Teachers Defend History Courses

In your article “Layoffs: Students Back Their Teachers’ Cause” (The Times, May 9), the statements attributed to Monroe Richman, president of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, amply illustrate the reasons for the gulf between the board and the colleges’ faculty and students now “bridged mainly by acrimony and distrust,” as your article notes.

His comment suggesting that Los Angeles community colleges offer frivolous, irrelevant courses such as “history of development of subways in New York” demonstrates, at best, his ignorance and, at worst, his cynical distortion of facts. He should know that no such course is offered in the district’s colleges. He should know that all of the offerings in history are part of the transfer program to four-year colleges and universities. He should know that all courses, before being offered, have been approved by him as a member of the Board of Trustees. If he does not know these things, he should not be the president of the Board of Trustees.

He berates the colleges for supposedly offering “trivia” and not emphasizing the substantive academic courses that comprise the transfer program, and yet voted for and continues to support the lay-off and reassignment policies of the board which are undermining the academic disciplines most important to that same transfer program. In history alone, mandatory in any transfer program, some 30% of the discipline’s faculty received layoff notices and were subsequently reassigned and scattered to a variety of other disciplines as though they were a set of interchangeable building blocks.

It is not the faculty members who engage in “gross misrepresentation” in order to “manipulate” the students, as Richman alleges. We teach perceptive adults, not easily misled little children. Student “fervor” is derived from their belief that the board would adopt less disruptive options if the board realized the destructive effects that its current “reorganization plan” would have on their educational and career goals.

The people of the Los Angeles Community College District deserve better than Richman’s ignorance or manipulation of facts, whichever the case might be. The faculty and students deserve more than his contemptuous dismissal.

This letter is endorsed by the 17 other members of this faculty.

SHANNON STACK

Van Nuys

Dr. Stack is the chairman of the Department of History, Humanities, Law and Political Science.