My major is at University Without Walls, with an Area of Concentration (That's what we call it at UWW.) in Community Organizing. I was fortunate enough to be one of the pioneering participants of weekends@uww with instructors Victoria Dowling and Rick Hendra. What a great way that was to come back to school!

As part of my Area of Concentration, I'm writing a portfolio of life experience based on my involvement in SEIU Local 211 and other workplace organizations I was involved in while I worked at Smith College. I worked there as a cook for ten years.

The UWW portfolio

My portfolio consists of the story and analysis, in six sections, of some turbulent events at Smith College in the early 90s, somewhat the same as what was happening in many other places at the time. In sort of an aftermath of the corporate-greed 80s, many colleges and universities undertook a vigorous campaign of consolidating their resources. These changes were explained as defensive measures against what college trustees, administrators and their paid consultants foresaw as impending economic hard times, and usually came at the cost of jobs and working conditions.
At the time I was a new president of our local union, and anticipated moving our organization forward with an agenda centered on multicultural development for Smith and for Local 211. Instead I found myself reluctantly battling "College Hall," fighting to keep our jobs, our wages and working conditions, and the unity of our organization. In some ways we lost a little bit of each. What victories we did see consisted mostly in not losing more than we did. I did gain personally, however, in terms of what I learned. This learning is the subject and purpose of my portfolio, which discusses some of the more interesting (I hope) events, and some of the more poignant lessons I took from them.
As an epilogue, either the prognosticators were wrong, or their measures were quite effective, because today colleges, including Smith, boast record-sized endowments, ever-increasing tuition rates, and continually healthy application rates. We've seen fewer colleges hitting those anticipated hard times than we have banks.