When a good idea goes bad

If you are just tuning in, here's the story to date. For the past ten years, I worked for a career college at its campus in Clackamas, a city near Portland. On April 1, we received notice from management that our site would be closing at the end of the term. Students were invited to transfer to the main campus in Wilsonville. On April 9, full-time faculty were notified individually if they were being asked to transfer or if they were being laid off. Three people, all program directors, were invited to stay. The rest of us were given notice that our last day would be May 2.

For the past three weeks, in an effort to cope with my shock and grief, I documented the closing of the campus with my funky old Sony Cybershot and posted the photos on my faculty webpage.

I took pictures of packing boxes. I took pictures of people I have grown to love and admire (and avoided others). I photographed the flyer that a posse of outraged students plastered the halls with in a futile attempt to save a teacher's job. I documented the stairs our boss Denny fell down. I captured a teacher's tattoo and and another teacher's glittery flipflops. Everywhere I looked I found people that deserved to be honored, moments that needed to be acknowledged, objects that deserved to be recognized. Some images were meaningful only to me, but some of the images seemed to sum up the bittersweet last days at our special campus. It was slipping away so fast. I wanted to preserve it, for me, for us, so every day I took more pictures and expanded my webpage.

Sheryl's filing cabinet, for sale for a day to the highest bidder, now left behind.... A whiteboard decorated with a student's scribbled love notes to a teacher she would never see again.... An accounting teacher on his shiny three-wheel motorcycle.... Classrooms, stairways, hallways, the lobby, the smoking area.... The view of the empty parking lot from the third floor computer lab.... A bizarrely shaped coffee cup imprinted with a tagline so astoundingly apropos I could hardly hold the camera still for laughing: There's a better life out there.

When I look back through the photos, one thing strikes me: everyone I photographed was smiling. Big, wide smiles. There were no sad faces, no moping expressions, no defeated postures. We all looked happy, despite the fact that our lives were being turned upside down, inside out. Even I looked happy.

The last day came. I finished my grades and had Denny sign off on them. I made arrangements to have the bookkeeper mail my final paycheck. I cleaned out my desk drawers. I posted the last photos on my faculty webpage. I prepared auto-replies that would activate at midnight, stating that I was no longer with the college. I packed up my book bags with my binders, my stapler, my post-it notes, my scissors. And finally, I drafted a goodbye email.

I addressed the note to everyone in Wilsonville and Clackamas. In it I described my gratitude at having been a part of the organization for ten years and how I was certain what I learned would help me in my new career. I entitled it Happy trails from Clackamas. At the end of the note, in a postscript, I gave the URL to my faculty webpage.

I finished the letter and then sat there with my mouse poised over the SEND button.  I had a gut feeling it might not be a wise thing to do. I re-read it, trying to imagine how it would be received. Should I take off the URL to my webpage? Should I delete the letter altogether? Should I fade away quietly without a protest, without one final poke, one last prod? I wanted to say, Hey, look at us, you stupid college, look at what you did with this bonehead move, you disregarded the needs of your students, you disrespected your faculty, you destroyed your brand. You thought by cutting off our campus, you could save yourselves. You thought you were abandoning us on the part of the ship that was sinking. Ha.

I predict we will survive, we will flourish, our ship will sail on, and in the end your top-heavy boat will sink into obscurity. Because you can't treat people disrespectfully forever. Sooner or later, you will find out what happens when you sail too close to the rocks. The next thought running through my head was, What have I got to lose? What are they going to do, fire me? That made me smile. So I hit SEND and sat back to wait.

Within moments I got my first response, oddly enough from the Compliance Officer, wishing me farewell and giving me his personal email address. (“Let's link up on LinkedIn.”) I was pleasantly surprised. In another few moments, two more responses wishing me well from employees who were former students (“I learned so much from you!”), then another from the program director in Wilsonville (“I never really knew you, but good luck!”). A few minutes later, Denny came into the office, checked his email, and said, “Your link doesn't work.”

“What? No, are you sure?” I said. I quickly typed in the URL. Sure enough: Error 404: File or directory not found. We looked at each other. I turned back to the computer, opened Expression Web, and tried to load up my site. And there it was, the message, spelled out in black and white:

There is no site named http://blablablacollege.info/myname.

It was dead. My faculty website was gone. I had been well and truly spanked.

I responded the way I responded to every interesting incident at the college over the past three weeks. I got out my camera and took a picture of it. A simple image to commemorate the end of ten years of service to a for-profit career college. There's a better life out there.