Desire and Obligation

REBEL GIRL spent the last weekend before the semester at a family holiday party in Parker, Arizona, on the banks of the Colorado River, some six or seven hours across the desert. As you may know, the Colorado River is held hostage by technology. This baffles Rebel Girl. The result this weekend was that the river was "low"–too low for boat rides, too low to gaze at and have one's spirits raised. She gazed instead at the television screen and watched a football game between the Green Bay Packers and some team from Seattle that was played in a raging snow storm, which added something, she must admit, to the spectacle. She opined to the cousin nearest her that her mother used to root for Green Bay way back in the late 60s. They were good then, the cousin confirmed.

Others headed out to the infamous Desert Bar where they drank and shot at things. Upon their return, yet another cousin confided that, at the Desert Bar, he was told that his grandfather had had a vasectomy BEFORE his own father was conceived, which suggested that his bloodlines to the family were perhaps thinner than originally believed. That means that you can go home NOW, Rebel Girl said but he didn't seem to hear.

The next day, on their way home, on the California side of the river, they drove past the Wyatt Earp Post Office. It's something sitting there, in the middle of nowhere. She wished she had a letter to mail. Next time she'll stop.

Meanwhile, the new semester begins.

Crisis caveat

Faculty, welcome back.

As you know, the big news right now is the governor’s proposed budget. According to CCC Chancellor Diane Woodruff, “The California Community Colleges received a reduction of $525 million that includes a two-thirds reduction in growth funds.”

No doubt, you’ve already received lots of emails alerting you to the trouble ahead.

But NOTE WELL: there can be no doubt that Chancellor Mathur will exploit the situation to serve his interests. That’s what the man does.

As you know, owing to his bungling, our colleges are, and have been, in crisis mode re the 50% Law. The gist: state law requires that at least half of expenditures (in community colleges) go to faculty salaries and benefits (“instruction”). But, for years, in part because of ATEP start-up costs, we’ve spent increasingly less on instruction and are now doomed to cross below the 50% mark. (See The data & Documents.) Among the desperate measures we’ve taken: the en masse and ASAP hiring of faculty.


No district would do that unless it had to. Faculty hiring should be done carefully, deliberately. Not hurriedly.

Our haste has already produced fiascos. HR has bungled advertising for these 45 new hires. Check out our ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's useless; and it contains errors. (This was discovered during a recent IVC Academic Senate meeting in which it occurred to folks to actually go online and check out the ads that HR was in such a hurry to get into the CHE.)

No doubt Mathur will seize the opportunity to blame all of our woes, including our 50% woes, on the state budget. He’ll announce various obnoxious initiatives too, using the budget crisis as cover.

We can’t let him get away with that.

"But wait!", you say. "The state’s budgetary woes do not apply to us because we’re on basic aid!"

Well, yes. But there’s a big “but”: despite our special funding situation (we rely on local property taxes), our board of trustees insists on funding the colleges as though we received the more common state funding. And so that means we’re headed for seriously lean times. We’ll have to spend less money.


Meanwhile, the district (i.e., Gary Poertner) projects that we are headed for non-compliance with the 50% Law (for 2007-2008) to the tune of four and a half million dollars. But the projection assumes a faculty COLA of 4.53%.

Among the provisions of the state budget: no COLA.

That means that we’re headed for an even greater degree of non-compliance (with the 50% Law) than we thought. And that means: we need to hire more faculty or increase faculty salaries/benefits.

How that all fits with spending less money ain’t exactly clear to me. (Admittedly, I’m no money guy.)

At any rate, it’s important that we learn the facts about all this and keep an eye on you-know-who.

So welcome back.

Historic districtular video

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Relive that lovely day in May of 2004 in which the ballots were counted and it was determined that 93.5% of the faculty of our district voted "no confidence" in Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur.


The last ballot.

The League of Women Voters was on hand to make sure that everything was on the up 'n' up.

A good time was had by all.

I don't get it

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  .....Gosh, it’s been a tough week for one member of our Board of Trustees—namely, fading OC rightwing guru and Prince of Darkness Tom Fuentes. That’s mostly ‘cause it’s been a tough week for some of his mentees.
.....MIKE CARONA. Take pious family man Mike Carona. You shoulda heard Fuentes’ introduction of the Sheriff at IVC’s 9-11 ceremony back in September. I covered the event for Dissent, thinking, “How come all these people are so respectful of this manifest rat bastard? What’s the matter with ‘em?”
.....I know, these are silly questions. Somehow, I never seem to stop asking them. I must have a screw loose, a hole in my head. Something.
.....Not long after the ceremony, the excrement hit the fan, what with federal indictments, etc.
.....Carona and crew (Schroeder, et al.) did what they always do: they nakedly pursued their interests, the public interest be damned. So, natch, Carona did not step down but instead took a leave only to return to work this week. He’s getting paid, but, essentially, he’s leaving the actual work of Sheriff to an underling.
.....How very righteous. Er, not. But he’s still got that flag pinned to his shirt. He still goes around praying and rolling his eyes.
.....That’s when the LA Times called for a recall (Recall Mike Carona) of the fellow, arguing

Carona has every right to his day in court, to fight the charges that he traded access to his office and power for gifts and money. But he and his department never would have reached this day, never would have come under scrutiny in the first place, had he run his department with an ethical hand. Instead, from his first day in office, Carona has been selling out the title of sheriff, providing supporters and others close to him with extraordinary favors. Just one example: hiring two top political supporters as his chief assistants even though they were patently unqualified for the jobs, so much so that Carona needed special dispensation to make the hires legal.

.....Um, those two guys are now in jail. Eventually, if there is any justice (silly me), Carona will join them there. But his unsavory (incompetent, reckless, hypocritical, etc.) character was manifest long before the indictments.
.....That didn’t prevent Fuentes from praising him to the heavens four months ago.
.....I just don’t get it. How come the people who go out of their way to stand for piety, rectitude, and patriotism are so often the least pious, the least righteous, the least other-regarding? Why are they so often the ones who cause the biggest headaches for those who actually do the good works that need doing? Tell me that!

.....CHRISS STREET. Yet another Pal o’ Fuentes is OC Treasurer Chriss Street, yet another manifestly ratular Rat Bastard. Fuentes advised him during his successful run for that office.
.....According to today’s Times (Public agencies withdraw from O.C. investment pool), things are going from bad to worse for Street:

Four of the seven public agencies that voluntarily participate in Orange County's investment portfolio have withdrawn almost all their cash in recent months amid concerns over Treasurer Chriss Street, and others are reviewing whether to keep their money in the pool, according to public finance managers. …Since becoming treasurer more than a year ago, Street has been beset by investigations into his private business dealings before entering office and questions about his handling of county business. …Street came into the treasurer's office as the hand-picked successor to now-Supervisor John Moorlach, whose management of the office for 12 years after the bankruptcy was largely admired. But Street ran into trouble even before he was elected. Questions emerged about whether he engaged in self-dealing while overseeing the affairs of a bankrupt trucking firm, which has since become the subject of a federal investigation. Local prosecutors are examining whether he sought to steer contracts for county work to friends and business associates….

.....Let’s face it: those close to Street must’ve been pretty clear about what kind of guy he was/is before he took office (in fact, the unpleasant facts about Street’s “business dealings” were reported long before the election).
.....But that was OK with them. How come?
.....Again, I don’t get it. The people I know—admittedly, many of them are progressives, atheists, skeptics and the like—would never dream of doing the nasty and corrupt things that Fuentes’ friends do as a matter of course. Nor would they support someone who would consider doing these things.
.....How come, when the Fuentes crowd lay claim to righteousness whilst dismissing my crowd as wicked and benighted, nobody calls ‘em on it? I be stupefied.
.....It’s like the President. He’s obviously a loutish and base kinda guy. So what’s with all the endless respectfulness? How come Brian Williams doesn’t just say, “Well, here he is again, embarrassing us with his cluelessness and naked cynicism and dishonesty. Um, he was in Israel today pretending to give a shit. It’ll be a great day when someone half-way intelligent and decent takes over the Presidency.”
.....So what’s with Brian? It’s as if it would be less-than-objective to state an obvious fact. Is Brian less-than-objective when he takes a side in the shape-of-earth “controversy” (it’s round)? Don’t think so. So why is it different noting the obvious facts re Bush?
.....How does that work exactly?
.....Sometimes, I think it goes like this: if one makes a great show of one’s “faith” and patriotism—not by actually doing anything, but mostly by wearing little flags, pledging at big flags, praying in hushed halls, engaging in eye-rolling whilst facing the heavens—one is ipso facto a soldier of the Right and the Good.
.....Even if, notoriously, one has a very hard time living up to the “values” of official rightness/goodness (that’s Fuentes all over), the fact that one loudly aligns oneself with respectable religion (Christianity or Judaism, not some silly “sect”) and a kind of unreflective and uncritical love of country common among Kohlbergian ten-year-olds, then, no matter how far one strays from the path of virtue, one is fundamentally one of the good guys, and no amount of intelligence and decency achieved by a “secularist” or “humanist” can ever compete with those credentials.
.....It’s a kind of Moronic Logic for a Moron Age. If that’s the thinking, then I may as well go back into that cave over there.

.....JEFF NIELSEN. Another member of Fuentes’ team of pious rat bastards is Jeff Nielsen, who was again in the news this week.
.....Yesterday, the OC Weekly (BOY, OH, BOY!) reported that

Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the once-cocky Orange County political activist who espoused conservative principles while molesting underaged boys, will enter a pre-prison program in the coming weeks with one more headache: One of his victims has filed a civil lawsuit seeking $1.35 million. …The plaintiff, whom we'll call John Doe, filed the suit in late December in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was there, in the city of Falls Church, in 1994 and 1995, that Nielsen used his positions as an aide to Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and a church youth counselor to rent a room from a Virginia family with a 13-year-old son, Doe. The family had no clue that Nielsen, a Bible thumper with friends in high places, was a clever sexual predator interested in sleeping with middle-school and high-school boys. …The Weekly first reported Doe's tale in September 2006. Nielsen—who, at the time, faced criminal charges for repeatedly molesting a Westminster High School freshman—angrily denied any pedophile conduct. Indeed, the man who keeps stuffed animals on his bed called the allegations "delusional" and the Weekly part of a liberal conspiracy to frame him because of his friendship with Rohrabacher and Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. Last March, a Newport Beach jury deadlocked after Nielsen's lawyer, Paul S. Meyer, savagely attacked the teenage victim on the witness stand while Nielsen posed as a generous, caring Christian with lofty ideals about mentoring troubled youth. …In December, after four years of angry denials, Nielsen finally admitted to molesting both youngsters. In exchange, he won a reduced prison sentence of three years, though he will have to register as a sex offender for the remainder of his life….

.....RAGHU MATHUR. This reminds me of a moment during the Chancellor’s Opening Session on Wednesday. The Chancellor hates Rich McCullough and is responsible for M’s retirement as President of Saddleback College (Rich is slated to retire in June).
.....But that fact didn’t prevent Mathur from singing Rich’s praises on Wednesday and handing him a big plaque. Listening to the Chancellor, you’d swear that Rich had no greater friend in this world than Raghu P. Mathur.
.....Now, see, I’d never do that. I’d be thinking, “I hold this fellow in low regard, cuz he refused to be a team player [i.e., helping me to screw my enemies, micromanage the shit outa things, etc.], and so, I’m willing, I guess, to brush up against the endless tributes to him, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna join in them, cuz that would be seriously dishonest and cynical and fundamentally corrupt. It would be a kind of gross hypocrisy, and I ain’t goin’ there, nope.”
.....But that’s just me. And my friends. You know: all those nasty atheists and progressives and godless America-bashers, the "liberals" who do all the work in this goddam district whilst enduring endless attack from Mathur (“faculty leaders” seek to “control” the district), Fuentes (over-paid faculty work a “36-hour week”), and all their equally corrupt and appalling rightwing, church-going, flag-wearing friends.
.....I don’t get it.

Those wacky librarians

According to this morning’s Inside Higher Ed,

The Association of College and Research Libraries [a division of the ALA] has issued an updated list of the top issues facing its members. Among them: … debates about intellectual property rights, demands for free access by the public to information, and a sense by students that they are “customers” of libraries.

The ”list” informs us that

In the 1960s, the Supreme Court ruled in support of legislation that assured the right of Americans to their privacy. Librarians have always recognized the importance of protecting the privacy of library users’ personal records and have informed their communities about the importance of this issue. Most recently, the library profession has opposed relatively recent government laws such as the USA PATRIOT Act that threaten the right to privacy. Some librarians have gone so far as to refuse to comply with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) requests for library patron records (American Libraries, 2006). Becky Albitz (2005) describes the climate of suspicion and mistrust the USA PATRIOT Act has created. In a recent document issued by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, the authors noted that, “according to FBI data, the FBI issued approximately 8,500 National Security Letters (NSLs) in the calendar year 2000, the year prior to the passage of the Patriot Act. . . . The number of NSL requests increased to approximately 39,000 in 2003, approximately 56,000 in 2004, and approximately 47,000 in 2005.” The Office of the Inspector General later stated that these numbers are underreported for various reasons. ALA has publicly criticized the Department of Justice for its use of these letters in libraries. The USA PATRIOT Act was reauthorized in 2006.


You’ll recall that trustee Wagner has labeled the ALA (of which the ACRL is a division) a bunch of “liberal busybodies,” in part because of their stance regarding the Patriot Act. Owing to such "facts," the board has prevented our colleges from membership in the ALA. See Wagner vs. ALA.

The Chancellor's Opening Session

—Some quick notes on today’s “Chancellor’s Opening Session” at Irvine Valley College.

Chancellor Mathur gave an overlong and passionless address about the usual things. He said that the state is increasingly concerned about the high cost of textbooks (a thousand bucks a semester for some students, said Raghu). He encouraged faculty to publish their own texts, making them available to students for free.

Blah, blah, blah, he said. I’ve got most of it committed to digital videotape, but I feel no impulse to review that. Nope.

He made no mention of the ongoing crisis and fiasco that he created by allowing the district to drift far out of compliance with the 50% Law. He’s obviously a very honest and decent man to be so direct with us about the real problems that we face.

Dr. Wallace Walrod (VP of Research and Communications, OC Business Council) once again informed us about the county and its financial health and future. Traffic and the high cost of housing are the big issues, everybody says. But the OC economy is strong compared to others. Plus there’ve been some real improvements in K-12 student performance among Latinos, and that’s great, he said.

Walrod seems very knowledgeable. Plus he knows how to keep things brief. I like ‘im.

It turns out that Lance Izumi (VP, Board of Governors, Cal Community Colleges, etc.)—you know, the former Meese speechwriter—is a good, if unspectacular speaker with useful info and interesting things to say. He discussed the problem of student unpreparedness for college work, etc. He really wasn’t bad and I told ‘im so.


As predicted, the entertainment turned out to be Elvis—or, to be more accurate, Scott Robertson, the “OC Elvis,” who seems to be the OC Neil Diamond, too.

Robertson provided essentially the same show as last year, and, again, it was good, for what it was, although I do think he was less “inspired” by the audience this time around. I couldn’t see the audience, cuz I was way in front.

—Which reminds me: he gyrated a lot, which does absolutely nothing for me, but waddoo I know. He went out into the audience, too, said some funny things, like when he did one of those Elvis “splits” and sang that he hoped his pants wouldn’t tear. I had the same hope.

And, of course, Raghu preceded the King with his odd “kinglet” performance, revealed in an earlier post. The less said about that the better.


Raghu "honored" a couple of people with big plaques. Among them: Saddleback's Rich McCullough. The way Raghu went on about Rich and his "high standards," you just know that he gave Rich a really great evaluation. Yep.

I talked to some people here and there after the session, and it sounds like things are going better with ATEP than I expected. It seems the trustees are still on board and the City of Tustin is coming around. Last semester, ATEP had 400 students; this semester, it already has 500 plus.

Went to the Faculty Association Luncheon, and that was good, I guess, if you don't mind chicken grease. (Liked the salad dressing, though.) I’ve got most of that on tape, too, but I’m only showing that stuff if somebody asks. Otherwise, forgetaboutit.

Tom Fuentes & Raghu Mathur bring dignity to our district

Raghu dances! --Sort of.



I present a scene from the Chancellor's Opening Session, held this morning at Irvine Valley College's Performing Arts Center.

You'll love it.