As you know, Chancellor
Raghu P. Mathur makes it a practice to occasionally meet with each of the Schools and Divisions of Saddleback and Irvine Valley colleges. He does this, one might suppose, to establish relationships and to start dialogues.
That's a bad idea. That's because Raghu is the sort of “leader” who is incapable of dealing openly and honestly with people. Working with Raghu means giving him what he wants. And, ultimately, he wants respect, flattery, obeisance. Give ‘im that, and you can do business. Otherwise,
forgetaboutit.Today, Mathur met with Irvine Valley College’s School of
Humanities and Languages. It was a mildly unpleasant meeting. Faculty—there were maybe twenty—were mostly silent, reserved, unhappy to be there.
The only discussion topic was an old complaint. Somehow, despite our School’s consistent high performance, plans to build a Humanities Building or just to provide dedicated classroom space seem always to disappear or to be pushed down the priority list.
Years ago, Raghu visited our School, and some faculty made the mistake of “dialoguing” with him about this issue. His face lit up. He immediately took advantage of the situation. “Ah,” he thought. “They want something!” Suddenly, it seemed, Raghu was our friend. He would advocate for us.
We never heard from him again. That was probably because we didn’t immediately sing his praises.
We didn’t understand the deal.
Today, in the course of the latest discussion of this issue, Raghu suggested—more than once—that a reason that H&L isn’t slated for a new building is that its faculty do not “participate” in the process.
I heard this as,
“It’s your own damn fault you don't have enough classrooms to teach in.” Raghu was wagging his finger at us. He loves to wag that finger--especially at
us, his most vocal and persistent critics.
Naturally, some of us were pissed. One instructor got up and left the room.
If Raghu’s word “participate” were to refer to
sharing in the work of making IVC a better college, then no one would suggest that H&L does not “participate.”
In Raghu-world, “participate” is code. It means:
lobby me. Tell me what you can do for me.I sat there thinking that it would be lovely to work in a district where decisions about the construction of new facilities and buildings would be based on need and effectiveness and bang-for-buck. In such a district, probably, the School of H&L would have had its own building long ago.
It may well be that our School would be wise to pursue a building
aggressively—not with Raghu, but within the processes of the college. That means competing for attention, ultimately, and that sucks, but I guess we can live with that.
But I can’t see any of us ever working with Raghu P. Mathur. We're just not corrupt enough.
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