By ART CHANCE

We and the English have developed an elaborate mythology and vocabulary about our schools. My generation refers to our schools as “alma mater,” Latin for “nourishing mother,” the entity that brought us up. “Alumna” means “foster daughter” in Latin. The nourishing mother adopted you and saw you to adulthood. 

I still remember the words of “the alma mater” song of my high school from 60 years ago and get a lump in my throat if I run across an old video of the Georgia “Dixie Redcoat Band” playing “Tara’s Theme,” although these days you’d probably have the FBI at your door if you played that song.

I think it is fair to say that all of that is pretty much gone except in nostalgic memories of aging “Boomers.”  Colleges and universities are not “nourishing mothers” anymore; they’re factories. With unlimited student loans, no entry standards, and “studies” degrees that only require paying and maybe showing up occasionally, a huge percentage of college students shouldn’t be any closer to a college classroom than the grounds crew or custodial closet, but when they showed up occasionally and paid, they got to hear “Pomp and Circumstance.”

You can trace much of this to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company. In 1971, the South was still very segregated. Mr. Griggs was a Black, low-level worker who sought a promotion. The qualifications the company set for the job bore no relation to the skills required for the job, and so Griggs sued. Griggs’ case was clearly meritorious and the Supreme Court found in his favor, and in so doing upset the whole traditional hiring system in the country, and not just in the segregated South.

In 1971 most companies of any size had fairly elaborate screening processes in hiring. It was a world of writing and math tests, typing test, and specific skills tests in specialized areas. Griggs held that a company had to demonstrate the business necessity of any desired skill or qualification. It didn’t take long for the Plaintiffs’ Bar to turn that into a cash cow. It didn’t take many six figure verdicts to cause the employers to almost totally abandon employment testing and detailed, probing interviews weren’t far behind. 

Enter needing “a degree” as a minimum qualification for jobs.

Corporate and government human resources and legal departments scrambled to set the minimum qualifications for all the jobs they dared at “a degree,” no particular degree, just “a degree.”   States with some political or ethical sensitivity to discrimination claims, Alaska among them, kept a lot of jobs open to starting at the bottom and working your way up, but even there soon “a degree” would give you about a five year advantage over the person who had worked their way up and actually knew the work.

The universities jumped on this and invented the “Studies” degrees for people who shouldn’t have been near a college class.    So, the lefty snowflake with a degree in “Environmental Studies” can come right out of school, basically with a middle school education and a lot of indoctrination, and go straight to work at the technical/lower supervisory level of a government’s environmental protection function.   If s/he can show up and more or less do as instructed, s/he will be a section chief; that’s just one warm bed or nice check at a fund raiser from a politically appointed division director.

Once there, it is just making friends with the right candidate for governor, and you’re running the department with your seventh grade education.

So, I applaud the notion of doing away with the “a degree” qualification. Of course, I’ve been advocating it in my writing for the better part of 20 years. Now we can talk about how the Dunleavy administration can screw up even a good idea?

I don’t know which idiot in Law, Administration, or the Governor’s Office wrote the implementing Administrative Order, but that person has no idea how state government works. They give elaborate instructions to Admin to make personnel rule recommendations to the State Personnel Board to carry out this change. The personnel rules and the Personnel Board have nothing to do with carrying out this change.    The director of Personnel and the Classification manager can revise any class specification at their discretion. All it takes is a signature.

Now the geniuses have given the opponents, and there will be many in the bureaucracy, endless opportunities to challenge every action Admin takes. It’s a lot like the same stupidity that took them to the wrong court house over implementing the Janus decision. I’m glad I’m older than most, maybe all, of the Dunleavy Administration; at least I can read.

Nota bene: There is a provision for submitting the state classification plan and revisions thereto to the Legislature for approval but, to the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t been done in 30 years.

Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.

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