Everyone forgets

ANTICIPATING RAGHU'S OPENING SESSION, August 14.

I see that “our Chancellor” (as the district website prefers to refer to the fellow) has organized a “Chancellor’s Opening Session” (August 14) for insomniacs.

In the past, Raghu has occasionally taken the opportunity of the opening session to try to humanize himself. These efforts have always been entertaining, but not always in the way intended. Who could forget, for instance, Mathur's Spring ‘06 Tonight Show “Carnac” sendup, in which he played Carnac the Raghubansh! (No, I’m not making that up. See Chancellor’s Opening Session: stinkeroo.)

Unfortunately, Raghu and the SOCCCD Not-ready-to-get-fired Players laid an egg.

Whatever the truth may be (and I don’t know it), most of us imagined that there was hell to pay among available underlings after that fiasco. Thus, his effort at self-humanizing had the opposite effect, at least for some.

A year later, Mathur made another effort to “humanize” himself, this time by giving over the session to an Elvis impersonator! (See Opening Session.) He had discovered the OC Elvis, he said, while bar-hopping in Laguna Hills!

OK, I’ve got to admit, that was pretty successful—it was good cheesy fun. Still, many faculty grumbled that the Chancellor’s choice for entertainment was unseemly.

Plus, the thing that really struck me about the whole business was the factoid that Mathur visits bars.

* * * *

AS NEAR AS I CAN TELL, for the fall of ’07, Mathur has returned to the “safe and sane” opening session formula: presentations by the most prominent “experts” and “leaders" that can be scraped up. This formula often produces a snoozefest.

His own planned address sports a clichéd title: “Adding Wings to Students’ Dreams.” (When Raghu isn’t ruthless, he's New Agey.) Just imagine the somnolent blather contained therein:

“So, I tell you, as an instructor, go fort' and be a wing-adder! Always ask, how will my wings help deh students to fly? Assemble mutually-respectful wings and convey them to deh classroom, which are provided by deh taxpayers! Courteously attach them to student dreams with mutual understanding and respect for all! And remember: the world is flat but dreams have wings that fly to the universe and can fill de giant black hole in space!”

The Keynote Speakers are George Boggs and Rusty Kennedy.

Huh? Those names will be familiar to anyone who has followed the sorry SOCCCD saga—that is, our crummy chronicle since Raghu and his greedy and unscrupulous friends engineered control of the BOT in November of 1996.

These days, of course, Boggs is the President and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). But he used to be with Accrediting commission (he was on WASC's board).

That's right: it turns out that Boggs was once a watchdog, snapping at our district’s heels.

Back in 1998, the Accrediting Commissioners expressed “concern” regarding our district. According to an April ’98 report prepared by Boggs (and Judith Watkins), the Commission “was concerned that the institutions in the District would not be able to demonstrate that they were in continuous compliance with the eligibility requirements and standards of accreditation.”

As I wrote at the time (see News roundup), as a consequence of that concern, the Commission arranged for a team to visit the District in order to verify its “progress report.” Things went seriously downhill from there.

Rusty Kennedy, too, has been among the legion of appalled SOCCCD observers. He has served with the Orange County Human Relations Commission for many years (he’s now its Exec Director), including some of the district’s zany Frogue years. (The OCHRC is supposed to be on the lookout for racial prejudice, intolerance, and the like. It's largely taxpayer funded.)

At one point in 1996, Frogue got himself invited to the Commission to explain and defend himself against charges of racism and Holocaust denial (made by a wide assortment of unassociated former students of his; he was a high school teacher). (See Frogue defends himself .) He showed up, yammered the way he does. Nothing came of it, as I recall.

(Recently, some OC conservatives have yet again called for an end to taxpayer funding of the OCHRC. Given their politics, surely Mathur's patrons on the BOT, especially Mr. Wagner, are inclined to join in that chorus—another reason to wonder why Mathur invited Kennedy, OCHRC's CEO, to the Opening Session. I mean, inviting Kennedy is a bit like inviting the head of the American Library Association, another "liberal busybody" organization.)

So, what does it mean that Mathur has invited these two to speak—and that they have accepted?

Probably nothing, I guess. They've probably forgotten who we are.

In time—efforts by this blog to the contrary notwithstanding—everyone forgets.