On Sunday, tylerh posted about the SOCCCD on OC Blog: Saddleback and Irvine Valley College Likely to Keep Accreditation.Mr. T, a regular contributor to the popular conservative blog, noted that “Saddleback's and IVC's accreditation status has become an issue for this year's South OC Community College District (SOCCD) [sic] races.” Those opposed to the reelection of Tom Fuentes and Dave Lang, he said, are raising the “bogey man” of accreditation loss.
His retort: that’s “unlikely.”
Mining for anything to bolster his position, T found a chirpy remark in the Saddleback College Accred report: “the college and the district have made great strides in responding to the recommendations of the visiting teams....”
“This,” he announced, “is not the tone of a committee that intends to administer the educational equivalent of the death penalty.”
Tylerh is ignoring a crucial fact: that the Accreds have declared that they are no longer satisfied with improvement. All issues must be resolved once and for all by October, or else.
T referred readers to my post for a “different view” on the accrediting issue. I wrote that I am not as interested in identifying the odds of non-accreditation as in the reasons our colleges' accreditation was jeopardized in the first place. I explained that Mr. Fuentes is a major reason. That's why he should not be reelected.
T seems uninterested in such subtleties.
Tylerh’s post has received only three comments. On Tuesday, a “conservative prof” took the opportunity to slam SLOs (one of the Accreds’ recommendations to Saddleback College concerned SLOs).
Then someone named “Missy” opined as follows:
It's true that there's been some improvement, but the relationship the board and the chancellor have with the staff is still horrible. Morale among staff members is extremely low. ¶ If this were a K-12 district rather than a CCD there would be much greater public scrutiny and a recall might have been launched by now. ¶ Yes, improvement has been made. But only because there was nowhere to go but up.
Naturally, one of OC Blog’s conservative readers responded to Missy by declaring that “around these parts we don't launch recalls against conservative elected leaders like Tom Fuentes who stand up to liberal union bosses.”
Fuentes standing up to the nasty “liberal union boss.” That’s the picture that Fuentes is selling.
On Tuesday, during the union luncheon (held in IVC’s acoustically challenged gymnasium), Bob Bliss, the union-endorsed challenger to Fuentes, referred to Fuentes’ recent explanation for seeking reelection: “he needs to stay on the college board to help ward off liberal influence.” That was reported in a recent Frank Mickadeit column.
Bliss pointed out that he has been a registered Republican since 1964. Bliss, wrote Mickadeit, “wouldn't exactly qualify as a liberal.”
BTW, the title of Mickadeit’s piece is, I think, very odd: Liver Boy back in his element (8/14/08)
Fuentes has liver cancer and recently underwent a liver transplant.
“Liver Boy”?
IN THE NEWS:
• UCI again cracks top 50 in US News school rankings
• The Community College Enrollment Boom
5 comments:
One of our Trustees showed up at an Accreditation Steering Committee meeting sporting a copy of "Conscious of a Liberal".
Chunk, I feel your pain.
College Boreds aren't a place to wave your partisan flag. The taxpayer funded district is to be run in a manner that eschews profit and provides the most educational and social opportunities for the available buck. Boreds aren't soapboxes for right/left issues...they're policy making bodies concerned vwith the districts heath.
Vote out all who feel otherwise.
Some of our trustees would argue, I think, that they are not partisan; rather, they happen to be conservative. Further (they would say--and they have said) they represent the values of the very taxpayers and residents who have created these community colleges.
I don't have a problem with trustees being conservative or trying to represent the conservative values of South OC residents. I do have a problem with dishonesty, bad faith, arrogance, and trustees' using their office to further their political careers or maintain their political power.
For a dozen years now, a board beset by such vices has thwarted and distorted the development of our district and its two colleges. I do hope that board President Don Wagner has finally seen the error of (at least some of) his ways and will now begin to work honestly with faculty.
Trust me, Fuentes & Wagner are not your garden variety conservatives, IMO they fall under the category of "reactionaries," who believe that the word "liberal" is a dirty word in Orange County (which in South OC you never know). Nancy, Dave, Marcia & Bill are whom I would refer to as real "conservatives," but Fuentes & Wagner are so far to the right they are almost full circle. IMO they don't have any business being on ANY school board, let alone on ours. They are pretty much to the right of Atilla the Hun. Fuentes, Wagner & Williams definitely do have political agendas & they don't make any bones about it. They want to turn the district into a bastion of right-wing reactionaries by removing anything that they disagree with, & so they label it what is a dirty word to them, "liberal" (ex. Fuentes wanting to ax certain education abroad classes b/c somehow a country like Spain are bad b/c they didn't support the US in the Iraq war. Then the stupid removal of the flags from one of the buildings @ IVC. Then you have the issue of the library & Wagner bantering senselessly about Jane Fonda. Most conservatives that I know wouldn't even go there). From my experience reactionaries usually do lie b/c they need to justify their wack job views & behaviors. Gee, remember a guy by the name of "B-1" Bob Dornan? Pretty much I'd say that Fuentes falls into to his category, except he just says it with a lower tone.
I just get a kick out of this pic of Fuentes, b/c it looks more like a mug shot from a side view. All it needs are the numbers undneath it. The theme of "Dragnet" running through my head.
El Conquistador Fuentes really stinks up the place.
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