request

[arkuat]

Please direct your search engines at the name of my friend who I love:

Marianne Kearney-Brown

and then please comment here about what you think of the situation.

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Eek. I'm more than a little disturbed. Maybe because I've been reading about Acadians recently, and this is awfully familiar.

I just don't get the logic behind requiring such things. I would imagine there are plenty of people working in CA's public school system who aren't even Americans.

There's not much arguing it, though. I've never liked Cole v. Richardson; I think it makes an unfair assumption that perjury will always be the totality of the penalty for violating a loyalty oath. But I don't really think enough has changed in the world to make challenging it worthwhile.

[arkuat]

I think the California teacher's oath was introduced in the McCarthy era, and no legislator ever bothered trying to work up a proposal to abolish it, ever since then. Since it's statute, the courts can't really touch it, unless the ACLU wanted to spend a lot of money challenging the constitutionality of the oath; I've heard people handwavingly outline a case that could be made on free speech grounds, but I'd probably never have heard that one had not "free speech" been so widely abused as a constitutional principle preventing the reform of campaign financing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's just evil. I don't swear loyalty oaths to any group or institution, period and full stop. "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." But even if I did, having to swear governmental loyalty to teach math is wrong and stupid.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am, and it doesn't make any more sense to me.

[arkuat]

The thing is, what she got fired for was for inserting the word "nonviolently" before the verb "defend" in the part of the oath in which she was promising to defend the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the State of California.

The best thing I have to say about the Constitution of the United States of America is that I'd love to rewrite it from scratch (parliamentary government, anyone? political campaigns that last only five weeks, once ever four or five years? How much advertising money can one spend in five weeks, anyway? Surely not as much as gets spent in our two-out-of-every-four years two-year long presidential campaigns.

But the rub in that is that every other American would rightly want to have a hand in rewriting it too, and the result would probably be even worse than what we've got now. So I defend the constitution.

[arkuat]

Oh, right, I forgot to add on my tirade about the California constitution part of the oath. I thought lawyers got paid to defend the California constitution, and much better paid than public-school teachers. What teacher has time to even read the whole damn thing? (No one studies more than a very basic civics outline of California constitutional law in high school, if that. If you want to study that stuff, you need to go to law school or else autodidact with your vast amounts of unoccupied leisure time.)

Thanks to the peculiar history of the California initiative process, our state's constitution is enormously gigantic and filled with vast swaths of lawyerese about arcane subjects. Why would anyone want to swear all public-school teachers to an oath to defend that?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Wellllll...the articles I read said that she wouldn't swear, she would affirm. As well as "nonviolently."

I'll defend the Constitution all you like. But I won't swear an oath on it, and I certainly won't swear an oath to a state constitution.

[arkuat]

The oath was already written "swear or affirm" because of 18th c. history, and crossing out the swear and circling the "affirm" was no big deal because that had been negotiated in advance for centuries. I still think it's the insertion that got her fired. But the UAW grievance committee already cleared it up, so why worry it?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Leftovers from worry about communists in the schools, I believe. The California system has had that fight particularly hard, back from pre-WWII as I remember it. And, of course, quite ineffective (though each time somebody refuses it, it's viewed as a victory by the supporters).

A lot of the American patriotism stuff is, I think, relics of building a nation out of a collection of immigrants, often from competing and even unfriendly countries. It was probably necessary to get to where we are, but it bugs the hell out of me in a lot of ways.

[arkuat]

Exactly. People just didn't want to see public-school teachers hired who taught that the government ought to be violently overthrown with explosives and whatnot. That's perfectly reasonable.

[pameladean]

I was going to ask you about this. It's crazy and creepy and not even consistent with the actual stated intent of the already-stupidly-conceived oath, as far as I can tell. You might find lj-user pecunium through my friendslist and look at his take on it; it's not very far back and it's unlocked. I don't know him personally, but he seems a very thoughtful person. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned this brings the whole university system into disrepute. I wonder if there's a way to make them care about that.

P.

[arkuat]

Thank you for the pointer to pecunium's excellent post. I really enjoyed reading it.

And as you say, hurrah for the UAW!

[sraun]

Ouch? Something is very broken.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I think it's shameful that the oath even exists. I do hope she has called the ACLU. They might well want to take this on.

K.

[zephyrcrow.livejournal.com]

This is a friend of yours? ACK. What a shitty situation.

[arkuat]

Yup. All fixed now, apparently.

[arkuat]

Apparently, and I'm only reporting hearsay, the settlement was supposed to involve the California State University system taking bureaucratic steps to ensure that this never happened again to any teacher (say, algebra-teacher, and it will all make much more sense).

And, apparently according to hearsay, the CSU is not moving with any noticeable speed whatsoever, and potential lawsuits are being investigated by those who are willing to stick a big hog-prod into CSU's side to speed them up.