Raghu Mathur is the kind of guy who’ll hear a stupid joke or saying and then repeat it for decades.I first met the fellow in 1986 or 1987 during some kind of accreditation organizational meeting at IVC. I do believe that the first thing I heard him say was: “If you point your finger at people, three fingers point back at you!”
I remember him trotting out that ”pointing finger” cliché when he was illegally appointed interim President of IVC in 1997. It was especially hard to take ‘cause, by then, it had become clear to me how essential to his being finger-pointing is. He pointed at me a lot.
Then, years later, when he became Chancellor (after pointedly suing the district for failing to protect him from me when he sued me and lost in the countersuit), he pulled out that finger again, and he said those stupid words anew.
It’s not just the finger. Remember when Raghu discovered Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat? Good Lord, he wouldn’t stop talking about that damned book. He brought it up at every occasion for several years, plus he forced every single one of his lackeys and underlings to read the damned thing. (I do believe that the HS 3rd Floor’s well-known antipathy for the New York Times derives from the Friedman episode.)
This reminds me of a family I knew when I was a kid. They discovered epoxy—admittedly cool stuff—and the event struck a chord so deep in that family’s soul that, for them, it replaced God. Something broken? Get out the epoxy! Loose tooth? Get out the epoxy! Soup too thin? Why, get out the epoxy! It’s good for everything! After a while, they lost their friends and moved to Vegas.
We appear to have passed through the “”World is Flat” phase and have now entered the “everything is a team” phase.
A friend of mine dropped by today and speculated that Raghu must’ve read a book about teams.
“What makes you say that?”
“Do you remember Raghu’s ‘District Management Council’”?
“Yeah?”
“Well, that morphed into the ‘District Leadership Council’—the DLC—and that finally became the ‘District Leadership Team’.”
“OK. So?”
“So there’s also the ‘Chancellor’s Executive Committee,’ or CEC. That, I’m told, has now been renamed the ‘Chancellor’s Executive Team.’”
Gotta go. I’m the Instructional Delivery Team (IDT) for this morning’s Introductory Student Philosophical Informational Reception Team (ISPIRT).
Go team.
