With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching, I feel the need to step back and ask myself what it is that I am thankful for.
Many things come to mind, but one of the top things that I am thankful for this year is the passage of Proposition 30, which provided for a temporary increase in taxes for Californians over seven years in order to help out our public schools and universities. Public education is so important to our society and had Prop. 30 not passed, it would have resulted in a $6 billion cut to budgets for California state schools.
The voting populace and educated people across this state saw the need for this temporary increase in taxes and voted accordingly, in a victory for teachers, students and schools. Isn’t it funny, then, that not all teachers urged the passage of this ballot measure, when it was something that was designed to be for their own best interest?
One teacher who publicly spoke out against Prop. 30 is Film and Electronic Arts professor Brian Alan Lane, who pontificated on the ills of the measure in a Nov. 4 letter to the editor to the Daily 49er.
According to Lane, who is a full professor who has been with Cal State Long Beach for 10 years, “too much of every new tax dollar would wind up paying salaries and bonuses to non-teaching administrators. “
Lane continues with a laundry list of doomsday scenarios that he predicted will happen should the proposition pass, including a loss of students to private schools where “they can get … quite frankly, a better education. “
I don’t know what is more offensive: that a teacher would not only throw his own peers under the bus and claim that they are giving students a sub-par education, or that it comes from the likes of Brian Alan Lane.
Lane, among others, was the focus of an audit report released by the Cal State University system in May 2011 which alleged that the professor had committed financial fraud. According to a Sept. 30 article in the Daily 49er, the professor would have remained anonymous if it weren’t for Lane’s effectual outing of himself by suing the university for $6 million for alleged “libel, defamation and slander,” making the case and all the details associated with it a part of the public record.
Lane’s lawsuit, which was filed in April 2011, has since been dropped. Lane, and others, failed to reimburse their lawyer, Michael Steponovich, Jr.
The CSU also issued a termination of Lane, who has appealed and will have a hearing in early 2013. In light of what has gone down, doesn’t it seem rather disingenuous for a professor who was audited for financial fraud to be commenting on the “failed state” of public education? If anything, Lane should serve as an example of how the system itself is flawed.
The fact that Lane still teaches here after frivolously suing his own employer and later dropping the case is a travesty in and of itself. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so crazy that a professor who was allegedly keeping students’ scholarship money for himself didn’t want a state measure to pass, which would make life easier for those in his profession.
Prop. 30 represents a bright new day for public education in California, and the voters have done their part.
Now the CSU needs to cut the fat. Frivolous lawsuits from professors who bite the hands that feed and waste university resources only hurt students, faculty and staff members in the end.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.
