board of trustees of the community college district. Those on the other side of the fence, including board of trustees president Monroe Richman, say that the coalition is the product of faculty agitation, that the students would not have acted on their own.

Rhetoric and Heartbreak

The rebellion has been waged with lemons inked with anti-trustee messages, telephone tapes, demonstrations, a lawsuit, reams of paper and an immeasurable amount of rhetoric. It has been bitter, prolonged and, for some, heartbreaking.

The dropping of full-time teachers has been the latest episode in a long-running drama of retrenchment and realignment for the financially strapped district that has suffered a severe enrollment decline--from 139,000 four years ago to 87,000 today. The decline has been blamed on many factors, most prominently on the levying of a $50-per-semester fee for colleges that previously were tuition free.

The board of trustees and district administration have defended the faculty cuts by arguing that most of the layoffs are coming in low-demand or non-essential areas. The curriculum must be revamped to offer more courses in such subjects as computer science, business, mathematics and English, they say. The reality, board members and administrators have said repeatedly, is that an era of luxury is over, that the day when Los Angeles’ community colleges could cater to every whim and taste are gone. Moreover, they add, the community colleges are serving a smaller and smaller slice of the public as many college-age students choose to go directly to four-year schools.

Unlike previous measures such as layoffs of non-teaching staff and deferred maintenance, however, the faculty layoffs galvanized students and teachers, who until this year had been able to largely ignore the colleges’ deterioration. For example, Fay Hall, a nursing instructor at L.A. Harbor College, is trying to decide what she’ll do after she has to leave her job this summer, four years before she would qualify for full retirement benefits.

While some instructors like Hall will be out of work, apparently the biggest impact of the firings is that many teachers will be shuffled into different subjects and departments in a process called “bumping”--teachers with more seniority moving into jobs held by more junior instructors. In addition, about 100 part-time instructors will be laid off. This process, mandated by state law and union contract, has created some odd situations.

Shift to Humanities

For instance, Jackie Russo, an instructor in City College’s optician program, will become an instructor in the humanities department. Russo said she apparently qualified for the shift because she had taken a number of humanities classes during her own education. “I had never taken any courses with the intention of teaching (humanities),” she said. In other cases a psychology instructor has been reassigned to the math department at City College and a dance instructor was transferred to the speech department at Valley College.

Some teachers say that the toll of the shifts is in some ways more damaging than outright job loss. Nina Terebinski, an anthropology teacher at West Los Angeles College, said her transfer to the sociology department has been a hard psychological blow. “I feel as if I have been destroyed,” she said, explaining that she considers teaching anthropology as the key to her professional identity.

Teachers--as well as students--who are not affected by the job cutbacks have come out in support of their colleagues. Stephen Saltzman, a psychology teacher at Valley College, is one. Saltzman has addressed meetings, attended board meetings and become a student of district finances and politics. When he speaks of the board and the district administration, he uses terms such as demagogic and autocratic. Les Boston, a Valley College English teacher, has been publishing a newsletter which includes minute analyses of the statements of trustees and district administrators.

Acrimony and Distrust

Over the months the dispute appears to have widened the gulf between the board and the junior colleges’ staff and students--a gap that now seems to be bridged mainly by acrimony and distrust.

In the latest last-ditch skirmish Wednesday, for example, students from Valley College presented hundreds of lemons to the board while it met yet again on the layoffs. The presentation came after students and faculty held a protest rally on their campus at which speakers lambasted the board with sarcasm and invective under the theme “put the squeeze on the board of trustees.” One teacher who is scheduled to be laid off, sociology instructor Mike Vivian, put a slice of lemon in a martini glass, poured in gin and toasted the crowd of about a hundred. Vivian also brought along a box of voter registration forms and urged students to campaign actively against board members who will be up for reelection next year.

Last week, nursing instructors and students from around the district held a press conference, complete with politicians supporting their cause, to attack cuts in their field. Moreover, last week a lawsuit was filed to stop the dismissals. Previously, students and faculty had protested the cutbacks with demonstrations on campus and at the district’s headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, as well as using a variety of other tactics, including taped messages decrying the layoffs on personal and departmental telephone answering machines.

Dogging His Footsteps

Richman, president of the board of trustees, said in an interview this week that protesters have dogged his footsteps. When he dedicated a new handicapped access ramp at Valley College recently, he said, students carrying signs were there to greet him.

Richman said he sympathizes with students, even though he believes that many have been “manipulated” and that “gross misrepresentation has whipped up their fervor.”

The Los Angeles district is a microcosm of a national dilemma, Richman argued, noting that junior colleges have been in decline all over the country. He attributed the decline to the national debate over public education versus private education, saying that government policy both in California and nationally has favored private institutions the last few years.

In his view, Richman said, junior colleges must return to the “nitty-gritty of transfer courses (to four-year colleges)” and dispense with classes such as the “history of development of subways in New York” if they are to have a role in the future.

‘Most Miserable Day’

While there are few who seem to be above this battle, there are observers who retain some distance from the fray. Herbert Ravetch, who retired last year as president of the district’s Pierce College, said that firing workers is the “most terrible thing anybody can face” and that his one brush with layoffs was “the most miserable day of my whole administrative career.”

Ravetch said the strong reaction to the layoffs may be due to the fact that “this is the first time in the history of the world as far as this district is concerned that any faculty had to be let go.” The former president also said the board might have avoided the furor over the cuts if they had been introduced gradually, along with the other measures taken in the past few years. If anything, Ravetch said, the board made “an error of compassion” by delaying staff cuts as long as it did.