When I was asked to write about the impact of society on our profession over the last twenty-five years, it occurred to me that the period also measures my own lifetime as a professional. I took up full-time teaching in 1957, the year before I received my doctorate. I gave my first paper at a Modern Language Association convention around that time, participated in producing two sons, and published my first article. I left one job, joined in antinuke, anti-ROTC, and prounion activities, and got fired from the second job. I remember complaining to my graduate school director, en route to a third job, how painfully remote upstate New York seemed from everything I valued. Said he, flatly, “You can publish your way out of any place.” Perhaps that was so, then; certainly I acted on that instruction. But I never really put it to the test, for somehow my career swerved that splinter and never returned quite to the groove. In 1963 I went to work for the Quakers, promoting peace studies and learning about political economy. Then, in 1964, I traveled to Mississippi to teach in Freedom Schools and discovered the profound limitations of my graduate school education. With deliberation, among a group of my students from Smith, I went off to jail in Montgomery. Later, as the peace movement brought the war home, I was provided with a more impromptu visit to the Baltimore pokey after trying to protect a Vietnam vet from an outraged policeman. For a number of years I sported a little red button that said “A free university in a free society”—an idea on the basis of which I tried to conduct my life. In due course, I became an active feminist, involved in efforts, like The Feminist Press, to change education and thus society. That pattern of life was not, of course, precisely typical of members of our profession— though more people than we now acknowledge participated in it one way or another. I speak of my life because it reflected, in a sense became a vehicle of, the forces for social change I am to write about here.
The Impact of School Building Conditions on Student Absenteeism in Upstate New York
