A Little Night Music

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars and Blonde Sense.

A little about Monday's board meeting: Mathur as village idiot

JUST A QUICK NOTE about my absence and about Monday's board meeting. I seem to have come down with food poisoning, or so the doctor thinks. It started late Monday, when I tried to do the ol' treadmill, but, after 15 minutes, it was no use. I thought about going to the board meeting, but there was no way.

Last night, I finally started improving, but I haven't even read my emails until just now, so I'm way out of the loop.

Friends have given me reports of Monday's meeting, however. One friend wrote that, oddly, the Faculty Hiring Priority List for both colleges had been pulled from the agenda, and no explanation had been given.

This meant that the matter could not even be discussed by the board.

But senate presidents can ask questions, can't they? At the part of the meeting (at the end) when the various governance groups give reports, IVC Senate President Wendy G asked why the priority lists had been pulled. Despite the late hour, Wendy's question sparked a great amount of debate and discussion.

Evidently, the unilateral pulling of the Faculty Hiring Priority Lists from the BOT agenda violates board policy 4011.1, which states that the Faculty Hiring Lists are to be submitted to the Board in October. (See board policies. And see excerpt below.)

According to my source, in the course of the discussion, it was revealed that Mathur had unilaterally pulled the item. Why? Because there were some "questions" from "some trustees." That's so typical. Mathur and his trustee partners—Fuentes, et al.—run the show by themselves and they freeze out the likes of Padberg. They're corrupt bastards, they are.

Padberg wanted specifics: who raised questions?

Controversy continued as different reports were given by the different groups. But faculty remained united. Mathur looked like the "village idiot," I'm told.

Naturally, this Mathur-caused delay will make it difficult getting things together by the time of the January job announcements.

Gotta go.

For October BOT meeting highlights, go to Board Meeting Highlights.

The relevant part of BP 4011.1 is section 11:

...By October of each academic year, following approval by the Chancellor, each College President will submit to the Board of Trustees a ranked list of recommended full-time faculty positions for the subsequent year, classified according to Item 2 above, and compiled by an internal process developed by the Academic Senate and the President, and approved by the President....

Video for the Oct. 27 meeting will eventually become available on the district website.

Six Days

In the new issue of The New York Review of Books, the editors gathered together the usual suspects to sound off about the imminent election.

Joan Didion is at her best. Here's the conclusion:

"We could argue over whether "intelligent design" should be taught in our schools as an alternative to evolution, and overlook the fact that the rankings of American schools have already dropped to twenty-first in the world in the teaching of science and twenty-fifth in the world in the teaching of math. We could argue over whether or not the McCain campaign had sufficiently vetted its candidate for vice-president, but take at face value the campaign's description of that vetting as "an exhaustive process" including a "seventy-question survey." Most people in those countries where they still teach math and science would not consider seventy questions a particularly taxing assignment, but we could forget this. Amnesia was our preferred state. In what had become our national coma we could forget about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and AIG and Washington Mutual and the 81,000 jobs a month and the fact that the national debt had been approaching $10.6 trillion even before Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke mentioned the imperative need to spend, which is to say to borrow, $700 billion for securities backed by bad mortgages, a maneuver likely to raise the debt another trillion dollars. ("We need this to be clean and quick," Paulson told ABC.)

We could forget the 70 percent of American eighth graders who do not now and never will read at eighth-grade levels, meaning they will never qualify to hold one of those jobs we no longer have. We could forget that we ourselves induced the coma, by indulging the government in its fantasy of absolute power, wielded absolutely. So general is this fantasy by now that we approach this election with no clear idea where bottom is: what damage has been done, what alliances have been formed and broken, what concealed reefs lie ahead. Whoever we elect president is about to find some of that out."

To read the rest (you really should), click here.