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
Jubal over on OC Blog notes a brief mention of Tom Fuentes’ recent campaign event (Rick Rieff On Fuentes Campaign Event) in this week’s OC Business Journal:
For some reason, Tom chose not to trumpet our district's equally outstanding "accreditation brinksmanship" or its "50% Law cluelessness." And then there's its remarkably persistent "hostility, fear, and despair."
