The likes of Orange Juice Blog’s Vern Nelson jumped all over Don “Spanky” Wagner: here. There's quite a buzz.
My guess is that this thing will die fast. But it's been fun while it's lasted!
Because Don is intelligent and has a grain of goodness in him (I've glimpsed it; it was a tiny blue spark), I have long sought to advise him—from afar. Don's problem is that he is hot-tempered, generally peevish, crudely arrogant, egoistic, and, above all, a bully. Over and over again, these weaknesses get the better of him.
Remember the "hiring policy" incident? According to law, development of faculty hiring policies is to be a matter of joint agreement between the district (trustees) and faculty (academic senates). So Don and Co., that gang led by bullies, unilaterally imposed changes to their Neanderthalic liking to faculty hiring policies. The faculty senates objected.
What did Don do? He said, dismissively, "So sue us." Thus spake Don-a-thustra.
We sued. We won. In the grand scheme of community college things, that was a serious defeat for the Neanderthals. It was precedent-setting.
Religion has long been mildly present in the doings of the SOCCCD board of trustees. But, generally, 1st Amendment (establishment clause) fans--with a few exceptions--could live with it. But it plainly irked Don that a small group of faculty occasionally carped about all those prayers.
What did Don do? Did he ignore the complainers? No. Don lacks a sense of proportion, owing to his enormous ego and his bully psyche. He raised the temperature. In the setting of a scholarship awards ceremony (three or four years ago), he gave an invocation/prayer that morphed into (or that was) a speech that peeved openly about the complainers. More than the hard core "establishment clause" crowd were offended. The speech so angered the civil libertarians that, ultimately (and with further instigation by the oafish Raghu Mathur and others), they sued. The district spent over a million dollars defending itself.
Whatever else might be said about the resulting litigation and settlement, it included the judgment, by a jurist appointed by the Bush Administration, that Don's rant was "unconstitutional."
Add that to your résumé Don.
Don, please try harder to be good. You've got it in you, I know.
