From the OC REGISTER:
College head getting home-security funds
CONTRACT: Irvine Valley president says he has been threatened
—By MARLA JO FISHER
IRVINE — The president of Irvine Valley College is receiving a $200 per month security allowance, after telling college officials that he had been threatened and feared for his safety.
National community-college experts said they were unaware of other instances where community-college presidents received payments toward home security.
Irvine College President Raghu Mathur, who has been the target of protests and lawsuits over the last two years, declined to comment on the alleged threats against him.
“For safety and security reasons, I would prefer not to go into any further details,” Mathur said. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about a safety and security matter.”
The payments have drawn derision from some campus employees, including English instructor Andrew Tonkovich, who wrote to Mathur Dec. 1, offering to escort him to and from his car and to taste his food for poison.
The stipend was approved by the South Orange County Community College trustees in November as part of a contract-renewal and salary-hike package.
District trustee Don Wagner said he voted to approve Mathur’s new contract and security payment because the president told them he’d received death threats at his home.
“He asked for it and it seemed reasonable in the context of the threats he’s received,” Wagner said, adding that he had no personal information about the threats.
“He has told us he has received actual death threats,” Wagner said. “It’s our understanding that reports have been made to the police.”
Campus police have no reports on file of threats against Mathur, college spokeswoman Joyce Kirk said. Irvine police have no record of threats against Mathur, but do show that he reported an office break-in in 1993, spokesman Lt. Sam Allevato said.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department was unable to say Thursday whether Mathur had reported death threats at his home in Laguna Hills.
While five of the seven district trustees voted to approve Mathur’s contract, district trustee Marcia Milchiker was among the two who opposed it.
“I’m not sure why he felt threatened,” Milchiker said, adding that she voted against the contract because it gave Mathur a $6,000 raise, to $111,037 per year, not including the security allowance.
“It’s taxpayers’ money, and I feel responsible to keep costs down,” Milchiker said.
Mathur became president of the Irvine college in 1997, after serving two decades as a chemistry professor and administrator on the campus.
Since 1997, he has been the target of lawsuits, critical newsletters and demonstrations.
Philosophy professor Roy Bauer successfully sued the college district in federal court last year for violating his free-speech rights, after Chancellor Cedric Sampson wrote to him that his newsletters were creating a hostile work environment.
In a 1998 newsletter, Bauer named a list of people he disliked that comprised a “two-ton slate of polished granite which I hope someday to drop on Raghu Mathur’s head.”
In another, Bauer wrote about a fantasy he had of a funeral of one district trustee in which Mathur and others would be “dispatched by a lurid gas emanating from the Great Man’s gaping mouth.”
In March 1999, U.S. District Court Judge Nora M. Manella ruled that the district could not interfere with Bauer’s political speech.
In September, however, the college president said during a legal deposition that the tone of the newsletters made him afraid.
“I think the threats taken as a whole about dropping granite, maiming, killing through lurid gas or using a gun, using a hatchet, any of those ways or some other ways I could be killed,” Mathur said.
Bauer denied that he ever meant harm to the president.
“He has absolutely no documentation for any of these alleged threats,” Bauer said.
In the September deposition, Mathur also said he had received since 1990 five to seven threatening letters, e-mails and voice mails, but didn’t keep copies of any of them.
The president said he gave the Sheriff’s Department two or three threatening letters that arrived at his house in 1990, when he was chairman of the college’s School of Physical Sciences and Technology.
Mathur, a native of India, said he received more letters in 1995, and a racist e-mail in 1997, but did not report them to police.
He implied in the deposition that some of the letters might have come from on-campus opponents, but was unable to cite any evidence.
The president of Saddleback College — the sister college to Irvine Valley — had her contract renewed at the same time as Mathur. President Dixie Bullock said she was also offered the $200 home-security payment, but turned it down.
“I said that I didn’t want it,” Bullock said. “My neighbor has a security system, and it goes off all the time when I’m asleep.”
Some presidents of universities live in houses with gated compounds, but Mathur’s security allowance may be a first.
“I haven’t heard of that particular benefit before,” said Liz Rocklin, a national expert who helps community colleges recruit top executives.
“I remember a number of years ago, there was a case in Texas where a president was threatened and had round-the-clock guards. In New York City, they also get a car and driver, because it’s impossible to park.”
[NOTE: a version of this story was aired on KNX news radio.]
[Later, during a deposition, Mathur was asked whether he kept any of the dozen or so email, mail, voicemail, etc., “threats” that he had supposedly received while President of IVC. His answer: he kept
none of them. Obviously, he had made them up.]
