Chapter 10—
Conservatives Take Office

With their ascension to power, the conservatives were in a position to realize their two major goals: to stop integration, and to remold the educational system to suit their idealized image. In part because of their political philosophy which dealt in absolutes, in part because of their constricted experience in community participation which left them relatively free from political and social cross-pressures, the new men of power were neither compromisers nor conciliators. In addition, their smashing political victory in April and the passage of the tax election in July made them feel invulnerable to any political threats from their adversaries. Hence, there was little need for constraint on their part.

As the time approached for the conservatives to take office, at least one political adviser counseled them against any immediate action that would stir the liberal wrath.

I tried to convince the new board to put off any action that would undo what the liberal board did — that is, firing Widel and rescinding Phase I — until after the July tax election. I was really frightened that it would lose whatever liberal support we might get for the tax election if they took those actions on July 1, and I couldn't see any reason why they couldn't put them off for a week.

But USP leaders argued that the symbols of their travail could not be permitted to stand an extra week. To accede to any delay was to forestall tasting the fruits of victory.

Phase 1 is Suspended

At their first meeting on July 1, the conservative board ousted Denzil Widel, the superintendent of schools and elevated in his stead the deputy superintendent, Woodrow Wilson Snodgrass, a local man who had grown up in Richmond, had graduated from Richmond High School, and had made his way up through the ranks of Richmond's educational hierarchy over the past thirty-five years. He was deeply tied into the administrative bureaucracy. As one respondent said,

The schools in Richmond are run by a small professional "club" — an entrenched group who have been there for many years. They're all local people; they all went to Richmond High together; they used to work together at El Cerrito High; and now they've fanned out into many of the top administrative posts. They have a tight-knit little clique that can subvert any program they want to.

In addition, Snodgrass was a trusted conservative who had won further favor by his covert opposition to the liberal Widel and by his overt stance against busing. Several liberals believed that Snodgrass had subverted the former administration. He was often accused of "manipulating the bureaucracy" with which he was so familiar. One former board member said bitterly,

He double crossed and worked against both the board and the superintendent. When he was given the task of redrawing the boundaries at Portola [Junior High School] in order to effect racial balance in that school, he did it so that some children who live almost next door to Portola had to travel across town to Adams. The plan was a total disaster and helped to crystallize public opinion against redrawing school boundary lines. He knows this district better than anyone else, so it wasn't just an innocent mistake. He did it to subvert integration.^[*]

With a new chief administrator acting as secretary of the board, the board members quickly suspended Phase 1 of the three-year integration plan and ordered Snodgrass to "submit alternate plans that do not include forced busing of children for racial balance."^[1] Within a week the district announced its alternative proposal, an open enrollment plan heralded as district-wide, in which students were given the option of attending one of a cluster of schools. The plan was quite simple: for each black school there were two, three, or four white schools that made up the open enrollment cluster. Within that cluster any black child might choose any white school, and any white child might go to the black school. No transfers were to be permitted from one white school to another. Any participating student would be transported to and from the school of his choice at district expense.^[**]

It is interesting, however, that six schools in the north end of the district where resistance to desegregation was most intense,^[***] were not included in any of the open enroll-

[*] When I asked Widel whether he shared this view, he said sadly, "I guess he did what he thought was best from his frame of reference. But I must say, that was a serious mistake to give him that job."

[**] See Appendix, Documents 2 and 3, showing the areas of open enrollment and the rules governing the plan.

[***] The schools were Tara Hills, Kerry Hills, Shannon, Ellerhorst,Montalvin Manor, and El Sobrante, all with between 0 and 2 percent black population. These schools provided the leadership for the conservative drive to victory. Three of the five board members and most of USP's leadership had children in one or another of them.

ment clusters. District officials contend that it is scurrilous to bring this up. The reason for the omission, they say, is simply that the schools were already overcrowded. But many find that explanation less than persuasive since other schools in the district had space problems as well. Moreover, in several of these schools, portable classrooms had been brought in to handle the increasing enrollment of white children. The district's critics asked, "Why not for blacks?" The reason, I believe, was that since the conservative sweep, racial attitudes in these areas had hardened once again; resistance to having black children in their white schools was no longer a socially unacceptable position.

As the conservatives had predicted, within days after the suspension of Phase 1, the Legal Services Foundation, on behalf of their clients, petitioned the court to enjoin the board from rescinding the desegregation plan. On July 28, just one week before the start of the first open enrollment period, a Superior Court judge ruled that, despite all indications that open enrollment plans did not and would not work, the district should have a chance to prove that its plan constituted adequate compliance with the law. He gave the district one year, until May 20, 1970, to demonstrate the feasibility of its open enrollment plan.

By the end of the open enrollment period (August 15) only 452 students at all elementary and secondary school levels had chosen to transfer; most of them were black students moving to white schools. The open enrollment period was extended, but, even so, only a little more than 1,000 students (out of 41,367, of whom 10,615 were black) were involved in the first year.

In a series of delaying tactics, the district has managed

postponement after postponement in the courts, so that the open enrollment plan continues unchanged into the 1971/1972 school year. As of October 1971 another 500 students (again mostly black) chose to participate, putting the number of students involved, after three years, at about 1,500.

In sum, open enrollment has done nothing to change the racial balance in the nine ghetto schools.^[*] At best, open enrollment has succeeded in enhancing somewhat the racial balance in schools that were formerly predominantly white, in helping to spread about 1,500 more black students around the district, and in somewhat alleviating the desperate overcrowding in the dominantly black schools. But the ghetto schools remain almost all black and, in fact, have increased their black populations by a few percentage points.

The Conservative Board Insulates Itself

Its two most urgent priorities accomplished — the firing of the superintendent and the suspension of the integration plan — the board settled down to a lengthy discussion on ways to "speed up" and "shorten" board meetings. Members suggested the curtailment of either the number of speakers they would hear on an issue or the length of time they would be permitted to speak, or both. This board, which throughout the liberal reign had railed that democracy was threatened if debate were cut off, these men (one of whom had walked out of a meeting a few months earlier when the liberal chairman had ruled him out of order) now sought to control the opposition by limiting debate and confining the circumstances under which people could be heard. The new president — the most articulate defender of his constituents' right to debate any issue for any length of time when he was a member of the minority — now solemnly reminded the assemblage: "A board meeting is not a public forum. It is held to administer the business of the district."

[*] See Table 9, for testimony to this.

While no decision was made at that meeting, the board eventually did develop procedures which helped to insulate the members from public pressure. First, in order to secure a place on the agenda, the board required that a request be made in writing five working days before a meeting and that the applicant must specify exactly what he wished to address the board about. The administration justifies the time and specificity requirement with the argument that it permits them to gather data for an intelligent response. In practice, however, the procedure often serves as a device for discouraging participation and for screening out or stalling individuals or groups the board prefers not to hear.

For example, when CEE requested time on the agenda to address the board on its open enrollment policy, the organization was put off for months. The first excuse was that CEE had not met the five-day notice requirement. My informant explained,

I did get the notice to them on the Wednesday before the next Wednesday's meeting, but it turned out that there weren't five working days , since one of the days in that week was a school holiday.

Having corrected that problem the next month, the request was turned down again because "[The administration] said that I hadn't specified in sufficient detail what my presentation would say." And so it went for three months. It takes determination and persistence to continue in the face of such administrative perversity.

Even so respectable an organization as the West Contra Costa Council of PTA was stalled for months when it requested time to address the board on the subject of student representation on the school board. After hurdling the bureaucratic roadblocks around time and specificity, the PTA was told simply that, since no one on the board thought it a good idea to have students sit with them, there was nothing

to discuss. Only dogged insistence on a public hearing finally got time on the agenda for the PTA after months of hassle and delay.

Second, once on the agenda, strict time limitations are imposed upon discussants: an individual is permitted two minutes to speak, and an organization is given five minutes. Time is kept by one of the administrators who controls a small signal light (much like a miniature traffic light) which is positioned where the board can see it clearly. The signal is green when a speaker begins, flashes a warning yellow when he has fifteen seconds left, and turns red when his time is up. If the speaker is not a friend of the board, no leeway is given; the chairman cuts him off almost instantly.

These two mechanisms, together with a chairman who wields his gavel dictatorially when his opponents are on the floor, have intimidated a great many people. Responding to my question about why they were no longer heard from regularly at board meetings, one black informant said,

No one wants to subject himself to that. We'd be on the agenda, and most of the time they'd never get to us. Or if they did, our spokesman would be called out of order, or out of time, or they'd just shut him off. Or else Mr. Fuller would be just plain nasty. Or they wouldn't respond to anything we said. They'd just sit there and as soon as we were finished, they'd go on to the next item of business.

Notice how eloquently this statement outlines the tactics of the conservative board, and how corrosive such tactics are to morale. One need never actually deny the opportunity to speak. Delay, obfuscation, and ignoring people when they speak accomplish the same goal quite effectively.

Furthermore, this board has an extraordinary record of missed meetings and executive sessions (closed-door sessions in which only the action taken is affirmed in public).

In their first full year in office (July 1969–June 1970), they cancelled six meetings (25 percent of the total number regularly scheduled in a year). In the previous year, when the liberal majority made the decisions, not a single meeting was canceled. Most cancellations have been on short public notice — rarely more than two days — and unless one has a very sharp eye out for school news in the Richmond Independent , very easy to miss. More than once, people gathered at the regularly appointed time and place only to find that the meeting had been canceled with the only public notice being an announcement buried somewhere on the pages of the Independent a day or two earlier (once, on the very night of the meeting).

It is a little more difficult to compare precisely the number of executive sessions the two boards held, since the 1968/1969 record is not absolutely clear.^[*] But leaving out the routine sessions concerning personnel matters which school boards normally hold either before or after regular sessions, the conservatives held twelve special executive sessions, some lasting as long as four or five hours. In addition, almost every meeting either began or ended with an executive session. Often no action was affirmed in public session because, it was announced, none was taken. Therefore, the subject of many such meetings was never made known publicly. By comparison, there is no record that the liberals ever held so many or such lengthy executive sessions. Indeed, apart from the routine personnel meetings, there is evidence of only three special executive meetings

[*] The question of executive sessions is relevant because many in the district believe that the board uses them to circumvent the Brown Act, which makes it illegal for a quorum of a school board to gather in anything but a public session which has been given adequate public notice except under specific conditions, for example, for the purpose of discussing personnel, litigation, or hearings on student discipline.

during the 1968/1969 school year. One former board member commented on the conservatives' record:

There just isn't any reason for so many executive sessions. There's certainly no reason for such a meeting at the beginning of every board meeting as this board does. When we did have executive sessions, we were always very careful to explain what they were about.

The conservatives reply to these criticisms that their many executive sessions are necessary because of the litigation in which the district is involved. But the liberal board managed also to sustain many lawsuits, including the Verde Suit, without so much secrecy.

The Opposition Is Scorned

A discussion of a drug-abuse program for the schools provides a typical example of the scorn with which a liberal spokesman is treated by the conservative board. The drug units of the various city police departments within the district presented their viewpoints. When the board settled down to discuss a motion about the adoption of the proposed drug-abuse program, a young lawyer rose to ask whether the program would present perspectives about the drug problem other than those held by law enforcement agencies. "Would some of the acknowledged medical experts be heard?" he asked. The board president, his voice registering incredulity, replied, "Are you FOR drug abuse, Mr. Peppard?" Peppard, angrily, "Of course not; that's not the point. All I want to know is whether there will be provision for other views to be heard even when they diverge from the law enforcement view." The board president, scornfully, "No, Mr. Peppard, we will not allow you or anyone else to come before our students to speak in favor of drug abuse."

Nor is any quarter given to the black community. Long

hostile to the school community worker program, a state and federally funded program that puts minority laymen into the schools to serve as paraprofessionals and to provide links between school and community, the conservatives failed to rehire four of the most militant blacks among them. The school board and administration charged the community workers with incompetence. A federal judge did not agree. In response to a suit brought by the discharged employees, he ruled that the RUSD had to rehire them since they had established a prima facie case that they had been discharged for participating actively in the school board and tax elections. The board threatened to appeal the decision, but two years later it still had not done so, indicating that school district attorneys saw little chance of reversal.

But the conservatives eventually had their way, for in the 1970/1971 budget, these teachers' aides were reduced in number from 124 to 41. When the cutback was challenged, the board explained that it was necessary because it did not know how much state and federal funding would be available. A spokesman for the black community asked the board if it would rehire the aides up to the previous year's strength if and when the money became available. Fifteen minutes later the board was still temporizing, and the petitioner was still saying, "Just give me a simple yes or no answer." Finally one member, James Shattuck, agreed that they were, indeed, talking around the question and said, "No! We will not make that commitment. This school board is not in a position to say now that we will use any part of any new money to hire teachers' aides." Fuller concurred vocally, while the rest of the board implicitly accepted the statement by their silence. The angry black man replied, "This meeting began with a discussion of what to do about Nystrom [a ghetto school that had been damaged by arson a few days earlier] and how to deal with such problems. Well, I don't think this board cares at all about Ny-

strom, and we now know that and what to do about it." Shattuck responded angrily, "I might say that the money that was spent last year wasn't that helpful obviously."

The USP leaders with whom I was sitting at that meeting all giggled appreciatively at Shattuck's retort, and one muttered, "Thatta boy! Get tough with 'em." Their tension throughout the exchange was palpable. From the time the black man appeared at the microphone, their disdain and hostility were clearly visible, not only in their under-the-breath comments (such as, "What in hell do they want now? Always asking for something for nothing."), but in all the nonverbal, gestural and body language with which we all convey thoughts and feelings — in their squirming in their seats, in their snickering and snorting, in their hands thrown up in the air in gestures of impatience, in the way their eyes met and exchanged "meaningful" glances, and in the way the tension drained from their bodies when the exchange was over.

Even small requests went unheeded. Early in 1970 both teachers' organizations petitioned the board to declare Martin Luther King's birthday a school holiday. Every other school district in the Bay Area, they claimed, memorialized King's birthday. In order to ensure favorable action, the teachers offered either to work an extra day to compensate for the holiday, or to give up a holiday that was already scheduled. Several people from the audience supported the teachers' request, while USP spokesmen were articulate in their objections. The board listened quietly throughout the pleas and the discussion and finally left their audience speechless when, without a single word of response , they moved to the next item on the agenda.^[*]

[*] Not a word of this exchange is recorded in the minutes of that meeting, which is consonant with the conservative board's many attempts to make themselves look good on the record. Until the conservatives took office, the minutes were fairly full and faithful tran-scriptions of what had taken place at the meetings. Now they are carefully edited to present the picture of a calm, neutral, deliberative body at work. Moreover, whereas traditionally the tape recordings of school board meetings were available for public use, soon after the conservatives took office the board withdrew those tapes from public use and had them destroyed after transcription. Some liberals continued to pressure to hear the tapes before they were erased, and the board solved the problem permanently by announcing that board meetings would no longer be tape-recorded.

When I talked with the board members, I asked each why he had behaved thus and suggested that it might have relieved tensions in the district if they had granted the request. As if they had been programmed, the first response from each of them was some version of "I don't believe it's up to the school board to set national holidays." When I reminded them that the request was not for them to set a national holiday, but a school holiday, a typical reply was, "He wasn't a national figure. He was only important to a small percentage of the people, and I don't see why there ought to be a school holiday for him."

When I said that that "small percentage" of the people were currently feeling very deprived, they shrugged and said that it would make no difference what they did about King's birthday because "those people would find something else to complain about anyway." As for relieving black-white tensions in the district, one of them summed up their philosophy neatly:

There's already too much emphasis put on race anyhow. People get sick and tired of being faced with race all the time. I know there are problems, but it doesn't help them any to keep forcing us to be involved with them all the time. Anyway, I don't believe in soft-soaping.

For the liberals and the blacks it would have been a gesture to "ease tensions"; for the white conservatives it would have been "soft-soaping." Not only the black-white problems,

but the white-white problems will never be solved until we can somehow cross that boundary.

Censorship, Conformity, and Freedom

Since they came to power, the conservatives have kept up a steady pressure for conformity. Teachers hardly dare innovate any longer for fear of insults and reprisals. For example, early in 1970 a new course titled "Principles of Discussion" was presented to the board for adoption. The course was prepared in conformance with district regulations, and the proposal went through official channels, gaining the requisite approval at each step along the way. Thus, by the time it came before the board, the course had received the following impressive list of recommendations: at the school level, the members of the English Department where it would be taught and the instructional vice-principal and principal; at the district level, the chairmen of the English Departments of all the secondary schools, the secondary curriculum committee (composed of instructional vice-principals in the secondary schools), and the superintendent of schools and his cabinet. When the secondary school curriculum coordinator completed her presentation, the board sat quietly without exchanging a word. When they prepared to move to the next item on the agenda, still without comment on the proposal before them, a teacher asked why the board would not discuss the matter. The president replied that the board members "apparently feel that the course does not satisfy their requirements." "What must a teacher do to get a new course approved?" the speaker demanded. "Go through channels," the board president retorted coldly. Angry and shocked, the speaker responded, "Begging your indulgence, that is precisely what was done!" The president of the board, turning to the superintendent, "Next item on the agenda, please." The teachers sputtered helplessly.

One popular teacher — hardly a radical, but a man who is in tune with his students — said,

I know that I'm constrained about what I can and cannot do, will or will not do these days. During the last two years teachers have been hesitant to do anything. You hear them say jokingly all the time, "Wonder what Fuller would think of that ?" But while they seem to say it jokingly, they're very concerned. So most of them don't want to take any chances of stirring things up.

Many found that they "stirred things up" just by doing the things they had always done in their classrooms. One teacher who had made the Freedom News (a local radical monthly that is very antagonistic to the present school board) available to his students as part of a body of research materials was severely criticized. At first he was told that he must provide balance in his classroom, and if Freedom News was to be available, he must also make available American Opinion (the John Birch Society organ). Having no objections to exposing his students to all viewpoints, he agreed. Unsatisfied, the board members still objected; they did not care what else was presented, they said, but Freedom News would not be tolerated in any classroom in the RUSD. But the board never confronted the teacher directly. Instead, they kept the pressure on the downtown administration and the principal. The principal insistently "suggested" to the teacher that it was only "sensible" to placate the board. The superintendent was more blunt. "If I have to come down and deal with any more trouble from you, I'll fire you," he warned.

Other teachers, on orders from the board president, have been called to task by the administration for club projects such as an Ecology Club Clean-Up Day, which the board president interpreted as a demonstration that was disruptive to the educational process, a Black History Week

display that included pictures of Black Panther leaders and Martin Luther King, and a dramatic presentation that the board decided (for unspecified reasons) might offend some sensibilities.

In an act that exposed them to widespread ridicule in the press and television, the board banned the use of the peace and the ecology symbols in the schools.^[*] The president solemnly declared, "These so-called peace symbols are an insult to religious students because they are symbols of anti-Christ." An administration spokesman, trying to defend the action said,

The use of symbols tends to divide society and what we are trying to do is accentuate the positive. The best example of this is President Nixon who is certainly leading us toward peace without the use of symbols, but with words and actions.

As a consequence of the repressive atmosphere, teachers censor themselves rather than waiting to hear "from downtown." For example, the board made plain its disapproval of the Vietnam Moratorium in the fall of 1969. As a result, while in districts all around the bay dozens of teachers were absent on that day, only five teachers remained away from their classrooms in the RUSD. Commenting on this, one teacher said, "that's because the board has instilled fear of their reactions so that only the really brave and courageous ones will dare to do anything like that."

Perhaps the silliest incident of self-censorship occurred when the principal of one of the elementary schools demanded that a third-grade teacher dispose of a little chicken hatchery that she was using to teach embryology because it violated the board's policy against sex education in the primary grades.

[*] The very next day a family sent their eight-year-old child to school bedecked with peace symbols from head to toe. When he was sent home from school, the parents protested to the American Civil Liberties Union which quickly won a court injunction against the ban.

Given the fact that they are protected by a lifetime tenure system, at first glance it seems strange that teachers should be so easily intimidated. But if one examines the structure of that system, it is no longer surprising. One of the primary facts about teacher tenure is that it is not transferable. If a teacher leaves a tenured job, he leaves the perquisites of tenure behind. To become tenured in another district requires three years' probationary service. In addition, promotion and salary increases are related to the number of years a teacher has served in the same district. Thus, once a teacher has taught in a district for twelve or thirteen years, he is at the top of the salary scale with lifetime security. To quit would mean to take a substantial salary cut and to accept an insecure probationary status elsewhere — an unlikely choice at any time, and even less likely now when school systems are suffering from severe budgetary crises and are cutting back their teaching staffs.

The security of the tenure system, coupled with promotional increments that are tied to the number of years in service, therefore, serve to lock a teacher in rather than to offer him freedom. At the same time, if he displeases his superiors, they have several weapons with which to make his life miserable even though they are unable to fire him. For example, they can transfer him against his will from school to school, giving him the least desirable assignments, or they can require him to teach subjects he hates. Knowing that he is bound into the system by virtue of the privileges he has accumulated, and at the same time knowing that his superiors can take punitive measures against him if he displeases them, the teacher is likely to acquiesce fairly readily even to repressive and unsatisfactory teaching conditions.

The teachers' bind gives the administration and school board an enormous advantage over them. Indeed, it substantially defuses the most powerful weapon a teachers

union has — the strike. For the administration always has the sure knowledge that, even if the teachers lose the strike, most will be back in their classrooms rather than rushing off to take jobs in the district next door. The more experienced the teacher, the more years he has in service, the more likely that is to be true.

Besides these pressures for conformity on teachers and students and the subtle censorship that is implied in them, more overt forms of censorship are common throughout the system. The libraries and classrooms, for example, are being stripped of books that offend either the very restrictive morals or the politics of the conservatives. Often it is like shadowboxing to find out what happened and why. Everyone has a different story; no one ever seems to know quite how or why a book happens to have disappeared.

One such case concerned The Learning Tree , a novel by the well-known black author and photographer Gordon Parks, which deals with the inner lives of a black family struggling to learn to accept and to live in a hostile white world. In the spring of 1970, English teachers in Richmond High School who were using the book in their classrooms were ordered to turn in all copies. The books were, I was told, "put away somewhere," and efforts by teachers to get them back were unavailing. As some teachers protested and called upon administrators to explain their action, the situation became more and more mystifying. Administrators in both the school and in district headquarters said they did not know who initiated the complaint about the book or who gave the order to withdraw it from the classrooms.

The principal of Richmond High originally said that he was told by an official from central administrative headquarters to withdraw the book because a member of the school board had given that order. Since such intervention by a board member violates district policy for handling complaints about books, some teachers instituted grievance

procedures. The official in question from district headquarters said that no board member had given such an order and that the school's principal had been mistaken. The action, he said, has been taken on the initiative of the superintendent (a procedure consonant with district policy). While he could not recall the superintendent's specific objections to the book, he thought he had judged it to be obscene and profane.

Educational television, too, was attacked sharply. Always leery of classroom television, for the first year the conservative board censored certain programs they found offensive or too liberal. During their first discussion of educational television in 1969, some board members said that they had no objections to the "academic" programs that taught science and mathematics, but those dealing with such matters as the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and the like were to them "liberal propaganda that has nothing to do with academics."^[2] When one of the administrators objected that such programs properly fall into the category of social studies and that the Bill of Rights would seem to him to be "a major historical document,"^[*] one board member shouted, "What will they teach kids in such a program? To go out and demonstrate in the streets?"^[3][**]

In the fall of 1970, the administration came before the board with a recommendation to renew the annual contract with KQED, the award-winning local educational television station. By that time, the majority of the board members knew they would not vote for it. In fact, more than two months earlier a USP leader had told me,

You can be sure we won't have KQED again next year. We took Jim Shattuck apart for his vote last year and he won't

[*] At that time, the profeessionals in the administration still dared to risk an occasional independent opinion, but no longer does one hear any.

[**] Again, this exchange does not appear in the minutes.

do that again. We got both Jim and Virgil [Gay], and they'll have plenty to answer if anything goes wrong this time.

Wishing to override its administration's recommendation, but unwilling to provoke a head-on controversy over the matter, the board simply voted to table it. A storm of protest followed, and the matter was reopened two months later, at which time they charged KQED programing with "liberal political bias" and rejected the contract on a 3-2 vote, the two opposing votes coming from one board member who has retained some independence from the group pressure and from another who is an upper-middle-class attorney.^[*] Epitomizing the quality of the conservative discussion was this impassioned statement from the USP president.

Parents are entitled to more than highly paid teachers as babysitters for KQED . . . Teachers now are paid between $8 and $16 per hour, and if they need outside help perhaps the district should look at the quality of the teachers it employs . . . It is time that this board stop subsidizing radical liberal establishments such as KQED which represents everything the board is against. KQED must go!

To this a representative of a teachers' organization responded, "These types of statements are responsible for teacher militancy." And the board president (in an angry reply that was also deleted from the minutes) retorted, "Maybe they're a response to teacher militancy."

[*] The outcry against taking television out of the schools was much greater than the conservatives had expected; many of their own supporters were ired. Consequently, the board negotiated a contract with a smaller local station which can be received only on sets equipped with UHF receivers and which broadcasts fourteen of KQED's twenty-eight programs. In twenty-seven elementary schools the district had to install UHF antennae before they could receive the new channel; in seventeen more, reception was only possible through cable television — a high price this economy-minded board paid to punish KQED.

While for many people the removal of KQED from the schools seemed a serious impairment of the breadth and quality of education, the conservative board's action was not without some rationality from their perspective. First, KQED does have a liberal orientation, and it presents rather sophisticated and cosmopolitan programing. Second, its news department had been less than kind to the conservative officials of the district. Third, this was the station that was responsible for the distribution of "Time of Your Life," a sex education film series that the conservatives despised. So deep did feelings against the station run, that several conservative parents told me that they did not permit their children to watch it because "the programs are too liberal" and because they often show "those Berkeley hippies as if they approve of people who look and act like that."

In addition, before the conservatives took over the direction of the schools, they were in a state of rage because they believed that their children were being exposed to alien values and life styles in the classroom, and they feared that this exposure would eventually separate them from parents and home. Since, as they saw it, KQED educational television was a major promulgator of those alien values, it was quite logical that they should ban it from the schools. The USP president was quite right when he said that KQED "represents everything the board is against."

The New Board and the Old: A Comparison

While the former liberal board had been less than totally responsive to conservative demands, it had made attempts — some serious, some pretenses — to compromise and conciliate. The conservatives, however, generally have not even bothered to go through the motions. It remains to speculate about the reasons for those vivid differences between the two boards. I have already indicated that the differences in social characteristics are at least partly respon-

sible for their differing political attitudes and behavior. In addition, I would suggest two other factors: their different political affiliations and participation histories, and their disparate views of the relationship of an elected official to a constituency — perspectives rooted in their disparate political philosophies.

Political Affiliation and Participation History

In the domain of political affiliations, the ousted liberal board members were split, with three of their number claiming registration in the Republican party and three claiming to be Democrats. Of the conservatives, on the other hand, four are Republicans and one a Democrat. Political party affiliation, however, is no longer a very informative variable, nor is it necessarily a predictor of voting behavior. In the 1968 presidential election, the conservative Democrat voted for George Wallace, while none of the three liberal Republicans voted for Richard Nixon.^[*]

Despite the fact that all of these men and women had been (or were then) elected officials in the community, all but one described themselves as not politically active.^[**] In part, this stems from the belief that schools are nonpolitical institutions — a belief that is part of a larger American myth which holds that by labeling an activity nonpartisan, it thereby becomes nonpolitical. This notion leads people to

[*] These voting patterns held throughout the study. Among fifteen conservatives interviewed, three voted for Wallace in 1968. One of the three was registered to the American Independent party; the other two were Democrats. Of the five registered Democrats on the conservative side, two voted for Wallace, two for Nixon, and one for Humphrey. One volunteered that he had voted for Goldwater in 1964. On the liberal side, of sixteen respondents, five were registered Republicans, but all voted for Humphrey.

[**] Among the entire sample of thirty-one lay leaders and board members, only five liberals and six conservatives characterized themselves as politically active.

perceive a curious disjunction between community and political participation and between nonpartisan and partisan political activity. Thus, two liberals who served on the boards of a half-dozen or more city, county, and state agencies, including the school board, said, "I've never done anything of consequence politically." Another liberal who had served as mayor of one of the cities in the district said, "I've never been active politically."

When I asked for digests of their participation in community activities and organizations, two of the liberals and four of the conservatives replied that they were not involved in community activities and that they "never belonged to anything." The common cry was, "We're not joiners." "My wife says I've always been a loner." "I'm a hermit." But when I probed beyond that initial response, the liberals who had given that reply remembered that they had served on the boards of such community agencies as the Richmond Model Cities program, the Richmond Planning Commission, and North Richmond Neighborhood House. In fact, the histories of participation of the liberals were rich, revealing high rates of activity and a wide range of interests. Not only did they participate in organizations in their own neighborhoods, but in city, county, and state organizations and agencies representing a variety of interests. In addition, four of the six liberal board members had previously exhibited some concern for the problems of the black community and were members of the board of the North Richmond Neighborhood House, an organization concerned with the troubled youth of North Richmond's black ghetto.

On the conservative side, however, no matter how I rephrased the question, prompted, or prodded, the answers remained essentially the same: participation histories were almost barren. One board member said he belonged to two men's service clubs and two fraternal organizations. One remembered that several years before, he had served on the

community council of his neighborhood; and the other three said they were concerned only with school affairs. Interestingly enough, however, only one was actively involved in school matters before the busing controversy arose. That these men had not been visible in the larger political community before the school crisis may explain, in part, their lack of responsiveness to any but their own adherents. Since they came to prominence within the framework of a special-purpose organization, they faced few or none of the constraints of maintaining a previous community position. Since they belonged to few, if any, other organizations, they felt none of the cross-pressures that derive from multiple group affiliation. Finally, since they came into public life at a time when the district was profoundly polarized, their continued isolation from those of different persuasions was ensured. Except for the public exchanges, which too often turned out to be hostile shouting matches, members of the opposing forces almost never met on a person-to-person basis.

The Board Members and the Community

Together, these differences led also to differences in the ways the liberals and conservatives viewed their role as board members vis-à-vis the community. In general, the liberals insisted that they were not committed to a particular constituency or segment of the community, but felt responsible to the entire district. And, indeed, their many attempts to compromise with the conservatives in order to palliate their discontent give substance to this claim. Their behavior over the issue of sex education is illustrative.

Contrary to the liberal belief, the conservative view generally is that sex education is a function of the home, not the school. Even those who agree that some kind of sex education in school is desirable balk at "anything that deals with people or emotions." One conservative respondent summarized that position well:

Personally, I think you can teach reproduction in a biological way without emphasis on sex. That's what I object to, the emphasis on sex and the whole emotional part.

Acting on those beliefs, the district's conservatives organized a movement to ban the showing of the sex-education film series "The Time of Your Life." After several months of dissension, the liberal board finally compromised and agreed that the films would no longer be shown during class. Instead, they stipulated that the films could be shown only before or after school or during the lunch hour, and only with written parental consent.

To the liberal board, this was a reasonable compromise. And while some of their liberal constituency might have wished it could be otherwise, they accepted the compromise as one of the cost of governing in a heterogeneous society. Now no child would see the film series without parental consent, nor would any child be deprived of class time while others viewed it. At the same time, this kind of education would be available to those children whose parents wished them to have it. Since the district already owned the films, there was no cost involved, and no one could complain legitimately that public funds were being spent for frills or immoral purposes.

The conservatives, however, saw it another way. Once in power, they, who had insisted that only they, as parents, had a right to determine what their children would or would not be permitted to see or to read, did not hesitate to dictate to others. Hence, four months after they were seated, the conservative board voted to discontinue the "Time of Your Life" series. To ensure that no future board could easily reverse their decision, the video tapes were either given away or destroyed. (Both alternatives were under serious consideration, but no conclusion was reached in public session.) The pleas of the liberals that this would deprive their chil-

dren of what they considered a valuable educational experience went unheard.

Since their own children were safe from exposure to these films, why would the conservative board not permit them to be shown for those who wanted to see them? The answer is probably two-fold. First, they saw the whole matter as a moral question and believed that it was dangerously immoral for any child to be exposed to the films. Second, three of the five men said that they believed it was their duty to represent the people who elected them, and those people wanted the films thrown out of the schools. Said one,

. . . a board member has the responsibility of keeping faith with all those who elected him . . . I don't look upon public office as being elected to think for the people but to represent them, to vote in their stead since they can't all be there voting for themselves.

Referring to another issue on which he voted against the wishes of his constituency, another conservative board member said,

I won't do that again. I voted wrong. I entered this facet of my life feeling that I was not going to follow in the footsteps of every other politician I know of. We elect a congressman, for example, to represent us in Washington, and within six months he's representing Washington to the people. . . . Maybe I wasn't even wrong on the issue, but the people I represent don't see it that way, and that's what counts. I view my role strictly as one of representing my constituency.

I asked, "What about the other people who hold another point of view? Who represents them?" He replied,

I learned early that you don't satisfy all the people. My idea of representative government is not that I'm so smart that I would know all the answers, or even that my constituency is so smart that they'll know it all. But if I can vote the way

they want me to, if I can vote as they would if they were voting for themselves, them I'm doing my job.

Their constricted and localized history of community participation made that perspective possible, it left them relatively free to meet the expectations of their constituency.

Two of the conservative board members belonged to USP; one served on its executive board. The only one of the five who has remained relatively independent of the organization is viewed by its leaders with suspicion.

A high officer in USP told me that he considered the role of the organization to be that of "a watchdog of the board to make sure they do their job right." When they do not, he said, "We take them apart, and they know we're not foolin' around." And, indeed, they were not "foolin' around." Within a few months after the conservatives took office, the president of USP, angered by the board's position on a routine matter of expenditures, publicly chastised and threatened them.

The people of this district have just finished dumping a board because they had refused to give the public access to information. I hope that we won't have to face this problem again with this board, but please remember that what happened to the last board could happen again.^[4]

The board beat a hasty retreat.

What difference, one may ask, was there between USP's relationship to the conservative board and CEE's with their liberal predecessors? The former board did, after all, have close personal and social ties with people in CEE leadership. And certainly CEE leaders coaxed, cajoled, threatened, and bullied the liberal board to adopt positions that were compatible with theirs. Sometimes they succeed, but unlike the situation between USP and the conservative board, sometimes they did not. And often CEE leaders compromised

their demands (witness the sex education issue) as they sought to help the board respond to the demands of the conservative community.

The difference is due not to different kinds of relationships between the boards and the organizations in question, but to the different political philosophies to which the groups adhered. For the liberals, moral issues gave way to political reality and to the belief that politics in America is the art of compromise; the conflict of competing groups must be kept within reasonable bounds. Thus, the liberal board expressed deep concern over the polarization of the community and sought desperately, if futilely, for ways to bridge the chasm. The liberal sector of their constituency, while sometimes impatient, sometimes ambivalent, sometimes angry, and always suffering from internal disunity, largely shared that concern and understood the board members' efforts to palliate the conflict.

For the conservatives, on the other hand, the majority not only rules, it dominates; and the obligation of society's minorities is to submit. That may seem an anomalous statement since the conservatives did not submit when they were in a minority position. The point, however, is that they always believed that they were an actual majority regardless of the outcome of electoral politics, and it is that majority of which they spoke when they argued that majority rules. The need to safeguard minorities from what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority was an alien notion. This philosophy was expressed quite clearly by the conservative board president:

We're saying that our philosophy prevailed and we're just carrying out the mandate given to us by the people who elected us. They're the majority, and majority rules.

Finally, the liberals tended to be aware that they could be wrong; hence, they avoided absolutes. For the conserva-

tives, however, their conviction about the rightness of their position and the righteousness of their cause was so profound as to be unshakable. As a leading conservative political scientist explains, for them there are no open questions; they "couldn't care less if they get caught assuming their own infallibility."^[5]

In sum, consonant with their clearly articulated commitment to the will of their limited conservative constituency, and probably reinforced by their constricted experiences in the political world, almost no attempt was made to hide their anger and contempt for the liberals and blacks; and few efforts were visible to compromise any issues. Since it is not possible to tap their constituency's "will" very readily, it means, in fact, that they have been bound to the will of USP. Since that organization has been functioning at a minimal level since 1969, in reality it reduces itself to the fact that a handful of active USP leaders have dictated policy. For the board members, who are in almost complete accord with these articulate people, there is no conflict. How well this does, indeed, represent the will of the more than 30,000 people who voted for them is an open question.

The repressive atmosphere in the district is taking its toll, not so much in identifiable and dramatic events, but quietly and insidiously. Thoughtful teachers have become ever more fearful. There is safety in erring on the side of caution; consequently, programs have been constrained and constricted, and new courses or new material for existing courses have been proposed less often.

Meanwhile, the liberals who retreated in disarray have remained in that state. Convinced that they could not win through the political process, they turned to the courts. But there has been little vindication of their hopes as the district has bargained for and won a series of delays that have already bought it more than two years' worth of time and the possibility of a changed political climate in the courts.

For the present, then, the dream of desegregating the ghetto schools is dead, and the conservatives have met with important successes in their attempts to restructure the RUSD schools into a system more compatible with their political and educational philosophies. How stable their hegemony over the district will be, is yet to be seen. Two board seats came up for election again in 1971 and although the incumbents won reelection, enthusiasm was lacking, voter turnout dropped by more than 54 percent, and their margin of victory was significantly smaller than in 1969.^[*]

[*] In 1969 48,469 people cast their votes; 22,136 did in 1971. The margin of victory in 1969 was 2 1/2–1; in 1971 it dropped to 1 1/2–1.