Some Chuckleheaded Hos

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SHUT UP.

OUSD trustee Steve Rocco is in the news again. At Thursday’s meeting of the school board, trustees adopted a rule restricting what may be placed on the board meeting agenda—an effort to prevent Mr. Rocco from blathering about loony (and maybe sometimes non-loony?) conspiracy theories. According to the Reg,

Some parents say Rocco wastes time at meetings with his meandering speeches about his parents' medical issues and a concept he calls "the partnership," which he describes as a sinister group of politicians, business leaders and education officials who are taking over the county. (See Board muffles Rocco.)

According to today’s Times,

The [adoption of the rule] was prompted by a March meeting at which Rocco attempted to make a speech about what he calls "the partnership," a cabal of powerful individuals he says runs the county and has tried to assassinate him. (See Rocco speech prompts school board change.)

OK, that one’s loony.

YES, BUT WE BLAZED THIS TRAIL YEARS AGO.

"I believe Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the ADL," Frogue said in a half-whisper during a recent interview on the Foothill High campus. Asked to repeat his assertion, Frogue said, "That's right.... I believe the ADL was behind it." —From the LA Times, 11/25/96

Long-time observers of our own district will recall similar efforts, a dozen years ago, to silence then-trustee Steve Frogue, a fellow who unashamedly used his position to speechify about the Anti-Defamation League and its alleged conspiracies.

Frogue’s behavior attracted the attention of local media. The Irvine World News was moved to ask: “What’s your point, Steve?”:

It's unclear what Saddleback Community College board member Steven Frogue is attempting to accomplish.

At recent board meetings, Mr. Frogue has been indulging in repetitious, lengthy, and at times antagonistic monologues about such disparate things as the Anti-defamation League of B'nai B'rith and faculty senate elections at Irvine Valley College.

At its Feb. 27 meeting, Mr. Frogue took up about 45 minutes of the board's time on these matters.

…During board meetings in January and February, Mr. Frogue has made some startling remarks about what the Jewish organization is doing these days. Another board member, Marcia Milchiker, a former ADL leader in Orange County, told Mr. Frogue he is misinformed about the organization. But he persists. And he has continued to harp on the Irvine Valley academic senate's election procedures, even though an attorney for the Saddleback board has said that the board has little or no control over how the senate conducts its business.

Not unexpectedly, the academic senate has asked the board to order Mr. Frogue to stop interfering in its affairs. The ADL has asked for an apology from the board.

What's puzzling about all of this is what these apparently tangential matters have to do with running the Saddleback Community College District? Mr. Frogue has offered only vague generalities in explanation.

...Judicious use of his gavel by board President John Williams would help keep things in focus. (3/2/95)

Unfortunately, Frogue’s pal Williams was none too judicious with that gavel, which he sometimes used to pound on trustee Harriett Walther’s head.

Eventually, Frogue organized a “Warren Commission” seminar, at Saddleback College, inviting four conspiracy nuts, some associated with an anti-Semitic organization that denies the Holocaust. Naturally, Williams' gavel was silent then, too.

The shit really hit the fan that time. Frogue eventually resigned in the summer of 2000.

FROGUE, THEN FUENTES.

“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. —OC Register, 7/13/00

These days, former chair of the OC Republican Party, Tom Fuentes, has taken over where Frogue left off (Fuentes replaced Frogue as Trustee for the Lake Forest area in 2000). Occasionally, he hints at conspiracies afoot in the Accreditation process. (Our colleges have struggled with Accreditation issues, in part because of the persistent “micromanagement” of the trustees.)

At a recent forum, Fuentes implied that the Accreditors get “all their information” from the faculty, a group that Fuentes contemns and despises, and so I asked him to spell out this alleged conspiracy. He declined to do so. (Like Mr. Frogue, Mr. Fuentes just naturally assumes that others are as dishonest and wily and cynical as he is. That’s only true when he’s hanging out with his Republican Mafia friends—or the Orange Diocese.)


FUENTES & THE OLD OUSD BOARD MAJORITY.

Incidentally, years ago, Fuentes, along with some of his “Republican Mafia” pals, orchestrated the election and scandalous/embarrassing reign of a Board Majority on the Orange Unified School District school board. (See Fuentes: some background.) That BM was almost as embarrassing as the SOCCCD BM of 1996-1998, and that’s saying something!

The OUSD BM was eventually ousted in a successful voter recall. Even those loveable rednecks in Orange (I used to live there, so I know) knew enough to get rid of the faculty-hating extremists that Fuentes and his gang supplied.

On the other hand, they did elect Mr. Rocco.

FOND MEMORIES.

Yeah, around 1990, I lived in a wonderful two-story "Victorian" near downtown Orange. It was built in 1903 and it looked it.

One time, as I was watering my lawn, some guy drove by and stopped to talk to me. We talked about the neighborhood.

“Years ago,” he said, “this neighborhood was in bad shape. It was pretty run down. Lots of weirdos, lots of drugs and stuff. Lots of crime.”

“Was that the early 60s?” I asked.

“Yeah, about then. It looks great around here now, but, back then, your house was a whorehouse.”

“A whorehouse?”

“Yeah, a whorehouse.”

In the end

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RECENTLY, we posted (on our sidebar—at right) a story about a UCLA study that concludes that diets don't work. Well, no. It concludes, not just that they don't work, but that, typically, they cause dieters to gain weight in the end.

Well, not necessarily in the end. You know what I mean.

There are new indications that "sexual abstinence" programs don't work in the end either, although, in this case, I coulda told you that. I mean, DUH.

From Bob Park’s What’s New, 4/20/07:

SEX EDUCATION: ABSTINENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER. Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress. Nor did they have fewer sex partners, or wait longer to become sexually active.

The report, released late last Friday, comes just after the abrupt resignation of Dr. Eric Keroack, an anti-birth control zealot, appointed by Bush just four months ago to head the Office of Population Affairs of the Department of Health and Human Services. A non-board-certified gynecologist/obstetrician who operates six Christian anti-abortion centers in Massachusetts, Keroack had been notified of a state investigation into his private practice.

A rainy day in the OC.:

"Troubled" Students: Civil Rights and Campus Safety

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Flags at half-staff at IVC

Rebel Girl notes the invitation that landed moments ago (8:21 AM!) in her virtual mailbox:

President Roquemore would like you to know that today's regularly scheduled bi-monthly Thursday President's Forum will be devoted to a discussion on campus safety. You are invited to join the President and Interim Police Chief Jim Pyle as follows:

Thursday, April 19
1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Room A126

All are welcome.

She herself will not be able to attend the Forum due to her teaching schedule, but she is glad that folks on campus will be discussing this issue—and she hopes the discussion will continue in a manner that will allow fuller participation.

Indeed, inspired by this week's tragic events in Virginia as well as a series of events this academic year at our own campus, she and a colleague hope to propose a FLEX week session not just devoted to campus safety, but also district policy and civil rights.

Among the questions Rebel Girl would like answered are these:

What exactly should an instructor do when encountering an obviously "troubled" student? (In the past, R.G. has been counseled to show the student in question a copy of the IVC Student Code of Conduct. She must admit that the most troubled students don't seem impressed by this list of behaviors. Of course not, she thinks, they are "troubled" and showing them a list isn't really addressing the problem.)

Is there any way for instructors to be informed of these "troubled" students before they enter our classrooms? (She thinks not but wants to know for sure, nonetheless.)

When, if ever, does protecting the rights of the "troubled" student begin to impact the rights of students, faculty and staff?

—And so many others questions…but it's Thursday and Rebel Girl's plate remains full.

For more, check out these sources:

In Dr. Helen's blog (she is a forensic psychologist), she writes:

What I am amazed by is that in many school shootings, especially in universities, school authorities and others were told that there were problems or in some cases, the eventual killer had already made threats but no one did anything. The schools deny any responsibility at all in most of these cases, although, sometimes, they end up being sued for it. But what is money when people's lives are at stake? It's often the case that when the killer finally lashes out, the people who knew him aren't surprised—they'd been predicting something like this for weeks or months, but no action was taken.

In my opinion, if we have mentally unstable students who have made threats, have behavioral problems, etc. in universities and schools who do not hold themselves or the student accountable for their behavior, there is no other alternative than to extend the civil right to concealed carry to the potential innocent staff and students who may encounter the wrath of such a person. If universities and schools won't take responsibility—and they won't—then someone has to."

—and in today's New York Times, in the essay, "The Killer in the Lecture Hall", Barbara Oakley, professor of engineering at Oakland University, recalls her own run-in with a "troubled" student and the university's reaction, concluding:

"In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?"

—and in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Gary Pavela, an expert on "troubled" students, answers questions, including this one:

Q. In your view of the events in Blacksburg, what else do you see?

A. Looking at everything I’ve read in press accounts so far, this student was a very strange loner who had dark thoughts. So what can you do? You can try and make contact with the student, and I applaud the professor at Virginia Tech who apparently tried to do that. But the bottom line is that I don’t think there is anything close enough to what the federal law would require to have removed the student.

And, of course, let us know what you think, what you have experienced. Have you ever been frightened by a student? Felt threatened? Has a student ever threatened another student? What happened? Posting a comment is easy—and anonymous, if you wish.

Yesterday, in class, Rebel Girl noted that the half-mast flag, usually lowered in honor of dead leaders, was instead lowered in recognition of people just like us.

No red meat

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ASMANIAN DEVIL STILL AT LARGE. Knowledgeable persons tell me that Chancellor Mathur continues to be on a tear. Evidently, one source of Mathurian consternation involves a presentation, to be given at Monday’s meeting of the board of trustees, of faculty curriculum actions.

Huh?

Nobody I talk to seems able to explain Mathur’s concerns over this. As you know, the curriculum process is a faculty-run activity in which the Chancellor has no role; it occurs via public meetings governed by the Brown Act. Any account of the curriculum process or of recent curriculum actions will be as dry as dust and about as interesting.

No red meat.

Maybe all will become clear at Monday’s meeting of the board of trustees. Hope so.

MATHUR LYING AGAIN. The April Faculty Association (union) newsletter reports on upcoming contract negotiations. According to the newsletter,

During the Faculty Association’s spring Flex luncheon, SOCCCD Chancellor Raghu Mathur stood up during the meeting to state that the District is interested in quickly resolving negotiations over the new faculty contract, and in not repeating extended negotiations necessary to produce the last contract.

Yup, I was there and that’s what he said.

As you know, the chief reason for the “extended” nature of negotiations for the last contract was the involvement of Mathur, who, you’ll recall, had prefaced those negotiations with a similar statement of the district’s intention to foster smooth sailing.

Right. After years of Mathur-created logjammery, VC Gary Poertner replaced Mathur as negotiator. Things then quickly improved.

Chunk's niece & nephew

Guess what? For the new contract, Poertner won’t be negotiating for the district (or he won’t be lead negotiator).

The job has fallen to VC Bob King. You remember: he’s the guy who helped Mathur in his ill-fated raise ruse.

The FA newsletter goes on to say:

On April 19th, when the agenda for the April 23rd meeting of the SOCCCD Board of Trustees meeting is published...the Chancellor’s promise [to promote a quick resolution] will be proved false.

…The District’s initial proposal, to be distributed on Thursday, … certainly contradicts the Chancellor’s hopeful comments from the spring. … The District has chosen to present a provocative sunshine proposal, containing many proposed provisions apparently designed to anger the faculty, and start negotiations on a contentious footing.

The newsletter lists the proposal’s odious provisions. Included among them:

• requiring faculty members to work a set minimum number of days on campus;
• allowing in faculty evaluations the use of information not collected through the evaluation process;
• …proposing the development of a new, “comprehensive ‘No Strike’ provision”


RED MEAT FOR CONSPIRACY FANS? IVC full-time faculty have elected Wendy Gabriella for another term as President of the IVC Academic Senate. She received 71 of 71 votes cast. (About 30 faculty chose not to vote.)

A friend sent me this. Are they trying to tell me something?

“[The authoritarian] management style is considered Neanderthal by today's management theory and practice.”

—Howard Eisner

Thank you, National Rifle Association. Thank you, Congressman Gary Miller

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«Posted for RED EMMA»

GRADE for Congressman Gary G. Miller:

A

—from Project Vote Smart’s Congressional Rating Record on the National Rifle Association/ILA.

.RED IS TOLD by those who divine these techno-details that of those hundreds out there in the ‘sphere who read last week’s provocative and polemical (and satirical) Miller posting (Meeting with Congressman Miller), many maintain addresses in Congressional offices or party headquarters. No doubt some wiseacre will now go tell on Red Emma to his elected rep, blowing any chances at further meetings with Congressman Gasbag. And it’s a darn shame cuz I had my Confederate uniform all spit-polished and my Stars’n’Bars dry-cleaned.

.Of course, delivering more of the goods on Gary G. Miller (not to be confused with George Miller of the 7th district, who earns an F, god bless him, from the weapons industry) isn’t that hard and, as you will note, his connection to events at Virginia Tech yesterday are as easy, and therefore, ignored, as the nifty grade he receives re “gun rights” voting. But I am getting ahead of myself.

.On this bloody second day, Red Emma chooses his words especially carefully toward offering the respect and awe which violence demands, especially violence which chooses its targets so carefully, so deliberately, from a community of young people, children really, at an educational institution on a Monday morning in the United States. This is hard to do perhaps, when you are weeping, shaking, restless, disturbed—as I have been since Monday morning. There is the sound of gunshots in the distance, played over and over on the radio, interviews with a professor barricaded and a student weeping. I feel I know these people. Working at home yesterday, listening to NPR in the background, I waited, all too familiar with the scene, and The Script which accompanied it. Yet in spite of the dark curtain, or because of it, my mind, perhaps panicked or trying for self-defense, looked for meaning, and even more desperately than usual.

.As with past shootings, and the reports of them, I was anticipating The Script, admittedly important and necessary, of shock and horror and disbelief. Anger, by the way, is an important and justified emotion here, as I intimate below. Naturally, it is almost always missing from The Script.

.But we have been here before, so that one loses patience with The Script. The power of intellect offers us some reprieve from the grief and the horror. The effort to obscure, neglect, and ignore the singular and most obvious element of a problem, over and over and over again, through so many years and too many similar episodes, can’t, finally be a mistake or an oversight, can it friends? So, yes, there is the breaking horror, the death toll, the story of the killer. So, yes, the story about cell phones and possible police tardiness. So, yes, the caliber of the weapon and the banal profile of a sociopath and the call for healing and the stories of families and the investigation and, of course, the visit to the clergy and the social workers, the “God understands” pabulum and the President of the Nation offering prayer and sympathy and flags at half-mast and a proclamation—all while actually doing, of course, not a thing.

.And, no. No discussion of what is most obvious. No deviation of The Script, except to warn us not to deviate. On Paul Harvey’s dreadful nationally syndicated show this morning, the embrace of a singular and single adjective to describe the shooter, about whom already much was known: “Asian.” What the fuck was that about?

.On “McIntyre in the Morning,” on KABC, the insistence that the topic was not political or part of a discussion of public policy, that it must be relegated to the “religious and philosophical.” This after two callers suggested, as did many on the commercial media apparently, that more guns, as kind of a Cold War deterrence strategy, were the answer. (Teachers with guns, imagine that!)

.Or that we employ something called a “gun box,” a variety of Old West saloon check-em-at-the-door, cowboy protocol. Perhaps at Irvine Valley College this would involve a sign: Welcome to IVC, Home of the Lasers. Leave Your Weapons with the Guard.

.This is not a public policy question? Look no further than The White House, whose spokesman said so too, advising that now was not the right time to even mention gun control policy.

.An elected official I think, or perhaps a campus administrator at V. Tech, anticipated the likes of Red Emma, advising that this issue, which he identified quite clearly as gun control, would not be allowed to be used as a political “hobby horse,” both a clear threat and a diminution of a genuine health and public safety issue. Let’s stop here to practice a bit of what Noam Chomsky calls “intellectual self-defense.” Substitute, say, "clean water" for "gun control" and then follow McIntyre in the Morning’s advice and relegate water quality to the realm of the “religious and philosophical.” Most sane people would laugh out loud and point fingers and make faces and identify the utterer of this nonsense as behaving like somebody with a psychopathology right out of the DSM IV!

.And let’s consider the following: “Was there a specific prayer or verse that you shared?” a reporter asked the university’s campus cleric on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today. Really. And others asked questions about how the university responded and why the police didn’t shut down the campus, as if a campus police force could be held responsible for managing safety against the years and dollars and legal maneuvers and coercion of, yes, the paid professionals (very highly paid) who facilitated and enabled the killing spree, namely, the lobbying wing of the NRA (see above).

.It doesn’t end. The Script is flexible, irrelevant, nuts. Today KPCC, our local NPR affiliate promised, unbelievably, to examine whether there were better ways to communicate emergency situations. Talk about killing the messenger. A sane reporter might have telephoned the NRA or at least reviewed its murderous work. A reporter might have called an elected official who voted straight As for the gun lobby and posed a few whimsical questions. A reporter might have compared the number of gun deaths in the US to those in Canada or Japan or England.

.It ain’t gonna happen. WE need to do it for them, apparently. (For the record, Red Emma called KPCC and asked.)

.Indeed, all of us might simply pick up the phone and call the NRA’s toll-free number and ask for its Legislative Office and, when the nice, polite killer answers, thank this outfit of death for its tremendous and successful work in guaranteeing yesterday’s atrocity and those in the future. The number is 1-800-672-3888.

.Its site, by the way, offers the following unbelievable statement: “The National Rifle Association joins the entire country in expressing our deepest condolences to the families of Virginia Tech University and everyone else affected by this horrible tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families. We will not have further comment until all the facts are known.” (Red’s emphasis, natch.)

.I wonder what “facts” could possibly influence anybody’s decision not to immediately raise the topic of gun control and the bloody work of the gun lobby in the very first moments of news of a shooting of dozens of people? Perhaps the “fact” that the shooter had made his own gun out of old sardine cans, or that he had arrived from a faraway planet where killing people turned them into gods or that an apple pie which he had been eating was suddenly transformed into a Glock 19?

.A political culture which will not admit the most obvious and clear evidence into a discussion is a deeply psychopathological one. In America, now nutty as a loon, it is verboten to say the phrase “gun lobby” or to mention “National Rifle Association.” It is impolite and wrong to call the NRA and the other paid sponsors of perverse “gun rights” and so-called freedoms, the pimps and bandits who make money selling and selling and selling guns but are almost never (today, so far, on most electronic media) called on to account for the obvious, predictable, even necessary result of their awful labor. And it is rude and inappropriate to call one’s elected representatives and ask them not to score so high on the next report card from homicidal maniacs.

.Which is why we must all do it, immediately. To show ourselves and other that we are not insane, and to honor those murdered by the gun lobby and the NRA. To prove that we respect them, ourselves, and the human spirit, despite it all.

Andrew Tonkovich

Aftermath

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WHEN WE WALK into our classrooms and on our campuses today, we will think of Virginia Tech.

A sampling from the academic blogsophere:

University Diaries remembers Professor Liviu Librescu, seventy-six years old, who blocked the advance of the gunman into his classroom and saved his students' lives.

The Paper Chase is penned by an assistant professor at Virginia Tech.

Educated and Poor writes about one of her Methodist College colleagues whose son was among those killed.

Bardiac muses about the events--and about spring, cedar waxwings and humanity.

Berkeley: Academic Freedom and industry-sponsored research

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AS YOU KNOW, the trustees and chancellor of our benighted community college district are inclined to bypass faculty input when developing major projects. For instance, the SOCCCD’s big ATEP project in Tustin has been developed with virtually no faculty input, despite its alleged focus on instructional programs.

At UC Berkeley, many faculty members have been hopping mad about a decision, announced earlier this year, to accept a $500 million “biofuels research deal” with the oil company BP, despite a failure to bring the campus’ faculty into the discussion.

In this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle: A divided UC faculty to debate BP deal:

UC Berkeley faculty members will debate academic freedom and industry-sponsored research this week at a meeting on the $500 million BP biofuels research deal announced earlier this year.

The oil company's funding of a proposed Energy Biosciences Institute to study alternatives to environmentally damaging petroleum-based fuels has created sharp divisions among faculty members over how the deal was designed and its impact on the university.

A group that includes faculty members from the humanities and environmental science, policy and management is urging Chancellor Robert Birgeneau to delay signing a contract that would finalize the partnership with BP. They will ask the Academic Senate on Thursday to support a resolution calling for the delay as well as for a formal review of the partnership by the full academic community, something that was not done before the deal was disclosed two months ago.

...The debate will take place at Thursday's special meeting of the Academic Senate….

In February, a consortium led by UC Berkeley won a competition to host BP's Energy Biosciences Institute. In a bid to dramatically lower consumption of gasoline and counter global warming, the institute will develop new, carbon-neutral sources of ethanol and a new generation of high-tech biofuels.

…George Breslauer, UC Berkeley's executive vice chancellor and provost, said the institute has widespread support among faculty because it will make the campus a world leader in combatting global warming….