If you’ve been paying attention to the curious saga of the South Orange County Community College District, you’ll know that one of its more interesting recent episodes was the BOT (board of trustees) discussion this summer of the proposed creation of a new deanship at Irvine Valley College.The board, of course, is split with a capital “S.” There are two camps: Team Wagner (Board Prez Don Wagner, Nancy Padberg, Marcia Milchiker, and Bill Jay) and Team Fuentes (Tom Fuentes, John Williams, and Dave Lang).
The schism arguably concerns recently ousted Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur, a conniving and officious pooh-bah who nevertheless displayed an unseemly obeisance to “his bosses,” the board of trustees, and, more specifically, to precisely those trustees who supported him. (I’ve actually heard him insult some of the others.)
But, over the years (Mathur advanced to Chancellor in 2003, thanks to an obviously hinky hiring process), IVC President Glenn Roquemore, a former Mathur hanger-on, found Mathur’s, um, style—especially his endless micromanagement—increasingly irksome and even repugnant. The latter state was probably achieved already by mid-decade.
Districts are complex. Alliances form for all sorts of reasons, not all of them bad. Starting after mid-decade, an alliance of some kind gradually formed between Roquemore, trustee Don Wagner, and long-time Academic Senate President Wendy Gabriella. Roquemore and Gabriella had already developed a close working relationship, but when they and Wagner served together on a key accreditation committee starting in 2008, Wagner’s Mathur-created caricature of faculty—namely, scheming, power-hungry, feather-bedding rat bastards—quickly disintegrated. In fact, Wagner found faculty on the committee to be bright, hard-working, dedicated, and earnest. Mathur was horrified that the truth about faculty (well, some faculty) was being revealed.
Meanwhile, Tom Fuentes, a fellow who believes in loyalty and team-building (think Cosa Nostra), remained steadfast in his support of the spectacularly unpopular Mathur. Probably, by mid-decade, none of the trustees liked or trusted Raghu. Some plainly hated him (e.g., Padberg). Wagner likely tolerated him owing to his (Wagner’s) complex relationship with former GOP kingpin and rolodex spinner Fuentes, Mathur’s one die-hard supporter (possibly John Williams is another).
Then something happened.
One hears many stories of alleged Mathurian outrages, but a persistent one concerns a classic Mathurian gambit. Fearing that more truth would continue to bleed into trustee consciousnesses owing to the continued practice of including trustees on the accreditation committees, Mathur secretly communicated with Babs Beno of the Accreds. He hoped to elicit from her the opinion that including trustees on these committees was bad practice.
Who knows. Maybe that never happened. Or maybe it did happen and something else got Wagner irrevocably steamed. But, at one point, Mathur had committed some atrocity, and Wagner, a fellow given to apoplectic fury, stormed around the colleges (or at least IVC), unapologetically spewing colorful depictions of the Mathurian demise. (That was a year or two ago.)So that set the stage for the Clash of the SOCCCD Titans. Fuentes is not the kind to abandon one of his capos, even if the capo is a duplicitous and incompetent rat bastard. And Wagner is not the kind who can reverse his death glare, once it is deployed upon its victim. He suffers from irreversible peevitudinal threshold syndrome.
"Uh-oh," said Raghu. That’s when he turned to Plan-B (or maybe Plan-C; dunno). He ran to Boss Tom and appealed to a favorite conspiracy theory: that a small crew of (IVC) Lasers and their friends was scheming against him and seeking total control of district power. The story included a newly emphasized element: an unseemly romance between differing species and a plot to advance a girlfriend to IVC administration.
Eventually, the yarn even included the element of “blackmail.” At one point, an anonymous person sent documentation of the blackmail charge to the press.
Gosh. I wonder who that was. (But the press, to their credit, paid no mind.)
Things get complicated. Many of us (or some of us anyway) have long been convinced that the creation of the new IVC deanship is genuinely needed. And it is by no means clear that a certain ally wouldn’t be very good at that job.
Yeah, but nothing says corruption quite like fixing a hire. And fixing is, of course, a matter of degree. Should one get bent out of shape over fix light (i.e., writing the description to fit the beneficiary to a T)?
Mathur’s now gone (though, in some circles, the dark rumor that he will be “brought back” persists). But the bitterness, and the daffy theory, remains. And so, when the request for the new deanship came up, at least one Axis trustees went apeshit.
It got ugly, man.
Well, anyway, the request was approved (in a predictable 4 to 3 vote) during a “special” board meeting.
And so the hire is going forward.
The “opening” of the search started on August 20 and closes September 10. Gosh, that’s brief.
Read all about the job here.
There’s a pdf file that presents the job description (it’s incredibly detailed!) and so on. There’s also a brochure. The latter describes the job as follows:
I was amused by the last element of the job description in the pdf file, which presents the “physical demands” of this dean job:
The incumbent regularly sits for long periods, walks short distances on a regular basis, travels to various locations to visit instructional sites, attend meetings and conduct work; uses hands and fingers to operate an electronic keyboard or other office machines; reaches with hands and arms, speaks clearly and distinctly to answer telephones and to provide information; sees to read fine print and operate computer; hears and understands voices over telephone and in person; and lifts, carries, and/or moves objects weighing up to 10 pounds.
