Nothing happened

.....I’m tempted simply to say that nothing happened at tonight’s meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees.
.....The closed session started at 3:00 and was supposed to be over by 6:00, but the trustees didn’t emerge until 7:30 or so. I really don’t know what they were doing in there all that time. We all figured they were screamin’ at each other about something.
.....When the open session finally started, I was surprised by the board’s mood. We all expected the trustees to be horribly grumpy. Nope. They got down to business, and there was a minimum of snipery, although Nancy’s invocation seemed to have a bit of an edge to it.
.....I do believe that her invocation made a special mention of Carl Karcher—you know, the hamburger guy.
.....The board took its time with resolutions and presentation re Professors of the Year. The part-timers didn’t show, but the remaining honorees did. No doubt Tracy will have pictures. (See Tracy's highlights.)
.....There were no public comments.
.....Trustee reports were unremarkable.
.....McCullough, Roquemore, and Kopecky updated us on educational and facilities master plans. That was mildly interesting I suppose. Nothing new.
.....I shoulda brought my Whoopee cushion.
.....Marcia pulled lots of things from the consent calendar, though that didn’t seem to produce the usual grumbling. She wanted to see the landscaping planned for the IVC Performing Arts Center and ATEP. Sure, why not.
.....As per usual, Nancy P had lots of questions about any new expenditures that might be hinky. Also, she was peeved about the list of District Institutional Memberships. Some of her favorite trustee organizations weren’t on the list, but another organization—one she did not like—did appear on the list. What’s up with that?
.....At first, Mathur became defensive; then he lurched into dismissiveness. Don tried to move things along, but then Tom piped up to urge the tabling of the item. Why not wait for more info?, asked Tom. In the end, the trustees voted to table, with an almost imperceptibly testy Don offering the only dissenting vote.
.....VC Bob King needed to make a last-minute change to the academic personnel actions, which inspired Dave Lang to fret about Brown Act concerns—i.e., does this provide sufficient notice? King was ready. He explained that he had sought the advice of one Wendy Gabriella, and she was OK with it. “Well, as long as you’ve got her approval, we’re cool,” said Wagner, smiling.
.....Next came the classified personnel actions. Wagner immediately turned to Wendy and asked, “Any problem with this one?”
.....It was a goddam love fest.
.....The board couldn’t say enough wonderful things about the Saddleback College Veteran’s Memorial Project, which, evidently, has been spearheaded by Nancy Padberg.
.....Well, that was about it. I videotaped lots of it, but I don’t know why.
.....That Don Wagner should does run an efficient meeting. Golly.

Hookers, togetherness, board meeting

1. IN THE NEWS. In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

• A wave of books and reports about French undergraduates paying for higher education by working as prostitutes has led government officials to pledge more assistance for low-income students, The Guardian reported. One estimate — disputed by government officials — is that 40,000 students are working as prostitutes.

• Anderson University, an Indiana institution affiliated with the Church of God, held its first on-campus dance this weekend, the Associated Press reported. Trustees last year lifted a ban on dancing. James Edwards, the university’s president, commented to the AP on the fact that many of the hundreds who attended didn’t actually dance. ” I don’t know if there’s a lot of great dancing going on or a lot of great standing going on,” he said, “but there’s a lot of togetherness going on.”

2. BOARD MEETING. Meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees tonight. For the agenda outline, go to January agenda

The closed session starts at 3:00. Among the items listed:

Conference with Real Property Negotiators (GC 54956.8)

1. Property – Lease of Portion of Advanced Technology and Education Park (ATEP) Property at 15445 Lansdowne Road, Tustin, CA - Agency Designated Representative – Dr. Raghu Mathur;

Negotiating Parties (1) Camelot Entertainment; (2) CSU-Fullerton; (3) Young Americans; and (4) Chapman University/University College.

Under Negotiation – Price and Terms of Payment

On the open agenda (6:00 p.m.):

4.1 Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College and ATEP: Educational and Facilities Master Plan Update
Information presented by Dr. Richard D. McCullough, President, Saddleback College, Dr. Glenn R. Roquemore, President, Irvine Valley College, and Dr. Robert Kopecky, Provost, ATEP.

5.14 SOCCCD: Revised Authorization for District Institutional Memberships 2007/2008
Approve memberships as presented.

6.1 ATEP: Submittal of Short Range Plan to the City of Tustin
Accept for Review and Study.

6.8 Saddleback College: Veteran’s Memorial Project
Approve the Veteran’s Memorial project.

Sorrow's springs are the same

The widow of my writing professor called last night from her home in Joshua Tree. She called this time last year and the year before. We've never met, but since her husband (though she would probably prefer another term) Richard Lee died, she calls. She refers to our holiday card and how pleased she is that she still receives it and asks about our family, our work, our writing. We talk about her late husband, which, I suppose is the reason she calls us. In some way, she is calling him.

Tonight we talked for half an hour. She has finished her memoir about Greenwich Village in the 40s and her time with Georgia O'Keefe and the deKoonings, Franz Kline, Joseph Heller, Joaquim Probst and others. Eventually, she met Dr. Lee (as I called him) there, when he was a student at NYU. They fell in love and moved out here when he got the position at Cal State in 1955. So, in 1981, when I wandered into his classroom clutching my overwritten poems, he had been teaching there for almost 40 years.

Here he is in the CSULB faculty parking lot. The photo was taken by David Barker and featured in Barker's book 12 Poets and Their Cars, published in 1972.

At the end of our conversation, she invited us to visit her and, since I've already thought about how beautiful the desert will be this spring with the rain and all, when I said yes, it didn't feel as if I were lying. It felt like the truth. I hope it is.

Dr. Richard Lee ran the poetry workshop I lingered in at Cal State Long Beach in the early 1980s. He had other, better students than I, including roots rocker and bluesman Dave Alvin. Another talented student was one Kyle Anne Bates who also published in IVC's literary journal, the Ear. (L.T. would remember her and her work, a poem about a UPS delivery person, I believe.)

Dr. Lee (I could never call him Richard) taught me how to read closely and widely and with joy. He loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet who was unafraid of exclamation points and joy. Hopkins would have loved Joshua Tree.

This one is for Dr. Lee:

Spring and Fall - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Somebody Got to Have Some Sense on this Highway

No school today.

I reminded my students last week of this fact. They knew. It's the first week of classes and they know exactly how many holidays to expect. They're counting down already.

It's the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, I said. We didn't always have this holiday, I told them, aware of the fact that for most of them, born this semester circa late 1980s, the holiday always had been. Do something, I said. And then, feeling very old, I added, when I was your age we used to march down to the South African Embassy and sit in and shut it down. You don't have to do that anymore, I added. Some on them smiled. The rest looked a little alarmed. Now that was a great excuse for missing class, I went on. (I couldn't stop myself.) You just told your teacher that you were in jail. I smiled. Widely.

Today at our home, we will read Faith Ringgold's wonderful "My Dream of Martin Luther King" with our little guy and listen to King's speeches on the radio.

This morning's New York Times gave us this holiday offering: Sarah Vowell's "Radical Love Gets a Holiday."

Here's some choice excerpts but you can click on the title above for the whole text. Go ahead. Click.

...Because I am a culturally Christian atheist the same way my atheist Reform friends are culturally Jewish, I look forward to Martin Luther King’s Birthday — when the news momentarily replaces the rants of the faith-based spitfires with clips of what an actually Christlike Christian sounds like — with the kind of fondness with which my pal Ben looks back on the decent, affectionate ideal that was his summer camp.

I have become just another citizen whose only religion is the freedom of religion and as such I patrol the wall of separation between church and state like some jumpy East German guarding Checkpoint Charlie back before Ronald Reagan single-handedly tore it down.

Which is why I am relieved that journalists and voters keep asking Mike Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate, what he meant 10 years ago when he told a meeting of his fellow Baptists, “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.” That is a curiously unconstitutional opinion for someone seeking the job of defending the Constitution, not to mention historically inaccurate considering the mostly deist founders were about as spiritual as the original cast of “Hair.”

But I am also relieved when Mr. Huckabee occasionally blurts out some Sunday School sentiment about how he doesn’t think a poor child should have to sleep in a car. Of course, this whiff of Jesus makes some of his fellow Republicans turn on him as if he’s Michael Dukakis. Because they fear that trying to find the homeless homes translates into raising the taxes they must render unto Caesar.Whoever wins the presidential election this year will be a Christian. (Unless of course it’s that one guy who is a member of a Muslim sleeper cell. Just when you think the electoral process couldn’t get any more stupid....) So the rest of us might as well suck it up and see if we can pick the Christian who is, if incapable of loving his or her enemies, the one who seems least likely to drum up a bunch of extra, new enemies to hate.

In this age of a slower, grubbier mutually assured destruction, when no one’s typed the word “nonviolence” since the typewriter, it’s worth reading Dr. King’s quarrel with the cold war’s MAD ploy. In the “loving your enemies” text he tells a pretty little parable about how one night his brother A. D. drove him to Tennessee. Infuriated by all the other cars’ brights, A. D. vowed to crank his lights and blind the next driver passing by. Dr. King told him not to, that it would just get everybody killed. “Somebody got to have some sense on this highway,” he said.

Advanced Technology & Education Park slideshow

Click on the BIG ARROW to start!
Click on individual photos to make 'em bigger.
(Don't forget to put on some music. Slides always go better with music!)

IVC PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
SLIDESHOW

Dissent's canyon slide show

Click on the ARROW to start the slide show.
Click on individual photos to enlarge them.
Some of 'em don't look like much until you do that.
(You might as well play some music while you view the show!)

PROFILE: the Foundation’s Adam Probolsky, Superhero

.....IN MY OPINION, not enough is said about the remarkable people who serve on the Irvine Valley College Foundation.
.....—People like the ubiquitous ADAM PROBOLSKY, who serves on the Foundation’s Board of Governors along with his pal Jon Fleischman, who, until about a year ago, was Sheriff Mike Carona’s Deputy Director for Public Affairs.
.....Dissenters first encountered Adam Probolsky back in July of 2000, when the GOP’s Tom Fuentes showed up at a special board meeting to apply for the role of replacement of resigning trustee (and Holocaust denier. Oops!) Steve Frogue. At the time (see Duck crap), we reported:

.....Fuentes’ appointment seemed to be, well, highly orchestrated. Consider: of the three candidates who were interviewed on the 12th [of July, 2000], 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 [including Ray Chandos and Sharon McMillan] 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”).

.....Another remarkable personage entered (or reentered) the picture at the time—Mike Schroeder, OC kingpin and head of the local “Republican mafia” (evidently, a role he inherited from Fuentes). I had a meeting in July or August of 2000 with Fuentes in which Schroeder sat in. Schroeder had been the state GOP chair, and, in that role, he assisted our attempt to recall Mr. Frogue.
.....Still with me? OK. Just two days ago, Mr. Probolsky’s name came up in Dana Parsons’ column (see Replacement for Carona too close for comfort) in the Times. Parsons revealed the curious politics behind the selection of Jack Anderson as exiting OC Sheriff Mike Carona’s replacement:

.....…Under federal indictment on corruption charges [Oops!], Carona had returned to office Jan. 7 after a two-month paid hiatus but decided to step down this week so he could get free legal help—something he couldn't do if he stayed.
.....Slight problem. Who would take over?
.....When he took his initial leave, Carona tapped loyalist Jo Ann Galisky to run the department.
.....Slight problem. It's unclear whether the county [Republican] party would fall in behind her as the permanent face of local law enforcement.
.....However, it would fall in line behind Jack Anderson, an assistant sheriff and member of the party's central committee. So, Carona, who made it clear this week he wanted Anderson to succeed him on a permanent basis, named him second in command.

.....Here we see the Mafia in action. Pay attention to what comes next. According to Parsons,

..... [Carona] couldn't name [Anderson] undersheriff, the position Galisky held, because Anderson didn't meet the county requirements for the post. Before he left office, Carona demoted Galisky.

.....—Garsh!


.....Our boy Probolsky now enters the picture. Parsons continues:

.....Anderson met the press Tuesday, assisted not by any of the paid Sheriff's Department spokesmen, but by Adam Probolsky, an ex-officio member of the GOP's central committee and a volunteer with the Sheriff Department's reserve program.
.....Probolsky serves on a few local governmental positions and is a pollster by trade. He said he helped Anderson in his role as volunteer reserve. He has stepped in for the county on other matters, Probolsky said, such as helping out with media during the protracted wildfire season. All he did for Anderson, Probolsky said, was provide reporters with names of public officials who had worked with Anderson and could offer perspective on him.
.....Not to be naive, but I asked Probolsky—well-known as an unapologetic political animal—if politics shouldn't have been separated from Anderson's press event.
....."I don't think you have to separate the politics," he said.
.....The central committee is sprinkled with names of people holding elective office, he noted, adding that the Sheriff's Department is a political office, as well.
.....I asked him how he happened to be at Anderson's event. "Did I get a call from a higher power?" Probolsky said. "No. I took it upon myself to say, 'Here's a project I think I can help with.' "

.....Mindful of Probolsky’s outsized helpfulness and ubiquity (he even helped with the fire!), Rebel Girl calls Adam a kind of “superhero”—you know, with special abilities from some higher power. I've got to agree.

.....A couple of summers ago, Adam suddenly appeared in one of my philosophy courses, listening intently. Amazing! How does the man do it all!

.....Another place where the P-man pops up is the current JANET NGUYEN saga. You remember: back in 2007, she ran against Schroeder-anointed Trung Nguyen for OC Supervisor in a special election to replace resigning Lou Correa. Carlos Bustamante also ran—seemingly as the GOP cigar-chompers' favorite. But on election night, it appeared that Trung won, though just barely. But Janet had her eye on the Mafia and she cried foul over perceived irregularities in Westminster. (See Claiming voter fraud.) So she got a recount, and she emerged the winner by three votes! But, see, Team Schroeder hates to lose, and so he took the matter to a higher court and, yesterday, the matter was finally settled in Janet’s favor. (See Janet Wins.) Whew!
.....But what about Probolsky? Here’s where things get seriously zany. Eleven months ago (see Probolsky won’t involve himself ), we had occasion to quote Martin Wisckol’s THE BUZZ. Martin had quite a story to tell concerning that wacky special Supervisor election. Prima facie, the local GOP backed rising star Carlos Bustamante, who was opposed by Janet Nguyen and Trung Nguyen, among others. Here's the story:

.....The venerable Lincoln Club apparently had its own money used against it to defeat the club's candidate, [Republican rising star] Carlos Bustamante, in this month's special election for county supervisor.
.....The OC club is made up of Republican business people that participate in campaigns on many different levels….
.....The PAC, which was coordinated in part by GOP consultant Adam Probolsky, ended that election with about $2,700 left. The account was collecting dust when somebody decided to rename it, raise more money and use it for attacks on Lincoln Club-endorsee Bustamante.  [My emphasis.]
....."It just gets weirder and weirder," said Matt [“Jubal”] Cunningham, the Red County/OC Blog editor trying to unravel the intra-party cloak-and-dagger affair.
.....The new treasurer of the committee, now called the Orange County Healthcare, Education & Neighborhood Leaders PAC, hasn't returned Cunningham's calls. But Cunningham tracked down some of the PAC's latest contributors as also being Janet Nguyen supporters.

.....Probolsky, it so happens, has done some work for Nguyen, and that has lead to speculation that he had a hand in transforming the PAC.
....."There is no advantage for me to get involved in that discussion," Probolsky told the Buzz when asked if he would deny the speculation.

..... .....--Now wait a minute. Probolsky's pal Mike Schroeder is Janet Nguyen opponent Trung Nguyen's attorney. Right?
.....This don't add up. Well, whatever. The point is that the Foundation’s P-man sure does get around. And he's clever. And he sure is helpful.

TRIVIA:

.....I looked up the above-mentioned PAC (see Contributors) and found that, in October of ’06, the Lincoln Club gave $15K to this PAC. That makes sense, I guess. That’s when the PAC was geared to getting Bustamante, not Janet N, elected.
.....Another contributor listed is the “LAW OFFICES OF HOWARD J. KLEIN,” who contributed twelve days earlier.
.....Wait a minute. Isn’t Klein the Chairman of the IVC Foundation? (See IVC Foundation.) Yep.
.....Klein was also a contributor to Sheriff Mike Carona’s first campaign, as was the Foundation’s Mark H. Cheung, John Fleischman, Mary Aileen Matheis, and, of course, Adam Probolsky.
.....As you know, several years ago, the IVC Foundation named Mike Carona IVC’s “Hometown Hero.”

.....Oh yeah. Guess who's the treasurer of the Saddleback College Foundation Board? It is none other than Adam's brother, Brian!
.....Gosh, it sometimes seems like everything’s connected! Know what I mean?