L.A.’s Universities Can Help Heal the City

Los Angeles is in a condition of institutional malaise and should call upon its universities for help. Its school district is in danger of an organizational meltdown, exacerbated by interethnic misunderstandings and rivalries. Despite some setbacks, secessionism still stirs in both the San Fernando Valley and the Wilmington-San Pedro area and, more subliminally, on the East and West sides of the city.

Elective politics, especially of the mayoral kind, is caught in a conundrum. For a mayoral candidate to ignore either the school-district crisis or secessionist sentiment--and the two are now being fused--is not an option. On the other hand, mayoral candidates have got to face the fact that by promoting the breakup of L.A. Unified, they are aligning themselves with the secessionist movement now that Valley VOTE and other secessionist groups have declared their intention to use the breakup of LAUSD as an anvil on which to shatter Los Angeles as well. A mayoral candidate favoring a district breakup, as all the declared seem to be, is also assisting the breakup of the very city that the candidate would lead as mayor.

As singer Peggy Lee asks, “Is that all there is?”: compromised standards, ethnic divisiveness, organizational meltdown, finger-to-the-wind politics, a sense of Los Angeles not as a moral community, but as a storehouse of political goodies to be looted.

The problem is: Where does one find a unifying vision, some sense of community beyond the fractionated present? Where can one find such healing? Where can one find effective action on behalf of a more mature L.A. identity?

Metropolitan Los Angeles is graced with a rich variety of academic institutions that can provide answers. Its two largest research universities, USC and UCLA, each maintain nationally ranked schools of education and institutes for regional study and research. The Getty Center, a research institute of global importance, has chosen Los Angeles as one of its dedicated fields of study. Loyola Marymount maintains a flourishing Institute for the Study of Los Angeles; and Pepperdine’s Institute for Public Policy is devoted to regional issues. At Cal State Los Angeles is the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr. Institute of Public Affairs. Cal State Northridge, meanwhile, is the major local educator of teachers and school administrators and maintains a notable expertise in the demographics of the region. Occidental and Whittier Colleges are among the most respected institutions of their kind, with long-standing traditions of local involvement. Further afield, but still within Los Angeles County, are the many research institutes of the Claremont Colleges, most notably the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna. UC Irvine in Orange County, finally, is rapidly gaining a reputation as a center for regional research, especially in the field of transportation.

Certainly, the resources of these academic institutions are not irrelevant to the current LAUSD crisis. As well as appointing Ramon C. Cortines as interim superintendent, the school board might also consider convening a blue-ribbon panel under the chairmanship of the president of USC or the chancellor of UCLA, or a co-chairmanship held by each of them, and charge that panel with investigating and making recommendations for the reform and revitalization of public education in Los Angeles.

By turning to the academy for help, the school district will not only receive expert guidance, it will also extract the entire issue of public education and the possible breakup of the district from the kerosene-on-fire forces of secessionism and mayoral politics. It will also establish a principle, a point of reference, that is in touch with a finer and more comprehensive vision of Los Angeles than is currently operative. As things stand, the situation can only get worse as Valley VOTE and other secessionist groups openly seek to break up the school district as the first step in breaking up the city.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever--no self-evident evidence in any school of organizational theory or any theory of organizational politics--that the mere breakup of the LAUSD into 12 separate districts, as is now proposed by Valley VOTE, will do anything more than create 11 more engorged bureaucracies, 11 more superintendents and deputy superintendents and 11 more headquarter buildings filled with education apparatchiks. True, local autonomy within a comprehensive organization is desirable. Ironically, outgoing Supt. Ruben Zacarias was struggling with such a concept before his rude and impolitic dismissal. But to reconceive LAUSD as a federation of local autonomies is not the same thing as to divide it into 12 separate bureaucracies, each of them possessed of its own lust for power and growth.

Such a 12-part division of the LAUSD would dismember Los Angeles into permanent enclaves of social and ethnic exclusivity. Is the challenge of weaving a multiethnic and multicultural civic fabric, containing within itself a variety of social conditions, too fatiguing an idea?

The methods used by the school board to strip Zacarias of his authority in favor of noneducator Howard Miller, a former board member, gravely insulted Latino Los Angeles, whose children comprise 70% of the LAUSD. By acting so disrespectfully, the school board steered Los Angeles into dangerous waters. For this city has not yet learned to cope fully with its challenge to integrate the peoples of the world into one civic fabric. Not that Los Angeles should be especially blamed for this continuing difficulty. The challenge, after all, is monumental. But the very specter of ethnic conflict, while it has brought out a few bottom feeders, has motivated most Los Angelenos to seek common ground. Not only is it immoral and un-American, it is suicidal to promote anti-Semitism in one of the great urban centers of Jewish civilization or to provoke anti-Mexican sentiment in a city that is itself ground zero of Mexican American civilization and the third-largest Mexican city in the world.

Universities, we must remember, were invented by cities in the Middle Ages. Universities represent the speculative dimension of civic life, and the time has long since passed for Los Angeles to begin thinking through its school problems in a detached and rational manner. The role played by USC constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky in helping to guide charter reform to successful completion shows how a certain kind of academic expertise, coupled with personal commitment, is still relevant to the reform process.

In a better world, elective politics would navigate us through these dangerous waters. Who knows? At some time in the upcoming mayoral campaign, one or another of the candidates might advance a healing, reconciling vision worthy of this great city. In the meantime, however, it is time for the school board to extract itself from the destructive forces of secessionism in all its formats and enlist the academy to investigate ways that autonomy and localism might be fostered without making the reform of the school district a referendum on and possible prologue to the breakup of Los Angeles. *