A CITY COLLEGE DEAN, OTHERS AND THEIR LANGUAGE LIMITATIONS

It could be any city college in any urban environment, where I could have taught, with multiple linguistic codes determining communication possibilities and ways to establish power; and my dean used to do it with me, by turning to a third person, anyone who was with us, and asking in response to any comment I would have made with my thick Puerto Rican Spanish accent, including “sonidos velares”, “What did he say?”. 

This is the same man who once asked another Puerto Rican professor and me (1990s in New York City) after we had a meeting with visiting Mexican academicians, if we understood each other. Should I have asked if he had read La Raza Cósmica, among many Latin American and Iberian classics, which I had to study and “intertextualize” (before the post moderns coined the term) as an undergrad at the Universidad Pontificia Santa María better known as La Católica Ponce or did he know that San Juan had academies run by Jesuist before there was a New York City. Civilization had arrived in the island of Puerto Rico before it did in the island of Mahattan, colony or not. Worse of all, he was responsible for not granting tenure to an excellent, well educated and in command of her field, leading Puerto Rican educator with a long history of social, political activism, who would have been an asset to School of Education, and project what the institution was about; instead, tenure was granted to a white woman, with a very mediocre record except she was good at writing reports.

Snce I was a member of the Committee reviewing the candidates, I know what kind of dirty politics against the Puerto Rican female candidate for tenure were played by another Puerto Rican, who spoke against granting tenure, simply because -like a great deal of colonials- she did not want to be seen as a person who would support another Puerto Rican (unless she could control them). She thought, I was under her control. That is when I decided to leave the place. And for the rest of the Committee, a bunch of white "progressive" women, it was quite easy to convince them to support the other white female candidate -a nice person, but could not compete with the Puerto Rican. It was a strange form of racism combined with a great deal of dishonesty, betrayal and parasitism. A very sad moment in the history of bilingual education at the City College.

It should not surprise anyone that such mediocre man -his own field included; trust me; I was there; he only published textbooks- would be a dean; though, this one -like many New York children of working class parents who make it into elite schools and IV league colleges- loved to brag about his “upper crust education” without ever realizing that the “standards” he met were very limited in scope - “una vida sin reflexión”-, otherwise, he would have been able to reflect like Augustine once suggested, be cautious, and ask in private for translation from the same people who were with us in the conversation, most of them “his own people”, who understood me. 

He was not the only one with linguistic limitations: there was the constructivist who taught like a behaviorist and corrected continuously my very “hispanized” open vowels, until I told another colleague that the constructivist-behaviorist did not have a clue, understood issues on language acquisition and development, much less when there was a “colonial” in the “bochinche”, and that she should stick to programmed pseudo open learning activities, to be sold as constructvist but were not, instead of entering into a discussion on language, colonization, racism, and her own inability to understand  theoretical constructs beyond her own limited and provincial education. She had never read the work of well known Latin American constructivists,  published in translation; much less, the educational classics from South of the border and their positions on "la barbarie".

"La barbarie": a topic when studying Latin American authors. As illusory as it sounds, yes, those of us educated (1950s Puerto Rico) with the ideas discussed by authors such as Sarmiento, Hostos, Rodó, Vasconcelos, Gallegos and their European peers at the time -"what the industrious North had in machine power lacked in civilized culture"-   did not come into the ring where my ex dean used to "rule" with a subordinate mentality. Colonials might not be colonized in the ways the "colonizer" thinks it should be or it has been". 

Never to be forgotten, the  professor of psychology who studied anxiety in the classroom and used to repeat, making fun of, what non-native speakers of English would say in class, until one African-American male student challenged him to apologize to the class or face consequences. The professor did apologize. Quick redemption when your job and limited vision of the world and its place in the City College is exposed. 

*From the book in progress There were not Soles Truncos in Academia