Fight your local equivalent of Halliburton--run for part time offices like

[yurbud]

Community college boards of trustees.

Unfortunately, the good-old-boy Chamber of Commerce deal-making runs from the top all the way down to the lowest levels of government.

Your local community college is run much like the Bushies are running Iraq: for the benefit of contractors. Many of the people who sit on boards of trustees ARE local contractors, real estate agents, or in building supplies, so their nearly sole priority is getting new buildings so they can steer the contracts to their friends.

To do this, they need to run a budget surplus every year, so they will qualify for a bond to pay for the building their friends will build.

They treat students and faculty much as the Bushies treat soldiers--as an after thought at best. This summer, I taught summer school in a brand new building, but the session was two weeks shorter than usual, so we supposedly covered four months worth of material in six weeks.

Most schools balance their budgets by having 60% of the faculty work part time and pay us about 40% as much as full time faculty per hour and rarely offer benefits like health care.

Presidents and administrators are paid like pashas to facilitate these contracting scams. The president at one of my schools made $250K, more than the governor of California, and did not have to account for her expense account. At another school, the president was caught abusing his expense account,and since the board was so involved in his wrong-doing, instead of being fired and criminally prosecuted, he was given over a million dollars to go away.

If you want to see what this situation is like in your state, simply google the state name, "community college" and "scandal" or "corruption." I would be surprised if you didn't find at least two or three districts in the news.

We need progressives on those boards, but teachers can't run in their own districts.

You could make a huge difference in whether higher education is really available in your community.

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