THAT AWFUL LITTLE MAN by Red Emma

    [Note: Dick Jones served as interim Chancellor of SOCCCD between Cedric Sampson and Raghu Mathur. I think that he was very glad to leave our district. No one has ever heard from him again.] 

February (?) 2002 

     Hi friends. Red Emma here. Or is she? With these wacky science guys going around cloning calico kittens and a guy as Chancellor who says he’s a doctor, I could be anybody. 

     Chancellor McGuffey: By the way, what is it about Doctor Dick Jones, former Chancellor, that makes me want to put on my gingham, churn butter, and get out the old buggy whip? Is the fellow a Quaker, a Mennonite, a Taliban, or only an extra on “Little House on the Prairie”? 

     Friends, it’s hard to know with whom you are dealing at SOCCCD. 

     Red of course admires Peace Religions, but wonders how Brother Dick could possibly get up each morning, saddle up the horses, not button his buttons and go to work with Minister of Pancakes Raghu Mathur, Ed.D. and the rest of the disciples. 

     Appearances can be almost as deceiving as public relations officers. Did you know, for instance, that Richard Nixon was raised a Quaker? Did you know Steve Frogue was a Boy Scout troop leader? Did you know that Red was once a Republican? (I made up that last one.) 

     Recently the good doctor asked Red, a writing instructor, if “you folks still teach the five paragraph essay?” 

     Well, yes, Brother Dick, we do. And then, sometimes for fun, we get out our McGuffey Reader or count up the number of stars on the flag. Yup, all twenty-eight of ‘em are still up on Old Glory. 

     Valentine’s Day: Not having visited campus recently, I was pleased that IVC’s typically state-of-the-art technology was, well, something typical, if less than art. Arriving for a fine Valentine’s Day reading sponsored by three English Department stalwarts (whose names, if mentioned here, will only climb higher on the dean’s shit list), I encountered an hourly parking-pass dispenser machine, which refused to accept my coins, bills, or gentle head hammering. 

     Judging it unlikely that I’d find valet parking, I tooled around in my new BMW (well, actually, an old VW, but it does sport a W, like the president), looking for the parking lot near the old orange grove, and found parking aplenty—but no damned orange trees. I fully expect that, upon arriving for a visit in, say, a month or so, I’ll find no school at all, only a small commemorative plaque, naming the site the “Raghu P. Mathur, Ed.D., Distance Learning Campus Mini-Mall.” 

     That night, the Humanities Building seemed to be my destination, but, providing a metaphor this rednik could not dream up, it was of course under renovation/construction, with windows boarded up and frightening Police ribbon strung decoratively. 

     The folks in the School of Humanities and Languages have been under a lot of stress lately. I watched my step, half expecting to find a chalk silhouette drawn on the pavement. 

     That awful little man: People who clone cats are not the people I want to have at my college event but, like so many things last week, this infelicitous feline science development caused me to consider the new chancellor, or, as I like to call him, “Chance.” 

     Did anybody else hear the eight-minute news update on KPCC’s “Airtalk” with Larry Mantle the other morning? It was more fun than a cat in a petri dish. The political reporter from the Register led Larry through recent developments at SOCCCD, with Larry interrupting every once in a while to exclaim “Really?” or “You’re kidding!”—or to wonder aloud if the new Chancellor could possibly be the same awful little man who, in recent years, sued his employer, took on student protesters, went after this very journal, and so on, delightfully. I don’t really like Larry, but he knows a weird, strange, unlikely story when he hears one. 

     Later in the week Larry did a special call-in show on whether Dr. Raghu P. Mathur should be given the Gold Medal for figure skating instead of those Russians and Canadians, though I may have heard that wrong. 

     Caller: I think Jews killed Kennedy. Nova Southeastern University is a swell school. Raghu should get the gold. 

     Larry: Steve, is that you? 

     Cat bite pleasures: Despite not often strolling IVC’s hollowed (and crumbling) halls these days, I do get nifty electronic announcements from the little college in the disappearing orange grove. I receive them via a plastic box my cat likes to call her couch, but which also delivers my email. And, boy, was I pleased to get the announcement of Dr. M’s matriculation to chancellorhood. 

     —It’s like when the doctor (I mean a real doctor) says the nurse will call you in 24 hours with test results cuz you got bit by a potentially rabid stray cat and you’re waiting by the phone to hear if you’ve gotta get those 14 shots in the stomach, but then the nurse finally calls and says, no, the cat wasn’t rabid but they’re gonna destroy it anyway. Well, upon hearing about Raghu’s TOTALLY SURPRISING APPOINTMENT AS CHANCELLOR, I wasn’t sure whether to feel like the doctor, the nurse, the cat, or the guy who got bit. 

The J. Edgar Mathur Memorial Scholarships 

     But I couldn’t have been more pleased when I learned that the Mathuristas (Board members and administrators on whom he apparently has the goods, viz., dirty pictures with animals) were sponsoring a scholarship in the name of the Great Man himself. Meow! An educational scholarship in honor of a lousy Chem Professor who got his “doctorate” through a mail order institution is kind of, well, like cloning cats or something. If you’re gonna clone something, aren’t rabbits the more obviously ironic Kafka-meets-Dr. Frankenstein-meets-Dr. Doolittle choice? 

     Yeah. 

     This news of course caused Red Emma to speculate about other possible scholarships we might see springing up soon and to which we, of course, encourage you all to donate. 

  1. The Raghu P. Mathur Security Stipend Scholarship. Sponsors: Argenbright Security Inc. Description: offers any student being harassed by Kate Clark a monthly stipend for purchase of mace, pepper spray, and a Rottweiler. 

  2. The Raghu P. Mathur-Dorothy Fortune Scholarship for Heterosexual Awareness. Sponsors: Pam “Same-Sex” Zanelli, Sharon McMillan, Sherry Miller-White. Description: a dollar bill, with portrait of our very butchest president, mailed to each voter in the county around, say, election time. –Obtuse, yet symbolic; sleazy, yet certainly not homo, no f**kin’ way! 

  3. The Raghu P. Mathur Revisionist History Scholarship. Sponsors: Steven Frogue, Thomas Fuentes, Michael Collins Piper, Spotlight. Description: an all-expenses paid trip for one lucky IVC history student (a Mathur Fellow) to Dachau, the Dallas Schoolbook Depository, the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, and the A-100 building. 

  4. The Raghu P. Mathur El Toro Airport Scholarship. Sponsors: Tom Fuentes, John Williams, Dorothy Fortune, Don Wagner, and Nancy Padberg. Description: employs a lucky IVC student to stand underneath the proposed flight path screaming, “Tom Fuentes was against this, goddamn it! Oh, the humanity!” 

  5. The Raghu P. Mathur Reassigned Time Abolition Scholarship. Sponsors: Hypocrites Anonymous. Description: At an elaborate Pancake Prayer Breakfast, a student is surrounded by a supportive prayer circle. Various godheads are evoked and then the lucky IVC scholar is awarded a keg of Vermont maple syrup and a shiny new “Greed is Good” button. 

      Our whimsical contract: Some readers may recall that your faithful Red scribe once objected, loudly, to the deliberate—or just stupid—failure of SOCCCD to honor the contract, which provides that Adjunct Faculty who’ve worked 5 years are entitled to receive an interview if they are silly enough to want an opening full-time teaching gig in the district. Last month, I finally sat down with, yes, a couple of lawyers, some union comrades, a nice arbitrator, and the district’s sole and singular representative: the acting (and bad acting it was) Chancellor, one Dick “The Woodsman” Jones, who, as I said, waxed so cluelessly about my profession. I wonder if Dick asks dentists about the old grind? 

     Anyway, the arbitration turned into a mediation, which turned nasty when the union had the audacity to suggest a financial award on my behalf. In a few months, I’ll walk into another meeting with lawyers, arbitrator, union comrades, and perhaps the apparent official representative of the district, the Chancellor, when I hope to experience, finally, the happiness, the joy, of meeting, in person, that awful little man.

     Which reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s instructive remark on learning that people were cloning cats: “On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.” 

 —RE