AS A HYPOCRITE, RAGHU KNOWS NO EQUAL!
By Big Bill
THE OLD GUARD SINGS RAGHU’S PRAISES: Board Meeting, August ’97
Tony Garcia: …[Raghu is] a courageous moralist who has confronted many of the ills of the north campus despite the vitriolic invectives and hollow protestations that he has encountered to condemn the obscene and immoral practice of release time…Release time has become one of the great scandals of academia…which is the root of the majority of our evils…I’d like to thank Dr. Mathur for his fortitude in confronting this specific problem. The community should erect a statue to him for his courage. The people that you see at Board meetings and read about in the Times condemning his actions you would find on the Who’s Who list of release time usurpers [Sherry Miller-White interjects: “Amen!”], if you were privy to it. Now you see the picture. [8/97, Board Meeting]
Bill Heffernan:…Reassigned time is really a euphemism for faculty welfare and has turned our college into a playground for spoiled children—not our students, but a few faculty who want to teach courses—two courses, not five courses as they were hired to do. Some of us—and that includes Raghu—say this scandalous system for the favored few is over. If you were hired to teach, it is time to teach. [8/97, Board Meeting]
Jan Horn: My name is Jan Horn…Raghu Mathur is being hailed as a hero for his tough stance against reassigned time and his tough decisions to cut [it].
His position is new and surprising to those of us who have worked with him for many years prior to his [recent appointment as president of IVC]. Raghu received 60%-80% reassigned time as School Chair for [10] years. In addition, for at least the past three years—possibly four—he received a stipend, equivalent to 6 LHE reassigned time, for his role as Tech Prep Coordinator. So he has had 100%—or close to it—reassigned time for a number of years, and now he and his followers are talking about the disgraces and abuses [of reassigned time]...
Does President Mathur think he did nothing during that job?...
I’d like you to take a look at his load...and then see what he actually did about reassigned time, not what he is saying about it now. [8/97, Board Meeting]
* * * * * * * * *
YEARS LATER, Raghu was still bemoaning the “scandalous” practice of reassigned time—and $100,000+ faculty salaries. In a story the appeared in the Irvine World News (5/27/99), Raghu (who, as an instructor and Chair, did the maximum of overload, making about $120,000 a year) explained that, “In 60 percent of the cases, [Chairs] had reassigned time and then were teaching classes as overload.”
Say it isn’t so!
CODA:
Does Raghu suppose, as do his union pals Garcia and Heffernan, that School Chairs were lazy?
It seems not, for, in a letter to the Chancellor (10/9/89), Raghu, then the Chair of his School, implied that the role of Chair was particularly taxing:
“Different faculty members…serve as school chairs because the position is rotational and it is now their turn to get burned out.”
Burned out? What about all this “playground” and “welfare” guff? I don’t get it.
–BB
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