Old Dissent files—newspaper articles, Dissent or ‘Vine articles, etc.—in reverse chronological order.
“Chunk Wheeler” and “Big Bill” (among others names) are my pseudonyms (Roy Bauer). I did most of the graphics.
Red Emma is Andrew’s pseudonym
Rebel Girl is Lisa’s pseudonym
The “Ask Miss Fortune” pieces were always written by Red Emma
Over the years, many students, colleagues, administrators, et al., contributed, using various pseudonyms (often one-off)—e.g., Sherlock, Frank Pulver, etc. They shall remain anonymous.
1 ✅ June 27, 2000
OC Register
Controversial trustee resigns [FISHER/SRISAVASDI]
EDUCATION: Steven Frogue had been the target of two recall attempts.
By MARLA JO FISHER and RACHANEE SRISAVASDI
MISSION VIEJO - The controversial community college trustee who sparked two recall attempts after offering a seminar that speculated Israeli intelligence agents may have assassinated President Kennedy has abruptly resigned only four months before his term was due to expire.
Steven J. Frogue, who was at the center of three years of tumult for the South Orange County Community College District, saw a rash of resignations, accreditation warnings, lawsuits and demonstrations as a board member overseeing Saddleback and Irvine Valley Colleges.
Frogue, who did not return phone calls Monday, sent a letter dated Sunday to the Board of Trustees president announcing his resignation effective June 30, which is also his 58th birthday.
Board President Nancy Padberg said Frogue did not mention at either of last week’s two board meetings that he was considering retirement, and she was unaware of any controversy that may have led him to step down. Padberg said Frogue sent her a letter linking his resignation from the board to his impending retirement as a history teacher at Foothill High School. “It is time for me to move on to new challenges and new opportunities to serve in other capacities,” Frogue wrote, according to Padberg.
Former board president Dorothy Fortune, who was a board ally of Frogue, said he told her that he found out late last week that he needed to retire from the college district board at the same time he retired from the Tustin Unified School District, in order to collect pension benefits from both districts with the state Public Employee Retirement System.
“Steve Frogue has been an intelligent, hard-working trustee with the courage of his convictions,” Fortune said. “He has always focussed first on our students.”
As a result of the resignation, Padberg said she expects the board to appoint someone to fill his seat until the November election, in order to avoid potential 3-3 votes on the normally seven-member board. The district plans to advertise the vacancy and discuss possible candidates at the July 12 board meeting, Padberg said. Frogue had served since 1992.
Frogue’s opponents were pleased but cynical about the surprise retirement, speculating he may have resigned in order to give a successor the advantage of being an incumbent in the upcoming election.
“I’m just ecstatic. This is a great moment,” said Wendy Phillips, former chairwoman of the Irvine Valley College Academic Senate. “But it is very clear that this is a political move to dismiss Frogue so (Trustee John) Williams can run on a slate with someone they’ve handpicked.”
Dissident Professor Roy Bauer, who has successfully sued the board on several occasions, said Monday that he just learned of the resignation. “Obviously, many of us working on the campaign to recall the board majority wonder if this is some kind of tactic, because now they can appoint someone who will be an incumbent,” Bauer said.
Frogue was a member of a board that oversaw a drastic overhaul of the administration at both colleges, appointment of new presidents at both Saddleback and Irvine Valley and an improvement in financial solvency for the district. Many of the changes drew sharp criticism from the faculty on both campuses, which led in part to accreditation warnings that were later withdrawn.
In 1997 and 1998, Frogue was the target of two failed recall efforts prompted by his proposal to host a Saddleback College seminar on conspiracy theories on Kennedy’s assassination. One speaker was scheduled to speak on how Israeli intelligence was involved - which drew outrage from both faculty and the Anti-Defamation League.
In response, the district canceled the planned seminar, but a group of community members raised about $125,000 to try to get Frogue off the board. The state Republican Party and the Orange County Democratic Foundation were among recall supporters.
The second recall effort was 6,000 signatures short of the 38,000 needed to qualify a recall measure for a vote.
Buckner Coe, who headed the recall efforts, said Monday that he was glad to hear of Frogue’s resignation.
“Frogue encouraged anti-Semitism by his presence on the board,” Coe said. “The time has come to move on and get a person on the board who is open minded about diversity.”
Board President Padberg said Monday that she thinks Frogue will be remembered as a survivor.
“I think for all the controversy surrounding him, he came back after the second recall attempt and made regular visits to the Irvine Valley College and showed he knew how to deal with adversity,” Padberg said. “I think he’ll be remembered for that.”
Trustee David Lang predicted the coming election in November will be “more interesting” with Frogue stepping aside.
“It will obviously change things quite a bit,” Lang said.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: At a recent board meeting, Frogue indicated that he resigned primarily for health reasons.]
2 ✅ June 29, 2000
Irvine World News
Anti-climactic exit for Frogue
Frogue resigns as college trustee [HAYES; IWN]
By Laura Hayes
Steven J. Frogue, the trustee who cut a controversial swath through the South Orange County Community College District and was the subject of two recall attempts, is resigning from the board as of June 30. Frogue, 57, is also retiring from his 33-year job as a history teacher at Foothill High in Tustin.
Frogue served on the board of trustees for 7 1/2 years, representing the area which encompasses the former El Toro air base, Foothill Ranch, Portola Hills and portions of Irvine, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo.
According to sources at the district, if Frogue leaves both jobs now, he can combine his years in the Public Employees Retirement System as a college board member and his years in the state teachers retirement system as a public high school teacher, thereby boosting his pension.
“It is time for me to move on to new challenges and opportunities to serve in other capacities,” Frogue wrote in a letter to board president Nancy Padberg dated June 25.
Frogue accepted a “golden handshake” incentive offered this year by the Tustin school district, said his colleague on the board, John Williams, who has served with Frogue since 1992. Frogue is on a trip to Europe, Williams said.
Padberg called a special meeting of the board for July 12 with the intention of interviewing candidates to appoint to the vacant post, she said.
The meeting is five days before candidate filing opens on July 17 for the November election. Candidates can file up until Aug. 11 and must live in the area they serve, but district voters elect candidates for all the areas. Frogue’s is one of four trustee terms up this fall.
Williams said he will run again, and Dorothy Fortune and David Lang have not officially announced their candidacies.
Padberg said her understanding is that if the board needs to appoint a member to Frogue’s post within 60 days to serve out the five months remaining on the term, or call a special election, or leave the seat open. “I think that would be a bad move. We could be paralyzed with tied votes,” Padberg said.
“That of course would be the option that makes the most sense to me,” Lang said.
“What’s clear to me is that any appointment that is made will be a political appointment and be suspect for that reason.”
“We still need a trustee in that seat for five months,” said Williams.
“Without Steve on the board a 3-3 vote means nothing happens. To give some representation to folks in Foothill Ranch I think a strong case could be made to go ahead and appoint somebody,” said Trustee Don Wagner.
Trustees Fortune and Marcia Milchiker were not reached for comment.
The position will be advertised in newspapers and the deadline for applicants to file with the district is July 10, said Pamela Zanelli, the district’s public affairs officer.
The board appointed former Area 4 trustee Teddi Lorch in 1993 when her predecessor, Iris Swanson, died before the end of her term. Lorch served out Swanson’s term, which ended in December 1994, then was elected to the seat and served another four years, until December 1998.
Williams said he knew his colleague was contemplating retiring from teaching, but he didn’t know Frogue was confronting a decision that would result in his resignation from the board.
“We’ve covered a lot of ground here, he just had to make a personal decision,” said Williams. “I wish him well, we’re all community volunteers that step forward to serve.”
…..
Suddenly the foes of Steve Frogue, community college district trustee, won’t have him to kick around any more. He is resigning as of Friday.
Frogue’s stated reason was to move on to new challenges. Colleagues said he stands to benefit from a pension boost by retiring from his trustee post and teaching job concurrently.
His critics say the timing is suspiciously fortuitous, opening the way for the board to seat a handpicked incumbent for one of the four seats up for reelection in the November election.
Frogue, a Republican who was denounced by the California Republican party leader at the height of the second attempt to recall him from office, was first elected in November 1992 by a large majority of voters.
In 1994, Frogue alleged there were irregularities in the election of the Irvine Valley College academic senate president, drawing a swift and angry response from faculty members who denied the charges. The stage was set for a long-standing feud between Frogue and some faculty members.
“Given the past controversy of Frogue and his leadership of the board majority, it was probably a good thing for the entire college district to have his untimely resignation. This perhaps may begin a healing process,” said Bill Hewitt, a former senate president and current head of student supportive services at the college.
Trustees Frogue, Dorothy Fortune, Teddi Lorch and John Williams formed a voting bloc in 1997 and instigated administrative changes which were followed by the exit of at least 13 administrators, including the chancellor and the vice chancellor of fiscal services.
The reorganization of Irvine Valley College administration and appointment of Raghu Mathur, chair of the physical sciences department, to the Irvine Valley College presidency in 1997 were protested by a majority of faculty members at the college.
Successful lawsuits were brought by faculty members, including philosophy professor Roy Bauer. Frogue has been one of Bauer’s prime targets in his underground newsletters “Dissent” and “The ‘Vine.”
 |
| Pam Zanelli |
“This is a political opportunity for the board majority to put into place someone as an incumbent without Frogue’s horrible baggage. I don’t want to be cynical, but that’s what I fear is happening,” said Bauer. “It’s just nice to see him leave. There are many problems with the district, he just represents one small problem.”
Frogue was criticized for planning a seminar in 1997, inviting several speakers to discuss theories surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, including Michael Collins Piper who wrote for Spotlight magazine. The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish human-rights organization, called Spotlight the most anti-Semitic publication in America and was one of the groups behind the recall attempt.
The Orange County Human Relations Commission also expressed alarm at views Frogue expressed at a commission meeting.
The district board tabled the Kennedy seminar but a national outcry had arisen and board meetings drew fringe groups from inside and outside the county. The district had to hire extra security to control raucous audiences.
In November 1998, a petition to force a recall election aimed at Frogue fell short of the 38,000 signatures required to place the issue on the ballot. During and after the two recall attempts, Frogue contended that he had been continually misquoted, misunderstood and maligned by his foes and the media. He later made a public plea for reconciliation and held a prayer breakfast at Irvine Valley College, however he never publicly admitted any wrongdoing or bad judgment on his part.
“I wanted to see him defeated for what he was and I think he would have been, despite the failed recalls,” said Irvine Valley English professor Lisa Alvarez.
“They were the most successful failed recall efforts in Orange County. No one came as close as we did. I think the election would have showed that. At the same time, it’s good he’s no longer in a position of power,” said Alvarez.
Frogue was known for making dry, mumbled, sometimes humorous quips during board meetings. His favorite long-standing argument was that the district needed to hire more teachers and offer more classes to shorten student waiting lists before spending money for other projects.
Originally from the Chicago area, Frogue started teaching after his discharge from the Marine Corps in the mid 1960s, said Williams. He and his wife, Carol, also a school teacher, have been residents of Lake Forest since 1972. In addition to his high school teaching job, Frogue taught at Saddleback College and Chapman and Pepperdine universities. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Chapman University.
“I wish him well, he deserves to enjoy his retirement,” said Williams.
“Following the recall I think he was a pretty good example of how to build peace. He tried to go to meetings at IVC where there was the most rancor. He held a prayer breakfast,” recalled Nancy Padberg.
“The bottom line is, he put in a lot of years in the system, he deserves a happy retirement,” said Lang.
3 ✅ June 29, 2000
Irvine World News/EDITORIAL OPINION
A process ripe for manipulation
 |
| Dandy Don Wagner |
Summary: The abrupt resignation of South Orange County Community College District trustee Steven Frogue comes too close to the November election to be viewed without suspicion.
The stage is set for more of the political shenanigans the public has come to expect of the board of trustees in the South Orange County Community College District.
The enigmatic Steven Frogue abruptly resigned this week just five months before his second term and eighth year on the board were due to end. After three years of battling adversaries on and off campus and surviving two recall attempts, Frogue retired from his job as a history teacher, mailed a brief letter of resignation as a trustee and left for a vacation in Europe.
He left without giving an explanation, other than the brief letter to the board president, of why he was suddenly abandoning the post he fought so hard to retain. The letter apparently linked his resignation to his retirement from the Tustin Unified School District and he told a board colleague he had to give up the trustee seat to collect full pension benefits.
Frogue’s actions also smack of back-room politics. Resigning from an elected board post just before a term expires is an old trick used to give a board majority the opportunity to hand-pick an ally for the seat. The handpicked successor then has the distinct advantage of running as the incumbent when the seat comes up for election.
Our college district trustees are no strangers to back-room politicking. The board’s fondness for conducting the public’s business behind closed doors is the cause of much of the recent years’ turmoil at Irvine Valley College and in the district.
Trustee Frogue’s post will be up for election in November along with the seats of Dorothy Fortune, David Lang and John Williams. Frogue, Fortune and Williams have been a controversial triumvirate of the board majority that has reigned for more than three years. The balance of power is at stake in the November election.
 |
Board president Nancy Padberg has already called a meeting for July 12 to discuss the selection of a successor to Frogue.
The special meeting comes just five days before filing opens for candidates for the November board election. Padberg said the seat needs to be filled to avoid potential 3-3 split votes between now and January. Tied votes are possible, but unlikely. Lang and trustee Marcia Milchiker usually are on the short end of a 5-2 vote.
There are options to hand-picking an incumbent to run as a board ally in the November election.
The six trustees could agree to seat no one unless they agree unanimously on the candidate. Or, they could limit their selection to someone who agrees to only serve out Frogue’s term and then step aside for the election.
Or, the board on July 12 could agree to do nothing and leave the seat vacant until the voters fill it five months from now.
Any of the three options would be preferable to manipulating the process to give a politically chosen ally an advantage in the November election.
4 ✅ July 9, 2000
LA Times (?)/Letters to the editor
Questions Raised by Frogue’s Resignation
* For many months following Frogue’s cancellation of his odious “Warren Commission” seminar, those of us who attended South Orange County Community College District board meetings endured the painful spectacle of racial separatists and anti-Semites, speaking in defense of the embattled trustee, sometimes dragging with them an alarming entourage straight out of a Mad Max movie.
Such was the support for trustee Frogue.
Not once during these episodes did Frogue repudiate that support. That fact revealed that he was not fit to serve on the board of this once-fine college district.
Trustees Dorothy Fortune and John S. Williams have been Frogue’s allies through it all, helping to make the district the laughingstock of the state community college system. Indeed, Fortune now feels compelled to assert that Frogue has “never ceased doing an excellent job.”
In November, voters will have an opportunity to express a different judgment by voting these two out of office.
—ROY BAUER
Professor of Philosophy
Irvine Valley College
* The resignation of Frogue gives us little to celebrate. The fact that he survived two recall attempts, despite these attempts being supported by religious and civic leaders, and both the Republican and Democratic Parties, shows that what he represents is alive and well in Orange County today.
Today’s report (June 27) mentions that “Frogue earned the enmity of professors, students, gays and Jews.” He was “accused of downplaying the Holocaust.” He invited “two speakers who wrote for an anti-Semitic newspaper.”
The support of Frogue by the majority of his fellow trustees, the failure of two recalls, and the open support he receives in letters and board meetings by admitted and boastful racists does not bode well for the future of education in our county. Frogue has never rejected or disclaimed any of this support.
Frogue now says, “It is time for me to move on to new challenges and new opportunities to serve in other capacities.” If past history is any indication, he should have no problems from the citizenry of Orange County.
This even though his hypocrisy in claiming to be fiscally frugal for the district is openly displayed in the timing of his resignation: “By resigning from the board at the same time [as from teaching at Foothill High School], he would dramatically increase his pension by adding his years as a trustee.”
—IRVING E. FRIEDMAN
Laguna Niguel
5 ✅ July 9, 2000
LA Times/Editorial:
New Start for College District
 |
The resignation of the best-known and most controversial of the trustees of the South Orange County Community College District is welcome, belated and an opportunity to set the district on a new course.
Steven J. Frogue quit as trustee at the end of June, months before the end of his second term. Other trustees said he told them that by resigning at the same time that he left his job as a history teacher at Foothill High in North Tustin after 33 years, he would increase his pension.
Frogue denied accusations of anti-Semitism stemming from his comments in and out of class. But at community college board meetings, he sometimes denounced the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group. He said in an interview that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John F. Kennedy, “worked for the ADL,” which he contended was behind the killing. He later denied making the remark.
One of Frogue’s more objectionable acts was his attempt to hold a seminar on the Kennedy assassination featuring a speaker who contended that the Israeli intelligence agency masterminded the killing.
After hundreds of calls of protest, the district agreed to bar the seminar from campus.
The college district, which includes Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges, also has suffered from criticisms from an accrediting commission and a judge’s denunciation for conducting its business behind closed doors. Faculty have warred with administrators, and students have complained of being distracted by the turmoil.
The trustees have been on the defensive for years. They were split whether to support or defend Frogue, who survived two attempts to recall him from office. The state expressed concern about the district’s finances and warned of a possible fiscal takeover, though trustees disputed the seriousness of the problem. The accrediting commission threatened to withdraw accreditation, then changed its mind.
With Frogue gone, teachers organizations and administrators should seek common ground, using the assistance of a professional mediator if necessary. Candidates for election as trustees this fall should campaign on specific platforms of healing measures. The district has an opportunity to move beyond some past distractions and focus everybody’s attention on education.
6 ✅ July 12, 2000
LA Times
Fuentes, 2 Others Seek O.C. College District Seat
Head of the county GOP is a surprise candidate for the post also sought by William Wachal and Joe Greco. The winner will be named today.
By JEFF GOTTLIEB
In a surprise move, Thomas A. Fuentes, the hard-line conservative head of the county Republican Party, is one of three candidates who have applied for the vacancy on board of the beleaguered South Orange County Community College District. The new board member will be announced today.
The other candidates are relative unknowns: William P. Wachal of Mission Viejo, regional sales manager for Ciba Specialty Chemicals in Los Angeles, and Joe F. Greco of Portola Hills, an assistant professor of international finance at Cal State Fullerton.
Fuentes has been a contentious figure in the county GOP in his 15 years as chairman, and his leadership has been challenged several times from the more moderate wing of the party.
He once said Democratic voters were like “good Germans denying the existence of the Holocaust” and compared Republicans’ support of President Clinton’s reelection with French politicians who collaborated with the Nazis.
Many GOP leaders began to look for a replacement after Republicans suffered several losses in the November 1998 election.
Fuentes has never run for office, other than the Republican Central Committee. The Lake Forest resident has become increasingly active behind the scenes in the fight against an El Toro airport.
The current position on the seven-member college board will be appointed rather than elected. The seat opened when another controversial figure, Steven J. Frogue, resigned last month.
Frogue, who served 7 1/2 years on the board, survived two recall attempts and allegations that he was anti-Semitic. He was accused of downplaying the Holocaust and became embroiled in controversy when he planned a seminar on President Kennedy’s assassination featuring two speakers who wrote for an anti-Semitic newspaper.
Nancy Padberg, president of the Board of Trustees and a Republican, said she was surprised when Fuentes declared for the vacancy.
Asked if he had the inside track for the job, she replied, “I have no idea.”
Board members will interview each candidate for 15 minutes today, and the new member is expected to be appointed afterward. The winner faces an election in November.
The community college district has faced lawsuits and dissension and has been the subject of outside scrutiny in the past few years. The body that accredits community colleges placed the district on warning status last year and said it was “wracked by malfunction.” Last February, the group reversed itself and accredited the district’s schools, Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges, for six years.
7 ✅ July 12, 2000
OC Register
GOP figure tries for college board
NEWS FOCUS: Tom Fuentes, county party chairman, is among three vying to fill out a term on the panel governing Saddleback and Irvine Valley.
By MARLA JO FISHER
MISSION VIEJO — The controversial chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County has applied to fill the unexpired term of a community college trustee who resigned abruptly last month from a board that has faced lawsuits, accreditation warnings, angry faculty and recall attempts in recent years.
GOP Party Chairman Tom Fuentes is among three candidates scheduled to interview today for the job of trustee in the South Orange County Community College District, which oversees the operations of Saddleback and Irvine Valley colleges.
Other candidates are businessman William Wachal of Mission Viejo and Joe F. Greco of Portola Hills, an assistant professor of finance and international relations at California State University, Fullerton.
“My sense is that (Fuentes is) probably the guy to beat,” said trustee Don Wagner, who is among the six expected to vote tonight on a replacement for Steven Frogue, who resigned June 26.
In a surprise announcement Tuesday, trustee Dorothy Fortune said she will not seek a second term for her Laguna Beach seat.
Fortune is a friend and political ally of Frogue’s. Fortune said she wants to spend more time on family and philanthropic concerns, including an orphanage she helps support in Nicaragua.
“I was really thinking of resigning ahead of time, but Steve Frogue beat me to the gun,” Fortune said. “I didn’t want to give anyone apoplexy, so I decided to hold off.”
Faculty members who oppose the board majority decided not to put up a candidate for the appointment, which will end with November’s elections, according to instructor Wendy Phillips of Irvine Valley College.
“The concerted wisdom was that any candidate we put up would be automatically rejected by the board majority,” Phillips said. “They will put their hand-picked candidate in that job. We will wait until November and let the electorate decide.”
Frogue had been a board lightning rod for years, sparking two recall attempts after offering a seminar that speculated that Israeli intelligence agents may have assassinated President Kennedy.
“From the standpoint of the coming election, I think this appointment is important because it means the person will be an incumbent,” said Patrizia Boen, president of the Saddleback College Academic Senate.
Fuentes did not return repeated phone calls, but other phone lines were buzzing as word began to spread around the two college campuses and in district offices that he was seeking the appointment.
“I’ve gotten numerous calls about him, from people asking what I know about him and his motivations,” said trustee David Lang, who had sought to keep the job unfilled until the November election.
Many were surprised Fuentes would be interested in the job after 15 years as county party chairman.
“I understand that a call was made to him asking who might be interested in applying (for Frogue’s seat), and he said, ‘Hey, that’s me,’” Wagner said.
According to friend and political ally Buck Johns, Fuentes is planning to remain in the seat if appointed and run for election in November.
Fuentes has become the target of criticism within the GOP in recent years by those who say the party would be stronger if it appealed more to women, minorities and moderates.
Although the party still holds a 17-percentage-point advantage over Democrats in voter registration in Orange County, the number has slipped slightly in recent years and Democrats have picked up key seats in the central part of the county.
Fuentes issued a statement late Tuesday saying he wants to be part of a “listening and understanding board.
“My interests in serving on the board are quality education for the students and the best value for the taxpayer,” he wrote.
Wachal said he would like to see the district expand its international programs, especially in the wake of the county’s ethnic diversity.
“I’m honored they accepted my application and I’m looking forward to the interview process,” Wachal said Tuesday night.
The third candidate, Greco, could not immediately be reached for comment. In his application, Greco cited a background as a teacher at Mission Viejo High School, a former commissioner in Laguna Hills and as director for the Center for Emerging Markets at Cal State Fullerton as qualifications for the job.
Board Chairman Nancy Padberg said she plans to keep an open mind. Since Frogue’s resignation, she said, the district received some 30 phone calls expressing interest but only three applications. The only qualification is to be a registered voter living within the district. The job pays $400 a month.
8 ✅ July 13, 2000
Irvine World News/Guest editorial
An easy litmus test: ‘Did you oppose Mr. Frogue?’
By Andrew Tonkovich
Every silver lining has its cloud, and the resignation of South Orange County Community College District Trustee Steven Frogue, a seemingly felicitous, if tardy event, casts its own dark one.
The departure of Frogue, target of two noble, failed recall efforts, comes in advance of an election, pointing the future of a college board long controlled by Frogue’s allies. These folk will appoint an interim board member, no doubt their candidate on the November ballot.
For me, celebration of Frogue’s resignation points to the moral and ethical failures of that board majority, which consistently supported Orange County’s briefly famous flirt with fascism, a man who enjoys attention he provokes playing footsie with Holocaust revisionists, anti-Semites and kooks. Steven Frogue’s failed effort to bring fellow political exotics to a college seminar on the Kennedy assassination made him an obvious political liability.
Perhaps not as obvious as you’d think.
Learning of his departure, Trustee Nancy Padberg called Frogue a “survivor.” Padberg displays a remarkable knack for ambiguity and fatalism.
Many of us understood that Frogue and his allies are more than freaks or weirdos. They influence profoundly the political process. How? If in no other - and perhaps no stronger way - they provide other elected officials a chance to make public their abhorrence of this perverse advocacy of pseudo-science and hate. They provide other politicians the chance to object on behalf of us all.
Tellingly, none of Frogue’s allies on the SOCCCD board - those three majority members who voted with him, indeed who elected him board president, and approved his phony course (John Williams, Dorothy Fortune, Teddi Lorch) and lately Donald Wagner and Nancy Padberg, never challenged him or said they were fed up.
As a teacher in our district, here’s the question I’ve consistently asked students, teachers, college administrators, deans, presidents and district officials. It’s an easy litmus test:
“Did you oppose Mr. Frogue?” Their often embarrassed responses are one political measure of their complicity - whether from fear or ignorance - in keeping Frogue and, more importantly, his handlers, in power and in our face.
Not to reduce Frogue and his board allies to a single issue, but how is it possible for elected public education officials not to express their convictions about this one particular issue, one so clear and requiring so little political risk?
And, hey, what about just plain expressing their own personal moral outrage, using their platform to isolate and discourage Frogue?
In months of protest, organized recall signature gathering, local and national news coverage, it just didn’t happen. Not in public gatherings full of angry constituents, not in board meetings and not in those two efforts to recall Frogue.
Even as both Democrats and Republicans officially condemned Frogue, his board majority allies kept silent - or worse - defended him in too-easy, intellectually weak and just plain wrong interpretations of “free speech” in academia.
Andrew Tonkovich teaches writing at Irvine Valley College at UC Irvine and is also a writer and editor for the Santa Monica Review.
9 ✅ July 13, 2000
LA Times
Fuentes Appointed to South O.C. Community College Board
Conservative, controversial GOP chairman succeeds conservative, controversial Steven J. Frogue as trustee.
By JEFF GOTTLIEB
Thomas A. Fuentes, chairman of the county Republican Party for the past 15 years, was appointed Wednesday to fill the vacant trustee seat on the South Orange County Community College District.
The board voted 4 to 0 to appoint Fuentes, with Trustees David Lang and Marcia Milchiker abstaining. Student Trustee Jason Wamhoff, who has an advisory vote, also supported the GOP chief.
Fuentes said he expected to run for election to the seat in November, which would be his first attempt at public office.
Asked whether his appointment was the start of a career as a candidate, Fuentes replied, “Who knows? Two weeks ago today I had no idea I’d be sitting here talking to you today as a new trustee.” ….
10 ✅ July, 2000
OC REGISTER
Tom Fuentes: A biographical chronology
by Martin Wisckol
Oct. 16, 1948: Born in Los Angeles
1960: Walks precincts for presidential candidate Richard Nixon. Volunteers for GOP campaigns each election year in the 1960s
1962: Moves with family to Orange County
1970: GOP club president at Chapman College, receiving bachelor’s degree in government. Works way through college at a hotel near Disneyland 1971: Hired as aide to county Supervisor Ronald Caspers
1972: Appointed, then elected, to the county GOP’s governing Central Committee
1974: Resigns Central Committee post, enters St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park to study for priesthood
1976: Returns to Orange County, working for the engineering firm of Robert Bein, William Frost. Elected to Central Committee
1977: Begins part-time post as communications director for Catholic Diocese of Orange. Several papal honors include a Knight of Malta
1983: Founds the Second Harvest Food Bank
1985: Elected chairman of the county GOP. By the mid-1990s, Republicans will hold all the county’s legislative and congressional seats, becoming the strongest county party in the state.
1988: Involved with the decision to put uniformed security guards at predominantly Hispanic polling places in a stated effort to deter noncitizens from voting. Fuentes and co-defendents eventually settle a civil-rights suit brought against them for $400,000.
1989: Resigns as director of communications for the Catholic Diocese of Orange. Some priests had complained about the poll guards and passed a resolution saying Fuentes’ political work conflicted with his church position. Re-elected party chairman
1995: Leaves for the engineering firm of Tait & Associates, where he is now a senior vice president
1996: Democrat Loretta Sanchez upsets Rep. Robert K. Dornan, R-Garden Grove.
1998: Democrats take two Orange County legislative seats. Republicans for New Directions, a group calling for more moderate party leadership, runs candidates for the Central Committee and gets 11 elected to the 80-member panel.
1999: Fuentes unanimously re-elected chairman by Central Committee members. Another splinter group, the New Majority, forms with the same agenda as New Directions but with $10,000-per-member dues. Nearly $1 million is raised by mid-2000. Some prominent Republicans, including Lincoln Club Chairman Dale Dykema, begin talking about the need to prepare a successor to Fuentes.
2000: Renegades fail to make significant inroads into the Central Committee, which continues to be dominated by Fuentes loyalists. However, two New Majority Assembly candidates beat out establishment candidates in the primary.
11 ✅ July 13, 2000
OC Register
GOP leader joins college board
NEWS FOCUS: A career politician is appointed to the rancorous south Orange County panel, filling out the term of a controversial trustee.
By MARLA JO FISHER
MISSION VIEJO – The longtime chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County on Wednesday became the newest member of the tumultuous South Orange County Community College District board, which oversees Saddleback and Irvine Valley colleges.
Tom Fuentes, who has been under attack recently from within his party, was selected over two other applicants to fill the unexpired term of Steven Frogue, who fought off two recall attempts to resign four months before his term ended.
It remains unclear how Fuentes’ presence will impact the board, which has been rocked for years with dissension and political infighting from its own faculty and students. He was sworn in Wednesday and sat in on a closed session.
“Hopefully, I can bring a fresh face and a fresh perspective to the board, because I was not involved in any of that,” Fuentes said.
Some faculty members were more cynical about the board’s replacement for Frogue, who left the board after a long battle over his support for a seminar suggesting that Israeli agents may have killed John F. Kennedy, among other issues.
“We’ve gotten rid of a crude Neanderthal but replaced him with a slick one,” said Irvine Valley College Professor Roy Bauer, who has successfully sued the district over free-speech issues.
Fuentes said he expects to run for the seat when it comes before the voters in November. This would be the first time the career politician has sought office outside his party.
Fuentes said he does not plan to decrease his party activities. The job of trustee appealed to him, he said, because it did not take him away from his family.
Trustees said they hope Fuentes will smooth the often-troubled waters. They also expressed the hope that Fuentes’ political contacts would benefit the district.
In recent years, the district has seen a rash of resignations and lawsuits, survived accreditation and financial warnings, and demonstrations and protests by students and faculty.
“It will be really interesting to see how he changes the board dynamics,” said Marcia Milchiker, who abstained on the vote, along with David Lang, because they opposed appointing a new trustee rather than waiting until the Nov. 7 election. “He has pledged to bring people together, and that’s what we need.”
Fuentes was selected over two other applicants — sales manager William Wachal and Joe Greco, an assistant finance professor at California State University, Fullerton — after each candidate was interviewed.
But Fuentes seemed the favorite from the start. When he entered the boardroom, Chairwoman Nancy Padberg came over to shake his hand. The small boardroom at Saddleback College was packed with his supporters, who applauded after he gave prepared answers to the interview questions.
As an incumbent, Fuentes may have an edge in the November election over any challenger for the District 6 seat, which includes Lake Forest, Foothill Ranch and adjacent areas.
“The trustees had an opportunity to leave the question of replacing Frogue to the voters, and, instead, they decided to pick the most political person they possibly could,” Bauer said. “They aren’t trustees. They are politicians.”
12 ✅ July (?) 2000
From the website for the School of Humanities and Languages, IVC:
Irvine Valley College supports limited academic freedom and the cautious exchange of officially sanctioned ideas, in carefully scrutinized conformity with the whim of the College President, the Board Policy of the South Orange County Community College District, and federal and state law....
13 ✅ July 20, 2000
Irvine World News
Fuentes appointed to college board [HAYES]
By Laura Hayes
 |
Thomas A. Fuentes, the county Republican Party chairman for 16 years, will finish out the term of Steven J. Frogue who retired from the Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges’ board of trustees on June 30. Frogue’s term expires in December.
Fuentes was appointed July 12, and is expected to run as the appointed incumbent for a four-year term of office.
“I called him,” said John Williams, a second-term trustee from Mission Viejo who will run for reelection in area 7 this fall.
Williams called a circle of his friends in town to tell them of the vacancy, including Fuentes, looking for qualified referrals. He “jokingly” asked Fuentes if he was interested in the job and Fuentes said he would consider it.
“We need someone in Steve’s area, there’s five months of work still to do. We’ve never not appointed in the history of the district,” said Williams.
Three residents applied for the seat on the seven-member board, including Fuentes, a senior vice president of Tait & Associates Inc., a civil and environmental engineering firm; William P. Wachal, a sales and marketing manager for Ciba Specialty Chemicals; and Joseph Greco, a professor of international finance at CSU Fullerton.
Fuentes garnered votes from board president Nancy Padberg, Dorothy Fortune, Williams and Don Wagner.
“I am extremely pleased to have such a well-qualified individual as Mr. Fuentes volunteer to serve on our board. He will be a valuable addition,” said Padberg.
Williams said all three candidates were qualified, but Fuentes rose to the top due to his broad range of experience and his roots in the community college system.
Trustees David Lang and Marcia Milchiker abstained from voting.
“Our abstentions really had nothing to do with opposing any of the candidates,” said Lang.
The two trustees felt excluded from the decision-making process surrounding the appointment, Lang said. Lang and Milchiker supported an option to keep the seat open until the fall election.
“There ought to have been more discussion. There is a board policy that lays out a procedure but it really doesn’t speak to the other option of not making the appointment. The board president was well within her rights, but it’s just another example of the lack of meaningful collaboration,” said Lang.
“I have high hopes that he will be a good trustee during this period. He certainly brings a lot of skills to the table,” said Lang.
Student trustee Jason Wamhoff gave an advisory vote to Fuentes.
“I think he was judging me from what he read in the applications and what he heard from the speakers,” Fuentes said on Monday.
“I accepted that vote with an understanding of the solemn responsibility that the students are the first priority to be served. It was very touching to get the student vote,” Fuentes said.
Fortune announced that she will retire from the board in December. Lang and Williams have declared their candidacy with the county registrar’s office and Fuentes said he expects to run.
Roy Bauer, a professor at Irvine Valley College and critic of the board majority, said, “They had an opportunity to leave politics out of this decision and simply wait four months. Instead they decided to make this a very political action. Padberg, Wagner, Williams and Fortune are not trustees, they’re politicians.”
 |
Fuentes said he got the application into the district office just ahead of the deadline.
“It was a very spur-of-the-moment decision, frankly it happened all so quickly,” he said. “Often times the opportunities for public service are really the consequence of timing and this was one of those. I happen to live in the specific trustee area of the district. I don’t think that has been well-publicized,” he said.
Trustees must live within the boundaries of their trustee area, but they are elected by voters from across the entire district. Fuentes has lived in Lake Forest (Trustee Area 6) for 11 years with his wife, Jolene, and three children, Michelle, 15, Thomas Jr., 13, and Joseph, 6.
In addition to GOP responsibilities, Fuentes is on the board of directors of Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. and Eagle Publishing Inc. in Washington, D.C. He previously served on the board of trustees for Pacific States University.
Fuentes said he followed headlines about the troubled South Orange County Community College District, but isn’t closely connected to the issues.
“I have not been deeply involved in the business of the district,” said Fuentes. “I suffer from none of that baggage, a little bit of ignorance might be bliss.”
Controversy at the district over the past three years includes recall attempts against Frogue, administrative upheaval after reorganization, a budget crisis allayed by the county’s healthy economy, political strife among faculty members, administrators and board members that received a warning from an accrediting commission, and lawsuits brought against the district by faculty members and students, resulting in mounting litigation costs without resolution.
Fuentes said he hopes to bring a fresh look and a new objective to a district that has been “beset by some controversy and some excessive consternation expressed by the press.”
“Here is an opportunity not to have an emotional or past burden of those issues. It is time to get beyond the previous controversy and build for the good of the students. I see students as the number one concern and taxpayers as the number one constituency,” he said.
Fuentes cited a rapport with local, state and federal elected officials and his relationships within the Latino and Asian population in Orange County in his application. Fuentes is the first Hispanic board member in the college district’s 33-year history.
The California Republican Party supported the second recall attempt of Frogue in 1998, as did county Democrats, but county Republicans did not speak out on the issue.
“The California Republican Party had taken a stand. The 58counties walk under the banner of the state party. There was a state party position, we do not typically take positions county by county,” said Fuentes.
Fuentes said he has never had a conversation with Frogue. “I never met Mr. Frogue, unless it was in a very large gathering,” he said.
“I look forward to getting to know everyone involved in the district who has good will and a constructive attitude in their heart, to hear them and listen to them patiently and openly and make my assessments as I learn.
“The district is a very large and complex environment that will require some quiet listening and some learning before talking and leading,” Fuentes said. “As I stated at the meeting, this is a college district and in this particular case I am a freshman.”
Fuentes, 51, was 12 years old when he started volunteering for a congressman whose campaign headquarters were across the street from the boy’s school, Transfiguration, a parochial school in Los Angeles.
The family relocated to Orange County and Fuentes attended Santa Ana College for two years.
“If ever there was a time for great fun, it was my first two years earning my AA degree. I was much involved in the life of the campus,” he said.
His experiences as student body president and editor of the student newspaper, el Don, were catalysts that launched him on the road to a bachelor’s degree at Chapman University. He enrolled at Loyola Marymount University in 1974 for post graduate studies. Fuentes also served as an aide to Orange County Supervisor Ronald W. Caspers starting in 1971.
“In those four years, I learned to prepare agendas from an enormous county bureaucracy that would pile on the paper,” he said.
He attended St. Patrick’s Seminary for one year in 1975, then left to work at an Orange County engineering firm.
In 1977, he became part-time communications director for the Catholic Diocese of Orange, where he served for 13 years. Fuentes twice received Papal honors and in 1983, he founded the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County.
In 1988, while Fuentes was GOP party chairman, a campaign manager started a program that placed poll watchers in designated precincts in Santa Ana on voting day. The move was made due to “mischief and misconduct by the Democrats,” said Fuentes.
“The campaign manager implemented a program of poll watchers in 20 precincts that hired security guards, never telling us that was the kind of staffing they would hire. I was never aware, never made aware they were going to be uniformed,” Fuentes said.
He said he has no knowledge of priests who complained about the poll guards and signed a resolution stating his diocese job conflicted with his political position. Fuentes said he retired from the 13-year church post because the bishop he served passed away. He got married and felt it was time to move on.
Fuentes said his college board appointment is not part of a career plan as an elected representative.
“A little more than two weeks ago, I never had an idea I would be talking to (you) as a trustee. It was not a political decision, it was a matter of community service that I took this step to accept involvement at the community college district,” Fuentes said.
He “takes umbrage” at being described as a career politician, “having never earned a dollar as an elected official. I’ve always been involved in volunteer party activity. Volunteerism is very different from being a career politician,” Fuentes said.
He does not envision having a job that would require traveling to the state or federal capital. “I don’t know how our good congressmen do that every week.”
“My children are 15, 13 and 6. Being at home, present to them and with my wife is very important. Remember this district meets one night a month,” he said.
“In terms of the political dynamics of district and the upcoming election, the South Orange County CommunityCollege District is two-to-one Republican households over Democrats and I have been elected by the Republican voters of Southern Orange County nine times now,” Fuentes said.
“That constituency, that parallel constituency of the past nine elections, is the same voter base with whom I have the privilege of representing now.
“I think of myself as a consensus builder, to have been elected and reelected unanimously to a diverse party hopefully demonstrates a level of consensus building andteam building and unifying in my track record.”
Fuentes was reelected to a two-year term in the county central committee last spring. Members select new officers in December.
“All I can say is we better win for George Bush this November,” he replied, as to his chances for keeping the county chairman’s post.
14 ✅ July 25, 2007
The newly completed IVC Performing Arts Center is complete with a large set design shop behind the main stage area.
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Irvine Valley College on Wednesday opened the doors to its newly completed $32 million performing arts center for the first time to media, faculty and school officials.
The hall should expand college curriculum and become the performing arts hub for the community, college officials said.
The 53,200-square-foot center will serve the college’s music, dance, and theater departments. It contains a 400-seat main theater with a balcony, an orchestra pit, a black box theater seating 200, a small music hall, a design computer lab and a costume shop among other rooms.
College president Glenn Roquemore has called the performing arts center a “gem destined to become a cultural and architectural centerpiece for the community of Irvine.”
“This is not your run-of-the-mill performing arts center,” Roquemore said Wednesday. “(The community) has been saying, ‘Where’s your art?’ Now we can show it.”
On the tour, college faculty and staff “oo’d” and “ahh’d” at the building’s features – particularly classroom and storage space.
. . .
The building is 15 years in the making, Roquemore said. The center will open its doors to all by the first day of school, Aug. 20. The center will also provide the community with a venue to host artists and performers, including nearby high schools.
The $32 million center was paid by state and South Orange County Community College District funds. The college foundation is looking to raise $2.76 million for theater equipment and musical instruments among other things.
A couple of hundred feet away on campus, the two-story, $23 million Business Sciences and Technology Innovation Center is taking shape. The building, which will house the entire business curriculum, chemistry labs and an information technology center, is scheduled for a spring 2008 opening. The college is also planning a life sciences and fine arts buildings.
Naming rights for the center, its theaters, rooms and seats are up for grabs. The center’s naming rights will cost $2 million.
15 ✅ August 11, 2000
OC Register editorial
Orange County judge’s harsh rebuke of the Mission Viejo City Council for violating the state’s open-meeting law is fascinating not just for what it says about one local city, but what it reveals about the way local governments may operate across the state.
The dirty little secret of local government is the degree to which major policies and spending projects are supported or opposed with near-unanimity, with council members and city staff orchestrating events behind the scenes to minimize scrutiny and public debate. What happened in Mission Viejo is simple. Four council members, who generally vote the same way and who are supporters of government-subsidized redevelopment programs, felt threatened by a lone council member’s plan to submit certain debt-spending and redevelopment measures to the public…
…The only thing that can go awry is the skunk at the garden party - someone like Mr. Ledesma, who isn’t afraid to hold his ground and state the principled and practical objections to such an approach. Redevelopment, weighted with issues of taxing, public debt, eminent domain and more, demands vigorous scrutiny and discussion. Mr. Ledesma is that voice. Ironically, the city’s post-lawsuit statement did all but call Mr. Ledesma a “skunk,” by referring to him as a “dissident City Councilman.”
Funny, we thought that dissidents were found only in places like China, Vietnam and Iraq, not on city councils in democratic nations! Judge Moore’s ruling may not mean much to many people, but if it encourages more “dissidents” to run for city council, then it will have served a useful purpose. Cities in free countries like the United States should have free and open debates, not be run behind-the-scenes like some Politburo, with dissenters punished for not toeing the party line.
 |
| Photo and graphic by Chunk W |
16 ✅ August 17, 2000
OC Weekly
 |
By Nathan Calahan
(Abridged)
In January [1999], you were re-elected as chairman of the Orange County Republican Party for the 14th consecutive year.
You’re the man in charge!
Which brings me to a small favor I’d like to ask: I’m collecting autographed photographs of famous Orange County celebrities—you know: Richard Nixon, Joey Bishop, John Schmitz, Dennis Rodman, Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, Tommy Lasorda. I’d like to include you in what I call “my own private pantheon.”
You might be asking yourself, “Why me? Why Tom Fuentes?”
Don’t be so modest. As the local GOP chairman in the 1980s, you were in command when Republicans held every elected office in Orange County. I can’t name an organization in the free world with that record of total domination! Of course, these days, we have a few elected Democrats here—Loretta Sanchez-Brixey, Lou “The Puppet” Correa and Joe Dunn. But I’m sure you’re working on ways to punch their Democratic lights out in the next election.
You’re the toastmaster, the kingmaker, and the boss of one of the biggest and most important Republican counties in the USA.
…..
Anyway, if you could see it in your heart to send me an autographed photo, I’d be delighted. You can inscribe it anyway you want. If, however, you’re drawing a blank on what to write, consider this: To my buddy Nathan, Scientia est potentis. Your friend, Tom Fuentes.
In case you’re wondering, “scientia est potentis” is Latin for “knowledge is power.” And you’ve got plenty of both.
Sincerely,
—Nathan Callahan
May 12, 1999
📭 Dear Mr. Callahan,
Thank you for your kind letter. . . . While I do not have a photo to offer, I would enjoy talking with you over lunch when your calendar permits. Please call me at (714) 560-8200.
Cordially,
—Tom Fuentes
May 30, 1999
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
Some of these New Directions kooks are reportedly withholding donations to your party in an attempt to leverage you out.
They’ll never be successful. You’re too clever for them. Mike told me a lot about you. Catholic school. The 1960 presidential campaign. Richard Nixon (Protestant) vs. John F. Kennedy (Catholic). You were the only student at your Catholic high school who wasn’t a JFK supporter. Nixon was the one for you. Boy, could you separate church from state!
…..
“Catholics for Nixon.” Boy, that takes guts. I told Mike that he was 100 percent wrong about you and the photo and the money. I figure the demand for Tom Fuentes photographs is so high that you just ran out of them.
But all this Catholic stuff got me wondering if you hated the quote I picked out. Maybe that’s why you didn’t send me a photo. Latin may not be your favorite form of expression. Not to worry. I found another, more appropriate quote.
Let me explain. Eight years after the Kennedy victory, you went on to become a renowned local political fund-raiser, and Nixon went on to become president. When he visited Orange County, you were master of ceremonies at the Republican Party Richard Nixon Presidential Shebang. The event was a huge success. Nixon loved your professionalism and style. “I have never had an MC handle the occasion better,” he said.
What an inspiration he was for you. When you listen to Tom Fuentes, the Los Angeles Times once said, “close your eyes and you will hear precisely the enunciated cadences of R.N.”
Wow.
Sincerely,
—Nathan Callahan
July 27, 1999
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
I looked at my calendar today and realized that it has been almost two months since I mailed you the photo to autograph…I found your photo again at the OC Weekly. This time, though, I Photoshopped the pope in next to you and enclosed two copies—one for me and one for you.
My friend Tim gave me the idea. Tim (he’s Catholic, too) told me that in 1977, you began a 12-year stint as spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Orange (kind of like the pope’s PR guy for Orange County). You had already been the president of the Young Republicans at Chapman and Santa Ana Colleges and an assistant to an Orange County supervisor. By 1981, you were serving as the local Republican Party’s vice chairman. Then, in 1985, you ran for the chairmanship.
As always, you were a campaign monkey. Everyone on the Republican Party Central Committee list got a phone call from you. You must have really worked the Reagan angle to persuade party members that their presiding chairwoman, Lois Lunberg (a moderate!), should be replaced with Tom Fuentes (a superconservative!).
Just weeks away from Election Day, you received an invitation from the archbishop of Panama for an all-expenses-paid trip to the Vatican to meet the pope. Jesus, Mary and Joseph (can I say that?), I’m not Catholic, but I bet the chance to hobnob with God’s messenger on Earth must be a real honor.
Your head must have been buzzing. You were ready to bag the party leadership AND go mano a mano with the pope—all in the same week.
Then came the disappointing news. It turned out that the flight from Rome wouldn’t arrive in Orange County until two days after the election. You were so primed to lead the Republican Party that you couldn’t take a chance on leaving town and coming back a loser.
So you blew off the pope!
…..
 |
| Trustees Tom Fuentes and Don Wagner |
There’s one more thing I’ve got to ask: you were a spokesman for the diocese and the chairman of the Republican Party at the same time for four years. Did you ever get confused?
I think you did. Do you remember the time you sent uniformed security guards to Santa Ana polling places on election day in 1988? What was THAT about? You said you wanted to protect the “sanctity of the ballot” by making sure there was no illegal voting, but all you did was piss off a whole demographic of Latinos and give Curt “Poll Guard” Pringle (your candidate and the eventual winner) a nickname. The only place you stationed the guards was in the barrios.
You’re a sixth-generation son of Mexican immigrants. What were you thinking? Could it be that you were still distracted by your aborted meeting with the pope?
Don’t worry. We all get distracted. And even though the guard incident was one of the lowest points in Orange County Republican Party public-relations history, you handled it like a pro. A few months later, you resigned as director of communications at the diocese in Orange and won your re-election bid to chair the Republican Party. Great recovery. But don’t ever let your mind wander like that again. Just remember: NO MORE POLL GUARDS. They tend to emit the vibe of a dictatorship…..
Sincerely,
—Nathan Callahan
Sept. 23, 1999
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
…I know we haven’t formally met, but what’s wrong with being pen pals?…
…In August 1985, you told the Los Angeles Times, “I simply cannot fathom how even well-intentioned Democrats can remain naïve about the evils their party has wrought across the great American political landscape. It’s a little like good Germans denying the existence of the Holocaust.”
I bet you had second thoughts about saying that! Democrats may be stupid, but I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that they’ve edged the U.S. toward the Third Reich. Later on, you said that the quote was “taken very much out of context,” that it was part of a long conversation about the Democratic Party’s position on abortion.
…..
Or how about when you were talking to the Times about political-party registration? “I can tell you the registration of the people in the house by observing the neatness of the lawn and what cars are in the driveway,” you said. I can’t imagine that’s what you meant. That’s like saying you could discern a homeowner’s religious beliefs by looking at his car.
Then there’s the incident with Judge Judith Ryan, who opposed Bob Dornan in the 1992 Republican primary. Ryan said you tried to stop her from entering the race by threatening to ruin her family’s business. That’s got to be a misunderstanding. Again, my friend—may I call you “friend”?—if you had composed a note to her, I’m sure she would have understood whatever it was you were trying to say….
Sincerely, your friend,
—Nathan Callahan
Dec. 17, 1999
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
Boy, you must be busy. I completely understand why you haven’t sent me your autographed photo yet. You’ve been out registering new Republicans ever since that Sept. 24 Orange County Register story appeared! What a headline! REPUBLICANS DIP BELOW 50 PERCENT IN REGISTERED VOTERS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1984.
Who do you think is responsible for this decline: Clinton Republicans? They’d be first on my list of suspects.
I’m sure you remember Roger Johnson—that turncoat Republican CEO of Western Digital who endorsed Clinton in 1992 and then went on to be named director of Slick Willy’s general services administration. Johnson was the first domino to fall. In 1996, more Republicans…endorsed Clinton for re-election. To top it off, Dougherty called the Orange County Republican Central Committee “an incestuous mob of fellow sycophants who are either on the public payroll as assistants to some Republican office holder or fat-cat corporate lobbyists.” Dougherty even got personal when he said that “your leadership and your bigoted Right wing of the party has led us down the path of defeat.” You got him back, though, when you called him a “Vichy Republican,” comparing him to the French politicians who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
I’ve got to hand it to you: first, you say that pro-choice Democrats are like “good Germans denying the existence of the Holocaust,” and then you call Dougherty a “Vichy Republican.” If I ever want to insinuate that someone is a Nazi, I’ll know who to call for the appropriate reference.
Which brings me to a great idea I had—one that will increase Republican-voter registration and make your job easier. Everyone knows that during World War II, the Nazis persecuted homosexuals. And everyone knows that today, there are oodles of gays in Orange County.
BINGO!
Put the two together, and you’ve got a voter-registration bonanza. Here’s what you do: target the gay community for a Republican-registration drive, and if anyone opposes you . . . call them a Nazi! I’m not talking about simply welcoming the gay lifestyle into to the GOP; you already have the Log Cabin Club acting as the GOP’s doormat. I’m talking about a Fuentes program that could shape the Republican Party into the No. 1 gay party in American politics—a party that really knows how to party! Right now, the Democrats have cornered the market on gays. Why? It doesn’t make sense. Bill Clinton didn’t have the guts to follow through with gays in the military when he was first elected; even his wife criticized that puny policy. Because of Clinton, the rule of law in the service is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” That’s not Republican Tom Fuentes’ style. You’ve got balls. If you were president, I bet your policy would be “Don’t Even Bother Asking.” I’m sure we both agree that being gay has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a conservative or a liberal or a libertarian or whatever. Look at Roy Cohn. He was a gay conservative staff adviser to Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and a member of the legal team that prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—proof positive that gayness knows no political boundaries. From one straight guy to another, Mr. Fuentes, you could really have some fun embracing homosexuality in your party. Imagine a Republican drag-ball fund-raiser at the Pacific Club. You could call it the Brian Bennett Masquerade (in honor of ex-Congressman Bob Dornan’s gay chief of staff). You might even get into the spirit yourself—cross-dress as Daisy Fuentes (just kidding).
By next September, if you use my idea, the Fuentes Gay Voter Registration Drive will be making headlines in The Orange County Register. This time, they’ll be saying, “REPUBLICANS BACK ON TOP.”….
Your friend,
—Nathan Callahan
April 4, 2000
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
Way to go! It seems you’ve taken my advice and implemented the Fuentes Gay Voter Registration Drive. Yesterday, I saw R. Scott Moxley—the reporter from the Weekly. He said you were “extra-friendly” at the March 7 election-night party. Moxley said that as long as he’s known you, you’ve never been so charming or gracious. You even put your arm around him. Of course, you know Moxley is gay and a Christopher Hitchens liberal. He said, “It would take a bit more than one hug to lure [him] into [your] den.” But who knows? Stranger things have happened. Either way, it’s a good start. Keep up the registration effort.
Your friend and adviser,
—Nathan Callahan
July 10, 2000
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
You can’t imagine how flabbergasted I was when R. Scott Moxley delivered a gift from you to me wrapped in red, white and blue ribbon. Thank you so much for the three books: Steve Forbes’ A New Birth of Freedom, Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton and Bob Zelnick’s Backfire: A Reporter’s Look at Affirmative Action.
…..
Zelnick’s book convinced me that Regnery must be an open-minded place. They hired you, the chairman of the OC Republican Party, as their director, and yet they can still publish Zelnick’s book against affirmative action, even though your party’s presidential candidate, George W. Bush, received a form of affirmative action himself when he was accepted to Harvard and Yale—with below-average grades! It’s nice when the rich get a helping hand.
…..
Anyway, I figure you sent me these swell books because you’ve been in an exceptionally fine mood after defeating the New Directions Republicans that night you put your arm around Scott Moxley. If I haven’t already told you, congratulations. What a sweet victory. USA Today said your critics raised $500,000 in an “attempted hostile takeover” of your Orange County Republican Central Committee. The two groups claim you’re an old-school conservative who alienates women. But when I looked at the membership of the New Majority Committee, they’re all guys! With an oversight like that, it’s no wonder they lost. My friend Tim told me that these guys are mostly Irvine Co. people who want Irvine Co. chairman Donald Bren-clone, neo-Republican candidates in charge of Orange County politics. Since you’re old-school and don’t always see eye to eye with Bren, they hate your guts….
Your friend and adviser,
—Nathan Callahan
July 20, 2000
📭 Dear Mr. Fuentes,
You’re the king of Orange County politics. You not only took a small-time college job, but you also replaced Steve Frogue, who had just resigned after seven and a half years of proving that lack of smarts is no deterrent to holding a school-board position in Orange County.
I asked myself, “What on Earth would you, Tom Fuentes (the man in charge of Orange County politics), want with an elected trustee’s position overseeing the disgruntled populace of Saddleback and Irvine Valley Colleges?”
Then I saw the simple brilliance of your strategy. Of course you maneuvered for the school-board seat. Here’s why (as if you didn’t know!): in November, George W. Bush is elected president. Then, since Orange County will play a major role in Bush’s victory and you will have directed the troops, Bush is sworn in and Tom Fuentes is given an appointment in the new administration —secretary of education?
There’s just one problem. If Bush wins the presidency in November but loses the local vote, chances are you’ll be out of the appointment loop.
Not to worry. Nathan has it covered.
Consider this: many people I’ve spoken with think you’re gay—and not just vicious, dim-bulb liberals, but Republicans, respected journalists, doctors and lawyers. I’ve often wondered why this whispering campaign persists in the complete absence of evidence. I know you’re not gay, Mr. Fuentes—not that there’s, you know, anything wrong with that.
In fact, it can be a real plus. Which brings me to my plan: in order to snag your appointment, you need to turn up the volume on the Fuentes Gay Voter Registration Drive.
How, you ask? You should leverage unsubstantiated speculation about your sexuality into something positive. If you act a wee bit gay, you could attract new votes and swing Orange County toward a Bush victory in November. Wear a pair of Dolce & Gabbana white jeans. If anyone asks whether you’re gay, follow Ricky Martin’s lead—or Michael Stipe’s —and say something like, “Questions about my private life should not be the subject of public speculation.” That’ll MAKE it the subject of public speculation. Be seen on dinner dates with good-looking men. Campaign in Laguna Beach. Do whatever you can reasonably get away with. In November, you’ll be glad you did. Then, since Bush has said that he’ll consider minority appointees in his administration, a straight Mexican guy like you with a little bounce in his step would be a perfect appointment choice. Before you know it, you’ll have a nameplate on an office overlooking the White House lawn. I’m sure of it.
Good luck, Mr. Secretary!
Your friend and adviser,
—Nathan Callahan
17 ✅ Aug. 17, 2000
Irvine World News
College trustees file; school board race set [HANSEN]
By Joan Hansen
 |
| John Williams in his youth |
The only thing left is the fund-raising, fliers and flack.
The nomination period has ended for two school elections on Nov. 7.
The South Orange County Community College District candidate list was set Friday when the last incumbent trustee, Dorothy Fortune, changed her mind on the deadline day and filed to run for reelection.
…..
The other election affecting Irvine residents will seat four of the seven-member board of trustees for the college district. The district oversees Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges. All four incumbents are seeking reelection and there are seven additional candidates.
The college district is divided in seven trustee areas with each area representative elected by the voters districtwide. Candidates must live in the area they represent.
Area 1 includes portions of Irvine and Tustin. Area 3 includes portions of Irvine, Laguna Beach and Aliso Viejo. Area 6 represents portions of Irvine, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo and Foothill Ranch. Area 7 represents portions of Mission Viejo, Coto de Casa, Rancho Santa Margarita and Dove Canyon.
Trustee David Lang in Area 1 will run against Don Davis, a business owner.
In Area 3, incumbent Dorothy Fortune is challenged by Bill Jay, a businessman and educator; Dave Colville, a retired educator; and Bill Shane, director for a non-profit organization.
In Area 6, where Tom Fuentes was appointed recently to complete Steven Frogue’s term, Fuentes will compete for reelection against Robert Loeffler, a college vice president.
John Williams, trustee for Area 7, will run against Bill Hochmuth, a business owner, and John Minnella, an educator and business owner.
The Registrar of Voters reports there are 70,588 registered voters in Irvine and there are 421,838 registered voters in the community college district….
18 ✅ August 19, 2000
Dissent: right between the eyes!
8/19/00 [?]
Later that night, I got a call from a friend who was acting as a green-capped legal observer at the protests outside the Democratic Convention hall up in LA. (See: 2000 Democratic National Convention protests.) She was on a “puppet truck,” she said, which drove away just minutes before a horrible clash erupted between protesters and cops. A mutual friend and fellow legal observer—a kingpin in efforts to support protesters’ rights—had been hit between the eyes with a rubber bullet which seemed to come from out of nowhere. (A few days later, the bruise left by the bullet had spread down her face, leaving her with two enormous black eyes.) Another legal observer—Carl Manheim, a respected educator—ended up in the hospital, owing to the effects of a rubber bullet or cylinder on his shoulder. These people were being peaceful and cooperative, she said, but that didn’t matter to the LAPD.
My green-capped friend was frightened. All the protesters now feared the police, she said, and that was plenty creepy. “These cops are insane. If you think those assholes at the district are stupid and ruthless, wait’ll you get a load of the LAPD!”
A few days later, she was back in OC and called me from her home. She was upset about LA and about the district. “Things suck,” she said.
And they do.
Oh, and, by the way, welcome back! —CW
19 ✅ August 20, 2000
LA Times
Saddleback College Hopes to Steer Alumni Dollars Its Direction [MOILANEN]
The school is launching an association for former graduates with the goal of boosting fund-raising.
By RENEE MOILANEN, Special to The Times
Hungry for a slice of the alumni pie, Saddleback College in Mission Viejo plans to join the growing number of community colleges starting alumni associations to compete with four-year schools in the race for donor dollars….
20 ✅ August 14[21?], 2000
Duck Crap and Rubber Bullets
By Chunk Wheeler [D50 8/21/00]
The Fall “Opening Session”
I showed up at Saddleback’s Ronald McDonald Theatre at about 9:00 a.m., just as the last of the coffee and donuts crowd filed inside to take their seats at the back of the hall (presumably in hopes of avoiding the stink that emanated from the front). As we entered, we were handed a program filled mostly with the names of “service pin recipients,” a list a more meaningless than which cannot be conceived. The session promised to by gloomy, owing to the overwhelming pall of ruin that now pervades the district now that, essentially, idjits are in charge and nothin’ works.
Ticklin’ them ivories
 |
At about 9:05, Cedric “Liberace” Sampson, seated primly at a piano in a sparkly rhinestone jacket, got things started with a single C-chord, which echoed stupidly through the hall. “Last year,” he warbled nasally, as Mathur tapped his foot, “was a turn-around year.” Meanwhile, at stage right, about a dozen dignitaries, including three trustees, quietly snoozed in chairs that were arrayed across the big, empty Ronald McDonald stage. Trustee Williams—who, as a tyke, was the model for the Bob’s Big Boy statue—stoically chomped on a french fry.
A year ago, cooed Ced, the press produced lots of “unflattering news” about the district—but no longer! Besides, he added, we’re no longer on the fiscal watch list and, owing to a highly effective intimidation campaign, we’ve overcome our warning status with the Accrediting Commission! We’ve been “delivered” from these nuisances, he roared, breaking briefly into a daft rendition of “Chopsticks.”
No one was buying it and he knew it. Worried, Ced broke into a Grinch grin and then explained that, at Saddleback College, they’re about to demolish a building, an event, which, he assured us, is “symbolic.” (Everyone seemed to agree.) He continued: they’re also putting up a parking-lot! (“Where’s his pal Dot?” I wondered.)
Oddly, Ced neglected to mention that, according to the DOE, the Commissioner in question was biased, not against the college, but in favor of it. No matter: Ced is into sophistry. He launched clumsily into “Heart and Soul,” humming persistently and defiantly through his nose.
From my perch amid snoring colleagues, I amused myself by studying the fine array of stinkwater dignitaries below. Marcia and Dave held their noses. Raghu picked his, I think, threatening a total cranial collapse. Trustee John “Brown Boy” Williams, sporting an aspect of staunch harrumphitude, bitterly clutched an empty bag of fries as a lurid puddle of goo formed around his left shoe.
El Ced spoke of the Master Plan, which emphasizes growth and development, he said. Full-time faculty hiring, he declared, should proceed in accordance with the Plan. “Our goal,” noted the Chance, is to achieve an “internal consensus” regarding the direction of the district. Also, we should seek to regain a leadership role in the “community college movement.” Cleverly appealing to an old TV ad, he urged us to “just do it.” He briefly paused to take a bow.
More yawnage. Somebody belched. Raghu Mathur’s lower lip jutted upward hideously as he contemplated Board Policy 8000 and the tight relationship it posits between campus speech and lawn-care. One or two droplets of a ghastly brownish fluid dripped from the ceiling, bespeckling the rotting floor.
Ced pressed on, noting that, all over the state, districts have failed to adopt policies required by law, and our district is no exception. We have until November to correct the situation. He seemed to look forward to the process.
Utterly bored, I again studied the seated dignitaries, who stared blankly into space. The audience stared back. A relatively lively Tom Carol admired his Hawaiian shirt, while, immediately to his right, Mike Runyan’s head seemed to sink impossibly deeply into his body. Meanwhile, somewhere, Mr. McClendon was listening for extra-terrestrials while Mr. Walker practiced trouser-fastening.
 |
| Lee Walker at a "Sons of the American Revolution" event |
Ced closed by promising, as he had done a year ago, that we will soon “convert” the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station. The political machinations of the Feds and other school districts have delayed conversion, he noted peevishly. Finally, he simpered: “I look forward to working with you,” and slid testily off the piano bench and into the repulsive puddle of filth that encumbered the stage. The feeble sound of polite applause followed him to his chair.
“What’s that stink?” asked a new hire. Someone pointed downward, toward the stage, aghast.
Her first big kiss
Next came the presentation of service pins. I do believe that I was the only person in the room who did not receive one. Dean Howard Gensler got a 10-year pin even though he was hired as a full-timer in 1999. “What could this mean?” I asked myself.
The ceremony would have been unrelievedly tedious were it not for two prodigious incidents. First: one of the recipients gave President Bullock a bear hug and then lifted her straight into the air, causing her to thrill and gasp, and, upon release, to stumble and squeal as though she had just received her first Big Kiss. Second: Kathie Hodge, despite not having been lifted into the air at all (not while I was lookin’), received a truly enormous round of applause, causing Ced to look up and feign magnanimity and joy. His pain was palpable. John, looking vaguely Hitlerian, strangled his empty bag of fries.
Eventually, Mr. Goo, radiating fumes from his sweaty suit, stood up, splashed through a stinkwater puddle, and made his way to the podium. The situation was not promising, for Mathur regularly punishes audiences with his trademark melange of New Age twaddle, educationist drivel, business-world blather, and stupefying malapropisms. Plus he owes me money.
“Good morning,” he sniffed imperiously, already employing the spiffy leadership techniques he learned this summer at Hah-vud. (On Tuesday, at IVC, he explained that, at the conference, he had read so darned much that it all started coming out of his ears!) The audience lamely responded with the same. Said the Gooster: “I think we can do better than that!” Not so, as it turned out.
Mathur then introduced new hires, a wholly tedious exercise, though, at one point, a comic book did fall out of Mr. Goo’s massive and fleshy left ear, injecting a welcome note of the bizarre. Bullock, who seems even more convinced than the rest of us that she has absolutely nothing to say, went through the same exercise. Everyone suffered horribly.
Crap slidage
After a while, an inexplicably cheery Maureen Smith stepped up to the podium to shout, “Tom Selleck for president!” and then introduced the guest speaker, one Anne E. Mulder, Director of Development at the notorious Nova Southeastern University, the repository of, among other things, several X-files and Dr. Raghu Mathur’s doctoral Scantron answer sheet.
Mulder instructed all the new hires to get up and move to the front of the room, cuz it’s a drag to speak to a big empty space like she was doin’. (At the Ronald McDonald Theatre, people traditionally line the back wall in hopes of avoiding notice by Ronald.)
This produced several minutes of chaos. The bespectacled Mulder gazed patiently upon the scene, wondering just what was wrong with us.
Nevertheless, Mulder soon expressed admiration for the quality of our new faculty and the “longevity” of other faculty, what with all the service pins and bald, shiny heads. She invited us to applaud ourselves, which we did. Then Mulder explained that she recently visited Tucson, where the average age was 112.
Mulder likes to tell jokes and stories, and she told a good one about “duck crap” (punchline: “We’ve been sliding into this building for years”). Looking briefly in the direction of the chancellor (or so it seemed to me), she deftly tied the crap theme to the notion of “responsibility,” as an oblivious El Ced polished a rhinestone with his hanky.
Mulder likes to string together lots of positive things, even if they don’t really add up to anything much. She announced that teachers are “wonderful” and that California is a “bellwether state.” She spoke of diversity and shared governance and how it really does rain in California. (“Man, it pours.”) She joked about the likes of Jimmy Hoffa (“I was nice to those guys”) and, finally, she noted WASC’s new standard, according to which faculty are supposed to take the lead in securing student “success,” etc., which is all part of the new “accountability” craze that’s sweeping the nation, like those damn Razors you can’t seem to get away from.
She lingered on that last point, her big “accountability” theme. We should not be threatened by this new accrediting “mandate,” she said. Rather, we should view it as an “opportunity” to invest in the future of students!
I found it necessary to snort.
Mulder is into lists. She spoke of five “powers” to produce change: the power of presence (that had something to do with being “entrepreneurial” and “showing up” for stuff), the power of imagination and intelligence (somethin’ about “kaleidoscopic thinking,” sacred cows, and dead faculty, I believe), the power of voice (“If you dream it and give voice to it, then you can do it”—Bleccch!), the power of partnering (some damned people, she said, think they’re in charge of everything!), and the power of motion, momentum, and persistence (“Middles are difficult,” said she, causing Old Guardsters in the center of the room to grimace and scratch their empty, balding heads).
Mulder made a few more scattershot points: we teachers have to take a leadership role; there are “five practices” that will help us (she listed them); teachers gotta experiment and take risks; my brother Fox is a flake; and so on. She quoted “Megatrends.”
Finally, Mulder returned to the theme of responsibility and duck crap: “We share responsibility,” she said with an air of self-satisfaction, “in creating the internal and external world.” That sounded like crap to me, but everybody else acted as though Agent Mulder had just handed ‘em a pearl.
That was about it, so we all got outa there fast. In the mad rush to leave, some people did get hurt—mostly, I think, owing to flying rubber cylinders and the frenzied feet of panicking Old Guardsters. Later that day, stinkwater broke through the walls and ceiling and drowned a coupla students. But, hey, life goes on.
The Faculty Association luncheon
Not long after, I wandered over to the cafeteria, where the Faculty Association was holding its customary Flex-week luncheon/love-in.
People sure do like to tie on the feed bag, especially when they can do it for free. (“Hell,” said someone, “I’m goin’ for seconds on them lard chips, cuz I pay for ‘em with my dues.”) There was so much sloppy beef and cheese that people got happy just lookin’ at it all. Soon, everybody was chowin’ down and yuckin’ it up with abandon, inspiring Lee H to announce that he couldn’t remember when we’ve all had so much fun!
Adam Probolsky is a big fat idiot
While in line, I spoke with a prominent member of the union Old Guard, who explained why, at the July 12 special board meeting, she had spoken in support of the appointment of Tom Fuentes as a replacement for Frogue. I noted that, as the leader of the OC Republican Party and a partisan of its conservative wing, Fuentes is undeniably anti-union. Then I listed several actions—the poll-guard incident, the Mexican flag gambit, etc.—for which Fuentes is notorious. What about all that? I asked.
Well, said she, when she arrived on the 12th, Fuentes’ appointment was really already a done deal, and, when that’s the score, you’ve gotta go along and just get the best deal you can for yourself!
She was probably right about the “done deal” part. To many observers of the special meeting, Fuentes’ appointment seemed to be, well, highly orchestrated. Consider: of the three candidates who were interviewed on the 12th, only Fuentes showed up with written answers for each of the Board’s questions. Someone in the audience told me that the pro-Fuentes remarks offered that night by three Old Guard unionists were read from documents written in the same font as was displayed on Fuentes’ prepared answer sheets. Possibly this verbiage was provided by the remarkable Adam Probolsky, a fat man in a white shirt who kept running around the board room fixin’ things. Probolsky, one of Fuentes’ lieutenants, is a consultant for local right-wing politicos. His partner is the son of Lou Sheldon (of the “Traditional Values Coalition”). Essentially, Probolsky’s a big fat idiot.
Conspiracy fans, I’ve got two intriguing facts for you to chew on. (1) Six days before Fuentes’ coronation, a select group of OC Republicans partied at the Corona Del Mar home of Tom Phillips, a filthy-rich East Coast publisher who hopes to enter politics here in OC. The shindig was a gathering of the “Silver Circle,” an elite support group for the OC GOP. I’m told that George W’s nephew was among the special guests that day.
Guess who else attended this soiree? That would be Trustee Williams, Trustee Wagner, Board President Padberg--and Tom Fuentes.
(2) Intriguing factoid #2: Raghu Mathur met with Fuentes months prior to Frogue’s resignation (perhaps in May). --Ain’t it cool?
Don’t sweat the big stuff
As I was saying, at the union feed lot, my Old Guard friend defended Mr. Fuentes, explaining that she is more impressed by little things about a person than that big dumb stuff she reads in the papers. That’s why she likes Frogue, despite all those pesky facts (legal declarations provided by former students, quotes in several newspapers) that seem to point to his being a Holocaust denier. Evidently, once during a conversation with the Froguester, he related how he killed a possum in his back yard. Boy did he feel bad about that. After all these years, he still grieves.
“That’s good enough for me,” she said.
“Oh,” I responded, as the “Twilight Zone” theme played in my head and “Mr. Bojangles” played in hers.
A Starship Enterprise
Lots of people attended the luncheon, including some bigwigs: John Williams, Marcia Milchiker, the Chancellor, the President of the Community College Association, Laurence Oldewurtel. –Dazzling.
At about noon, Association president Lee H addressed the group. His election, he said, was a mandate to “right the course” and “steady the ship.” People didn’t want “business as usual.” Lee then introduced various Faculty Association officers and division representatives. They all seemed terribly pleased to be there.
This exercise made clear that the days of Old Guard domination are over, even though several Old Guardsters were in the room, sneerin’ and gossipin’ and runnin’ up for seconds, cuz they paid for the chow, goddam it.
“Uh-oh,” I thought.
Hard to port!
Lee then asked the Chancellor to address the crowd.
The Chancellor? How odd, thought I. Here’s a guy who, on behalf of his corrupt board patrons (who fear union opposition in the next election), illegally blocked the collection of union PAC funds despite instructions from duly authorized union officials. And we’re lettin’ him speak? I don’t get it. “The ship’s a bit off course today, Lee,” thought I.
El Ced got up to repeat some of his blather about how last year was a “turn-around” time for the district. Then he picked up on Lee’s “working together” blarney. You’ve gotta have three things: a strong faculty, a strong board, and strong administration, he said. When the system works, it’s like three strong stool samples on somebody’s leg. (Or maybe it was three strong legs on a stool. Not sure.) Now, he added, the board is strong, but administration is weak, and, in recent years, the faculty have been weakened by divisiveness. So it’s like we’re on a broken sub on the bottom of the ocean or something.
Ced, who, I’m told, is seeking the union’s support in his effort to receive a lengthier contract and a big fat pay raise, threw Lee a kiss and then ended his remarks by inviting us to send thoughts and suggestions his way. Even hostile ones. “Anytime you have a hostile thought,” he said, “send it as an email.”
I wouldn’t recommend it.
Just then, the coffee maker made a deep bubbling sound. Someone whispered to me that we oughta rename the union the “Kursk.”
The president of CCA (I think) got up to speak. (Her name’s Dian Dolores Hasson.) She addressed the state budget. She noted that each district must come up with a five-year plan to reach a 75/25 ratio of full-time to part-time faculty. She condemned the voucher initiative (Prop 38), which, she insisted, isn’t just a K-12 issue. She’s a firm believer in public education, she said. “Everything we do must be for the students,” she added.
And that was about it.
Stupid and ruthless
In the melee Monday night, police charged protesters with horses, fired “stinger rounds” at them and pushed them far away from Staples before allowing them to scatter. The opening moments of that push were rough, and amplified by the fact that the LAPD had cut off some natural routes of departure. That, according to many observers, made it hard for protesters who wanted to leave peacefully to do so without confronting the police. Instead, many were struck with batons or shot with stinger rounds.
On Friday, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks apologized to anyone who was struck or shot while trying to leave the area peacefully.
“We’re sorry if anyone was injured unnecessarily,” Parks said.
21 ✅ August 27, 2000
From the Associated Press
Book: Nixon Took Drugs, Beat Wife [AP]
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new biography asserts that Richard Nixon over many years took a mood-altering drug without a prescription and that he beat his wife at times of personal crisis—a claim a Nixon intimate calls “inconceivable.”
“The Arrogance of Power” by Anthony Summers will be published Monday. It chiefly concerns the aspects of Nixon’s life “that he and his supporters have preferred to conceal,” writes Summers, a BBC journalist and author of biographies of J. Edgar Hoover and Marilyn Monroe.
The author named his sources for most of the book’s assertions. But many of those he quotes got their information second-hand. Some of the book’s claims have been made in the past but in less detail.
The book said that in 1968 Nixon was given 1,000 capsules of the drug Dilantin, an anti-convulsant used to counter epileptic seizures, by Jack Dreyfus, founder of an investment firm and an enthusiastic promoter of the drug. Dreyfus later supplied another 1,000, it said.
White House physician Dr. Walter Tkach, “a compliant doctor who would do exactly as a patient asked,” was also a user of the drug himself, the book said, citing Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman as its source.
When asked later if Nixon was still taking the drug, Tkach replied, “I don’t know, but the amount of pills in the bottle in his bathroom is reducing in size, so I suppose he is,” according to Summers.
“The Physicians’ Desk Reference” lists a number of adverse reactions to Dilantin, including slurred speech, decreased coordination and mental confusion.
Summers wrote that the relationship of Nixon and his wife was one of “prolonged marital difficulty, of physical abuse, of threatened divorce.” But that view was contested by John Taylor, Nixon’s chief aide in his retirement years, now director of the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif.
Summers’ claims that Nixon abused his wife came from secondary sources. Among others, he cited journalist Seymour Hersh, who said he learned of three instances of Nixon wife beatings but did not identify his sources; retired Washington lawyer John Sears, who was a campaign consultant to Nixon; and the late Bill Van Petten, a Los Angeles area reporter, who years later told a friend, not identified by Summers, that just before or after his 1962 loss to former California Gov. Pat Brown Nixon beat Mrs. Nixon “so badly she could not go out the next day.”
Summers said Sears told him that he had been told “that Nixon had hit her (Pat Nixon) in 1962 and that she had threatened to leave him over it. ... I’m not talking about a smack. He blackened her eye.” Sears said he had been told of the beating by two lawyers, both now dead, Walter Taylor and Pat Hillings.
Twenty-two years later, after he resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal, Nixon “attacked” his wife at their home in San Clemente, Calif., and she had to be treated at a hospital, Summers wrote, citing Hersh as his secondary source….
22 ✅ September 1, 2000
THE FUENTES FILE:
From OC Weekly
Dick Nixon’s Revenge [PIGNATARO/OC W]
El Toro Airport Watch No. 146
by Anthony Pignataro
 |
For at least four years, a small group of county residents has pushed for the construction of an urban park at the now-shuttered El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. They’re not proposing your typical OC park—a sun-blasted, mile-square patch of Kentucky bluegrass mowed down to the sterile earth. They’re talking about a park as lush and relaxing—as monumental —as New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Until recently, the proposal was the project of a small group of progressive, slow-growth activists working with officials at Irvine City Hall and specifically with Irvine City Councilman Larry Agran. They see it as a two-for-one deal: they bury the county’s plans for El Toro International Airport beneath rolling meadows, shade trees and trails, and they build one of the world’s great parks.
But on Aug. 13, they discovered an unlikely supporter when an old voice made a new call for the death of the county’s hated plans for an El Toro International Airport and the conversion of a large portion of the base’s 4,700 acres to parkland.
Writing in The Orange County Register, longtime Orange County Republican Party head TOM FUENTES urged readers to “forget the airport. Let the federal government transfer El Toro from the Pentagon to the Interior Department and create a park for all Americans. How about Richard Nixon Urban National Park?”
I don’t care if they stuff Nixon’s corpse and mount it at the park entrance. I’m for a park.
But Tom Fuentes? As head of the Republican party, he authorized GOP-funded poll guards in heavily Latino voting areas during the 1988 election. He’s also the chosen successor to take over Steven “The Jews Might Have Killed Kennedy” Frogue’s seat on the South Orange County Community College District (SOCCCD). And yes, he’s also the guy who once told the Los Angeles Times that he could “tell you the registration of the people in a house by observing the neatness of the lawn and what cars are in the driveway.”
Wooohooo! The rightest of the right-wingers, the tribal chieftain of the Republican Cavemen himself, is now standing beside liberal Larry Agran in calling for a massive people’s park at El Toro.
And he’s doing a pretty decent job. Granted, he wants to call it Nixon Park, but you have to take the good with the bad. Consider the following from his Register piece, which echoes 19th-century park designer Frederick Law Olmstead’s vision of parks as “a single work of art”:
“[H]ow about a spectacular urban national park with vast green areas and plenty of orange trees to enshrine the county’s agricultural heritage and provide contact with the land for generations to come?” Fuentes wrote. “With Saddleback Mountain [sic] in the distance and the local foothills as a backdrop, an urban national park in Orange County could be a dream come true.”
Fuentes also spent valuable column inches referencing his old mentor, the late 5th District Supervisor Ronald Caspers. Among the supervisor’s proudest achievements, Fuentes wrote in language that would make any slow-growth activist proud, was the supervisor’s work to preserve Newport’s Back Bay.
“Caspers wanted the Back Bay to remain undeveloped and natural for future generations,” Fuentes wrote, explaining that the Irvine Co.’s early marina plans “would encroach on the pristine habitat of shore birds and local wildlife.”
If you believe Fuentes, Caspers killed that marina. “Thanks to Caspers’ committed efforts,” Fuentes wrote, “rather than more development, wide expanses of natural open space and an ecologically sensitive county park are today on the estuary acreage amid residential surroundings.”
Fuentes didn’t return the Weekly’s phone calls for this story. But it’s easy to speculate on why Fuentes decided to break his long-standing decree that in order to preserve unity, “Republicans do not speak of El Toro.”
Fuentes’ appointment to the SOCCCD board runs out in November, when he says he’ll campaign for a full term. This would be the first election bid for the 51-year-old political insider. But the canny Fuentes obviously understands that the district is deep in the Saddleback Valley—solid anti-airport country.
School officials may have no official role in the airport debate, but in South County elections, almost nothing else matters.
It’s just as easy to speculate that Fuentes has grander plans for himself. Whispers have floated around for years that current 3rd District Supervisor—and airport opponent—Todd Spitzer is looking for a higher office. Anyone jumping into Spitzer’s vacated chair would need solid anti-airport credentials. And the Aug. 13 Nixon Park proposal is a good start for Fuentes, a longtime 3rd District resident.
—Anthony Pignataro
23 ✅ Sept. 12, 2000
NIGHTMARE ON MARGUERITE PARKWAY: A GOOlish look at monsters, drag queens, union Republicans, lady rastlers, and other things that take a dump in the night—Well, sorta
By Sherlock [D51 9/12/00]
The enrollment numbers are in for fall 2000, and the picture they paint is mighty dismal.
Productivity is an important part of the story. In truth, since the emergence of the “Board Majority” in December of 1996—and the illegal appointment of the conniving Raghu P. Mathur as IVC Pooh Bah in early ‘97—productivity at IVC, once stellar, has shrunk to a cinder. It has shrunk to the extent that it actually matches Saddleback’s long-standing productive ho-hummery. (See graph A.) So, while Williams, Fuentes, Fortune, Ced and Pam “Big Hair” Zanelli rev up the propaganda machine for November, the alarming truth stares up at anyone who gazes down upon the busy little stats of the district’s “almanac.”
Think of it as a Nightmare on Marguerite Parkway, an experience in terror that extends all the way to Irvine Center Drive.
The problem’s not just productivity either. This is particularly clear for IVC. According to the almanac (see www. socccd. cc.ca.us /ref/almanac/enrollments), for “north campus,” almost everything has gone south compared to one year ago. Headcount (the number of students enrolled at the college) is down (3%). The number of classes is down (5%). Even the number of faculty is down (4.5%). Evidently owing to cuts in classes, compared to last year, IVC has suffered a decrease in instructional hours equivalent to 8 full-time faculty loads. That means that lots of part-timers are out of work.
Why, then, did Mathur and his bumbling “team” of toadies and deadwood take this particular course?
Once again, the answer is productivity, which, last spring, dipped below the all-important 500 line, the crossing of which is widely regarded across the state as a trip to institutional Zombieland.
That’s pretty creepy; one’s gotta do somethin’ about it! Well, if you decrease the number of classes, theoretically, you fit the same number of students into fewer classes, and productivity increases. But, if you don’t do it right, you lose students. They just go somewhere else. And that’s not good.
District Econ 101
Let’s back up a minute. Just what is “productivity” anyway? Well, it’s a technical term in the teaching biz that refers to the ratio of weekly student contact hours (WSCH) to full-time equivalent faculty (FTEF). That is, it relates the number of instructional hours “caught” in classes (multiplied by the number of students—“catchers”—in them) to the total number of hours “pitched” by faculty in those classes. Productivity, then, measures amounts of student listenage to units of faculty squawkage, measured in hours. Thus, a class with 24 students enrolled is twice as “productive” as one with 12 students enrolled, even if Wacky Walter is teaching.
Productivity doesn’t measure how much teaching (squawkage or listenage) is getting done—if it did, then large colleges would always be more productive than small ones. Get it right: productivity is a ratio; it relates “work accomplished” to “effort made”—student listenage to instructor squawkage.
By plotting the productivity numbers on a simple graph from ’92 to ’00, the picture becomes startlingly clear. IVC has taken a bath since ’97, descending rapidly from an all-time high in ’95 to even lower than Saddleback in ’99 through 2000.
Given this sorry state of affairs, any board in its right mind would immediately take remedial steps—that is, unless the board itself is part of the problem.
The situation should be clear even to a knucklehead: the Board Majority’s puppet is a Goolish monster making a ghastly mess, and the longer he stays, the worse it all gets.
But wait!
Oddly enough, the recent spate of bizarre class cuttages at IVC can be traced back to Froguenstein and his board pals’ never-ending yelps and howls regarding “wait lists.”
Again, look at the almanac data (see Graph B): in ’97, the number of classes at both colleges was drastically increased. More classes, in Frogue and Mathur’s monster-mashed minds, just meant shortened wait lists. But what neither the Board Majority nor Mathur could ever fathom is that you have to add classes that students want or productivity suffers bigtime. That’s exactly what happened: productivity tankage. It’s stunning.
Currently, according to the almanac, the percent of closed classes at IVC (an indirect measure of productivity) has plummeted to an all-time low since ‘97—to well below the mediocre level of our sister college. (See graph C.) Good job. Of course, some of the wait lists have disappeared. But so have the students.
Windfallage
Meantime, according to the election propaganda being produced by El Ced and “Brown Boy” Williams, the district has turned the corner: we are off the fiscal watch list and we’re rollin’ in dough. They say this proudly—as though they had something to do with it.
Nope. In truth, the district’s reversal of fortunes occurred in spite of their bumbling, counter-productive micro-management.
Here’s what’s actually happened: since we’re a “basic aid” district, when the amount of property tax revenue collected within our district exceeds the amount that would have been allocated to us by the state, we get to keep the difference. Well, amazingly, we experienced a huge increase in collected property taxes. Windfall!
“Ballpark” for this unforeseen bonanza is 6 million dollars for the district. Brownie, Ced, and their crew of boobular cronies had nothing whatsoever to do with this surplus. Don’t let ‘em tell you otherwise.
After the “windfall pie” is sliced up and distributed (in accordance with the district budget model), IVC’s share should be about 1.5 to 2.0 million dollars. So, for now, the Board Majority, Ced, Mathur, and all the district’s hired hands are off the financial hook. That explains the big dumb smiles.
But the college and the district are barely afloat despite this 6 million-dollar sea of “Basic Aid” largess.
How long can this last? Will what goes around come around?
Who knows? But things could turn ugly fast. Don’t be thinkin’ that things are fine. We’ve just been lucky, that’s all. A monster might just be lurkin’ around the corner.
Gotta go. –S
NOVA: [a college with] A GOOEY ACADEMIC REPUTATION
By Chunk Wheeler [Roy Bauer]
 |
| Graphic by Chunk W |
This month, U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) put out its college rankings issue. One category is “National Universities,” which includes hundreds of institutions. USNWP ranked them in four tiers, with the first tier best. Princeton got the #1 spot.
Among USNWP’s criteria, naturally, was “academic reputation”—Princeton received a 4.9 out of 5—but various other criteria were also used to determine whether a particular institution was a good value.
Some local universities did very well in relation to “reputation.” For instance, UCI, which was in the first tier of “National Universities,” received an academic reputation score of 3.6. Chapman University received a score of 3.0. It was ranked #16 among the “Western Universities.”
I thought it would be interesting to see the USNWR ranking for the university from which the odious Raghu P. Mathur received his funny little doctorate. Plus the guest speaker at the Chancellor’s opening remarks gig was an official from that institution. In truth, I’ve never heard a good word said about Nova Southeastern.
Here goes:
Well, Nova Southeastern is located in the fourth tier of “National Universities” in USNWR’s rankings. And guess what? Of all the universities listed, Nova has the lowest score for “academic reputation” (1.7 out of 5.0). Why, that’s pretty bad, isn’t it? And to think that Raghu made the college pay for his expensive new graduation Raghulia! Jeepers!
To be fair, this ranking concerns Nova qua undergraduate institution. USNWR didn’t rank Nova qua graduate school. But you gotta figure that the grad school sucks, too.
(See See http:// www.usnews. com/ usnews/ edu/ college/ rankings/natu_nf4.htm.)
By Chunk Wheeler; [D51 9/12/00]
July 1, 1997: at 7:00 a.m., interim IVC president Raghu P. Mathur holds an emergency meeting of chairs and administrators regarding his recent action of dismissing Social and Behavioral Sciences Chair Wendy Phillips. Mathur had charged Phillips with failing to accord him the proper respect.
At the start of the meeting, he declares that there will be no questions.
Accompanying his words with vigorous finger tapping, he thunders: “You are obligated to toe the line, and toe the line you will!” A few minutes later he adds that “Disloyalty will not be tolerated!”
There is silence. Horribly, a chair squeaks. Later, Mathur has the chair taken out back and shot.
I arrive late. Hence, when Mathur completes his “address,” which takes less than ten minutes, I immediately ask him a question. Hatred flashes in his eyes. Everyone looks at me and whispers: “No questions!”
“No questions?” I ask. “How in hell can there be no questions?”
August 30, 2000: it’s a Wednesday, and I finish my 8:00 a.m. class. I’m kinda peevish because a student just complained about the classroom clock, which, he said, is “way wrong.” It is. It’s been displaying “3:30” for years.
After class, I hang around the IVC administration building (A100) in order to admire the expensively framed “inspirational” posters that IVC President Raghu P. Mathur has hung there. One of ‘em shows an eagle in a tree and says: “A true leader…does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the quality of his actions….”
I’ve been told this stuff cost the college $1,200.
* * * * *
At one point, over in the corner, I hear people talking about a chair. I draw closer. “A chair?” I ask. “Yeah, a chair,” they answer. One person explains that President Mathur ordered a new chair for his office and that it just now arrived in “the warehouse.”
“How strange,” I think. Hadn’t Raghu received a new set of office furniture not so very long ago? –Yeah, now I remember: he also ordered a new phone ($500) plus a shitload of self-improvement books and tapes ($118).
They didn’t take. “The chair’s big and expensive,” someone says. “Real expensive.”
Hmmm. That sure sounds like a misuse of college funds to me. I make a mental note of it.
* * * * *
A few minutes later, I’m photocopying handouts for my 11:00 class in A200. Some colleagues are hangin’ around, and I share with them what I just heard about the president’s “expensive chair.” One colleague speculates that Raghu really does need a massive high-backed chair, owing to his “bald spot,” which, says the colleague, has grown very “large and hideous and shiny,” and which reflects light beams from within A100. Those beams, she adds, routinely blind and flummox students who pass by his office window.
Another colleague suggests that the President really can’t use a large chair, owing to “the curse of feet danglage.” “Mathur is vertically challenged,” she adds. “Podiatric danglage,” she continues, “is particularly nettlesome to the Gooster, what with those nasty little feet of his. So I don’t buy this ‘big chair’ story for a second. Not for a second.” She sniffs.
I say: “No, it looks like Raghu’s really ordered a large chair all right. Besides, he might’ve ordered an ottoman, too.” Everyone nods.
The discussion continues as we walk through a door (propped open with a chunk of wood), wander down the hall, and then enter the “lounge.” Unfailingly, A200’s roof leaks during rains, causing flood damage, and so, last spring, someone decided to tear out the stinking lounge carpet and replace it with stinking linoleum tiles. As a result, the “lounge” now has all the homeyness of a shiny new coroner’s office.
Priscilla and Kathy’s office, which faces the lounge, still sports some of that stinking carpet, and it plainly displays the high-water mark of the last flood. During the Deluge, unspeakable biological specimens floated from Priscilla’s shelves down the hall to places unknown. Or so I’m told. Nobody wants to know where that stuff ended up.
* * * * *
 |
| Graphic by Rebel Girl |
Later, at about 12:15, I wander back to the lounge, and I find two Wendys, one of whom is equipped with a camera, owing, she says, to her enrollment in a photography course. Addressing the two, I say: “Hey, I heard that President Raghu P. Mathur ordered a big expensive chair and it’s over at the warehouse. Wanna help me investigate this apparent misuse of taxpayer funds?”
They do.
When we arrive at the warehouse, we can find no chair. Nevertheless, within a few minutes, we determine that the thing is being kept in the trailer next to the parking office. We head over there.
As we approach the trailer park, we find several classified employees jawing outside. We ask them some questions and trade pleasant jibes. The boys direct us to the trailer on the left, which is marked “maintenance and operations.” The door is unlocked. We enter.
The trailer, which comprises a secretarial area on the left and two work areas on the right, is empty, evidently. Over in the area immediately to the right—a wide-open and unmarked room—we spot a large leather chair, wrapped in plastic. It’s as plain as day. We step inside the room. Affixed to the chair’s clear plastic covering is an invoice, which indicates that it is a “La-Z-Boy presidential highback.” It’s price: a whopping $1,085.98! I write down the information.
Covered in handsome black leather, the chair sports brass studs along its impressive sides. From directly behind, it looks like a horse’s ass on casters. One of the Wendys starts to take pictures. We photograph the invoice with great care. “I hope you know how to use that camera,” I say to Wendy. She chirps and beams.
After a minute or so, some guy enters the building, and, since we got what we wanted, we leave.
We tell everyone we can find about the president’s new chair. People are shocked—shocked!—that Raghu would spend over a thousand dollars of taxpayer money on a chair for his office. “Doesn’t he already have a chair?” they ask. “Why would he buy such an expensive chair?”
* * * * *
Later, I run into an employee who seems preoccupied. Standing outside B100, she declares that she is “sick and tired” of the toilet paper deficit in the women’s bathrooms. I commiserate. “Yeah,” I say. “You should see the men’s bathroom over in A400. The mirror is all tagged up, all kinds of stuff has been ripped off of the walls, and it generally looks like a war zone in there. On the other hand, the urinals are industrial strength. Way cool.”
August 31, 2000: it’s Thursday morning, and I hear a rumor that someone has tipped off the president regarding the faculty’s knowledge of his highfalutin new chairage. Reportedly, Raghu responds by ordering that the chair be returned to the store immediately.
“Jeez,” I think. “That’s the same as a confession.” I make inquiries as to the chair’s whereabouts and learn that it is back in the warehouse. Accompanied by a few denizens of A200, I walk over to investigate. We find what seems to be The Chair over by the west wall, again covered in clear plastic. I examine it and decide that it’s the very chair we spotted yesterday in that abandoned trailer. Someone tells us that, now, the darned thing is being sent back to the store.
“How come?” “Don’t know.”
As I head back to A200, I observe others making the pilgrimage to The Thousand-Dollar Chair. Evidently, word about it has spread all over campus.
* * * * *
Later, I run into Rebel Girl, who is smiling. She explains that she has told one of the student reporters about Raghu’s chair. The kid, she says, seems to think that there is a news story in it, so he headed over to the warehouse to investigate. Later, she now tells me, he returned with a photographer, but, by then, the chair had been covered with opaque plastic. This only piqued the journalists’ interests. The photographer took what pictures he could, lifting the chair’s dark skirt.
* * * * *
After my 12:30 class, I drop in during the IVC Academic Senate meeting, but it’s a real snoozefest, so I head back to my office. After a few minutes of reflection, I decide to drop a note to some trustees. I quickly compose and send the following email:
Dear Don, Marcia, Dave, and Nancy:
Yesterday, while in the administration building, I heard a rumor that our president, Mr. Raghu P. Mathur, had ordered a chair for his office and that it just arrived, though it had not yet been delivered to A100...I did some research and discovered the whereabouts of the chair. When I found it, it was covered with plastic upon which was attached an invoice. Apparently, the chair—a “La-Z-Boy presidential highback”—cost the college $1,085.98. I can testify that it is indeed presidential. It is a chair fit for a king!
Today, I was told that the President somehow became concerned that faculty had learned of the purchase. Oddly (I’m told), he has ordered that the chair be sent back to the store. (McMahan’s I think.)
I certainly hope that my little inquiry yesterday didn’t discourage the president from using college funds for something of such manifest importance to our mutual endeavor of “serving the students” in a fiscally responsible fashion. I would raise the matter with him myself, but he owes me a lot of money, and I don’t want to embarrass him.
Perhaps one of you can intercede and explain to the President that he should feel entitled to spend a grand on a chair, given what a grand job he’s done for this college. (No doubt, the downward trend in enrollments…is a temporary situation. I sure hope so.)
Hope you’re all doing well. I’m doing fine.
September 1, 2000: it’s 12:45, and I get a cell-phone call from Wendy P, who’s been teaching all morning. She tells me that she has just served Raghu Mathur with papers regarding his “Judgment Debtor’s Exam.”
I should explain. You see, back in January of 2000, Mr. Goo filed a suit against Terry Burgess—and me—regarding my reports (in three issues of Dissent) regarding Mathur’s violation of a student’s right to privacy as delineated by a federal law (FERPA). That Mathur had violated that law was, at any rate, the conclusion of the district’s lawyer, Spencer Covert (yes, Covert—I’m not makin’ this stuff up!), who had been asked, by then-IVC president Dan Larios, to provide an opinion on the matter. Ironically, Mathur, a man who can neither detect nor pronounce irony, believes that the Dissent stories amounted to a violation of his privacy rights, and so he sued us for $50,000. According to Mathur, the only way I could have secured the documents I reported on was through the help of Terry Burgess, formerly the VP of Instruction. (That’s nonsense. The documents had been readily available on campus for years.) Thus Burgess was included in the suit.
Unfortunately for the Gooster, the great state of California has a law (the anti-SLAPP statute) designed to protect citizens from lawsuits that are filed by powerful interests—developers, politicians, et al.—merely in order to silence legitimate criticism. SLAPP suits are burdensome annoyances, or worse, for defendants, but they produce a chilling effect on potential criticism by others as well. They thwart free speech.
To make a long story short, we responded to Mathur’s suit by appealing to the anti-SLAPP statute, which yielded a quick dismissal. In court, Judge Brenner noted that my Dissent reports were both true and newsworthy and that, further, there was no evidence whatsoever that Burgess provided the information regarding Mathur that I had reported. In fact, he hadn’t.
As per the law, Brenner ordered Mathur to pay Burgess and me costs and attorneys fees. That amounted to $34,000 and change. Ouch! That occurred months ago.
But, as of this day (Sept. 1), Mathur hasn’t paid. In such situations, the prevailing side files for a “Judgment Debtor Exam.” Once it is granted, the “judgment debtor” is served papers that inform him that he must appear in court on a certain date. “If you fail to appear…you may be subject to arrest and punishment,” say the documents.
On August 29th, Carol Sobel, my attorney, filed for a debtor’s exam for Mathur. The order was granted on that day. So, on this day—the 1st of September—Wendy serves Raghu with the papers:
“Hi Raghu. I’ve got something for you!” chirps Wendy.
He stares but doesn’t move. She hands him the papers, smiling broadly.
Eventually, he takes them, glumly thanks her, and then disappears behind the door of his office.
Later, someone tells me that she thinks she heard Mathur crying and banging his head against a chair. But she isn’t sure.
Could be, though. The document orders Mathur to bring 27 kinds of document, including
All checkbooks, registers, and canceled checks for all savings, checking, credit union, bank, mutual fund accounts and/or all other accounts owned by you and/or you and your spouse for the past three years…All payroll check stubs for you and/or your spouse for the past three years…All passbooks for savings, checking, credit union, bank, mutual fund accounts, and/or all other accounts owned by you and/or your spouse for the past three years…All financial statements listing your assets…during the past three years…All stock registers or other records of stocks presently owned by you…All documents evidencing any partnership interest in property owned by you…All credit card applications…Ownership documents…Your state and federal income tax returns for the past thee years…
—and so on. Jeez, I’d cry too. The exam is set for September 19th.
September 5, 2000: It’s the day after Labor Day, and I’m at school. I hear a rumor that Nelson C, head of maintenance, has asked campus police for the form to report an “unusual occurrence.” I make inquiries. Sure enough, that’s what he’s done. But what’s the unusual occurrence? Mathur’s purchase? Yeah, that’s pretty unusual all right.
In the hallway, someone tells me that someone he knows recently met Mike Corfield, Mathur’s hapless attorney. Supposedly, they asked Corfield about Raghu. “He’s the worst client I’ve ever had,” responded Corfield. Or so he said she said.
* * * * *
I go back to my office. I lean back in my chair and think. The chair issues a lugubrious squawk.
* * * * *
When I arrive home, a find a phone message informing me that, according to Corfield, Mathur wants to settle. In return for a reduction in the award, he will pay the entire debt in one cash payment, thereby rendering the “exam” unnecessary.
I confer with the lawyers.
September 6, 2000: it’s the morning, and I’m in A200, standing atop a water stain. Someone accosts me and says, “It’s back!”
“What’s back?”
“The chair!”
She drags me outside to the window of Mathur’s office. We peer inside and see Raghu and his Amazing Techno-leather Dreamchair. He looks like a midget in a tree, purring.
“That’s not it. That’s Naugahyde,” I declare, referring to the chair, not to Raghu.
“Nope. It’s leather. Plus, look at the brass studs.”
Sure enough, those brass studs are ashinin’. Lots of ‘em.
“It’s the chair,” I say, charily.
* * * * *
It’s the afternoon, and I’m home. I get a call from my attorney, Carol. “He’s agreed to pay $32,000 cash,” she says.
Evidently, he wanted to pay with a personal check. Nothin’ doin’, said Carol. She insisted on a cashier’s check, she says.
“Good idea.”
September 11, 2000: it’s the morning, and I’m at IVC. Someone tells me that they have it on good authority that Raghu kept the chair owing to the Chancellor’s insistence.
Perfect.
* * * * *
I arrive home. There’s a message from Carol. She has received the check. She sounds chirpy.
* * * * *
I leave for the House of Humor to buy a Whoopie Cushion. –CW
25 ✅ Sept. 21, 2000
Irvine World News
Colleges get property tax windfall [HANSEN]
By Joan Hansen
Deans and faculty members at Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges are going shopping.
The board of trustees of the South Orange County Community College District allocated $1 million for each school to spend on primping sports fields and purchasing paraphernalia for science and technology labs.
Vice Chancellor Gary Poertner said the money is available from 1999/00 local property tax dollars.
“The economy was robust,” he said. “School districts received more money in local property taxes than anticipated. The board designated the amount for one-time improvements for facilities and educational equipment.”
Renovations and improvements could take up to a year.
Glenn Roquemore, vice president of instruction at Irvine Valley College, said next year at this time students will see changes.
“Each academic dean will work with the faculty on their technology needs. We intend to update many classrooms with multi-media capabilities,” he said.
From the podium, instructors will operate a computer program that enables students to see demonstrations on a big screen.
For instance, the students will see on a big screen what the instructor is seeing under the microscope.
The chemistry department is asking for equipment necessary in the biotechnology industry.
The physics department may receive models that better explains gravity, electricity and space.
The astronomy department would like to set up observatory sites on campus.
“We are very excited,” Roquemore said.
Leveling the soccer field is also at the top of the college’s shopping list.
A priority for Saddleback College is resurfacing the track and expanding it from eight to nine lanes.
“We cannot shut down anything,” Saddleback college president Dixie Bullock said. “The work will begin after track season.”
The money will also pay for track and field equipment.
James R. Wright, Saddleback College dean of math, science and engineering, said he is only in the shopping list stage. He said the money will be spent on updating lab and technology equipment, but he has not finalized any specifics yet.
“We will be looking at what is out there,” he said.
Wright traveled to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., to investigate its state-of-the-art science lab and will check out the lab renovation at Grossmont Community College in San Diego.
GRAPHIC: the requisition for President Mathur’s infamous “La-Z-Boy Presidential High Back Chair.”
GRAPHIC: L and A’s “Nova-matic Buttmaster” cartoon. (See Sept 12 below.)
26 ✅ Sept. 21, 2000
Irvine World News
Faculty backs slate of four for college district seats [HANSEN]
By Joan Hansen
 |
| Campaign manager |
Last week, the same four candidates announced their plan to run as a slate under the slogan “Vote the Clean Slate on Nov. 7.”
The endorsements include Area 1 incumbent Dave Lang, Area 3 candidate Bill Shane, Area 6 candidate Bob Leoffler and Area 7 candidate Bill Hochmuth. Lang and Area 3 trustee, Dorothy Fortune represent portions of Irvine.
“The support of the teachers union is the best endorsement you can get,” Hochmuth said.
Lee Haggerty, faculty association president, said the slate was not endorsed, but the individual candidates were judged on their community involvement, their views on education and how they want to see Irvine Valley College and Saddleback College grow.
“We asked each candidate their views on budgets, governance issues, accreditation, equity and finances,” Haggerty said.
The representative council consists of approximately 35 members of the faculty. It approved the recommendations by the association’s 15-member political action committee, which includes past presidents and council members.
The union includes 232 members from both campuses.
The last time the four seats were up for election in 1996, the union endorsed John Williams for Area 7, Fortune in Area 3 and Steven Frogue in Area 6.
Since then, the leadership of the union has changed hands.
In this round, incumbents Williams, Fortune and Tom Fuentes in Area 6 were not endorsed by the representative council.
Other candidates who were not endorsed include Dave Colville, Area 3; John Minnella, Area 7; and Don Davis, Area 1.
Fuentes was appointed in August to complete the term of Frogue who retired. The appointment was not supported by the faculty association, which contended the election was near and it would give him an unfair advantage in the race.
Williams said the association’s decision came from a small group of the people and not the entire membership.
“It is interesting that they endorsed me in three previous elections,” he said. “This election, they support a person who did not support their current contract or their cost-of-living allowances along with three unknown newcomers,” Williams said.
Final board approval ratified a five-year contract by a 4-3 vote with Lang casting a dissenting vote. Lang said he was opposed to how the contract was negotiated, adding that he did not oppose the pay the faculty received.
“John Williams was inappropriately a part of the contract negotiations,” he said. “The contract Williams helped negotiate is a classic example of the type of micro-managing and conflict of interest the board is characterized by. In fact, the contract needed substantive corrections by the chancellor and faculty association.”
The reason for the about face in endorsements may be steeped in history.
In the past three years, many board decisions alienated numerous faculty members.
Since the 1996 election, the board struggled to make decisions as it was put on a fiscal watch by the state and Irvine Valley College’s accreditation teetered. Both colleges received full accreditation.
Haggerty said that many factors influenced the endorsement selection.
“Many faculty members have concerns that include the district’s violation of shared governance, micro-managing, concerns with the process of transferring administration around the district, budgetary cuts, the board’s decisions that endangered accreditation.
“It’s been a horrendous three years,” he said.
Haggerty said that Fortune, retired trustee Frogue and Williams helped to drastically change the administrative structure, which caused turmoil between the faculty and trustees.
“Dave Lang was a voice of moderation, he enjoyed support across the board in the voting council,” he said.
Williams said he has no plans to team up with other candidates in a slate, but he has received endorsements from county Sheriff Michael Carona, Seniors and Veterans for Education, the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, Assemblywoman Patricia Bates and state Sen. Bill Morrow.
Trustee Fortune is out of the country and was unavailable to comment. Lisa Alvarez, the slate’s campaign organizer and a union member, said the unanimous vote of the faculty council is symbolic.
“The union has been so divided for so long. It’s quite amazing. Such unity is inspiring.
“Clearly the faculty on both campuses has sent a powerful message,” Alvarez said.
