The Chancellor's Opening Session

The session—held this morning in Saddleback College's cavernous McKinney Theater—started with a few numbers by the college's Vocal Jazz Ensemble. These kids looked great and sounded great, too. I was impressed.

As usual, the Prince of Darkness (aka Tom Fuentes) served as the MC. He ended the session by playing a lugubrious video about returning vets that seemed to suggest that only vets are entitled to complain about anything, since they have been through hell and the rest of us are like pigs in clover.

Yeah, many vets have been through hell. 

And exactly why is that, Mr. GOP?

Next time, I'd like to see a video that identifies the irresponsible, deceptive and stupid people who cause unnecessary and disastrous wars.

The Chancellor's remarks amounted to sustained finger-wagging. Evidently, Raghu thinks that, somehow, none of us is aware that times are tough and that people are losing their homes, their jobs. 

Meanwhile, the people in the auditorium—instructors mostly—have jobs, good ones. "We need to count our blessings," said Raghu repeatedly.

We are undergoing a "major paradigm shift," said the illiterate Chancellor who has no clue where that phrase comes from but who nevertheless lectures us with it.

The "basic aid bubble" that we are living in will burst, fumed the Gooster. But some of us are living in denial about that, he said. He seemed to point his stubby finger at everyone, wagging it scoldingly. He lectured us about the politics of economic meltdowns. He demanded the emergence of new leadership, in California and in our colleges.

He once again mentioned Thomas Friedman's book, "The World is Flat." 

I do believe it is the only book the fellow owns.

Yes, he really did this grade school thing with the word diversity. I especially like what he did with the letter S: "skin."

The T and Y stood for "turpitude" and "yuckiness," as I recall.

The Chancellor imagines that the value of tolerance obliges one to value the incompetent, the despotic, and the vainglorious. 

No.

The benighted fellow confuses a rejection of his dark character and deeds with a rejection of him owing to his ethnicity. Again, no. Dissenters expect and demand decency. And so we oppose the conniving and unscrupulous Mathur. It's simple.

As you know, it wouldn't be a Chancellor's Opening session without one of Raghu's inane quotations. Read this one. Unfuckingbelievable. (See The Dash.)

Imagine a discussion of a passage from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics or Kant's 2nd Critique. Maybe something about respect for others.

But no. Instead, we get New Age flatulence and paternalistic admonitions.

The Vice Chancellor entertained us mightily with a display of musicianship and technical whiz-bangery. His brief performance really was fun.

Later, he showed us a brief video of images of the 60s mostly—accompanied by Dylan's "The Times They are A-Changin'".

I think the point was that we Old Fogies have got to get on board with this Distance Ed thing, 'cause that's just the way it is, like it or not. 

Yeah, that was the gist of it.

Keynote speaker Amanda Cox-Otto was very entertaining. Evidently, she was there to inform us that we are old and tired and need to get with the program or else get the hell out of the way. Guess so.

She gets points, though, for using the word "frickin'."

I'm not sure, but I think the theme of today's session was "Arbeit macht Frei." Or maybe: "be grateful you have a job and so don't be complaining about anything, especially not about your pay, you fucking, doddering idiots, you."

It was all pretty inspiring.

THE UNION LUNCHEON

The union (Faculty Association) luncheon was well attended.

Union Prez Lee H is usually a very effective speaker. This time, he didn't seem prepared. "He kinda sucks at this, doesn't he?" said someone at the next table.

I guess some of the old boys from IVC took Cox-Otto's "old and doddering" malarkey to heart, judging by their demeanor and drool. Wendy, who is neither old nor doddering, was amused.

Lee introduced this guy, some bigwig. For some reason, the fellow chose to break into a musical theater number. Not sure why. He was good, though.

Even Saddleback College's president seemed to get caught up in the wackiness. He grabbed those flowers and stuck 'em between his teeth. Well, no, but he was thinkin' about it.

The main event, I guess, was a brief presentation by the president of CTA, who did a decent job saying the usual things. "Blah, blah, blah," mostly. He announced that "The era of the apathetic voter has come to an end." He's got tickets to the Inauguration, and he's plenty proud of it.

Alannah asked him a good question. Something about what's gonna happen now to the Dept. of Education. "Blah blah blah," he said.

Spotted some old faces around the room. 

Lewis was on hand to talk about the contract. 

I hear that, despite Mathur and Fuentes' best efforts to screw things up, we still have enough trustee votes for approval of the new contract. Whew!

Another fine mess

We read in today’s OC Reg that Education Alliance-backed “reform” trustees, who now control the Capistrano Unified School District board, are making quite a mess of things. They've even inspired talk of a "recall."  

(Several SOCCCD trustees have ties to EA. See Bad Bully Boards on the March.)

Capistrano district superintendent put on leave

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO – Embattled Capistrano Unified Superintendent A. Woodrow Carter was placed on paid administrative leave late Tuesday, angering dozens of his supporters who brandished homemade “recall signs” while threatening to oust trustees.

School board President Ellen Addonizio announced the decision at about 11:45 p.m., after a four-hour, closed-door performance review that attracted about 500 parents, teachers and community members.

“The school board voted 6-1, with (trustee Anna) Bryson voting no, to put Mr. Carter on paid administrative leave. This concludes our meeting,” Addonizio said.

The trustees offered no other details and immediately left for a conference room behind the board room. District officials blocked reporters from following them.

About half of the 500 people who packed the board room at the start of the 6 p.m. meeting stayed to hear the decision….

Tearing a big hole in the good ol' boy network

Arguably, one obstacle to replacing our notorious board is the way in which our trustees are elected. Our South County district is divided into seven geographical areas, and each trustee represents one of those areas. But our “at-large” voting system has all voters in the district voting in all races. 

Thus, during the November election, though I reside in Mr. Fuentes’ area (Lake Forest, etc.), I was able to vote also in the races for a seat in Mr. Williams’ (Mission Viejo, etc.), Mr. Jay’s (Laguna Beach, etc.), and Mr. Lang’s (Irvine, etc.) areas.

The “at-large” system is widely used in California, but it has now been successfully challenged owing to its conflict, in some areas, with California’s Voting Rights Act.

Whether these changes will ultimately yield a change in our own district—with its peculiar demographics—is difficult to say.

An article from Sunday’s LA Times:

Madera Unified case is changing elections throughout California

…[Retired custodian Jesse] Lopez was one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit earlier this year against the Madera Unified School District aimed at greater Latino participation on the school board in the San Joaquin Valley town.

An injunction in the case is forcing Madera Unified, which is 82% Latino, to change the way it elects its board.

The decision has already begun to reshape school boards, city councils and special districts throughout California. Dozens of jurisdictions have Latino majorities with few, if any, Latino elected officials—the very conditions that led to the ruling that the Madera district's electoral system had fostered "racially polarized voting" in violation of the California Voting Rights Act.
…
The latest [episode in this struggle]… was a ruling in September by Madera County Superior Court Judge James E. Oakley, who invalidated, in advance, the results of the November school board election. Oakley said Madera's at-large voting system, in which all voters in the district cast ballots for all board members rather than for a candidate representing their section of town, violated the Voting Rights Act.
…
Roughly 90% of California school boards use at-large voting, as do many city councils and other local boards. The state's Voting Rights Act, enacted in 2002, bans at-large voting if there is evidence that it "impairs the ability" of a minority group "to elect candidates of its choice or its ability to influence the outcome of an election."

Other jurisdictions are paying heed. In the wake of Oakley's order, the Madera City Council decided to switch to district elections, City Councilman Robert Poythress said. And in neighboring Fresno County, where 28 of 32 school boards use at-large elections, all 28 decided to follow Madera's lead and switch to district elections, county schools Supt. Larry Powell said.
…
[In explaining the low number of Latino candidates for public offices, Latino trustee Robert] Garibay argued that Latinos were, perhaps, discouraged from running because "they don't feel that they have a chance." As a result, he said, "they don't get involved, for the most part, in community events." That is the argument made in interviews by the three plaintiffs.

"What are the chances of one of us being able to run citywide?" asked Carlos Uranga, who ran twice unsuccessfully for school board. "And what are the chances of us motivating our voters to vote when they don't think we stand a chance?"
…
The idea behind district [i.e., area]-based elections, which most large urban school systems use, is that a minority candidate has a better chance of being elected in a specific area than citywide.

The argument against them is that they encourage territorial disputes and pork-barrel fights for resources.

"Our concern is that it could lead to some Balkanization, where you have one candidate who really just represents one race of people, and we think they should represent everyone," said Ralph Kasarda, a staff attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a leading legal voice against affirmative action in California. Kasarda said he wasn't familiar with the Madera case and stressed that he had no problem with a legal remedy that prevents votes "from being diluted."….

Ultimately, it was the threat of a costly legal battle … that persuaded Madera Unified to give in.

"It's too expensive," Supt. John Stafford said. "We can't afford to take money away from our students to fight this, even though we don't feel we've done anything wrong."….

Ah, yes. Defending the current system is expensive. If the SOCCCD's embrace of at-large voting is legally challenged, perhaps the specter of unnecessary cost would deter the board from pursuing a legal defense.

Well, anything's possible. I guess.

In the past, Dissent the Blog has advocated pursuing a challenge to the at-large voting system in our district, though not for reasons related to the Voting Rights Act. It seems to me that, where voter cluelessness about "down ballot" races is the norm, at-large voting only exaggerates the tendency of voters to vote for incumbents. Perhaps, if a voter only had one trustee race to think about, he or she would be more likely to pay attention to the candidates and the issues.

Who knows.

UNRELATED NEWS:

UC to curtail enrollment in 2009 (Contra Costa Times)

The University of California is preparing to limit the number of freshmen it admits this year, a step brought on by the state budget crisis.

The UC Board of Regents will meet Jan. 14 to discuss the best way to cut enrollment, university system officials said Tuesday. The 10-campus, 220,000-student system follows the California State University system in limiting admissions for the fall 2009 term….

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "so much of any year is flammable"

Welcome back!

I'm inspired by Madness Organica's post (fyi - Madness is an IVC alum) and her link to a wonderful image of a boxer who is adorned with a ribbon that proclaims: Begone sadness and begone woe and come hither my good friend hope.

So, here's one for the new year and the old one, for our sadness and our woe and for our good friend hope, written by poet Naomi Shihab Nye:


Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Mendacious, obsequious, supercilious and niggardly besides

This morning’s Inside Higher Ed informs us that

Lake Superior State University is known for its annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Now a new site at Wayne State University, Word Warriors, aims to draw attention to “words of style and substance that see far too little use.” Among the first words identified for this list: cahoots, defenestrate, insouciance, mendacious and quixotic.

I’ve read WW's list of underused words, and it’s amazing how many of them apply to our Chancellor:

Borborygmus
Cahoots
Calumny
Charlatan
Churlish
Ersatz
Higgledy-piggledy
Legerdemain
Mendacious
Niggardly
Obfuscation
Obsequious
Preposterous
Quisling
Skullduggery
Supercilious
Sycophant
Unicoid

Heck, that's like half the list right there. I do think that these words are way underused in the case of Chancellor Mathur.

Re the word “niggardly”: it means, of course, stingy, and it has no connection to the “n word.”

Nevertheless, in using this word, one invites trouble. Check out the Wikipedia article regarding controversies surrounding use of "niggardly."

Perhaps the most memorable incident occurred in 1999:

On January 15, 1999, David Howard, a white aide to Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., used the word in reference to a budget. This apparently upset one of his black colleagues (identified by Howard as Marshall Brown), who incorrectly interpreted it as a racial slur and lodged a complaint. As a result, on January 25 Howard tendered his resignation, and Williams accepted it.

However, after pressure from the gay community (of which Howard was a member) an internal review into the matter was brought about, and the mayor offered Howard the chance to return to his position as Office of the Public Advocate on February 4. Howard refused but accepted another position with the mayor instead, insisting that he did not feel victimized by the incident. On the contrary, Howard felt that he had learned from the situation. "I used to think it would be great if we could all be colorblind. That's naive, especially for a white person, because a white person can't afford to be colorblind. They don't have to think about race every day. An African American does."

It has been speculated that this incident inspired Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain.

The Howard incident led to a national debate in the U.S., in the context of racial sensitivity and political correctness, on whether use of the word niggardly should be avoided. Some observers noted however that the "national debate" was made up almost entirely of commentators defending use of the word. As James Poniewozik wrote in Salon, the controversy was "an issue that opinion-makers right, left and center could universally agree on." He wrote that "the defenders of the dictionary" were "legion, and still queued up six abreast."

Julian Bond, then chairman of the NAACP, deplored the offense that had been taken at Howard's use of the word. "You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding", he said. "David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back — and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them."

Bond also said, "Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue. [...] We have a hair-trigger sensibility, and I think that is particularly true of racial minorities."

If you get a chance, check out Stanley Fish's New York Times piece (Sunday) about his all-time favorite movies. An interesting list, including almost enough Billy Wilder.

Student journalism: a free press at last?

Perhaps you’ll recall the case of Kathleen Dorantes, a part-time instructor who was, insiders acknowledged, removed from her role as advisor to the student newspaper at Saddleback College (the Lariat) owing to the paper’s criticisms of the board of trustees and that body's corrupt union supporters. (See Times article at end.) Unsurprisingly, Dorantes was replaced with unionist and board majority supporter Lee Walker (an English teacher who, oddly, failed to grasp writing basics). Since then in California, imperfect laws have been passed to protect student journalism from censorship. A new law promises to complete the process, protecting journalism advisors too: New California law protects school journalism advisors (LA Times):

…The so-called Journalism Teacher Protection Act, which became law Thursday, prohibits school administrators from retaliating against advisors for trying to protect student press freedoms. The measure, the most stringent of its kind in the nation, closes a loophole in state law that for years has ensured free speech rights for students but failed to guarantee protections for advisors, according to supporters. They say administrators have been able to exercise de facto campus censorship by clamping down on journalism advisors. … In the last three years, at least 15 high school journalism advisors have lost their jobs or been reassigned by administrators who perceived stories as critical, said Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. He said Colorado is the only state that provides similar protections for advisors. But the new California law goes one step further by protecting any school employee, such as someone who might help distribute a newspaper, from being reassigned or losing a job merely for helping ensure free speech. "If administrators can go after the teachers, then students are going to be less likely to do the bold stories and the investigative stories that the law encourages them to do," said Ewert, who was also the lobbyist for the bill. … The measure was sponsored by state Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco). He said Saturday that he was moved to act after hearing repeated stories from across the state about good advisors stripped of their jobs after their students pursued valid stories. … One of the cases often cited by supporters involved Janet Ewell, who oversaw an award-winning journalism program at Rancho Alamitos High School in Garden Grove. She lost her advisor job in 2002 after her students wrote editorials criticizing filthy bathrooms and bad cafeteria food. … [T]he bottom line, Ewell said, is that student newspapers are not publicity newsletters for principals….

Or college presidents. Or chancellors. Or trustees. SEE ALSO • Above the law? (From Inside Higher Ed: UC claims it will defy Yee's no-censorship law.) • Bill would protect college newspapers (Times: about Yee’s earlier legislation.) June 5, 1997

Saddleback College cans newspaper adviser Student paper has been critical of district board

Kathleen Dorantes received word May 20, without warning that she would no longer be the adviser to the Saddleback Valley [sic] College newspaper, The Lariat. She was told the decision came from the office of the college president, Ned Doffoney, and Doffoney had given no reason, Dorantes said last week from her home in Riverside. Some sources at the Mission Viejo college...say the move was politically motivated. The student paper has been critical of the majority of the college district's board of trustees since the election in the fall. The faculty member appointed to take Dorantes' place as adviser, Lee Walker, is an outspoken supporter of the board majority. ... During one of the years she was the adviser, 1996, the paper won one of the top awards in the state for community college newspapers, the General Excellence Award from the California Journalism Association of Community Colleges. ... Doffoney said in a telephone interview that the decision had been a "contractual" one. He said that any full-time faculty member can bump any part-time faculty member at any time. Doffoney said that Walker had approached him and indicated that he wanted to advise the newspaper. Walker could not be reached for comment. ... When asked about reasons for the change or reasons that the college president, rather than an immediate supervisor, would make a decision about a faculty teaching assignment, Doffoney said, "I think this conversation has gone about as far as it can," and indicated he did not want to comment further.

Lee Walker, Son of the American Revolution event, 2015

PURPOSEFUL CAT (AT NOON):

TigerAnn occasionally complains.

But not often. She tends to observe Aristotle's Golden Mean.

TigerAnn patrols the property, happily.

She's the kind who always stops to smell the flowers.

She remains inscrutable.

Riding my bike down Trabuco Canyon

(The actual ride doesn't start until the 3:00 point.)

It's raining up here in the mountains.