Rat Bastards in the news: Carona, Citron, Gensler, et al.

Howard Genler, Saddleback instructor

• FELONS TURNING IN THEIR DEPUTY BADGES.

It’s another tough day for OC right-wing rat bastards. As you know, back in the late 90s, former OC Sheriff Mike Carona started a seriously hinky reserve deputy program that gave power and guns to untrained friends and patrons. Well, recently, one of Carona’s “deputies”—his martial arts instructor—was convicted of making a criminal threat. (On a golf course, he threateningly pulled out his gun to slowpokes).

Naturally, the department, now under new—and female!—leadership, has dropped the fellow from the reserve program (and seems destined to dump the program, too).

Today, we learn that another of Carona’s pals, Henry Samueli, billionaire owner of the Anaheim Ducks, has also been dismissed from the program, owing no doubt to his recent felony conviction: he lied to regulators about involvement in “an alleged plot to secretly reward employees by manipulating stock options.” (LA Times: Samueli dismissed from O.C. sheriff's reserve team.)

As you may be aware, UC Irvine's new engineering building is named after Samueli. It's the perfect OC factoid. Tell Bravo.

According to the Times, “He is among 31 civilians who have left the reserve ranks since former Sheriff Michael S. Carona resigned in January to fight criminal charges that he misused his office in a broad conspiracy to enrich himself and others, including his wife and former mistress.”

• FELONS LIVING HIGH ON THE PUBLIC DIME. 

Over at the OC Register’s Watchdog blog (One million dollars paid to convicted felon), Teri Sforza informs us that lots of our local rats have received or are slated to receive big bucks.

Sforza reminds us of former county treasurer/tax collector Bob Citron (a Democrat, as I recall), the New Agey fellow at the heart of the OC bankruptcy. Citron pleaded guilty to "lying to investors, falsifying the county’s books, diverting $89 million in interest away from cities, schools and other governments into county coffers.”

Here’s the kicker. Since then, writes Sforza, “Citron has been paid more than $1.3 million by the Orange County Employees Retirement System. That’s the total of his $92,904-a-year pension, from 1995 until the middle of 2008.”

Citron’s assistant, Matt Raabe, “skimmed .. $89 million [of county earnings] in an attempt to keep people from asking too many questions. That $89 million enriched the financially struggling county instead of the cities, school and special districts it belonged to.”

Raabe, Sforza tells us, was later convicted of fraud and misappropriation of public funds. After 41 days behind bars, he was freed pending appeal, and the appeal succeeded, owing to a “conflict of interest” on the part of the DA’s office.

But it looks like Raabe, who’s moved to Northern California, is in for some big taxpayer money too: “He worked for the county for 7.5 years and made … $81,182 per year when he was canned in 1995, after the Board of Supervisors discovered that misplaced $89 million.”

Convicted felon George Jaramillo (Carona’s hand-picked second-in-command) and Carona himself (if convicted) will be coming into some nice retirement benefits when the time comes.

Sforza promises to have more details tomorrow.

• NO "BIBLE AS LIT" COURSE. 

No rat bastards in this story. It turns out those Huntington Beach trustees voted “no” on the Bible as Lit class last night. (OC Reg: Trustees vote no on Bible lit class.)

The vote was 4-1, with trustee Matthew Harper the sole “yes” vote.

It turns out this really was a bit of a hot potato. Trustees explained their negative vote by saying that “a Bible class could be confused as proselytizing.” As I explained yesterday, such courses, at least when taught at the college level, do nothing like proselytize. But of course the Huntington Beach trustees were worried about perceptions, not reality.

Further, according to the trustees (according to the Reg), "The teachers have said they are not interested and for us to make this top-down decision would be pure folly."

Sounds good. This outcome appears to be a victory of good thinking.

Evidently, only one other school district in the OC offers this kind of class, namely, Los Alamitos Unified.

• CONSCIENTIOUS ADJUNCTS WILL BE FIRED. 

Getting back to rat bastards: in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, we learn of a prime example of the vulnerability of part-time (“adjunct”) faculty at colleges. (Out of Work for Doing Extra Work?.)

Essentially, the story is this: an adjunct instructor (in Statistics) at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana received complaints from some of his students that the course text was much too difficult. So the instructor, Pejman Norasteh, “started handing out supplementary materials to cover the same subject matter as the textbook, but with his own explanations.”

Sounds good so far.

That pleased the complaining students, but other students now complained to administration that they were being given extra reading that had not been mentioned on the course syllabus. Unsympathetic administrators told Norasteh that he’d better stick to what’s on the syllabus, so he immediately backed off, withdrawing the supplementary text.

He was fired anyway.

This isn’t the first time adjuncts got wacked upside the head at Ivy Tech:

Becky Lee Meadows last year found her contract as a full-time, non-tenure track professor suddenly dropped after she tried to organize a benefit concert to raise money for health care for adjuncts at the college.

This is precisely the sort of thing our trustees—or their Yes Man Chancellor—would pull in the good old SOCCCD. They're ruthless, and they don't give a damn about Academic Freedom—or about retaining good faculty.

Back in the late 90s, the adjunct faculty advisor to the journalism program—Kathleen Dorantes—got dumped (from that job) because the board and the then-corrupt faculty union didn't like the college newspaper's unflattering (although objective) coverage of them.

English adjunct Red Emma was fired not long after his criticism of the trustees and administration appeared in a local paper, although his canning was performed by one of the Chancellor’s Yes Men, Dean Gensler.

Another victim: philosophy adjunct K. Brown, who objected to mistreatment of adjuncts (not himself) during a school meeting. Gensler gave him no more assignments. (I called a meeting of full-timers to address the matter, but only one of my colleagues showed up. Don’t worry about Dr. Brown, though; a former student of mine, he’s now a Professor of Philosophy at one of our fine state universities, where he's flourishing. I suspect that, at some point, he would have been happy to take a full-time job at little Irvine Valley College, but his summary canning ended all that.)

Indiana’s head of the AAUP said that his organization has had worries about academic freedom at Ivy Tech for a long time. With regard to Norasteh’s case, he opined that instructors should be given some leeway “to use their ‘best judgment’ in how to guide a particular group of students through the material.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

His group has asked Ivy Tech to reconsider its action against Norasteh, but, thus far, there’s been no movement.

• SPEAKING OF RAT BASTARDS. Back in October of 1999, the OC Weekly named Sheriff Mike Carona one of OC’s 31 “Scariest People.” Carona came in at #8. Guess who was #7? You guessed it:

RAGHU P. MATHUR

"Disloyalty will not be tolerated." "I apologize for doing that, but I don’t admit to doing it." "When you point your finger at someone, three fingers point right back at you!" Such are the curious pronouncements of Raghu P. Mathur, ruler of Irvine Valley College, the northern campus of the South Orange County Community College District. Recently, upon surveying his kingdom and detecting unsightly clutter, his Highness ordered his subjects to remove everything from their doors and windows. Although maybe it wasn’t the clutter. Maybe it was those "Mathur must go!" posters. It all started in ’96, when the board of trustees launched an assault on "shared governance," the state-mandated policy giving faculty and other groups a share in campus decision making. Soon, Mathur, a chemistry instructor, was made president, whereupon he embraced the board’s agenda, especially the elimination of "reassigned time," a form of compensation for non-instructional duties such as senate office, upon which shared governance depended. But wait! As a teacher, Mathur enjoyed massive amounts of reassigned time! Oh well, l’Ètat c’est Mathur. Unilateral board rule has continued, and through it all, Mathur, the recipient (in 1998) of a 74 percent vote of no confidence, has remained unswerving in his devotion to governance unshared. MITIGATING FACTOR: When students flee the strife-ridden college, Mathur allegedly tells each one, "Thank you, loyal customer; please come again."