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.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: Dark Sacred Night

Years ago, - Rebel Girl is now at an age that when she says years it does indeed mean years, - so over two decades, nearly a quarter-century ago, Red Emma, who even then was a man who knew what he wanted, gave her the following poem. (Yes, they go waaay back folks, those two.) Yes, he typed the poem out as was done then.

Rebel Girl had never heard of the poet before, the great Peter Everwine who lived then and lives still (someone say yes!) in the great Central Valley of California. The poem was from Everwine's book Keeping the Night. She taped the poem to the wall of her small kitchen, above the round table where they first began to eat regularly together. Rebel Girl cooked Red his first artichoke, made him drink coffee, red wine, ouzo. He kept giving her poems. She is, all these years later, still thankful.


Night
- Peter Everwine

In the lamplight falling
On the white tablecloth
My plate,
My shining loaf of quietness.

I sit down.
Through the open door
All the absent I love enter
And we eat.


~RB

Democracy by the Numbers (Red Emma)

     WELL, DISSENT READERS, it’s been quite a while now, and the editors of the Register have failed to respond to my short, once-topical, middle-brow, politically tame, and at least mildly amusing commentary (see below). Maybe they think their regular commentator, Larry Elder, is funnier than Red Emma. 

     Larry sure says some funny things on his radio show—about the war and tazering kids and locking up Arabs. The nice folks at the LA Times thanked me, offering that the essay was indeed clever but didn’t quite work for them. I’d send it along to the OC Weekly now, but those folks are all more clever than I am, and besides, the people who I imagined needed to read my wacky brand of broad satire or sophomoric humor don’t read the OC Weekly, though I certainly hope they at least check out the ads in the back. Cheri is new in town. Tanya is waiting for your call. 

     In addition to posting it below, I am now also sending my commentary along to the new Al Jezeera English network, Women’s Wear Monthly, and High Times. Happy Thanksgiving. —Red Emma

Democracy by the Numbers 

     It’s been a week now. Post-election analysis of the vote by television, radio and internet pundits suggests that Democrats won big because of perceived GOP corruption, Bush’s war, Congressional scandal, and hypocrisy. 

     I beg to differ. That nearly 15,000 voters in Area 2 of the Rancho Santiago Community College District voted for candidate Steve Rocco may not mean anything to you. You don’t reside in eastern Orange County, don’t live with these folks—whoever they are. You don’t run into them at the market or while walking the dog—again, whoever they are. Of course, you probably don’t accept the proven fact that aliens occupy Area 51 of the Southern Nevada desert. It probably doesn’t impress you that, four hundred years ago, Nostradamus actually predicted the birth and subsequent election of Mr. Rocco to the Board of the Orange Unified School District (true!) or that there is no interchange connecting the southbound 55 to the southbound 5. 

     But riddle me this: Remember that scandal over letters mailed anonymously by Republican candidate Tan Nguyen to potential “Latino” voters in a local congressional race? It turns out that the number of Tan letters was almost exactly the number of voters giving the notorious Mr. Rocco their “aye”!  

     Accident? Coincidence? I think not. And no more inexplicable than the fact that the former head of OC’s Republican Party received a $15,000 (that’s right, 15,000) consulting fee from Nguyen. Or that, two years ago, Orange voters elected Mr. Rocco, a man nobody had ever seen, to a seat on their city school board because he wasn’t the candidate endorsed by the dreaded liberal teacher’s union, a Mexican-American county ranger. Or that the OC Register’s chief editorial writer boasted that he’d voted for Rocco to challenge the status quo. Or that a neighbor of ours voted for Rocco “to shake things up.” 

     Mr. Nguyen was onto something, and it’s all about the numbers. Just to review: Roccoistas voted for a guy who wears a longshoreman’s cap, a beard with no moustache, and sunglasses. —A recluse who some have suggested is Andy Kauffman playing his best prank, whose vanity press autobiography reveals “secret chronicles and public-record accounts of corruption, murder and scandal of corporate and political California, written by America’s premier legal technician.” —A man who has alleged that Albertson’s (yes, Albertson’s) has tried to murder him. 

     The Rancho Santiago college district board election offers an hypothesis about democracy. It is this. At any given moment, an admittedly fluid rubric about the voting demographic may be applied, indeed must be applied:

Some percentage of the voterate is certifiably insane.

And in Orange County this number is a little higher than elsewhere, perhaps as high as one in four. Indeed, the League of Women Voters confirms that 26% of those casting votes in the college district did so for Rocco, who, it notes, “did not respond to our request for information.” And why would he? Organizing the insane, endorsing the insane, hitting up the insane for political endorsements, voting the Insane Candidate to “shake things up,” happens here without spending a minute at a candidate’s forum, a dime on advertising, or a calorie walking a precinct or printing a handbill. Steve Rocco’s loss is a gain. 

     His performance in a local community college district race should be a heads up for party bosses, editorial writers, and voters, at least in Orange County. This constituency can be relied upon, and should not be overlooked. It took a nutty anti-immigrant candidate and an experiment in direct, if insane democracy to prove the undeniable political power of an often-overlooked constituency. Insane people.

     Out here in eastern Orange County, we should expect—as Nostradamus also predicted—a campaign that will make history: Rocco for Assembly. -RE

What Ever happened to faculty?

Two interesting articles in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

● ‘What Ever Happened to the Faculty?’

“Mary Burgan, former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, is not happy about the trends she sees with regard to faculty rights.” She talks about “distance ed” as well.

● Back to the Basics on Science Education

The best approach to teaching science is to understand not education, but the scientific method, according to Carl Wieman…He is a Nobel Prize laureate and garnered the highest teaching award at the University of Colorado at Boulder…During the talk on Friday, Wieman said that traditional science instruction involves lectures, textbooks, homework and exams. Wieman said that this process simply doesn’t work. He cited a number of studies to make his point. At the University of Maryland, an instructor found that students interviewed immediately after a science lecture had only a vague understanding of what the lecture had been about. Other researchers found that students only retained a small amount of the information after watching a video on science.

Another problem with the current structure of science education is that teachers try to get students to learn “key concepts” from physics. “We think that physics has a few ideas that can be widely applied,” he said. “So people test for those few ideas.” Wieman says that students really only retain about 30 percent of those key concepts, so this approach simply does not work….

● Board meeting tonight! See Board meeting preview