Padrόn’s sin
MIAMI – Eduardo Padrόn committed a cardinal sin. The Miami-Dade College (MDC) president spoke truth to power. He named names and denounced the actions of legislators that are supposed to fight for the interests of our community but seem to be following a different agenda.
Speaking truth to power is risky. It is not supposed to be so in this country, but it often is, especially in Miami. Padrόn, a consummate diplomat, seldom if ever has openly clashed with power. Instead, he has carefully and very successfully cultivated the powerful for the benefit of his institution. He has a keen sense of where the local mine fields lie and he steers away from them if he can.
This time he couldn’t. The powers that be in Tallahassee, namely the reactionary Republicans who run the legislature, were coming after him, or rather after the lifeblood – money – of the college to whose development Padrόn has devoted his working life.
Worse, some of our own local legislators, far from making the case for MDC, were standing in the way not only of the home team, but of democracy itself. What Padrόn and some other educators are asking for in order to raise badly needed revenue is far from the kind of taxation without representation that helped spark the American Revolution. Instead, they are asking only for the state to allow local voters to decide at the ballot box whether they are willing to pay an additional half-penny in sale tax to fund MDC and other public educational institutions.
Miami-Dade College is second only to the storied early twentieth century City College of New York in providing opportunity for immigrant, minority and economically disadvantaged students. For that reason alone the legislators blocking the referendum should be ashamed of themselves, especially since the legislature created the need for alternative funding through deep cuts in spending on public education.
But Miami-Dade College provides the area with many other benefits, from an outstanding annual book fair, to badly needed technical training which benefits local businesses and students alike, to even more badly needed cultural programming, including a film series at the Tower Theater on Calle Ocho which rivals the best on offer at the other art houses in Miami. And culture has an economic impact. One local business owner told me that her sales declined drastically when the Tower temporarily closed for renovation.
So, this time Padrόn spoke out, publicly and harshly. He called the gang of four legislators from Miami (state Reps. Jose Oliva, Carlos Trujillo, Michael Bileca and Frank Artiles) mainly responsible for blocking the referendum “bullies” and “ideologues.” That was too much for the tender skin of these four horsemen of the apocalypse. They went ballistic. They demanded an apology. Padrόn, predictably, did apologize for the personal nature and charged tenor of his comments, although he did not move from his position on the substance of the issue. Some people say that the gang of four doesn’t consider this enough contrition and they want Padrόn’s head on a silver platter. I doubt they will try that because by now they must know that to do get they will have to walk over the dead bodies of lots and lots of people, Anglos, African Americans, Haitian, and Latino, including Cuban.
Incidentally, Padrόn did not say anything that isn’t true and the tough shots he fired were not undeserved. Indeed, in their irate letter demanding an apology, the four proved that they are bullies when they said that “they will not tolerate” these kinds of comments. Really? What were they going to do, send in the storm, or rather, state troopers? In this context, the phrase “will not tolerate” is the language characteristic of the bully. Who are they to decide what speech should be tolerated from a college president who, among other things, chairs a presidential commission on Hispanic education, or from anybody else for that matter? Hey, fellows, ever heard of the First Amendment or academic freedom?
These are the kind of politicians who love democracy and clamor for free speech – in Cuba. But when it comes to allowing voters to decide democratically on an issue of vital importance, well, that’s another matter. And when free speech is aimed adversely at them they treat it as insolence and issue threats.
What do these guys have against democracy or the idea that the common person or even the poor, not just the rich, should get a decent education? Don’t they know that the cost of higher education has skyrocketed?
It may be just a coincidence that all four have reportedly received contributions from private schools that are in direct competition with MDC. Unlike some people who say there are no coincidences, I know that sometimes coincidences do happen. But as I wrote before in another context, I doubt this is one of those times.
My natural skepticism is reinforced by numerous press accounts that have laid bare what really goes on in the state legislature, the deeply institutionalized corruption and collusion between businesses, their lobbyists, and legislators – all aligned against the public’s interest. To call it a cesspool is an understatement. And when you swim comfortably in such waters, you seldom emerge pure as the driven snow.
Looked through a larger lens, this fight is just one more battle in the GOP’s long and relentless war against public education at all levels, indeed against anything public. In turn, the effort to starve public education is one more component of the long, relentless top-down class war that Republicans have been waging on behalf of a small minority of denizens of the economic stratosphere and against the interests of the vast majority that inhabits a zone much closer to the ground.
In recent years, the state of Florida has foiled several attempts by Miami-Dade College to secure the resources to meet its obligations to its students. It may unfortunately succeed in doing so one more time. Then again, what can you expect from a legislative body that turned down billions of free dollars to enable working people of modest means to afford health insurance, for no logical reason, and in spite of the healthy economic stimulus such an infusion of cash would bring to state a long way from having fully recovered from the collapse of real estate and the nation’s worst recession in eighty years?
