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Orwellian oligarchy
Monday, June 18 2012
Since losing her job as a prison college administrator, Gretchen has been trying to cobble together work where she can. One idea she had is to host poetry writers' workshops, and today we would be having one at our house. So I thought it a good idea to spruce up the outdoors, which had been overrun yet again by vegetative growth. I spent a couple hours weed-whacking the lawn, cleaning up dog shit, and making the chaos of my garage-based carpentry prefabrication operation look a bit tidier.
At some point Gretchen got a communication from the prison-college partnership for which she'd been an administrator telling her that her services as an academic adviser would no longer be required.
[REDACTED]
This amounted to a second firing on top of the one that had cleaved us from both a salary and a health care plan. This was devastating news; it meant Gretchen would lose contact with most of the prisoner-students. While I'm not people-oriented to fully understand Gretchen's trauma, I understand that educators appreciate staying in touch with the people they educate, something that is inherently difficult with prisoner-students unless one is able to enter the prison on a regular basis. But it's becoming clear that the prison-college partnership Gretchen had been working for is run as an Orwellian oligarchy. For some reason they developed a distaste for Gretchen and sentenced her relationship with their partnership to death.
Nevertheless, Gretchen pulled things together this evening in time for the poetry writers' workshop, which for her proved to be a welcome distraction. During the two hours when that was happening, I holed up in the laboratory sipping wine and doing web development.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120618 feedback
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