Tonight's board meeting in pics

I'll have a full report on the meeting tomorrow. Right now, I've got to feed the cat, and so I'll just mention some big obvious stuff.

Tonight's meeting wasn't the Big Ugly, not like last month's outing, but it had its moments. Like the point, near the end, when Dave Lang, starin' at the clock, pretty much strong-armed the panel of Presidents, governance group leaders, et al., to skip their reports, and then Nancy said something like, "Hold on, Bean Boy, where's the fire? Let 'em speak", and Dave got all pissy about how he hadn't stopped anybody from squawking, but he had.

Once again, Chancellor Mathur recommended giving himself a big fat raise (in the form of a COLA), and Nancy, Marcia, and Bill just weren't having it. The discussion was kinda fun. It reached its nadir when John Williams pulled out a copy of the Chronicle--I'm sure he's never seen one before--held it grandly in the air, and then read from it statistics about the average pay for presidents or CEOs. Naturally, their pay was way up there.

For once, though, Bill Jay was on the ball, and he said something like, "Um, John, the standards are different for four-year institutions." Well duh.

John made an ugly face, I think. It's hard to tell. He yammered about how we've got to be competitive, salary-wise. He compared Goo's salary with the salaries of others around the state.

Marcia noted that, FTEF-wise (i.e., relative to the number of faculty), compared to all those other CEOs, Mathur was at the very bottom of the barrel. Bottomer, even.

Raghu's nose twitched.

The other "highlight" came when Andreea Serban gave a fine and well-received report on our Study Abroad programs. Turns out these SA programs are very much on the rise nation-wide, and even the government is pushin' 'em. Serban spelled out various relevant facts, told a joke about Romania, and even managed to make Kevin O look good.

She's a star.

The truth is that Fuentes (and later Fuentes/Wagner) have pretty much set back the cause of Study Abroad programs several decades, or several months anyway. We used to have 14 such programs--14!--but after Tom got done offing the Santander trip (owing to his hatred for Carmenmara & Spaniards & himself), we're now down to two trips.

I was surprised. Man!

Part of the problem was the board's idiotic decision, two years ago, to insist on $500 billion in insurance for the students--OK, it was just $50 million. I guess they wanted to make sure the kids would be insured in case of nuclear wars or gypsy attacks. But this insurance requirement pretty much thinned out the vendors to nothing, leaving just a couple of used car salesmen.

The upshot: Study Abroad-wise, in the good ol' SOCCCD, everything is now utterly FUBAR, and--wouldn't you know it?--the one thing you never heard tonight was the Troublemint Twins fessin' up to their FUBARitude. Oh no, never that.

Mostly, though, it was a good meeting, and Saddleback got some kind of prize for its football (?) team creamin' the competition. Everybody was pretty smiley about that, as you can see.