Trustees, Utah, Red Meat

"As with administrators in any organization, high on the list of expectations of chairs is that they will display loyalty, courtesy, and willingness to participate as a member of the leadership team….”

—John "Brownie" Williams (7/11/97)

n a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (February 24), Piper Fogg describes problems that commonly arise in the working relationship of faculty and trustees. Fogg, of course, is writing about four-year institutions, not community colleges.

For every college trustee who complains that professors are a difficult, whiny lot, there is a professor who thinks trustees are pompous stuffed shirts.

Governing boards are packed with businessmen, faculty members will moan. They are steering institutions down the dreaded path to corporatization.

Trustees will counter that faculty members don't know how good they have it: They teach just a few hours a week, have summers off, and enjoy more benefits than most professionals.

Boards often think faculty members should be supervised by the administration just as any employees would be by their managers. But faculty members generally feel they are part of a collaborative enterprise and are entitled to a say in how it is run.

Pompous stuffed shirts? (“Spain has abandoned our fighting men and women….”)

“Corporatization”? Business? (Remember when Raghu considered setting up “consumer complaint” stations around campus?)

—Hey, that sounds like our kind of squawking!

Whiny faculty? (Remember when Trustee Lorch referred to faculty as “squealing pigs”?)

Teaching “just a few hours”? (36 hrs. a week, according to Trustee Tom.)

Managers and employees? (“Disloyalty will not be tolerated!”)

That sounds familiar, too.

Faculty and trustees who've grown distant and suspicious of each other are often advised to do lots of commingling and working together—and, evidently, that can work, as Fogg illustrates with examples from around the country. On the other hand, “Trustee organizations warn boards against commingling too much with the faculty, lest their respective roles be confused.”

Go left. No. Go right. D’oh!

It’s common, evidently, for boards not to speak with or listen to faculty. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for pesky administrators who fill up the info vacuum:

Some boards may not talk much to professors, but they all get an earful from the president. The AAUP's Mr. Bowen says it is common for trustees to get most of their information from the college's top administrators. That can be problematic, he says, since presidents sometimes vent their frustrations about the faculty. Trustees, in turn, take those comments at face value. "It's too damn easy to demonize faculty," he says.

At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, faculty members say the board is getting a warped sense of reality by listening only to top administrators. "I think they don't have much of a clue about what goes on in the trenches," says Mary M. Beck, a professor of animal science and president of the Academic Senate.

A “warped sense of reality”? Clueless trustees? That sounds like the SOCCCD all right. Only our top administrator is a notorious schemer and liar to boot.

In another article, “When Trustees Blunder” (Feb. 17), Richard P. Chait asks:

Is inept governance contagious? Has the germ that infected corporate America contaminated colleges and universities, too? For every Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, we seem to have an academic equivalent.

Egregious boards, writes Chait, tend to make the news ("Board bites college"), but they’re rare, he says. “In reality nearly all board members work diligently and contribute constructively….”

It must be swell dealing with a board like that.

On the other hand, “the manifestations and permutations of dysfunctional [trustee] governance are so plentiful.” Chait goes through a disturbing litany. We don’t get mentioned, but that’s because we’re a community college district. Or maybe we're just off the scale.

Check these articles out. Faculty, if you don’t have an account with the Chronicle, you can access it freely through “NexisLexis” on our school computers. We’ve got anything that’s ever appeared in the CHE at our fingertips.

WHAT’S NEW?

n this week’s “What’s New?”, Bob Park reports on the continuing “Dover Effect,” that is, the spreading legislative crapulosity among creationists and IDers caused by their huge court defeat in Dover.

Writes Bob, “Utah is one of the most conservative states in the nation, but on Monday, legislation favoring intelligent design lost. Alas, I'm sure the Discovery Institute will be able to find a new gimmick.”

Who funds the Discovery Institute? That would be OC’s own Howard Ahmanson. In the early to mid-90s, Ahmanson was the sugar daddy of Tustin's Education Alliance. The EA, of course, is the organization that helped bring us Nancy Padberg and Don Wagner.

I hope everyone has noticed that Nancy is now battling Mr. Wagner with regard to his red meat tossage--i.e., pulling our colleges’ memberships in the American Library Association just to keep his Neanderthal constituency happy.

Plus she's on the case with regard to Trustee Williams' expensive junketing habit.

But Nancy, give us the details!