The last few years have been troubling times for the City Colleges of Chicago, and for Ron Gidwitz, the colleges’ chairman of the board.

Gidwitz was out of the country and unavailable for comment, but the college press office responded to my questions by sending a fact sheet that praises him for leading “a top-to-bottom cleanup of the City Colleges–possibly the most comprehensive such effort in the nation.”

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As Gidwitz’s backers see it, the college payroll is bloated by lazy professors, and the faculty’s howls of protest indicate the chairman’s “reforms” are working. “No one likes change,” Mayor Daley said at the July 13 City Council meeting where Gidwitz was reappointed. “We have a crisis at the City Colleges. You have to take drastic steps. Education is not accountable. When you get them accountable, they don’t like it.”

In the last 15 years the system has attempted to hold back salaries by replacing full-time teachers with part-time staffers who work without benefits for about $1,000 a class. The low pay breeds transience, teachers say, as the better part-timers rarely stay for more than one or two years. “As soon as they see there’s no future in the job the better ones move on,” says Thomas Gillespie, chairman of the mathematics department at Washington. “It’s hard to build continuity. You have to wonder, if this trend continues what kind of college will we have in the next 10 or 20 years?”

“There was no discussion, no debate–his language was slipped onto a bill about public school education when no one was looking,” says Shapiro. “Most legislators didn’t even know what they were voting for. Certainly no one asked if it was good for education. I mean, is it good to stuff 50 students into a classroom? As it is we have some biology classes where there aren’t enough microscopes to go around. Can you imagine how little individual attention I could afford a writing class of 50? Can you imagine a public-speaking class of 45? Each student would get one minute and 45 seconds to speak.”

In fact, the Sun-Times editorial made that very assumption, absolving Gidwitz of any role in the matter on the grounds that “those investments were made before he was appointed.”

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.