DEFIANCE: A brief report on tonight's wild board meeting

This’ll have to be fast. Gotta get some sleep. More tomorrow.

It was quite a meeting tonight. It was a horror movie, and Raghu and trustee Tom were the monsters. More on that in a moment.

During public comments, IVC Academic Senate Prez Wendy, on behalf of senators, noted that the district planning process is illegitimate, given that it was developed without Academic Senate input. She explained that failure to include faculty violated Title V and BP 2100.1. Hence the Academic Senate decided to pursue a “minimum conditions” complaint with the State Chancellor’s Office.

During trustee reports, Lang used his time to express his “disappointment” in Wendy’s remarks, which he rejected as erroneous. No, he said patronizingly, the district gets to pursue planning. Planning is not just the faculty’s purview.

Of course, she (i.e., the IVC senate) never said that. Rather, the point was that, according to Title V and 2100.1, the district is to rely primarily on the academic Senates regarding the development of a planning process.

Nancy Padberg indicated that she would have to leave early for some reason, and this got me to worryin’, since she was the 4th vote for “reinstatement” of the American Library Association to the approved district membership list. Sheesh.

During her report, Nancy expressed gratitude for last month’s staff report on trustee traveling expenses in the last year. I’m told that the report makes John Williams look pretty bad.

Well, on this night, Nancy requested that the report now be extended to “five years” in order to see whether the pattern of the last year was just an aberration.

Guess what? Williams, Fuentes, Wagner, and (I think) Lang voted that down!

Luckily, the public has a right to this info, so we’ll work on getting it for you.

There was some carping about item 31, “budget development discussion,” which requested the authorization of two guidelines. Trustee Fuentes used the occasion to complain that, in effect, the board was failing to follow its chosen policy according to which “basic aid” money would not be used for “ongoing expenses,” but, rather, only for “one-time expenses.” But, asserted Tom, each year, we permit these “one-time expenses.”

Near as I can tell, Mr. Poertner responded by saying that the colleges are $15 million in the hole, and they can’t operate without some help, so you better help them. I think he prevailed.

Mathur and the college presidents gave a slide show concerning responses to the Accred’s recommendations. That went on for a while. It seemed clear that Mathur and Co. are stuffing "Accreditation" items into board meetings because that leaves an impressions that they're serious about the Accred's recommendations, which, plainly, they are not.

At some point, Raghu stopped the whole show to read a lengthy statement regarding the Accreditation issue. In his mind, evidently, he was stepping up to the plate to provide some “leadership.”

I’ll have lots more, including audio files, maybe tomorrow. I'll just say for now that Raghu’s “leadership” took the particular form of his asserting that certain people are trying to tear down the district’s reputation, and that the real problem in the district is that a few faculty leaders are trying to run the whole show. Naturally, this message presupposes that the Accreds' recommendations are crap.

Plus, said Raghu, some of these people who want to control the district are indecorous and disrespectful (I think that last one was about me, though I’m not a “leader.”)

This went on and on and it was so obnoxious that the faculty union president and the two senate presidents got up and left in protest. Later in the evening, Mathur referred to that exodus as evidence that the problem is with faculty.

I think it was item 28—a resolution to affirm board and district commitment to address the Accreditation Teams’ recommendations—when Mr. Fuentes insisted that he wasn’t about to affirm any such thing. No, he would only affirm a statement that included mention of faculty “macromanagement.”

More than once, Fuentes asserted that the problem with the district isn’t board “micromanagement.” OK, maybe two trustees engaged in some micromanagement, but so what? Somebody’s gotta control these pesky over-reaching faculty leaders! There’s your problem!

Student Trustee Ho tried to mediate. He expressed the worry that Fuentes’ defiance might lead to our Accreditation ticket bein’ pulled. Fuentes then advised Ho not to buy into the nonsense that trustee actions threaten accreditation. Paul backed off immediately.

At some point, Nancy disappeared, and then item 29, “reinstatement of ALA to approved district membership list” came up. For some reason (graciousness? Nah), Fuentes moved to table the item, but that failed. (I think Marcia and Bill need to talk. They need to find a clue.)

And so the inevitable occurred: the vote was 3 to 3, and thus the reinstatement of ALA failed. It seems unlikely that the board will again agendize this issue.

Within minutes of that vote, Nancy returned to the meeting. D’oh!!!! Too late!

I noticed just after I got home that union president Lewis L sent faculty an email responding to Mathur’s obnoxious remarks. Check it out.

More later.