Tonight's board meeting: "setting the record straight"

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TONIGHT'S MEETING of the South Orange County Community College District board of trustees was short and largely uneventful. Well, Trustee Don Wagner said something interesting, I guess.

Trustee Fuentes prayed to the Lord; Craig Grossman got a nice resolution; the Irvine Valley College Foundation presented a slick commercial that urged audience members to become “Performing Arts Patrons”; Tracy Daly showed us the new district website; three or four faculty spoke about approved curricula and the upcoming contract negotiations; others carped about the board’s prayers; Fuentes fretted about potential drops in home prices and the corresponding threat to our Basic Aid gravy train; the new ATEP dean was approved; etc.


A big chunk of time was devoted to a presentation about DISTANCE EDUCATION, especially the online variety. Vice Chancellor Andreea Serban plus June Millovich and Bob Urell handled that. They did a good job, and the board seemed to think that this whole DE thing is just swell.

Turns out most of our growth in recent years has been from DE, not from traditional “brick and mortar” instruction, which is slowly eroding. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old brick and mortar. And it isn’t gonna disappear neither, cuz distance ed isn’t for everybody, or so everybody kept saying. It was a night of truisms and reassuring slogans.


Students are “partners,” said June. “Frankly, we do this better” than other districts, said Bob. We're “growink," said Andreea. She threw in a couple of "downloadinks," too. Then she said that she was gonna adopt the moniker "Natasha." She's funny, boy.

Fuentes seemed to want to make some kinda trouble about the caps for online courses, but it turns out that, in our district, the caps are the same no matter whether a course is the “traditional” kind or the online kind, though some districts lower the cap for online courses, what with the intensive interaction that’s involved. (The union really oughta get on that. Or so opined Ken W during the break.)

Fuentes asked a clueless question about how off-campus sites—High Schools and the like—figure into all this. Everybody looked confused. Bob U finally said something like, “well, internet courses are done over the internet.”

Bill Jay figured it was his cue to yammer about off-campus sites again, so he did that, though not unpleasantly.

Williams took the opportunity to pat himself and his colleagues on the back about the big "COPS" expenditure of ten years ago, which paid for fancy fiber optics and other digital whizbangery. That COPS debt will be paid off in a year, he declared.


“Motivation is the key,” said everybody re what kind of student can handle online instruction. “Yeah, but that’s true for traditional face-to-face instruction, too,” said someone. "Yeah," said everybody. People were pretty goddam agreeable, although Nancy did roll her eyes a few times, especially at Tom and John.

Mathur talked about students learning in pajamas; Cosgrove announced that we do DE “deeper and wider”; Padberg reminded us that phone ed is distance ed, too; Raghu said that this online thing is goin’ “big and wide"—plus he wrote his dissertation about it; I kept staring at the monitor, what with its bright lights and perty colors.

Padberg worried about the high cost of the Performing Arts Center at IVC. Nobody seemed to want to join her. She did a lot of solitary carping tonight.

She fretted, too, about apparent “nepotism” among classified mother-daughter team organizers, whatever they are. People started yawning.


The board discussed the upcoming special meeting (April 23, 3-5 p.m.) re the ACCREDITATION midterm reports (due in October). Let’s trot out those 94 goofy ideas that we scraped up last Spring, said Raghu. “Yeah,” said Bill Jay. “What for?” said Don Wagner.

That’s when Wagner said the only interesting thing that was said all night. He said he “remains unconvinced” that debating those daffy old ideas from a year ago will help. Then he said that the meeting would be a good opportunity to “set the record straight,” since the Accreds’ reports “contain some errors.” He was talking about how they said that he, the Don, had engaged in micromanagement most foul.

Yeah, the Accreds will just love hearing about how we all got together to discuss how they gave Don a D when he shoulda got a C+. Absolutely.

IVC Senate Prez Wendy G responded to Lang’s suggestion that he should facilitate the April meeting. Hey, said Wendy, during Chancellor’s Cabinet, we discussed the possibility of getting a celebrated person from outside to facilitate. Whatever happened to that?

Well, Lang just shot that down fast. He wasn’t “inclined” to do that, he said. Then he announced that the discussion was over. Raghu said nothing.


Wendy looked like she’d just been hit by a truck.

Padberg fussed again about Williams’ habit of going to Florida for conventions, when he could just as well stay here in the Golden State, wasting taxpayer money closer to home, but that went nowhere. Bob Cosgrove had his hand up for a long time, and Williams even tried to get Lang to notice that, but it was a no go.

And, “boom,” just like that, the meeting was over pretty much on time.

Yup, that Lang. Reminds me of what they used to say about Mussolini: "he's a fascist asshole for sure, but at least the trains run on time." —Somethin' like that.