Patti Smith rules; Captain Adjunct remembers; Mathur contributes

• PATTI FLICK
In this morning's New York Times, Manohla Dargis reviews—and thoroughly enjoys—a new film about the great Patti Smith: Patti Smith: Dream of Life.

Sounds like a must-see!

• GOLDEN AGE
Meanwhile, over at the OC Register’s College Life blog (Summer Reading (1971)), Captain Adjunct, aka Red Emma, aka Andrew Tonkovich reminisces about childhood trips to the public library, endless entertaining explorations of hagiography—all against a backdrop of bombs dropped on kids far away. And yet, says the Captain, it was the Golden Age of public education.

• MATHUR'S POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS.
Today, I came across a record of Chancellor Raghu Mathur’s political contributions. As you know, some observers object to the "politicization" of the SOCCCD by Mathur and the Board. For instance, our board, led by Don Wagner, acted to cease the colleges' memberships in the American Library Association, since, in their judgment, the organization is a bunch of "liberal busybodies." A few years ago, trustee Tom Fuentes lead the board in denying approval of a study abroad trip to Spain on the grounds that Spain had "abandoned" our soldiers by pulling its troops out of Iraq. (The action was later reversed, over Fuentes and Wagner's objections.)

It is commonly supposed that chancellors should advise trustees and steer them clear of unnecessary controversy and politics. Despite his extraordinary $300K salary, Mathur does not lead the board at all, repeatedly standing by mute as the board stirs up anger and conflict. Further, he has allowed the board to conduct itself in a manner that has now threatened the continued accreditation of our two colleges.

If these trustees were genuinely "fiscally conservative," they'd fire Mathur's ass for the lousy job he's done all these years. No doubt, urged on by so-called "conservative" Tom Fuentes, they'll give him a raise instead.

Evidently, Mathur's not given much political money lately. According to NewsMeat, in April of 2006, the fellow gave $500 to Bill Morrow (House). He did the same the previous December.

Back in December of 1991, he gave $250 to Senate candidate John F. Seymour.

Naturally, both candidates are Republicans. Mathur's a Republican. All of the trustees are Republicans. Their pal Mike Carona—they love to bring that guy around—is a Republican too. Wall-to-wall Republicans. Zero clue.

Someone explain why this isn’t evidence that John McCain is addled?

Freakin' Sturgis?

Is he, well, addled?

Sometimes, he seems unable to utter sentences; then, when he finally gets them out, they make no sense: “My friends, we need a Commander in Chief who’ll (end?) the war in Iraq. We’ll win it the right way, and that’s by winning it.”

We'll win it by winning it. That’s just great.

(The first 2 minutes):



Do you know what this Sturgis motorcycle thing is like? Do you have any idea?

Cindy should do what? What’s the matter with the poor fellow?

(The first minute and a half):



We've experienced nearly 8 years of the ignorant LOUT presidency. Please don't tell me that we're gonna exchange that for a (possibly) addled OLD COOT presidency!?

Lie detector

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind is making the rounds, promoting his new book, The Way of the World. In it, among other things, he describes how a desperate Bush administration manufactured evidence to support its worrisome theses about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

According to the A.P. (White House denies fake Iraq-al-Qaida link letter),

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from [director of Iraqi intelligence] Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001," Suskind wrote. "It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al-Qaida, something the vice president's office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link."
…
Denying the report, White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said, "The notion that the White House directed anyone to forge a letter from Habbush to Saddam Hussein is absurd."

Absurd? Don't think so.

Here's Suskind on the Today show earlier this morning:

Red County whistles in the dark

TODAY, on the popular Red County (OC) blog, Tyler H (one of RC’s stable of conservative bloggers) reports on the upcoming SOCCCD trustee races.

According to Tyler, “the Tom Fuentes' [sic] led majority seems well-positioned to deliver another victory this year.” He is referring, I suppose, to the block comprising Fuentes, Don Wagner, John Williams—and Dave Lang.

No doubt Don Wagner, the president of the board, will be pleased to hear that Tom is the leader.

C’mon Don. Don’t that piss you off? Not even a little?

Tyler refers to “Tom Fuentes ally and Area #1 Trustee David Lang.” It pleases me to have Lang’s sympathies stated so clearly and publicly. For many years, Lang had strong faculty support (especially at Irvine Valley College), owing to his distaste for board majority toady (President, then Chancellor) Raghu P. Mathur. But then visions of "OC Treasurer" danced in Dave's head—no doubt he figured that Fuentes would be helpful there—and so he suddenly became Mathur's big supporter. Why? Cuz Fuentes just loves Mathur. Why? Cuz Mathur will do anything Fuentes tells him to do.

Lang is the Benedict Arnold of the SOCCCD. We’ll never forget you, Dave.

Tyler thinks that, judging by Lang’s challenger’s (viz., Carolyn Inmon’s) recent political history, he is likely to hold onto his seat.

Incumbent Bill Jay (area 3: Aliso Viejo, Laguna Beach and Dana Point) is seeking reelection. According to Tyler, he faces real estate investor Randall Johnson. Tyler tags Jay as the enemy, cuz he's a unionist:

Bill Jay has not been supportive of Tom Fuente's [sic] efforts to maintain fiscal sanity and is regarded as a "Union Guy", so it is unsurprising that the pro-Faculty website Save the socccd is supporting Bill Jay. Randell Johnson is a new face.

Fiscal sanity? Like our huge problem complying with the 50% law, caused by Fuentes’ man Mathur? Like the ATEP black hole, promoted by Fuentes' man Mathur?

And what about Accredular sanity? Thanks to the Fuentes board and their toady Mathur, for the first time in the district's history, its two colleges face the possibility of losing their accreditation (in January). The Accreds are not impressed with endless trustee micromanagement and the pall of despair created mostly by the ruthless and conniving Mathur.

BTW: gosh, Tyler, thanks for the mention. I didn’t think anybody read that little website (Save the SOCCCD). As soon as I created it several months ago, I couldn’t get anybody in the union leadership to visit it (I wanted feedback so that it would be OK with the PAC). I pretty much had to abandon it.

Well, at least this Tyler fella reads it.

Tyler seems wary of trustee John Williams, who is the incumbent in area 7 (Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita):

Area 7 … is the most curious race. Sixteen-year incumbent John Williams faces "Retired Educator" Carl Christensen. Tom Fuentes ally … Don Wagner considers John Williams a solid Republican, a fiscal conservative, and a helpful ally on the board. However the Save the SOCCCD website is also currently endorsing John Williams. Perhaps Carl Christensen is so focused on his favorite issue (he is a history teacher who recently spoke to the board about the need for more history classes) that he hasn't noticed that both opposing factions are supporting his opponent?

••••

On Friday, Red County’s Jubal (aka Matt Cunningham) posted about Tom Fuentes’ race against Bob Bliss (Tom Fuentes' Community College Re-Election Campaign Off To Powerful Start).

Fuentes, said Jubal, is “off to a powerful start” in his re-election efforts. The union, says the Jube, “might as well save their money, because Tom Fuentes will run over Bliss like a freight train.”

How come?

Well, first, Fuentes is the incumbent. Second, Fuentes has made lots of friends over the years, and they’ll pony up some big money. Then there’s Tom’s impressive list of endorsements (Jubal presents a list of 81—the usual suspects).

Jubal speculates that this is a case of a union leadership supporting candidates it knows will lose—to placate the rank and file.

Well, we’ll just see about that.

P.S.: At Red County, I've commented on both the Tyler and Jubal posts, indicating to each writer the error of his ways! I do hope they'll try to respond. Probably not. We're small potatoes.

Indications of a willingness to kick academic butt

Recently, I attended a meeting in which faculty and others discussed Saddleback College’s accreditation difficulty. The Accreds had sent the college a letter in February essentially requiring the college to “address” long-standing recommendations (in a report due Oct. 15)—or else.

Clearly, one reason the Accreds’ latest threat has not inspired much reaction in some is the conviction that the Accreds are all bark and no bite. Given their history, that view is understandable. The SOCCCD’s two colleges have been dinged for trustee micromanagement and a “plague of despair” for years. (Hell, they were carping about that ten years ago!) We’re still living under such dingage. And we’re still accredited.

But things change. At the meeting, I explained the special circumstances that we are now in: some time ago, the Dept. of Education spanked the Accrediting agency (ACCJC/WASC) hard for failing to enforce its own rules—for being namby-pamby. Prima facie, this gives the Accreds a motive to finally kick some academic butt.

It’s a bit more complex than that—we’ve reported on the details here on this blog for quite some time—but, essentially, we’d be taking a hell of a chance ignoring or discounting the Accred’s threat to pull the colleges' tickets. (Both of our colleges got such letters.)

Well now hear this. Our old pal Jeff Gottlieb over at the Times is reporting on some Accred butt-kickage in LA (Los Angeles Southwest College is put on probation).

According to Jeff, “Los Angeles Southwest College has been placed on probation by the regional accrediting agency, an action local college officials call unwarranted.”

Here’s the kicker. The president of Southwest asserts that “It's completely unprecedented to put a college on probation where there was no previous indication the college was in trouble….”

He notes, reports Jeff, that “probation was primarily given to colleges that failed to respond to accreditors' recommendations from previous visits.” That’s not Southwest’s situation.

So, here’s evidence that things have changed in Accredville re butt-kickage. Take note.

Another fine example of Mathur's leadership

I KEEP trying to ignore it, but no one will let me.

Many citizens of our little district community were amazed last Thursday when Chancellor Raghu Mathur spammed us with Governor Schwarzenegger’s infamous executive order in response to the state budget impasse. You know the one. According to the AP:

Schwarzenegger's order…eliminated 10,300 seasonal, contract and part-time positions. It also ordered that up to 200,000 permanent, full-time state workers will receive the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour in their paychecks until the budget is passed. (Associated Press.)

The order included a “request” that, among others, state college employees be included in the action:

IT IS FURTHER REQUESTED that other entities of State government not under my direct executive authority, including … the University of California, the California State University, [and] California Community Colleges … assist in the implementation of this Order and implement similar mitigation measures that will help to preserve the State’s cash supply during this budget impasse.

Naturally, that line was in the email Mathur sent to district employees. Mathur offered no explanation of what the Governor's order means for our district and its employees. He allowed us to think that, apparently, we too would be living on minimum wage. Good grief!

Then, 77 minutes later, came a second Mathur missive, which said:

We would like to offer clarification of the Governor’s executive order to address our state’s budget crisis. This information was forwarded to inform employees of the dire nature of the crisis and how it will affect some state employees.

Please be assured that employees of the South Orange County Community College District will receive their payroll checks. There are no plans to terminate temporary/hourly employees at this time.

Let us extend our support during this difficult period to the families affected by the Governorʼs executive order.

Raghu P. Mathur, Ed.D
Chancellor

Oh. So he forwarded the Governor’s order to “inform” us of the “dire nature of the crisis and how it will affect some state employees.” I guess he figured we wouldn’t understand the seriousness of the situation unless we went through 77 minutes of supposing that it would affect us directly.

Thanks, dad. You sure are tough on us kids. In fact, you’re solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

But that’s because you care.

Sam Kinison in "Back to School": he really seems to care


ADMINISTRATORS WANT GREATER FACULTY ROLE IN GOVERNANCE
This morning’s Inside Higher Ed reports on a national survey of college administrators:

A majority (60 percent) believe that faculty members should play a bigger role in running campuses, with most of the rest happy with the status quo and only a few believing that professors should play less of a role. But while seeking more of a faculty role, the administrators share a highly critical view of faculty knowledge and perspective when it comes to campus decision making, with a broad consensus finding professors focused far too much on their own issues or departmental issues, and lacking either the knowledge or perspective to think about institutions as a whole and to promote change.

Sounds about right.

• I WRITE, THEREFORE I POLUTE.
Just in case you required proof that the New York Times' resident postmodern academic curmudgeon, Stanley Fish, is an asshole, read his latest piece: I Am, Therefore I Pollute. Read the reader comments too.

Oh great. California cancer chips.

EXPENSIVE BUT OFTEN WORTHLESS DIPLOMAS.

Friday, our pal Marla Jo Fisher wrote about the many graduates of local vocational schools who find that their diplomas, though costly, profiteth them nothing (Students wanted jobs, but got debt instead).

Marla informs us that “Each year, some 400,000 students are enrolled in the state's for-profit schools. At last count, 160 of such schools were operating in Orange County.”

160!

WHITE PUNK ON DOPE.

This morning’s New York Times discusses the saga of the making of “What We Do Is Secret,” a movie about the 70’s Hollywood punk band The Germs (A Phoenix of a Film Exhumes a Punk Prince).

Germs' singer Darby Crash committed suicide in 1980, all according to plan:

In 1975, at the age of 17, he devised a five-year plan for achieving immortality: form a band, collect a following, release one album, then commit suicide. … On the night of Dec. 7, 1980, Crash injected a lethal dose of heroin and lay down in his leather jacket.

It was a good plan. Unfortunately, John Lennon died the next day and so, today, only fans of punk remember the Darbster.

WHITE PUNK ON OED.

Also in today’s Times—a terrific review of a book that recounts author Ammon Shea's reading of the entire Oxford English Dictionary (From A to Zyxt):

Shea is well equipped for the task he has set himself. He owns about a thousand dictionaries, which he keeps on shelves in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Alix, who teaches psychology courses at Barnard. Some of the dictionaries he bought from a book dealer named Madeline, who lives in a loft in Lower Manhattan. Madeline owns 20,000 dictionaries. She taught Shea, he says, “the ineffable joy that can be had in pursuing the absurd.”

Amazingly, Shea’s word odyssey sounds interesting. The book is divided into chapters, each one a letter in the dictionary, Chapter A to Chapter Z:

Months in, Shea arrives—back-aching, crabby, page-blind—at Chapter N. “Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word glove. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

I recall playing “Boggle,” a word game, with my brother Ray. I claimed the word “four” (pronounced, it seems, to rhyme with “Bauer”). Ray looked at me. “That’s not a word,” he declared. I wasn't sure. We looked it up in a dictionary.

Soon, we burst out laughing. The Bauers don't need no stinkin' dictionary reading marathon to manage to look at an utterly familiar word and to not recognize it!

YOU SAY "POTATO," I SAY "ACRYLAMIDE".

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle informs us that “Frito-Lay and two other potato chip companies have agreed to reduce the levels of a cancer-causing chemical in their products in a settlement of a state lawsuit….” Or so said California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

Evidently, the culprit is something called acrylamide. The stuff is “used industrially for treating sewage….” It is present in lots of fried potato products:

Besides Frito-Lay, which sells most of the potato chips in California, the other companies agreeing to reduce acrylamide levels are Kettle Foods, maker of Kettle Chips, and Lance Inc., maker of Cape Cod Chips, Brown's office said. In another settlement last week, Heinz agreed to cut in half the acrylamide levels in Ore-Ida frozen french fries and tater tots and pay $600,000 in penalties and costs, the state said. … Procter & Gamble agreed in January to reduce acrylamide by 50 percent in Pringles potato chips. McDonald's, KFC, Wendy's and Burger King agreed last year to post warnings about acrylamide in chips and fries.

Nobody knew it was in these chips until a few years ago.

Good grief.

INFAMOUS SERBIAN FUGITIVE PRACTICED ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE.

On Friday, physicist Bob Park noted that mass murderer Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested after 13 years.

How, Bob asks, could the fellow support himself in hiding all this time? Says Bob,

"No problem. He practiced alternative medicine, which requires little more than a lack of scruples. He was fully qualified."

TUBES: "White Punks On Dope" (circa 1977)