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Gidwitz is completely unacceptable. Please read:

Ron Gidwitz: Mayor Daley's Stealth Candidate for Governor of Illinois
Written by Robert Klein Engler
Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Richard Wagner’s opera Twilight of the Gods opens with the three Norns busy spinning threads of past, present, and future. As the race for governor of Illinois heats up, we can imagine the Norns also at work here, spinning the destiny of Illinois politicians. What a complicated design they tease out.

The current Illinois governor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, has millions of dollars to spend on his reelection campaign, but also has declining support around the state. Illinois Republicans, still hurting from an unsuccessful attempt to run a candidate for the U. S. Senate, but realizing Blagojevich’s growing unpopularity, feel they can get back power in the state capitol. They just might be able to do that if they can decide on a candidate from the many Republicans who are seeking to win the primary election.

If the Democrats in Chicago sense they may lose the govenorship to a Republican, then they might try to counter this move by working to elect a Republican they can use to their advantage. To do that, they could support a stealth candidate. Of all the Republican candidates who have announced so far, Ron Gidwitz could be Mayor Daley’s stealth candidate for governor of Illinois.

Thread of the Past

Ron Gidwitz is the former president and CEO of Helene Curtis Industries and past Chairman of the State Board of Education. He is on many boards, including the Board of Directors of Lyric Opera Chicago. Membership on these boards does not say much about Ron Gidwitz’s qualifications to be governor. Nevertheless, in an operatic move that seemed more calculated than caring, Gidwitz announced his campaign for governor in Dixon, Illinois, the boyhood home of former President Ronald Reagan.

Dixon is a long way from Ron Gidwitz’s seat at the Lyric Opera, but not so far away that money from his well-heeled supporters had trouble following him there. Robert C. McCormack and T. Russell Shields, among others, contributed $100,000 to Gidwitz’s campaign fund. It costs a lot to run for governor or to attend college in Illinois these days.

Most voters in Illinois have to work at least two years to make $100,000 just to support their families. Undaunted by this fact of life in Illinois, Gidwitz said in a telephone interview with reporter Bernard Schoenburg of the State Journal Register, he would “restore fiscal responsibility, honesty and integrity and ‘adult leadership’ to the state. ‘I think the governor too frequently acts just a little juvenile,’ Gidwitz...said.” After reading these remarks, those cynical about Illinois politics asked, “How much honesty and integrity does $100,000 buy?”

If you want to know what kind of governor Ron Gidwitz would be, then you should ignore his comments about the present governor and instead look at Ron Gidwitz’s record at the City Colleges of Chicago. Gidwitz was Chairman of the Board of the city colleges for many years. Some say he left the city colleges worse off than when he came.

According to an interview by Fran Eaton, in the IllinoisLeader.com, Gidwitz’s involvement with Mayor Daley and the City Colleges of Chicago goes back much father then may be good for the state of Illinois. “I was vocal about the quality of the product coming out of community colleges, and Mayor Daley asked me to chair the City Colleges of Chicago and I did for three terms,” Gidwitz said.

This statement ought to be investigated by the media because “da mayor” does not ask people out of the blue to head a department or agency. We know from the ongoing federal corruption investigation that things work differently in Chicago. Gidwitz came to the city colleges with little background in education, so it must have been something other than expertise that landed him the job as chairman.

The city colleges in Chicago are part of an apparatus that keeps the mayor in office. Those familiar with the college system know that the colleges assure votes for the mayor, but not always an education for the students. It is hard to believe Ron Gidwitz was unaware of this. The rumor among the faculty at the time of Gidwit’s appointment was that Daley’s wife Maggie and Gidwitz’s wife Christina were good friends. That friendship probably contributed above all to his being picked as chairman of the city colleges board.

Ron Gidwitz was chairman when the city colleges board selected a new president for Daley College, one of the seven colleges that make up the system. Even though the selection committee at Daley College recommended three candidates to the board, the board chose as the new president a man who was not among the three recommended. It was reported that the mayor needed Latino votes for his reelection, so it was politically expedient to select a candidate from Texas and not one from Chicago with more experience.

That new college president from Texas proved to be tumultuous. Today, Daley College is a shadow of what it used to be. Ron Gidwitz, who professes to care so much about education, does not seem to care about that, or the trail of ruin left behind. The example of Daley College alone ought to be enough to convince the voters of Illinois that Ron Gidwitz should not be their governor.

While at the city colleges, Gidwitz imposed a so-called “business model” on the system. It had little effect. Most of the classes at the city colleges are taught by adjuncts who earn sweatshop wages, the college has just suffered a disastrous faculty strike, and the academic reputation of the system has plummeted. Can the state of Illinois expect the same results if Gidwitz becomes governor? If the answer is “yes,” then the strains of a Republican Gotterdammerug may echo all the way from Springfield, across the cornfields and up to the high offices of Chicago’s major corporations.

Thread of the Present

Even if Ron Gidwitz’s tenure as chairman of the city colleges was problematic, what is worse now is his present vision of higher education for Illinois. Ron Gidwitz holds the shortsighted view that public education should train people for jobs. He probably learned such nonsense at Brown University where he earned a degree in economics. Perhaps, if he had attended the University of Illinois at Urbana instead, he may have learned that the motto of the University of Illinois is both “LEARNING and Labor.”

The purpose of public education and especially public higher education is not simply to train people for jobs. Public education should also make good citizens and preserve our traditions. If Illinois’ students cannot afford to go to an Ivy League school like Brown University, then they should be given an educational opportunity at a public university, or at a community college. The future of Illinois rests more with good citizens than it does with workforce training.

As Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the City Colleges of Chicago, Gidwitz supposedly cut waste and inefficiency and reformed course offerings. Yet, to cut course offerings solely because they do not match the needs of the workforce is what they do in communist China, not what we ought to do in a republic that values education.

The fundamental problem with Ron Gidwitz’s vision of education is that it represents liberalism at its worst—in short it is Marxism in disguise. To focus public education on training for the workforce is to define people only as workers. Furthermore, it places authority in the hands of a few instead of creating a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” If public education teaches us simply to work and not about our heritage of freedom and responsibility, then we will stop being free. Go to China and you will learn this lesson.

Ron Gidwitz claims mistakenly, “From a community college standpoint, the colleges have always been basically a work force training program.” Contrary to this, many working-class and minority families in Illinois without $100,000 to give to his political campaign send there sons and daughters to community colleges so that they may have an opportunity to get a traditional liberal education, not simply to be trained for dead-end jobs. These families believe the words of Abraham Lincoln, that we must educate our citizens so they “may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions.”

Such an appreciation seems absent from Gidwitz’s vision of education. He admits, “I came there with the intention of changing how we train people so that they are ready for the 21st century work force, and became shocked to find that 95 percent of graduates of the Chicago public school system required remediation.” If this is the case, then why did Gidwitz go in the wrong direction? Did he ever confront Mayor Daley about the shoddy state of education in Chicago? It is not the fault of the state’s universities and community colleges that Chicago’s public grammar and high schools do not educate, even after years of being controlled by the mayor?

Lack of direction is repeated on Gidwitz’s webpage where we read, “In 2003 Ron personally launched Students First Illinois, a nonpartisan, statewide grassroots coalition...to help put Illinois’ 2.2 million children first in state policy.” What Students First Illinois has to do with quality education is anyone’s guess. If you know anything about how you get an education, then you know it is never students first, but really teachers first that makes for quality education.

Placing students first is putting the cart before the horse. It is just a smoke screen to hide placing administrators first. Students first does little to improve education or take away the root cause of failed educational systems in the state. Besides politicians who use public education to get votes, in Illinois there have been at least two other long-standing reasons why teachers are not first: poor administrators, many of them Affirmative Action political appointees, and obfuscating unions like the Cook County College Teachers Union in Chicago. Now, it looks like there may be another reason--mayor Daley’s stealth candidate for governor of Illinois.

Thread of the Future

Although Ron Gidwitz has said little so far about his position on illegal immigration, we may guess he will do nothing to stop it. Even though illegal immigrants cost the state millions of dollars a year in education funding and social programs, Gidwitz’s web page offers a link to the page in Spanish. Why that Spanish link is needed in a state whose official language is English is not clear. Maybe Ron Gidwitz needs a webpage in Spanish because his plans for education have been such a failure that not enough voters leave the state’s schools able to speak and read English. That must be the case, for anything else looks like pandering again to get the Latino vote.

If the citizens of Illinois want real change in Springfield, then they need to elect a Republican governor who has few ties to the Daley administration in Chicago. Having been a part of that administration, it seems unlikely that Ron Gidwitz will speak out against the mayor anytime soon. Yet, the more Gidwitz distances himself from being viewed as the mayor’s stealth candidate, the better off he will be. If he doesn’t distance himself, he may have to run a political campaign against the backdrop of a growing scandal in Chicago.

Changing Ron Gidwitz’s view on public education is another matter. Taking him at his word that he wants to help students, he could help them much more by spending $100,000 on scholarships, rather than spending it on a campaign for governor or a grassroots coalition that perpetuates failed educational policies. Those scholarships would be a lasting legacy for him, the Republican Party and the state of Illinois.

The next act in Illinois politics is about to begin. If Rich Miller’s accusation in the Daily Southtown that “A Gidwitz family company manages a hellhole of an apartment complex in downtown Joliet,” is not enough to make voters wonder about Ron Gidwitz, then voters ought to spend a few moments looking at Gidwitz’s record at the City Colleges of Chicago and his vision for education. After doing that, they most likely will send him back to his seat at the Lyric Opera and not to the governor’s chair in Springfield.

Fortunately, Illinois voters have an opportunity to cast a vote for a Republican candidate other than Ron Gidwitz. The Illinois state Treasurer, Judy Baar Topinka, may announce her candidacy soon, and then emerge as the Republican front-runner. In this opera, it’s not over until the state treasurer sings.

About the Writer: Robert Klein Engler is an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and a versatile writer of op-ed articles, poetry, and philosophy. His recent book, "A Winter of Words," is available from amazon.com