State of the Senate Fall 2001
(Hoke's Dream presented at the 2001 Fall Pleanary Session)

You may remember that it was James Carville who ran Bill Clinton’s first campaign for President, and in order to keep himself and Clinton and everyone else in the campaign focused on the key issue, Carville had a sign over his desk that read, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Well, I’ve got a sign over my desk this year, and it says, “It’s the funding stupid!”

Now, I’m sure that Carville got his inspiration from a careful analysis of the issues, tons of polling data, and so on. In my own case, the approach was somewhat less scientific and left-brained; in fact, the idea came to me in a dream.

Now, at this point in my presentation today, I have two choices, and I’m going to ask you to decide which one I should make.

On the one hand, I have my prepared speech on the State of the Senate—it’s chock full of data, with tables and graphs that I’ll have to describe for you because I don’t have them in overheads, but that’s ok, because they’re really fascinating, and the speech is also replete with references to past resolutions of the Academic Senate and detailed accounts of the people and committees that carried them out, and there’s a section on the governance structure of the community college system, for anyone who doesn’t know about the roles of each group in the Consultation Council. And some of you might find all this a little dry, but I’m prepared to do it because it’s important.

On the other hand, I have some notes here on my dream, and I could tell you about that. So you decide—which should it be? [Shouts of  “The dream!”]

OK. [Tear up paper in right hand.] The decision’s made.

But if I’m going to tell you about my dream, I need your help if I’m really going to communicate the emotional impact to you. Because at certain points in the dream there were whole choruses of voices shouting at me, “It’s the funding, stupid!” So when I go like this [make one-handed pointing gesture at audience], you need to yell, “It’s the funding, stupid!” [Try it once.] That’s good. Now, I don’t want you to get bored, and there is a variation. So I want you to watch really carefully, and when I go like this [make two-handed pointing gesture at audience], yell, “It’s the stupid funding!” [Try this once.] Great. OK, so here’s how the dream went.

I dreamed that I had this very responsible position as President of the Academic Senate, and I had to figure out what to do, where to put my effort and energy, what direction the Senate might take that would make a difference: Would it be shared governance, or diversity, or part-time equity, or one of the areas of authority specified in Title 5, or what?

So I decided to go ask the head of the system, our Chancellor, Tom Nussbaum, what the Senate should do. (I see Tom over there smiling. He knows this was a dream!) Anyway, there I was in Tom’s office asking him what our focus should be, and Tom didn’t even look at me, he just reached out and took hold of the pen in his desk set and pushed it to one side like he was throwing a switch—and there popped up behind him, like one of those pop-up pictures in a children’s book, the whole Chancellor’s staff and the Consultation Council, and the Board of Governors too—but they weren’t pictures, they were all real. There was Patrick Lenz, and Vicki Morrow, David Viar, Rich Leib, all of them. And they all looked at me and shouted as with a single voice, [one-handed pointing gesture] “It’s the funding, stupid!”

“Well,” I thought, “maybe you’re right, but you don’t have to get personal about it.”

So I decided that was probably as much wisdom as I was going to get out of the people in this world, so I decided to visit Heaven and Hell and see what I could find out there. So I flipped a coin and headed for the underworld. I went straight to the eighteenth circle of Hell, which is the circle reserved for extroverts—Dante doesn’t really talk about this circle much, but it’s going to figure prominently in my forthcoming update of the Inferno—and there I found all of the past Senate presidents. When I asked them what the Senate should focus on, they all began talking at once, and they were almost all saying different things. Mike and Regina agreed on shared governance, but then Regina said diversity and Mike said student equity, Mark Edelstein said we should pay more attention to the rights of administrators, Bill said it was really all about transfer and articulation, Janis kept saying “Take the high road, take the high road,” and Linda said that we had to watch out for the cynical juxtaposition of a dialectical synthesis of theoria and praxis with a linear extrapolation of Existenz, resulting in a permanent divergence of something-or-other, and I began to feel that I’d never get a singular answer here.

So I went and called on the Devil, and put the question to him, and he called all his minions together, and they stood there swaying back and forth, twitching their little pitchfork tails and tapping their cloven hooves, looking for all the world like, well, a Motown group from Hell—when all of a sudden they spun around once and screamed in a terrifying cacophony, [one-handed pointing gesture] “It’s the funding, stupid!”

“Wow,” I thought, “imagine that. The Chancellor’s Office and the Devil on the same side.” I’d heard it could happen, but I’d never really believed it.

So I headed on up to Heaven, and I found God strolling through an Alpine meadow, every now and then taking a little skip, and jumping up and clicking his or her heels. You see, in my dream, it was impossible to tell whether God was a man or a woman.

“God, I said, “you’re looking mighty chipper. I expected you to be all frowning and somber, seeing as how you have the whole complicated universe to run.”

God looked at me and smiled. “Used to be that way,” she or he said, “until I hired Julie Adams to run the place. Now it’s all milk and honey and sleeping ‘til noon. Then of course there’s the angels and archangels; they help a lot, but Julie keeps ‘em on track.”

So I asked God my question about the senate’s focus, and he or she didn’t answer right away. Just whipped out a cell phone and called Julie, and within the blink of an eye all the angels and archangels were assembled in the meadow. And you can only guess how surprised I was to see that every one of them was an Exec member—but there were multiple instances of each one of them, one for every committee they chaired or task force they sat on. I counted at least fifteen Ian Waltons and as many Kate Clarks and Mark Snowhites and Linda Collinses. I was puzzled for a moment about how Linda could be both down in the eighteenth circle of Hell and at the same time a member of the heavenly host, but decided it must have something to do with that dialectical synthesis, and I kept looking around. There were Mark Lieus, Nancy Silvas and Bev Shues, Debra Landries and Elton Halls, there were multiple Dibakar Baruas and Lacy Barnes-Milehams, Scott Lukases, Dale Newmans and many, many Renee Tullers. They were indeed a glorious host, and when God put my question to them, they fluttered their beautiful wings, and inhaled as one the golden air, and sang forth their answer with a sound that shook the stars in their orbits: [One-handed pointing gesture] “It’s the funding, stupid!”

Well, you’d think I’d have gotten the picture by now, but there was one more place I had to go, so I waved goodbye to my heavenly advisors and took off for the White House to put my question to Dubya. Dubya took his good Texas time answering me. He poured us both a Scotch, we lit up a couple of cigars and sat back with our feet up on the south porch railing.

“Answer’s easy,” said Dubya, between sips and puffs. He glanced at me knowingly, and said, in a voice that echoed down Pennsylvania Avenue, [two-handed pointing gesture] “It’s the stupid funding!”

“You know, Dubya,” I said, “I think you’re on to something, and I like the way you put it. It is stupid to give the least to the students who need it the most, when they’re potentially the largest part of your educated workforce.”

Dubya replied, with the cigar clenched in his teeth: “Morally reprehensible, too,” he said. The phrase, “morally reprehensible”—it came out clear and unbumbled, un-Dubya’d, really, and I think I began to suspect for the first time that I must be dreaming.

And then I dreamed that I woke up—you know how sometimes you do that in a dream—and I found myself standing in front of a roomful of faculty representatives from the California community colleges, and I asked them, “What should we do? What’s the issue that we can all come together on, faculty and students, administrators and staff, local boards and state Board, the Chancellor’s Office and the people? What is it that we need if we are going to truly deliver on the promise of a high quality education for every student who comes to our doors? Where do we put our focus,” I asked, “if we are really going to provide equity for the top 100%?”

And those faculty representatives answered me with a shout that came from every corner of the state, from the mountains, the valleys, the plains and the seashores, from one hundred and eight community colleges and counting, where faculty everyday are performing their shoestring miracles, they said in way that you knew that they meant it, [one-handed pointing gesture] “It’s the funding, stupid!”

That was my dream, and that’s why there’s that sign in my office.