Author James Jacobs, a New York native, worked at Macomb Community College for 50 years, starting as a part-time instructor in 1967 and eventually as president from 2008 to 2017. On campus, during the Vietnam Era, he was involved in the activist group, SDS -- Students for a Democratic Society.
He has written a book, published by Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., titled "Moving a Community College Forward: My Story as an Educator, Researcher, President, and Radical." The book is available on Amazon.
The following is an excerpt.
By James Jacobs
My teaching experience in Basic Education stayed with me for the rest of my life. It helped me always ground my work for change within a perspective emphasizing respect and understanding for the ordinary struggles working people face when attempting to get an education. While I did not share the students’ specific backgrounds and aspirations, such as home ownership or an interest in new automobiles (many were shocked I never had owned a car until I was in my early twenties), my experience from a working-class immigrant family allowed me to see some of myself in them.
Macomb Coummunity College President Jim Jacobs With President Obama at MCC campus in 2009 (Photo by Michael Sarnacki)
This made me a better instructor and began a critical process that was fundamental to my later career. I learned not to be arrogant in my political beliefs and to listen to understand what motivated the views of others.
Through our classroom discussions, I also learned a good deal about the lives of these
predominantly white community college students. They lived a tripartite life around their families, work, and school. Despite going to school full-time, almost all of them worked.
Their family life was often significantly disrupted by financial and health issues. Many cared for dependents, whether children or grandparents. At the same time, they were influenced by the youth movements of the 1960s, which questioned the conventional definitions of success and family authority. Their rebellion was expressed through long hair, drug use, and music, all alien and frightening to their working-class parents, who believed they had escaped Detroit to join conventional suburban life as depicted on television.
Some had joined the military and their experience in Vietnam made them question American society. In addition, many women were going through painful divorces and trying to survive and raise children as single heads of households. Part of getting an education for them was removing themselves from traditional relationships within their communities, while at the same time not leaving Macomb or metropolitan Detroit.
In the struggle of these students to form new relationships between themselves and their communities, I began to appreciate the potential role a community college could play in not only helping them but providing a means for changing their environment for the better. The team-teaching approach allowed students to see the usefulness of different approaches to their lives, and many gravitated to change. I also learned the power of peer support for myself.
While my colleagues were not self-defined “radicals,” they were also influenced by civil rights and anti-war movements. The team-teaching approach bonded me with the instructors in the program. We worked together, got to know each other’s families, and developed long-term respect and trust. It also provided us with a strong peer group that could withstand outside pressure from the administration to tone down our selection of materials or issues to discuss.
To this day, the teachers I met in the Basic Education Division are some of my closest friends. Even though Basic Education ended fifty years ago, and we are all retired and scattered all over America, we continue our interactions through weekly Zoom calls.
Unfortunately, many of the other faculty did not appreciate our innovative unit. The Basic Education program was considered controversial because of the collaborative teaching approach and its mandated integration of courses. This approach defied the conventional understanding of college education being the mastery of specific academic subject matters, with the instructor being the sole determinant of knowledge.
Many faculty were opposed to team teaching. They thought it was a “watered down curriculum,” contradicting their academic discipline’s commitment. Some faculty referred to the ECD program not as the “Education and Cultural Development” program but as “Educating College Dummies.” They remained committed to the traditional style of college instruction, designed to “weed out” those students
who should not be attending college. Only the talented few would advance. For us in Basic Education, student dropouts were a program failure, while for other faculty, they often viewed students dropping out as a sign of a high-quality rigorous program.
Our critics overlooked or didn’t seem to care that Basic Education students had higher
retention rates, meaning that a higher percentage of our students remained in college and stayed enrolled into the next year. This statistic is a major measurement utilized by community colleges today to determine the effectiveness of a program and institution.
Basic Education students were also more likely to continue their education at four-year institutions than other Macomb students. Perhaps most consequential to faculty outside of Basic Education, since the students were locked in a full-time class schedule, many liberal arts faculty saw Basic Education as a potential competitor draining students away from their classes.
The technical faculty were also not supportive because they could not understand why students would waste time with all these requirements before getting to their classes. Even though the program was designed as one year, which gave these students an opportunity to take on other courses and programs, we were still considered a threat. Ultimately, it was this issue that eventually pressured the faculty union to express concerns about the program.
In addition to the faculty’s opposition to our pedagogy, there was concern among the administration that the program was a hotbed for student activism. The Basic Education students were on campus full-time, and they often reflected the values of the critical inquiry we taught. They became leaders of the student government, writers for the student newspaper, and organizers of political events. The Basic Education structure developed their self-esteem and metacognitive abilities, and they quickly gravitated toward activism and questioning authority.
They, along with other students, were fertile ground for my efforts at organizing an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) presence on campus. I was the faculty advisor for an SDS chapter in 1968, my first semester, and we developed substantial civil rights and anti-war activities on campus. The chapter attracted cultural rebels (also known as “hippies”) but also Vietnam veterans fresh out of the military, making this SDS chapter more than a collection of alienated youth. Some of the African American veterans had ties with the Detroit Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and representatives from these groups spoke on South Campus.
Other students worked in auto plants and were familiar with the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, a Black worker organization at the Chrysler Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck. The SDS chapter also attracted high school students from some of the local school districts. When SDS collapsed as a national organization after 1969, the group recast itself as the Macomb Liberation Front. The ease with which community college students were able to integrate political work in the high schools, the community, or the plants became a strategic political calculus for my organizing within a community college.
The Macomb administration was not happy with the development of an SDS chapter. At first, I was denied the right to form one. However, the administration relented when the faculty union supported my right to form the organization as a free speech issue. I needed to be careful because I was still a probationary teacher and could be terminated without explanation.
After two years, I would become a permanent instructor. During that period, my students often received calls from the Campus Police asking about what I was discussing in the classroom, looking for an excuse to terminate me. When the students told me about the calls, I exposed this activity, and they probably backed off firing me. I became a permanent teacher shortly thereafter, but the administration was still looking for an opportunity to fire me.
The administration finally got their chance during the clerical strike of 1970. During the strike, I also knew from previous encounters with the administration that it would be wise for me to avoid any activity that was not legally protected. I kept on the picket lines, talked with the strikers and students, but engaged in no confrontations or made any threats. Even so, a few days after the settlement, the administration decided to punish those faculty who had refused to cross the picket lines by docking their pay, claiming that taking personal days (under our contract we were allowed to take days off from work) to walk picket lines violated the contract.
In my case, however, they simply fired me. I was given a letter before one of my classes asserting that I was fired for physically assaulting students, which prevented them from attending class, dismissing my classes early so students could not learn, and disrupting campus life! Because I was protected by my union contract, I could remain teaching and was entitled to an arbitration hearing. I was not surprised that the institution wanted to terminate me.
Since at the time I saw myself as an organizer, I assumed that if I lost the job (as some of my political associates were losing jobs in other work settings), I would simply move on to new employment. Fighting to maintain my job was not a significant consideration for me, since I was young and single with no family. If my firing made people angry and more political, I thought that would be a good outcome.
Fortunately, I had a great mentor who challenged my ambivalence about resisting the firing. Saul Wellman was a former trade union organizer, Spanish Civil War and Second World War veteran, and Communist Party leader. Saul left the party in the 1950s but maintained close ties with young radicals in the Detroit area. He placed my firing in broader political terms as an outrage, not only against me but also for the future success of the Macomb College community. He saw me as an asset to the college and argued I should fight my firing because I was needed.
For Saul, participation within the system while at the same time holding your vision enhanced your significance and influence. My place, he argued, should be at the community college, and if I fought the firing, I would obtain local support.
The reaction of the staff at Macomb to my firing was exactly as Saul had predicted.
The administration’s gambit backfired. When the administration singled me out for firing, many people in the college—faculty, clericals, and students—correctly saw it as an attempt to use the strike as a pretext for getting rid of me. I became a symbolic leader at the college, strengthened, not marginalized by the administration’s actions. This backing translated into significant support for my case. I now had “good friends in low places,” with clerical workers supplying me with all the administration’s meeting notes as they prepared for my case. We knew their arguments, and in April 1971, the arbitrator ruled there were no grounds for dismissal. The arbitrator saw that the college was using my strike support as a pretext for eliminating me and discrediting my political views.
I was now part of the college, fused to the institution. The staff who had opposed my firing expected me to stay as a "college leader." From then on, I became not an individual radical organizer embedded within the institution, but I became convinced of the long-term significance of the institution to the future of America.
I believed good community colleges would help change America for the better. I had no desire to leave Macomb; it had become part of my life. Of course, this decision confronted me with new political questions for the rest of my working life. How was I to operate on a tightrope of being within an institution, while at the same time, trying to change it?
