Saddleback College gets off the dime

Today, not for the first time this summer, the Saddleback College Academic Senate met to discuss some pressing issues, including the college’s accreditation crisis.

(In February, the accreditation commission [ACCJC] wrote to the colleges, informing them that unless certain long-standing problems—board micromanagement, etc.—were overcome once and for all, they would lose their accreditation. A college report to the Accreds outlining efforts to address those issues is due in October.)

Turnout for this mid-July meeting was impressive: about twenty-five people attended, though this included a few administrators, one or two classified managers, some classified employees, and one trustee (Dave Lang).

Senate President Bob C presented a “proposed plan of action” for completion of the report, which is due in less than three months. Bob enumerated various circumstances “working against us,” including a lack of leadership at the administrative level (the college is between presidents and the Chancellor has failed to name a temporary or acting president), the lack of an Accreditation Committee chair (the recently retired college president had been the chair), the recent resignations of faculty committee chairs, a continued “work-to-contract” action called by the union, and so on.

Bob also listed some advantages and a list of things needed. There was a lively and helpful discussion, and, unless I am very much mistaken, the group managed to assign various crucial tasks and zero in on a (in parts) promising and forceful course of action.

* * * * *

As you may know, the accreditors have presented the college with three “recommendations”: that the college needs to develop “student learning outcomes” across the college (roughly, these are carefully crafted sentences, describing what students should be able to do at the end of a semester, to be placed in course outlines and other documents), that the trustees must cease their unfortunate pattern of micromanagement, and that groups within the college (presidents, faculty, trustees, administrators, et al.) need to come together to overcome hostility, fear, and despair. (Save the first, Irvine Valley College received a similar list of recommendations.)

It is widely believed that both colleges’ last skirmish with the Accreds went south in part owing to the arrogant meddling of the Chancellor and one or two dominant conservative members of the board who insisted, over vociferous faculty objections, on wedging inappropriate elements into a report. The Accreds were not amused.

* * * * *

During today’s meeting, trustee Dave Lang said that he would agendize some items for the next board meeting, July 28 (I do believe this concerned, among other things, ways in which faculty might be compensated for doing extra work during the summer months or might be supported, as necessary, during the fall).

The group was unanimous in proceeding with a survey of the college community as a part of the report.

* * * * *

The SLO issue (the first “recommendation” above) was of foremost concern, since it lay squarely in the lap of the faculty. The group decided that administration and the senate, jointly, should write and send a letter to deans informing them that relevant faculty must finally write and submit the needed SLOs by the end of August (the 27th, I believe)—this is a little over a month away. The group considered later deadlines but, in the end, they seemed compelled by circumstance to accept the earlier one. There seemed to be agreement that, though this endeavor would be challenging, college faculty were up to the task.

Further, headway was made in organizing continued work on reports regarding the remaining two “recommendations.”

Clearly, it was a good meeting.

* * * * *

The parallel Irvine Valley College accreditation effort has been proceeding with biweekly meetings throughout the summer, a process that started in the Spring. Its report draft is in a relatively developed state.

(Note: I did not attend today’s meeting with the intention of reporting on it; I have done so at the quasi-urging of some SC faculty leaders.)

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."