My Own Experience with Trumpism

We had had an excellent principal at this school who had served faithfully and well for 20 years. He was one of the finest Christian gentlemen it has been my privilege to know and the best boss I’ve ever had. But 20 years is a long time to deal with the constant headaches of being in his position, and he had wisely and proactively made plans to go on to a second career, that of college history professor. So the day came when he announced that the current school year would be his last. The hunt was one for his replacement.

So here was this man leading up a school that was in great financial shape. What could be better? That spring he was invited to come visit the school. He happened to visit my class and then sat right across me at lunch afterwards. He hardly spoke to me, nor, as I remember, to anyone else. He was unfriendly and unsmiling. We were all kind of appalled, I think. I certainly was, and I hoped fervently that he wouldn’t end up being hired.But he was. I can vividly remember the silence in the room the day that the president of school came to faculty meeting and announced that this man had been hired. I stayed afterward to talk to the president (who was also the pastor of the church), as I wanted him to know why we had reacted as we did. (Of course, one might point out that my speaking out at this point was an exercise in futility. Why hadn’t I spoken up earlier, when it might have done some good? A reasonable question.) I shared my perceptions of the principal-elect as a cold, unfriendly person who didn’t seem at all interested n building a good relationship with the faculty. My concerns were airily dismissed, and I was treated to a disquisition about how wonderfully well his current school was doing financially. As a friend pointed out to me when I related the conversation to her: “So it’s all about the money.”

The new principal arrived the next fall. I guess I’ll call him Mr. Jones. From day one, chaos reigned. He seemed to have no concept of the great honor he had been given in being hired to lead one of the premier Christian schools in the country. He had no respect for the history and traditions that were a part of this decades-old school. (Is any of this starting to sound familiar?) Instead of recognizing that he was the new guy on the block, keeping his head down and learning his job, and building relationships with the people who had made the school what it was, he let it be known that the new order had arrived and the new broom was set to sweep.

One of his first actions, taken before the school year had even officially begun, was to attend the season’s first football game. There we were, student, faculty and parents, standing around the field on a beautiful late-summer afternoon, watching the team play. And what was Mr. Jones doing? He was going around giving out demerits to students who were chewing gun. I kid you not. The rule in the student handbook was, “no gum chewing allowed on school property.” And the football field was school property, wasn’t it? So . . . he was honor bound to enforce that rule, wasn’t he? There didn’t seem to be any conception of appropriateness in his mindset. Did he really want his first interaction with some of these people to be his handing them a demerit slip? Wasn’t the game perhaps a good opportunity to get acquainted with his new student body and their parents? Apparently not. His action passed into the folklore of the school. (I guess you could make a case that stepping on a wad of gum hidden in the grass is just as obnoxious as stepping on a wad of gum on the sidewalk, but . . . hey, lighten up already!)

Okay. Mr. Jones was known as a no-pants-on-women person. (If you’re reading this and you’re not from a certain background, that sentence isn’t going to make a bit of sense to you. But remember: even secular society frowned on pants-wearing women until fairly recently. When Mary Tyler Moore was cast as Rob Petrie’s wife in The Dick Van Dyke Show, she had to put her foot down very hard that she would not be wearing the usual dress, heels and nylons that housewives were supposed to wear on TV. And this was in the Sixties!) The female teachers at the school had long been barred from wearing pants “around town,” in the words of the former president/pastor, and of course we had to wear skirts and pantyhose in the classroom, but even then it was acknowledged that there were times and places when a pair of pants on a woman only made sense, such as on the ski slope. And the new president/pastor had relaxed the rules quite considerably, simply asking that women faculty continue to wear dresses while teaching. I will never forget the pre-school-year faculty meeting when Mr. Jones was going through the faculty handbook and got to that section. He stopped, looked up, and said, “Since this rule is already in the handbook I will let it stand for this year, but I want it to be clear that next year it will be changed.” And the p/p was standing right there! It was insulting and inappropriate. I’m sure all of us women faculty and staff sighed inwardly; I know I did.

Now Mr. Jones took a look at the class schedule. Our sensible former principal had had the sense to realize that it wasn’t a good idea to try to cram the entire junior and senior high student body into the lunchroom at once. It would be too crowded, always a bad idea when you’re trying to maintain order, and it would involve too great of a range of ages, also a bad idea. He knew that there would be a tendency for the older students to pick on the younger ones. So he had always set up the schedule to have a separate lunch hour for the junior high and the senior high. But to Mr. Jones this was just too complicated. Since lunchtime was a different length than a regular class hour (half an hour vs. 45 minutes), the different times had to be slotted in around each other in a way that they came out even. Also, teachers’ schedules had to be worked out so that they’d have a lunch hour. Hey, it wasn’t rocket science! But Mr. Jones didn’t want to bother, even though several of us objected to the plan. It would be fine, he assured us. Well, some of us said, could you at least be sure that you’re a presence in the lunchroom? It’s very helpful to have the principal on the spot. Our former principal had always made a point of being there, and there was always a discernible difference in student behavior when for some reason he was gone. The noise and rowdiness levels would go up. But Mr. Jones didn’t make many appearances in the lunchroom. In fact, it started to become clear that he didn’t really like students very much. He had no rapport with them; he actually seemed a little afraid of them. He preferred to stay in his office, making great plans, while his policies created difficulties. Eventually, after several weeks, he reluctantly changed the lunch schedule to reinstate the split lunch.

Well, time and space would fail me to go into detail on the ongoing saga that developed. As Mr. Jones looked to revamp the finances of the school he decided that far too much money was being spent on the sports program, in particular the football team. After all, at his former school the boys played soccer, a sport requiring far less equipment and insurance than football, and they didn’t even have a gym for practicing basketball but instead played at a local park. (His former school was in Arizona, a state not known for cold weather or snowfall, unlike Colorado, where he was now serving.) Let me tell you something: there were fathers of kindergarteners who were counting the days until their sons would be able to play on the high school team. Was that a little silly? Probably. Is high-school football maybe not such a good idea after all? Almost certainly. But that wasn’t the point. He had come into a school and immediately started shooting himself in the foot. We had an hours-long faculty meeting with him followed by a even-more-hours-long parent meeting. He saw nothing wrong with what he was doing. He knew what was best.

At some point I found out that the whole “Mr. Jones will put the school back in the black” idea had been founded on a total misunderstanding of how his previous school had operated. The two institutions were not remotely similar, as the previous school’s enrollment was made up of over 25% kindergarten students, both four-year-olds and five-year-olds, with class in the morning and daycare in the afternoon. Since there was a college connected with that school, there was a ready supply of low-cost workers to staff the kindergarten positions that didn’t require a degree. We had always had kindergarten for five-year-olds only and only for a half day of class. And there had apparently been some big donors at the old school, people who liked Mr. Jones and gave accordingly. We had no such people at ours. It had always been a pipe dream that we were somehow going to be ushered into the Promised Land under the new administration.

So the year dragged on. I was up in my classroom with the door closed, teaching away, actually having a very good year. And it’s only fair to say that the anti-Mr. Jones camp wasn’t exactly pure as the driven snow in their opposition. There was far too much griping and complaining among the faculty; I got involved a few times with an ongoing after-school session that was really doing nothing to help matters and decided that I needed to stay away. And there were parents who started making malicious phone calls to Mr. Jones’ home, an action that was cowardly and counter-productive. But there were those who tried to address the problems of the Jones administration directly and got nowhere. Students were being treated badly, called into the office and bawled out for minor offenses. Parents’ concerns were going unheeded. It was clearly not a situation that could continue. The school was losing students, and probable enrollment for the next year didn’t look good at all.

My own realization that I couldn’t stay in the situation came sometime in the early spring when Mr. Jones called me into his office to inform me that he was going to be revamping the history program for the following year in order to fit in with some curriculum he wanted us to use. Instead of there being two years each of world and American history there would be only one each, as that was the way the preferred textbooks were written. I had poured hundreds of hours into developing my world history classes for eighth and ninth grates; now all of that material would have to be cut down by half. I might not have been the best grammar or literature teacher in the known universe, but my world history classes rocked. I tried to point out to Mr. Jones that he was gutting a long-standing program, not just of my classes but of the overall arc of history and government classes from seventh through twelfth grade. He wasn’t interested in hearing what I had to say. I remember leaving his office and thinking, ‘This is the final straw.’ I made the decision then that I wouldn’t be signing a contract for the next school year. If I was supposed to honor and respect those in leadership, then I needed to remove myself from leadership for which I couldn’t fulfill that obligation.

And what finally happened? Mr. Jones ended up leaving the school before the year ended, sometime in April. The assistant principal filled in for the rest of the year, and then the school went through a succession of principals—and scandals. First the high school was closed, then the junior high, and then the announcement was made last school year that the school as a whole was closing. An institution that people had selflessly worked for and donated to was gone. Why? Ultimately because of a failure of leadership.

Well, I won’t belabor the point here. (Some of you may think I’ve belabored it way too much already.) The parallels are pretty clear. I’m not at all encouraged by the story I’ve related; a good school that had done good work never recovered from a stretch of disastrous leadership. All I can say is that I hope and pray that America can somehow recover from the horrendous mistake of putting someone far worse than Mr. Jones into a far more prominent position.