Understanding the Crisis at Irvine Valley College
by RED EMMA, instructor
Many IVC students and some faculty are still confused about the handmade signs posted on campus (“Recall Frogue” and “Mathur Must Go!”), recent news stories and letters to the editor regarding the recall of Trustee Frogue and the appointment of Raghu Mathur as president of this community college. There is reason for their confusion, in no small part resulting from the unwillingness of many to point to the unhappy direction suggested in the actions of the SOCCCD board, Mr. Frogue, the faculty union which elected and supports the board majority and their lackey, President Mathur. These, then, are my own complaints against this group, framed in a wider, national context which I see as a right-wing, corporate attack on public education by people who imagine that, yes, schools should be “run like businesses.”
2. They have tolerated, even encouraged, anti-Semitism and homophobia in the auspices of an intellectual community. They have equated the value of a wacky seminar with intellectual discourse. It’s instructive to note the two minority groups targeted: gays and lesbians (by the teacher’s union) and Jews (by Mr. Frogue). Attacking the civil rights of politically weak homosexuals seems to fly in South Orange County, or at least Ms. Fortune and her colleagues thought it did.
3. They have successfully co-opted a labor union local. A small anti-democratic minority created a situation where labor colludes with management, prevents its own members from voting and funds candidates who pretend not to understand what’s going on, all the while lobbying for the perceived interests of a small power elite.
4. They have created a political opportunity, a testing ground for activism by far-right groups. The Christian Coalition sought to find a way into Orange County education politics and now has: Board members actually attended a meeting with Christian Coalition leadership, activists who oppose women’s rights, promote hate and anti-Semitism and homophobia, all in the name of establishing a religious state.
5. They have promoted the corporatization and further privatization of the academy—changing IVC to IBM as it were, trying to transform public colleges into trade technical institutes “managed” to meet the perceived needs of industry.
6. They have championed the ghettoization of faculty. They have tried to turn full-time faculty into “employees,” exploited the slave labor of adjunct faculty and proposed turning real classrooms into so-called “distance-learning”; in other words, television shows.
7. They have marginalized students, turning them into political numbers valuable only as products to the corporations it is presumed (absent any evidence) will someday hire them.
8. They have limited expression, inquiry and engagement in the political process, designing rules suggesting a suburban homeowners association and not a dynamic college environment.
9. They have spent district money defending themselves against much of the above, including the recall and separate lawsuits brought by both students and faculty.
10. They have lied to the community which they claim to represent. They twice violated the Brown Act. Recently a mailer on behalf of two union-sponsored candidates bragged that they oppose the El Toro airport. In fact, these two have done nothing to oppose the airport and of course, their position on the airport has almost no relevance to the administration of SOCCCD. When asked on a recent OCN debate regarding their stands on the recall of Mr. Frogue, all either pretended not to know the problem or condemned intolerance in general terms. Similarly, IVC President Mathur, in a recent Irvine World News interview, questioned the well-document charges against Frogue.
What’s instructive here is that these actions together reflect a wider trend. Our district represents a microcosm of what’s happening across the state and the nation. Sadly, the crisis at SOCCCD has received almost no state or national media attention since Mr. Frogue’s proposed seminar. Why not? It is in fact because in its way, this crisis nearly perfectly represents all the coordinated attacks on public education: the attack on intellectual integrity, the attack on labor and student rights, the promotion of corporate hegemony and so on.
Because our crisis is in fact so wonderfully representative of a single, connected trend it’s easy to pretend not to see that Big Picture. It’s easy for media to pretend that its readers won’t get it. It’s easy for students and teachers not to understand that as it happens here, it is happening everywhere.
We can, of course, end it here. We can write letters, vote out Mr. Frogue, democratize a union, replace President Mathur, restore shared governance; in short, we can speak truth to power and put IVC on the map as a place where supporters of public education took on the privatizers...and won. —RE
Andrew Tonkovich
