The district ponies up more than $3,000 for John Williams' six nights at hotels in Palm Springs & Tampa

Yesterday, I noted two or three interesting items agendized for Friday afternoon’s meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees (See agenda--a large pdf file). Item 6.6 is the Chancellor’s recommendation that the trustees’ monthly stipend be nearly doubled, from $400 to $750 a month.

Tsk, tsk.

Item 7.4 is a report of trustee expenses. As I explained yesterday, trustee John Williams stands out among trustees with regard to expenses. Whereas trustees Fuentes, Padberg, Wagner, Lang, and Jay spent nothing on conferences (transportation, lodging, etc.) and trustee Milchiker spent $4,523.00, trustee Williams spent $15,555.00.


The details of Williams’ conference expenses are occasionally interesting. Williams attended 9 “conferences." The interesting stuff is in red.

1. CCL CONVENTION. In November of 2007, Williams attended the Community College League’s annual convention in San Jose. His lodging (at the Fairmont) cost $540.20. It was a three-day convention.

2. CCFA CONFERENCE. Williams next attended January’s 4-day Community Colleges Futures Assembly conference in Orlando, FL. His stay there cost the district $956.20, which makes sense, I suppose, if he stayed for the entire conference. I have no idea. (I'm told that Williams has a brother in Florida.)

His car rental cost the district $327.87.

3. DINNER MEETING. In February, Williams attended some sort of dinner meeting in Irvine, which cost the district nothing beyond registration.

4. CHRONICLE TECHO FORUM. Late in February, Williams attended the Chronicle Technology Forum, a three day conference (Feb. 24-26, 2008) at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay (in Tampa, FL).

This cost the district $1,540.00 for lodging.

How do you spend $1,540.00 on three nights at the Grand Hyatt, where rooms (per the event) go for $215/night?

His car rental cost the district $573.01.

5. EDUCAUSE. Williams next attended Educause’s Fifth Annual Western Regional Conference, March 31–April 2, 2008 (InterContinental Mark Hopkins, San Francisco). It is hard to read, but the chart seems to say that Williams’ stay cost the district $885.32. As far as I can tell, the rooms cost $225/day. That’s $675 for three days. Add $94 for tax, and you’ve got $769.50. Hmmm.

6. CCLC CAPITOL DAY #1. In April, Williams attended CCLC’s Capitol Day in Sacramento, which is described as a “one-day” event. Somehow, “lodging” cost the district $782.75.

How do you spend $782.75 on one night at a hotel in freakin' Sacramento?

7. CCLC TRUSTEES CONFERENCE. Next, in May, Williams headed for Palm Springs for the CCLC’s Annual Trustees Conference, a three-day event. Lodging was at the Hotel Zoso, where rates seem to run from $165-249/night.

Nevertheless, Williams cost the district $1,531.70 for “lodging.” How is that possible?

8. DINNER MEETING. Next (May 7), Williams went to another low-cost local event.

9. CCL CAPITAL DAY #2. Then it was back to another “one-day” CCL “Capitol Day” event. This time, lodging was $605.56.

Seems mighty steep for one night.

District data:
See board agenda; large pdf file

Trustees set to nearly double their monthly stipend

I was perusing the agenda for Friday's meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees, and I noticed agenda item 6.6.

Essentially, the board will consider increasing trustee pay from $4,800 (per year) to $9,000. (That is the proposed change. It is presented as an increase in monthly pay from $400 to $750, but do the math.)

You can see for yourself: p. 223 of the agenda (a mammoth pdf file).

Predictably enough, trustees have made a point of noisily empathizing with the plight of the poor student and taxpayer during these difficult financial times. For instance, both student government entities were recently told to go back to the drawing board after they presented their budgets—trustees complained that at times like these student government should be giving back more to students, keeping less, etc. They did a lot of "tsk, tsk, tsking."


So what’s with this nearly doubling of their own pay? At the very least, it's bad timing.

THEY'RE PAID FOR NON-ATTENDANCE:

If you pay attention to board agendas, then you will know that the SOCCCD board routinely votes to grant pay to trustees who miss meetings, as per board policy 164 (they've got to take a special vote for this). Nobody's ever made a stink about that. Not sure why. (See item 5.10 of Friday's agenda.)

JOHN WILLIAMS COST THE DISTRICT $38,000

While we’re on the subject of money and trustees, I should mention agenda item 7.4 of Friday's meeting. It is a report, requested by trustee Nancy Padberg, on trustee expenses.

Trustee John Williams, of course, isn't only a trustee: by day, he is our county’s Public Administrator, and, for a while, Padberg was one of his underlings. You'll recall that he fired her two or three years ago.

Especially since her firing, Padberg has attempted to lay bare Williams' bold junketeering ways—and his habit of getting the district to pay for trips to Orlando, where his brother lives, I’m told. (Conveniently, Orlando is the site of some trustee "conferences," although, as Nancy has noted, similar conferences occur close to home. Williams doesn’t seem interested in those.)

If you go to page 303 of the agenda (See that enormous pdf file), you'll find a breakdown of trustee expenses over the last year. Five of the trustees hover around $23,000, although Milchiker is at $27,000.

John Williams is the real standout: $38,000.

The district spends $7k a year just for lodging for the fellow.

If you look at p. 304 of the agenda, you'll find that two of the conferences that Williams has attended (within the last year) have been in Florida. One was in Palm Springs.

His lodging bill there was about $1500. Seems kinda high to me.

You gotta love these fiscal conservatives.

SEE ALSO:

• Padberg: closing in on “junket” abuse? (Feb. 7, 2006)
• WHAT'S WITH TRUSTEE PADBERG? (Nov. 6, 2005)

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: haiku!

Inspired by your recent responses, Rebel Girl has crafted some seasonal haiku to mark the end of the semester.

She suggests you do the same.

It's so easy and satisfying: 5 syllables,7 syllables, 5 syllables - plus some kind of kigo or reference to the season or nature.

She is still working on several featuring book orders, requests for syllabi, extra credit and the xerox machine.

Help her out!

* * *

Winter has come near
Another project was due
And so I missed class

* * *

Where is your office?
Students wander halls
Late papers in hand

* * *

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "Contained in this classroom/is a microcosm of human existence"

~
Today's poem is by Tom Wayman, from his book, The Astonishing Weight of the Dead.

Did I Miss Anything

Question frequently asked by
students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren't here

Dropping the F-bomb on students

The OC Reg recently reported that gun sales are way up in Orange County. How come? The reporter asked the gun-mongers at The Grant Boys in Costa Mesa and Army-Navy in Orange, and those guys claimed that their customers are afraid. They fear that President Obama will take away their right to bear arms. They fear “civil unrest” when the recession shifts to a depression.

So, naturally, they’re arming themselves.

As you know, there are lots of stupid people in the world, and we’ve got more than our share of ‘em right here in Orange County, which explains a lot. OC is, of course, a seriously red county, and so, during the recent presidential race, lots of OC’s gente estúpida embraced the notion that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.A. (There’s an OC preacher who’s suing somebody over that.) Then there’s the notion that Obama is a Muslim, and a socialist, and a terrorist.

I seem to recall that Huey Long once got people riled up against a political opponent when he accused the guy of living in “open celibacy” with his sister. Hell, I’m living that way right now. And I’m sick and tired of it, too.

Most stupid people aren’t literally stupid, of course. Mostly, they’re ignorant and willing to allow demagogues to fill the empty spaces in their heads with a simplistic and attractive worldview, no questions asked. So they’re sheep, not dodo birds, basically.

Stupid People may be simpletons, but they're also complex, ‘cause they’re simultaneously trusting and cynical. They have a child-like faith in their noisy demagogues—who instill in them paranoia and skepticism regarding everything excepting the Official Demagoguery. So they sound as hard-bitten and cynical as Dr. House, even though they’re actually as naïve and trusting as Dr. Cameron.

You can’t reason with these people. They may as well be literally stupid, for all that you can achieve arguing with them. That’s routinely revealed in the comments to this blog. Have you noticed?

Winston Churchill famously opined that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." The Stupid People demographic is always pretty large, and so it’s easy to see where Winnie was coming from. Some days, I think that democracy is the worst form of government period.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, now does it? People can avoid sheep-like behavior and think competently on their own (this entails a rejection of skepticism)—if you educate ‘em properly. Still, I don’t see how we’re ever gonna make much progress when society is so big and messy. Modifying the thinking and habits of a huge, heterogeneous population is difficult, maybe impossible.

If you’re like me, you are continually stunned by how hard it is to get even the simplest ideas across to our large population. “You can’t get AIDS from a doorknob.” —Remember that one? It took forever getting the doorknob idea across.

Every once in a while, I discuss the state of education in the U.S. with my students. That state is dismal, of course, and the signs and proof of abject dismaltude are everywhere. But when I clue my students in on this (I start by reading from the opening of "A Nation at Risk"), many of them look surprised. Or they think I’m just telling liberal lies.

How can that be? Don’t they read the paper or watch the Daily Show?

I don’t know what’s the matter with me. If anybody should be accustomed to Stupid People behavior, it should be me, ‘cause I’m a teacher, and a teacher is someone who makes a BIG FREAKIN’ POINT of explaining to students what they are required to do, who repeats that info endlessly, and who, at the end of the semester, is invariably overwhelmed by students who explain that they had no idea that they were required to do the writing assignments.


I’m in the thick of that right now. “You had to get 6 points out of 16 in the writing assignments. That's all. Just 6. You got 2. So you’re getting an F. That’s all there is to it.”

I hate having to say that.

At the start of each semester, I explain that, in a few months, I’m gonna be saying those very words to several of the students in the room. They all smile. “Not me, boy,” they think. So I say, “Yeah, some of you are thinking, ‘not me, boy.’ But it’s gonna be you, unless you listen to me now!”

They don’t listen. I say, “No really. I don’t want to give anybody an F, believe me. But look at things from my perspective. I’ve gotta do things to motivate you guys to do the work for the course, and this is one of those things. And if I tell you now that you’ll get an F if you don’t do the assignments, and I don’t actually give those Fs, then nobody will believe me in the future!”

Some students stare back at me like fish.

So I show ‘em a clip from Dr. Strangelove, when the good doctor explains the concept of deterrence and the idea behind the Doomsday Device: it’s “simple to understand... credible and convincing," says Herr Doktor Merkwürdigliebe.

I then explain that, when students fail to do the absolute minimum amount of work, they’ve gotta face consequences. “I can’t not mete out the promised consequences,” I plead.

Near as I can tell, none of this makes much of a difference. At the end of the semester, I’ve gotta drop the big one all over the place.

I’m thinking about escalating. Maybe I should pin notes to students’ shirts, explaining the requirements, the consequences of blowing those requirements off, in that stupid note, which, no doubt, will be read by no one.

Or maybe I should write warning tattoos, in reverse, on their foreheads. "Do the goddam assignments!"

It’s depressing. And, at the end of the semester, the predictable catastrophe surprises and amazes me anew, even though I’ve been here, in this bombardier’s station, dropping these bombs, a hundred times.

Yeah, I’m stupid too.

See Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa (aka 365,000 unnecessary deaths caused by a stupid idea)

P.S.: Gosh, I was driving earlier today and, on the radio, I heard a song from my youth. Somehow, it was devastating. I nearly had a panic attack. I'm not so hard-bitten myself, you know.

THE SEEKERS ~ "I know I'll never find another you"


Dr. Strangelove explains:

You know you're in Orange County when...

Pow! Bam! Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a new gun!:

Business is booming at gun shops around Orange County. “The first two weeks of November have been extraordinary,” says Randy Garell of The Grant Boys in Costa Mesa. “Sales are running about 60 percent over last November.” … “The reason I keep hearing is that people are concerned that their rights will be taken away,” says Tony Alvarez, gun department manager of the Army-Navy Store in Orange. … “We’re selling everything we can get our hands on,” says the Grant Boys’ Garell. “The other day, a husband and wife came in to buy Christmas presents. He bought a gun for her and she bought one for him.” There’s another fear at play, too: Fear that if recession turns to depression, civil unrest may follow…. (OC Register, yesterday.)

Rancho Rinconada de Los Gatos

Tiger Ann, pining after her mom, who returns in the morning.

Prowling this morning.

IVC's recent veterans' ceremony

Ditto.

PAC at left, Beefsteak at right, Vet's tents in middle.

My bro and Catherine.

Natalie.