Children of the Corn

I work at a large community college in Portland, Oregon. It’s actually the biggest college in the state, surpassing in size both of the large state universities. Last year our college president of 7 years retired, and as his final gesture, he sent everyone who works for the school a packet of corn seeds. That’s right. He sent every employee of the state’s largest college, a college located in a major metropolitan area, branded packets of corn seeds. As my coworkers started to receive theirs, our group text was blowing up making fun of this gesture. Who plants corn in the city? Why was there no note or explanation included? Who told him this was a good idea? As days went by, I honestly couldn’t wait to get mine. Not because I planned to plant corn or because I thought this was a good or nice gesture, but because I wanted to make fun of it. Sometimes the best part of working in higher education is the chance to poke fun at how ridiculous it is. When the school comes up with a new acronym, I no longer roll my eyes in despair, I make a meme. 

Image of the corn seed packets that the school president sent to every college employee EXCEPT FOR ME.

But there’s just one problem: my corn seeds never came. Despite the fact that I’ve worked at the school for 10 years and had the same address for the last 5, I somehow wasn’t on the list. I watched as my friend who moved out of state got his corn seeds. I made my friends send me pictures so I could see, first hand, the bizarre choice to pay to have a packet of corn seeds branded with the college logo. It’s been almost a year since the corn seeds went out and I’ve accepted the fact that mine must have gotten lost in the mail. Just when I thought I wouldn't hear anything else about them I heard a new story from one of my colleagues. Someone she knew had gotten a notification that he needed to pick up a piece of mail at the post office. He waited in line for an hour at the busy USPS, only to find when he got to the counter that a piece of mail had been sent to him without adequate postage. He owed $3.67 on an envelope for which the sender had only paid 83 cents. He paid, got his mysterious piece of mail and opened it up to find, with no explanation–you guessed it–a packet of “Golden Bantam” corn branded with the school’s logo. 

Everyone’s getting their corn except for me, but I’m glad I didn’t have to pay $3.67 for mine.

Besides being funny, the corn gestures at something larger that makes working for this institution farcical on good days, and cruelly corporate and detached on bad ones: the gesturing and virtue signaling are often so far out of touch with the actual experiences of the employees and students that you end up with, well, a part-time employee driving to the post office to pay to receive a useless packet of corn seeds. Take our acronym-happy administration’s latest attempt at coming up with a snappy way to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (or more realistically, their latest attempt to *signal* that they prioritize DEI). They came up with the acronym B-JEDI, which means Barriers to Justice, Equity, Diversity,  and Inclusion. It’s now a requirement that anyone who works in the academic success department is “familiar with B-JEDI work.” As someone who worked in this department for a while as the coordinator for the campus Reading and Writing Center, I was handed a rewrite of my job description last year (something I had formerly written myself because I started the center and created the job). All over the new description was this new acronym: “Coordinator must make decisions informed by B-JEDI. Work with managers to ensure emphasis on B-JEDI.” I had to search the school’s website to see what this even meant, and it was clear that I apparently wouldn’t be able to do my job unless I knew about B-JEDI.  I had so many questions. Is it supposed to be a star wars reference? If so, is that a good way to get people to take racial and social justice seriously? Did some dean just make this up and start adding it to stuff instead of just saying the words that explain how/what they would like a person to do? Was B-JEDI a result of the millions of dollars my institution had recently spent to hire outside consultants? The B-JEDI is like the corn. It sounds fun (Star Wars! Gardening!) but it doesn't translate. Most employees are not likely to grow corn in their garden (if they have a garden, which is a big if). 76% of instructors at this school work part time with no long term contract, meaning it’s unlikely they can afford to buy a house in Portland. And barriers to equity, diversity, and inclusion aren’t overcome by rearranging the letters DEI over and over and plopping them into job descriptions. Furthermore, the majority of the institution doesn't seem to care about actual barriers at all. 

Last week my colleague in the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) department was trying to help her student appeal an unjust parking ticket she had received while trying to attend class. The student had bought a daily parking pass for campus but had put it in her window instead of on the dashboard and consequently received a parking ticket. The student is in a low level ESOL literacy class. This means she’s not only learning English for the first time, but also learning to read and write for the first time in any language. On top of this, she doesn’t have computer literacy because it’s not something she had access to in the country where she lived up until very recently. All of this means that she just doesn't yet have the skill set to create a student log-in and password,  log onto the school portal, and compose a written appeal (in English) to have her ticket forgiven. Because of this, my friend (the instructor) got on the phone with parking enforcement, explained the situation, and gave them evidence of the parking pass and explained the window/dashboard misunderstanding. The parking enforcement department said that despite having all the information (the parking pass number, the ticket number, the student info) they would not appeal the ticket unless the student herself logged into the portal and wrote her own appeal. The student does not yet know how to log into the student portal at all. And it will be a while before that’s a skill set she has. I wonder if the parking enforcement people have ever tried to navigate a website in Arabic? Or if they can imagine trying to write an appeal in a language that they have studied for only 10 weeks without any previous reading or writing skills at all? They told the instructor that if the student didn’t know how to do these things then it was her job to teach the student how. And that was that. Is this considered an example of B-JEDI? Are parking enforcement employees trained in B-JEDI? Could money spent hiring outside consulting firms to come up with an acronym like B-JEDI  instead be spent abolishing a punitive parking system that creates literal barriers for the most marginalized students at our institution? The institutional website where I found the definition for all the terms in B-JEDI offers this definition of the word oppression: “Unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power, usually directed towards marginalized groups, coupled with the power and privilege of the oppressive group, and manifested at individual, cultural, and institutional levels.” The corn packets made me laugh. The parking ticket fiasco, in the wake of the school's invention of B-JEDI, makes me want to burn down the school. 

I still don’t know what the purpose of the corn was or how much those corn seeds cost. It’s not something you can look up on the institution’s website. The parking ticket, on the other hand, is less mysterious. According to the parking enforcement page, a parking ticket is $25, a fee that will be doubled after 30 days of non-payment and sent to collections after that. I can only imagine what it would be like to navigate that process with no English or literacy skills. I popped back over to the “School Mission Priority Terminology” site (yes, that’s really what it’s called). They give the following definition to the word access: “Equitable access allows for an individual to experience a mutually beneficial relationship with the institution that creates a true sense of ownership, belongingness and familiarity. It is the ability, right, and permission to approach, enter, speak with, or use all aspects of the community college, no matter who you are.”