beautiful film. i worked at a community college

and although its not a direct match up, this movie is so beautiful i dont know what to say.

unions are not the whole answer, and unions are not the whole problem, the answer is people like the Davis and Gyllenhall characters who keep trying to improve things.

really, there is just so much ossified bureaucracy, there are some truly rotten systems in place that push people to do awful things, while good people are ostracized and expelled for saying anything. and yes, i would say that some sociopaths are coddled and promoted while they do horrible things.

the administration of colleges has gotten really corrupt, where 'part time professor' has become the rule, no health care, no insurance, not even what one would call a "career" - while the administrators get huge bonuses. and this is for professors who are teaching future nurses and so forth and so on. there is no union - and unions could fix some of this. but not all of it. you need to realize these community colleges are getting the products of the unionized school systems - where kids, yes, cannot do basic reading comprehension, where teachers showed films in class instead of teaching, where every student has to go through remedial math classes that in other countries would have been done in 7th or 8th grade. its not just a union vs non union thing.

the world is held up by people like this Gyllenhall character. not that everything was bread and roses after the end... but that is not the point. the point is that you dont let yourself be beaten down by things that are clearly unfair and hateful and mean and small.

it goes beyond any party, any political philosophy, anything like that. its about the students, and this thing called 'education', which is fundamental to our nature as human beings.

Don't know how to say how great Davis and Gyllenhall were in this. Wow.