In the latest issue of Citric Acid, former OC Weekly writer and now UC Irvine School of Social Ecology’s Social Media Manager Matt Coker remembers Roy Bauer:
Having spent too much of my youth reading Mad, Cracked and National Lampoon—blatantly plagiarizing the latter’s high school yearbook issue for my high school newspaper’s April Fools edition nearly got me removed from the editor’s chair—I felt I found a kindred spirit in Roy Bauer. His Dissent newsletters tackled important issues swirling around his beloved Irvine Valley College and IVC’s South Orange County Community College District overlords in true muckraking fashion. But Dissent’s presentation was slavishly sophomoric, filled with rude and crude images that were gif- and meme-worthy before anyone knew what the hell a gif or a meme was.
My memory could very well be faulty, but I believe IVC English Professor Lisa Alvarez first alerted me to the shenanigans happening in the SOCCCD alphabet soup in the mid- to late 1990s, with source material coming in the form of Dissent clippings that both enlightened me and made me envious because of the hilarious images, headlines and overall snark. I seem to recall Professor Alvarez leading me for the first time to the classroom of IVC Philosophy Professor Bauer, who provided a sobering overview of the SOCCCD shitshow.
That meeting, Roy’s follow-up calls and emails and my trusty Dissent subscription produced short items in my OC Weekly printed blog-before-there-were-blogs column "A Clockwork Orange" (that I now wish I’d named "Clockwork Orange County"). My clips, more reporting and attendance at, oh, let’s say colorful SOCCCD Board of Trustees meetings led to the April 10, 1998, cover thumbsucker “The Evils of Froguenstein: The real monsters behind community college trustee Steven J. Frogue.” (If you want to read it a) God bless you, and 2) Don’t try OC Weekly’s archives because … does OC Weekly even have archives? Not that I can see. Probably went down with a former owner’s Chris-Craft. Fortunately, Roy reprinted the whole thing for his own blog-after-there-were-blogs blog, Dissent the Blog—with the original OCW cover and much better illustrations than what we used inside.)
To quickly recap the Frogue thing without prejudice, we turn to Terry O’Banion, author of The Rogue Trustee: The Elephant in the Room (2009, The League for Innovation in the Community College) and the chapter titled “What Motivates the Rogue Trustee?” (that makes me wish we’d used fROGUE in our headline).
Presidents and other members of the board have a particularly challenging situation when the personal agenda championed reflects values and prejudices that are anathema to educational culture. While educators usually support the examination of all sides of an issue, it is embarrassing for the college as a whole when one of its own trustees publicly champions a perspective that few educators can support. One of the most challenging cases cited by a number of presidents in this study is that at the South Orange County Community College District (SOCCCD) in California—a case that has been very public in the local press and on faculty-sponsored websites, so it can be referenced here.
In 1998, Matt Coker, a reporter for the OC Weekly, described in detail the efforts of a college trustee at SOCCCD to persuade the college to sponsor a seminar on the John F. Kennedy assassination. As the board president, he got his fellow trustees to approve spending $5,000 in district funds to pay four speakers. The speakers included talk-show host Dave Emory, who contends Nazis who fled defeated Germany played a leading role in slaying JFK; John Judge, who says a cabal of gays and the military-industrial complex was behind the killing; Sherman Skolnick, a contributor to Spotlight, which the Anti-Defamation League calls the most antisemitic publication in America; and Michael Collins Piper, who wrote a book claiming that Kennedy’s assassination was a hit orchestrated by top-level CIA officials in collaboration with organized crime and Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad. The national media covered this case, and there were protests from hundreds of local citizens, including college faculty and students, as well as a number of local and national organizations. In response, the board of trustees decided to move the seminar off campus; it was finally cancelled. There are many, many details and problems surrounding this personal agenda by a trustee in a very complex situation that has become a legend in California community colleges.
Before we go any further, if Rob Reiner’s new podcast concludes actual German Nazis (as opposed to the lame, Trump-loving kind) locked arms with gay Defense Dept. warmongers, CIA spooks and Mossad agents to off Kennedy, scrunch what you just read into a ball, swallow it, and lose this IP address.
As for our dearly departed Professor Bauer, please know that he kept me in the loop about SOCCCD shenanigans for years and years, and while I always appreciated the chuckles, I also knew that despite Dissent’s Mad/Cracked/Lampoon-worthy takes, deep down Roy despised the unnecessary shame that came his school’s way. He would have preferred the shit for the shitshow had never been … um … shat. He really cared, and I hope someone coming up takes his lead.
To read the rest, click here.
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