What gives?

    Despite assurances made by Saddleback's PIO Jennie McCue to the contrary (on Monday), this sort of disturbing comment continues to appear on the Saddleback College Facebook Page. (I'm referring to the first comment below.)

Appearing on SC Facebook Page as of 1:45 p.m., 9/16/16

MEANWHILE, this morning:

Groundbreaking: IVC building at ATEP

ACCORDING TO THE DISTRICT: 

     "September 16, 2016 – South Orange County Community College District (SOCCCD) broke ground early this morning on the first building at the Advanced Technology and Education Park (ATEP) which will host career technical programs for Irvine Valley College."
     ...SOCCCD Interim Chancellor Debra L. Fitzsimons provided a global view of the 62-acre site at ATEP which will accommodate a mix of educational and non-educational uses and host education, business and commercial partners. 'I know that you share my enthusiasm for this project. This is just the beginning. You will hear much more in the coming months and years as public-private partnerships form to build a national model at ATEP,' said Interim Chancellor Fitzsimons. Saddleback College is planning a Center for Innovation in Healthcare Education which will include a fully simulated hospital to train students in a risk-free environment as well as a regional training conference center...."

IVC ceremonial abbondanza!

IVC denizens received these two fliers today:

     Unremarkably, completion of the Liberal Arts Building is a year behind schedule owing to various snafus, at least some of which were the fault of the contractor(s). The building looks nice both inside and out. So far so good (though students have already taken possession of it, and I've barely been inside!).

     You'll recall that Burnett of Saddleback College and Roquemore of IVC have carried on an extended pissing contest over control of ATEP. At one point, the Chancellor (Poertner, who took a powder recently) had to step in, shut everybody up, and make like Solomon, promising each college their own building with precisely the same square footage. I bet Burnett's out there right now double-checking the new building's footprint, if it even has one yet (likely not).

     Maybe I should drive out there, to beauteous Tustin, along sunny Redhill, and see if there's any hideous ooze poking up from the carcinogenic toxic waste below. I should go at night to see if anybody's glowing or puking. Or maybe I should collect some dog sh*t and leave a nice, neat pile for all to see, with a sign saying, "Raghu P. Mathur commemorative sh*tpile." (As you know, former Chancellor Mathur long imagined that the ATEP facility would be his chance to get chiseled onto Mount Rushmore. Fat chance of that now. He'll have to settle for that sh*tpile.)

     I should wear tiger pants. 

     Which reminds me: a former IVC administrator once told me that he is determined to live just long enough to piss on Mathur's grave. I do believe he meant it. I really do.

     I should do likewise when the time comes.

25 months ago (now called the "Liberal Arts Building")

The Seven and their Afflictions

     I want to bring up an old theme: the inveterate cluelessness of the SOCCCD board, a crew I shall refer to, somewhat dramatically, as “The Seven.”
     Now, don’t get me wrong; nowadays, and at long last, we have a decent board, perhaps the best board the district has ever had. And we definitely benefit from that fact and will continue to benefit.
     I won’t say I’m grateful—my standards aren’t that low—but I will say that I’m very glad about the New Decency—including the decency of the current Chancellor, a fine fellow.
     But c’mon. Recently, the board was confronted with long-standing complaints from a representative of the (enormous!) ranks of part-timers—about poor pay, poor support, poor treatment, etc.

Susan Bliss; board low point

     (See part-timer all up in trustee grill and What the speaker said was accurate. See the video: Board of Trustees: minutes/video: April meeting; skip down to item 7.2)
     Those complaints are sound. We—faculty, anyway—all know that they are sound. Full-timers, of course, have all been adjuncts, and they work with adjuncts daily.
     But, somehow, the board heard these complaints with the wax-filled ears of the utterly clueless. They made fools of themselves, responding to the complainer (Susan Bliss) as though she were a mere crank or idiot.
     It was a low point for this otherwise decent board.

* * *

     Let me state the obvious. For many years, Dissent/DtB and various other entities (Academic Senates, respected senior faculty, classified leadership, et al.) have attempted to direct trustees to various longstanding troubles—with abusive or incompetent administrators or managers, counterproductive reforms, wrongheaded procedures and structures, corrupt faculty, etc.
     But these efforts have had virtually no impact with The Seven (with, of course, notable exceptions).
     Why?
     Board members, it seems, are forever afflicted with a condition—let’s call it the “Smiley Suit & Title” Error (SSATE)*—in which powerful and multi-faceted indications of TROUBLE are immediately rendered no-account by a few apparently sincere assurances whispered by the likes of Glenn Roquemore† and Tod Burnett‡—those well-dressed and well-mannered, but manifestly OOTD (out of their depth) galoots.
     Is it their suits? Their flag pins? Their sometimes whispery delivery? Their plastic, clean-cut looks and winning smiles? What makes these manifest bozos so believable to The Seven? (I could never understand why everyone didn’t react to meeting Raghu Mathur with the observation, “Who is this creepy mother-f*cker?”)
     Near as I can tell, The Seven, albeit a much improved crew over earlier iterations, remain seriously afflicted with SSATE. How else explain the continuing uneventful weeks in the life of that utterly vacuous doofus Glenn Roquemore? How can it be that trustees (and the chancellor) do not routinely drive up to Irvine, stomp into Rocky’s office, and scream “J’accuse!” —or worse?
     And, of course, there are many other examples of The Affliction and the problems it allows, month after month, year after year. (I encourage readers to list them for others to consider.)
     (I realize, of course, that other syndromes than SSATE have afflicted trustees over the years. Some former board members noticed the TROUBLES, all right, but have ignored them in the spirit of, “Well, Chancellor/President/Dean Brontosaurus may be an incompetent rat bastard, but he’s our incompetent rat bastard.” I suspect that Fuentes and Wagner strongly possessed this curious feature, which I shall dub "BYOB" (Bastard? Yes! But Our Bastard!).

Adjunct confronts trustees; trustees respond: go to: Board of Trustees: minutes/video:
 click on "video" for April 2013 meeting; using the links listed in the outline 
below the video monitor, jump to item 7.2.

* * *

     Recently, the board fell into some odoriferous empirical indications of (among other things) Roquemorean Shititude. It came in the form of the district “climate survey” results. (See also Verbatim responses.) The results underscored troubling themes that surfaced in earlier surveys.
     Did the trustees not read it? Have they somehow misunderstood it? The survey powerfully supports points DtB (and others) have made—about Roquemore, his VPI, about HR, about the relationship between the two college presidents, etc.—for years.
     No doubt, already, the reassuring besuited galoots have whispered it all into utter oblivion.

Notes:

     *Akin to the "availability error" that psychologists yammer about.
     †Roquemore became an administrator during the darkest days of the SOCCCD—the late 90s—as part of Team Mathur. By 1997, Roquemore was a foe of Mathur owing to the latter's stranglehold on the chairship of their school. But when Mathur became interim President (April '97), he desperately cast about for support among faculty, and, all of a sudden, Roquemore became his friend and ally. As a loyal ally, Roquemore was given the VPI position and, when Mathur ascended to the Chancellorship (in 2002), Roquemore became IVC President, and he has remained so ever since. When, starting about 2007(?), R tired of serving as Mathur's lackey and asserted his independence, Mathur turned against him, but R was supported and protected by D. Wagner, who gradually tired of Mathur's endless petty machinations. R must've looked good to W, just as a dirt clod looks good when sitting next to a turd.
     ‡Raghu Mathur strongly advocated hiring Tod Burnett as SC President, despite the latter's shocking lack of experience as a college administrator. But Burnett had been the Governor's deputy appointment secretary (and a functionary in the state chancellor's office), and so hiring him might give Mathur (and perhaps trustees) an "in" with Sacramento. Voila!
     A bio that was once available at the state chancellor's website described Burnett thus:

He is ... an Associate Faculty at the University of Phoenix. Prior to joining the Community Colleges System Office, Tod served as Deputy Appointments Secretary for Governor Schwarzenegger where he advised the Governor on making political appointments to hundreds of full and part-time positions in State government.

     For a time in the late 1990s, Burnett was VP of Eva Gabor's wig company. (See.)

The best SOCCCD board ever—but....

Evidently, the IVC Academic Senate cabinet won't agendize whether IVC should support Saddleback faculty's "shared governance" resolution

Cabinet "determination": Senators will
not consider the question of supporting
the SC Ac. Senate resolution

     Back on March 5, a colleague at Saddleback College emailed me about a resolution recently approved by the Saddleback College Academic Senate (i.e., the faculty). Here it is:

   Whereas, Commencement is an important event for all members of the Saddleback College community…, and
   Whereas, the College Commencement Committee includes representatives from all of these groups to ensure that their voices are heard in planning this ceremony, and
   Whereas, the principle of shared governance is that all constituent groups should have a real role in the decision-making process, and
   Whereas, President Burnett’s decision in 2011 to override the Commencement Committee’s unanimous vote to offer a moment of silence instead of an invocation in that year’s ceremony is inconsistent with the principle of shared governance, and
   Whereas, such top-down decision making has repeatedly caused problems for our College in the Accreditation process,
   Therefore, be it resolved, that
   The Saddleback College Academic Senate affirms that the College’s Commencement Committee is the best group to decide whether or not to include an invocation at the annual Commencement ceremony … [and] The Commencement Committee as a whole should be explicitly charged with making this decision and their decision should be final, …And, … This should go into effect beginning with the 2012-2013 academic year, as an invitation for a speaker to deliver an invocation has already been issued for the 2012 Commencement ceremony.

     The colleague wrote:

… I’m not 100% sure how the decision to invite a Rabbi for the invocation this year was made….
…Do you think there’s any chance that IVC’s Senate would consider a resolution backing up ours?
…Be aware that we tried to keep the focus on shared governance and not on the prayer issue itself….

     I wrote back: “I read the resolution and it looks great. Yes, I think we can get the IVC senate on board, as long as we don't just give it to the Senate President….”
     Normally, our senate meets every two weeks, and the cabinet meets on the off weeks to put together the agenda for the next meeting. So, on Thursday of the 8th, hours before what I assumed was the cabinet’s biweekly “agenda” meeting, I wrote the Senate cabinet:

     I request that we agendize the following item for the upcoming meeting of the IVC Academic Senate Rep Council: whether our senate should support SC Academic Senate's recent resolution re President Burnett's action to ignore or overturn the SC Commencement Committee decision re a prayer at commencement.
. . .
     Friends at Saddleback College tell me that, last week, the SC Academic Senate passed a resolution in response to President Burnett's action of overriding the decision by the Commencement Committee regarding whether there would be a prayer or invocation at SC Commencement. Here is that resolution….[see above]
. . .
     I'm told that President Burnett has already arranged to have a rabbi give the prayer.

—Senator Roy Bauer, Humanities and Languages

     A few minutes later, IVC Academic Senate President Lisa Davis Allen wrote me: “Roy, I will bring it to the cabinet. The agenda for the next meeting has already been set due to spring break. —L” (Note: Spring break was the week of March 11.)
     I also heard from another cabinet member, who wrote me to say “I support this” for reasons echoing the Saddleback senate's reasoning.
     I responded: “LDA has already responded that this [item] can't be agendized for the next meeting because the agenda has already been done—something about the Spring Break.”
     The cabinet member then responded, indicating surprise that it had already been decided that my item was not to be included on the agenda. They said they would themselves request the item formally.
     I didn’t hear back.
     The item didn’t make it to the agenda.
     And so, a week after the March 22 senate meeting, I requested yet again that the matter be agendized (for I was never told whether my item had been discussed by the cabinet; I assumed it hadn't been). LDA responded by writing: “Cabinet will consider it today when we create the 4-5-12 agenda.”
     But then, again, I was never informed what the cabinet had decided, if anything.
     So, on April 12, prior to the senate’s cabinet meeting, I once again wrote the senate cabinet, “asking that this matter [i.e., whether we should support the Saddleback College Ac. Senate resolution] be agendized for the next meeting.”
     I soon got a response:

Roy,
     Your agenda item request concerning Saddleback Commencement plans has been considered by the IVC Academic Senate cabinet. The item will not be placed on the Senate Rep Council agenda because the cabinet has determined that it is not an IVC issue or a district issue, but rather a Saddleback College internal issue addressing their commencement plans.
     —Lisa

     When this "determination" occurred—I have no idea. No one has informed me.
     And since when is an administrator's act of blowing off shared governance at Saddleback College not an IVC issue? If Saddleback’s Burnett can do it, then IVC’s Roquemore can do it too.
     Good Lord do we ever need new leadership of the IVC Academic Senate.