“EDUCATION on Saipan and probably elsewhere in Micronesia is in a desperate situation,” said a Marianas High School teacher who was originally from the states. In a letter to Variety’s editor, the teacher noted that an “increasing number of students are entering our schools and the budget does not expand fast enough to provide them with an adequate education.” The teacher said money “is being wasted on overly sophisticated T.V. and audio-visual aids, unnecessary ‘semi-private’ vehicles for administrators and uneconomical padding of administrative staffs on both the district and headquarters levels, but even if all these wasteful practices were eliminated there would still not be enough money in the budget to provide adequate education for the children….”
Who’s to blame? Why, the government, of course.
“The U.S. government has ignored its Trust Territory obligation and has been negligent in supplying an adequate budget for education…. [W]hen [it’s] time to put some money behind the propaganda, little appears for education.” The teacher said the student body at MHS “will increase next fall [by] almost 30% while the teaching staff will increase by only one teacher if any. This situation is disgraceful.”
MV published the teacher’s letter on Jan. 26, 1973. Seven months later, Variety reported his resignation. Classes at MHS opened on Monday, Aug. 20, 1973. According to one of the teachers, “It is a mess. It will take a week to settle down…. Not enough teachers, no counsellor and the registration was not completed.”
At the time, the NMI was one of the six districts of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands which was administered by the U.S. The other districts were the Marshall Islands, Palau, Ponape (Pohnpei), Truk (Chuuk) and Yap. (According to a team from the United Nations, the TT islands were America’s “neglected colonies.”)
The TT government’s chief executive was an American high commissioner appointed by the U.S. president. The TT had a bicameral Congress of Micronesia, and each of the six districts had district legislatures. In the NMI’s case, it also had mayors, municipal councils, district or village commissioners on top of the various TT government departments, agencies and other offices.
In MV’s Feb. 2, 1973 issue, an unsigned editorial blasted the American high commissioner for surrounding “himself with special consultants and assistants who have usurped most of the department powers….”
In the same issue, a student noted that MV had been regularly publishing a column regarding the TT government’s “master plan” for the districts. “I would like to ask,” the student wrote, “why is there no water and no power sometimes on Saipan? … [T]here is little news about what is being done for our people. Let’s take Chalan Kanoa for instance. The village has always been dusty and dirty.”
In an editorial published on March 9, 1973, MV declared that “people anywhere in the world will eventually get tired of political antics…. The people are getting smarter. They are beginning to know that such antics can come only from childish and politically immature persons,” referring to certain members of the Marianas District Legislature. “We suggest that before the Legislature loses support of the people, it had better tend to the real and pressing needs of our people. A list of such needs is endless but includes a paved road around the hospital [then located at what is now NMC on As Terlaje hill], more classrooms to eliminate the double sessions in effect in most of our schools, more scholarships, etc…. The people are not blind and they now want good leaders.”
A letter to the editor titled “Stating the Obvious” said “the paternalism of the TT government has to come to an end some day.” The writer said “businesses and political organizations blame past failures on the TT government” and yet they “expect this same government to do everything for them in the future….”
Another letter, “Feeding at the Public Trough?,” complained about the district legislature’s questionable expenditures. The writer “is considering a public lawsuit enjoining the district legislators as incompetent pigs at the public trough and sue for an accounting of all funds spent.” The writer added that impeachment proceedings against the legislature’s presiding officer was justified.
For his part, MV columnist Jon A. Anderson, who was unhappy with anonymous comments and unsigned editorials, shared the following plea of the Associated Press president to journalists:
“It is the journalist’s task to be a clear, cool, objective voice bringing reason to an inflamed and confused world. The strident, partisan voices in today’s society contribute heat but no light to a society drowning in problems…. Someone must make sense out of the heated rhetoric. Someone must search for the facts — all the facts — not just those that fit his point of view, and present them to the public.”
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