'twas the night before the election...

At the East L.A. storefront office of the NO on 8 campaign, Rebel Girl and her family celebrated the wedding of longtime friends...When Rebel Girl says longtime, she means longtime. She's known one woman since 1985, the other for fifteen years.



Meanwhile, next door, the Obama campaign was in full swing.

So many volunteers showed up that they sat in chairs on the sidewalk phoning voters into the evening hours.

Vote.

Mathur and his trustee cronies mess up faculty hiring—and that hurts students!

For a classic "rat bastard" moment for both Chancellor Raghu Mathur and trustee Tom Fuentes, check out video of last week’s board meeting (October 27). The upshot: owing to Mathur, Fuentes and Wagner's "unilateral" ways, faculty hiring has been delayed a month--and that means that the colleges have been placed in a less favorable position to hire the best possible faculty.

To see the video, go to Archived Video (i.e., click on the link).

Then click the VIDEO link for Oct. 27.

The STREAMING VIDEO PLAYER should appear. Using the “jump to” menu at bottom, jump to 8.0 WRITTEN REPORTS, the last section listed.

That’s what you want to watch.

The issue here is that, at the last moment, the Chancellor pulled from the agenda the full-time faculty hiring priority lists. That item (5.19) was listed as

“Approve announcement of and recruitment for full-time faculty positions, contingent upon funding, at Saddleback College and Irvine Valley College.”

Board Policy 4011.1 (faculty hiring policy) requires that this matter be taken care of during the October meeting of the board. Hence, Mathur’s pulling of the item ipso facto violated board policy.

During the meeting, IVC Academic Senate President Wendy Gabriella explained the ramifications of pulling this item and then asked why that action had been taken.

Mathur explained that he pulled the item owing to “some questions” by some trustees. This annoyed trustee Padberg, who had not been consulted about this unilateral decision (as we all know, the real "decider" in this district is Wagner/Fuentes and their toady Mathur; other trustees often seem unincluded in decisions). 

As Wendy and SC's Bob Cosgrove explained, pulling the item means that the process for the new hires will be delayed a month, which means, among other things, that some of the best candidates for hire will have been hired by the time our colleges finally get around to hiring. (No doubt this is one reason that the board policy requires that the matter be taken care of by October.)

Observe that the original item (5.19) includes the phrase, "contingent upon funding." At least as far as faculty are concerned, the faculty hiring priority list is not a request that all the positions listed by hired; rather, it is a list of priorities for faculty hiring. The number hired is a separate issue (one about which faculty claim no authority).

There was no reason why the prioritizing (i.e., the list provided by faculty) could not have been ratified by the board on the 27th. But because Mathur pulled the item, that didn't happen.

Listen carefully to Mathur and Fuentes in particular. Their righteous indignation is hilarious. In fact, they fucked up, plain and simple.

Our faculty leaders did a great job attempting to shed light on the situation, despite Mathurian and Fuentean protests. 

As Bob C noted, this delay does not help students; it hurts students.

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....

Horowitz to speak at MLA meeting

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

The program for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association is out and there is a surprise speaker: David Horowitz. The long-time critic of the academic left and humanities professors will appear in San Francisco Dec. 29 on a panel on academic freedom, along with Mark Bauerlein of Emory University (himself sometimes a critic of the academic left, but one whose tone would not be confused with that of Horowitz), Norma E. Cantú of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Cary Nelson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (who, as president of the American Association of University Professors has frequently criticized Horowitz).

Horowitz has repeatedly questioned why academic groups have not invited him to speak at their meetings. … In the past, Horowitz has been critical of the MLA, with a few swipes in his book on “dangerous professors,” and with articles his Web site publishes. Via e-mail, Horowitz praised the MLA for the invitation. “It’s about time academics behaved like academics and opened a discussion with its critics,” he said. He called Gerald Graff, president of the MLA and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “one of the few academics with enough courage to write about the problem of classroom indoctrination.”….

Research has tended to dubunk Horowitz thesis concerning classroom indoctrination.

RON HOWARD becomes Opie  for OBAMA