The Big Picture

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ECHOING THE FINDINGS of a recent national study, a study conducted over six years by Cal State Sacramento's Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy suggests that only one-fourth of degree seeking community college students attain their goals.


Read the L.A. Times coverage of the report: "Few California community college students graduate or transfer, study says"

Rebel Girl's favorite observation:

"There is a tremendous amount of pressure to get student enrollment as high as possible," said Steve Boilard, higher education director for the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office in Sacramento. "But very little pressure to make sure they complete or transfer out."

Now go grade your papers.

It's Camelot!

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UH-OH, THE ACCREDITATION LETTER

GOOD LORD, what a long day! Taught a class at 9:30, then another at 12:30, then dashed off to the Academic Senate meeting at 2:00, which went until past 4:30.

I hung around campus (IVC) long enough to find out what kind of letter the Accreds had sent the college. Looks like we’re in for another “focused midterm report,” only this time without a “site visit.” That’s an upgrade from the last report card, although the Accreds still seem to think our board micromanages and that the college community continues to soak in Mathurian goo (aka, hostility and despair).

THE BIG ATEP MEETING

Eventually, I made my way to Saddleback College for the special SOCCCD board of trustees meeting concerning the “Advanced Technology and Education Park” (ATEP) in beauteous Tustin, along lovely Ant Hill Boulevard. Tonight was the night for presentations of the “partnership” proposals submitted for use of our 68 acres, which are located just three or four blimp-lengths from one of those big Marine helicopter hangers.


For some reason, the trustees were late—someone told me they were probably screaming at each other about the replacement of Donna Martin. But I dunno. I huge crowd awaited their arrival.

At about 6:40, the trustees made their way to their chairs. Then there was a long and weird silence. Nobody said a thing. Then somebody pushed a button, and off they went.

After some folderol, Chancellor RAGHU P. MATHUR introduced the ATEP business. He explained about the 13 proposals that had been submitted. For tonight, he said, only three of the groups who had submitted proposals would be making presentations. CSU Fullerton would present two of them, some outfit called the SEIS Group would present a third, and then Camelot Entertainment Group would present the fourth.

The idea seemed to be that these four are the top of the heap.


According to whom? Mathur made a point of explaining the process whereby the use of ATEP was being determined. According to Mathur, the “governance groups”—faculty, et al.—are a part of the decision-making process! (Don't think so.) The 13 proposals, he said, were duly assessed by the Chancellor’s Executive Committee—a group that included no reps from the governance groups. The Committee, he insisted, “not only invited input” from the governance groups, but “their input is expected!”

Well, that’s bullshit. We stared at him.

Mathur blathered a while the way he does. He talked about the need for nurses. He yammered about “culinary arts” and “hospitality arts.” I don’t know what he was talking about. Everybody just wanted him to shut up.

Eventually, he reminded us that, by 2009, we’ve got to demonstrate to the City of Tustin that we’ve got our act together, ATEPwise, or we’ve screwed the pooch bigtime.

Raghu didn’t put it that way, of course.

PARK RANGER BOB


Park Ranger Bob Kopecky then spoke. “Partnerships are a two-way street,” he said. It’s all about “embedded education,” he said. We’re talking big money, he said.

Then he sketched all 13 of the proposals. One has something to do with “rapid prototyping” and modern manufacturing techniques. Another involves building some kind of big educational thingamabob that will take up the whole 68 acres.

CSUF has two proposals. One concerns the biotech industry and state-of-the-art facilities. The other is a CSUF satellite, comprising upper division and graduate programs. Then came CAMELOT Entertainment, the 800 pound gorilla of the evening. Camelot hopes to spend $800 million on a studio complex with sound stages and back lots. Meanwhile, EBD wants to help out minority businesses. Entertainment Arts Consortium wants to retrofit existing facilities to do I-don’t-know-what. ICON wants to train 18-26 year-olds in needed skills. The SEIS Group—one of the night’s big presenters—is “robotics”-oriented.

The next proposal was way cool: SkyVenture wants to build the world’s largest vertical wind tunnel. It would be used for testing products or something. I think they’re gonna drop guys into it and blow ‘em around, too.

Some engineering firm hopes to do something with rapid prototyping. There was something about expensive software. An outfit named VOIT seems to specialize in master planning. So they’d pretty much take over this whole ATEP thing and do it for us, I guess. Not sure.

The last proposal was called “Young Americans.” They’re patriotic and cheerful or something, and they used to be on Ed Sullivan. They sound like total shit. I think they want ATEP for their world headquarters, where they’d train 200-250 young Republicans to dance and pray and warble. (See Young Americans.)

After the Bobster spoke, two “project consultants” yammered at us. They sounded pretty smart, but don’t ask me what they said. I liked their names: “Dante” and “Andreas.” Andreas (or was it Dante?) carried around an opera book. I checked it out. Hardcore, man.

THE BIG THREE

It’s getting pretty late, so I’ll cut to the chase. CSU Fullerton got up first. They wanted to “nourish” entrepreneurs, I think.


The SEIS Group was next. The Group seems to be these two young guys. They seemed too young to do anything real or serious. They used a Mac, though, so I liked ‘em. They went on and on about Robotics. Evidently, they want to train kids to use a machine that they seemed to think was pretty special, but I keep seeing that very machine on American Chopper—you know, the one Vinny uses to cut special iron parts. I think these SEIS guys need to watch the Discovery Channel more often.

Next came Camelot, and, man, they were slick. Plus they were determined to WIN THIS THING.

I’ll have more to report about this tomorrow, cuz, right now, I need to catch a few Zzzzz's. But, trust me, these Camelot guys are slick. At one point, they even called themselves "slick." And they dragged everybody that they could think of to this presentation. One guy flew out all the way from New York just to stand up and wave. Another guy said something about a letter of recommendation from Sheriff Mike Carona. So it could be that Camelot is mobbed up. Or maybe they're into Russian cuties.

Well, the Camelot people went on and on, and the board treated them like special cases. The meeting stretched into the night, with multiple time extensions. I kept watching administrators: they were sleeping and drooling and staring that thousand-yard stare.

More tomorrow. But I think things went well. I think Bob was pretty pleased.

We’ll see.

A pic-a-nic tonight!

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MAN, THAT TUSTIN BASE PROPERTY of ours has had quite a wacky history. We fought with others over a chunk of it for a few years, but that finally got settled, and so now all parties happily clutch their own chunk of toxic dirt. Then there was all this talk about our setting up some kind of “Homeland Security” center over there, complete with retired KGB, Arabic instructors, killer lasers, and Schutzhund dogs. Faculty didn’t know what to make of that. It seemed ridiculous.

Well, nobody’s talking about that anymore. We’re glad.

Then we heard that entire Irvine Valley College programs would be ripped out of their moorings and floated over to Tustin on barges! That set off all sorts of premature outrage. It was probably just a rumor.

But you never know around here. I remember when, back in April of ’97, somebody was buzzing around the A200 hallways, claiming that RAGHU P. MATHUR had just become the President of the college. Boy did we laugh at that one. “Can you imagine believing something as preposterous as that?”, we said. “Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Well, years passed, and the Tustin acreage was eventually christened “ATEP,” which stands for “Amazingly Totally Empty Park,” I think. I always liked the “Park” designation. It inspired Rebel Girl to dub Provost Bob Kopecky the “Park Ranger.” That stuck. But Bob’s got a good sense of humor and he likes being called “Park Ranger Kopecky.” He’s even got his own pile of dirt, which he calls “ATEP Mountain.” I spotted Yogi and Booboo over there once.

I think they’ve even put up some pic-a-nic tables.

So now it all comes down to this: ATEP has attracted 13 proposals for “partnerships.” They’re pretty diverse, and you know how we feel about diversity! One involves film production, I think. Another concerns helping people start businesses. I think another one is about blimps and Japanese submarines, but its kinda out of date.

Tonight, there’s a special board meeting dedicated to presentations of some of these proposals. According to an ATEP news release dated January 23,

A special session of the South Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees will be held on Thursday, February 1, 2007 from 6-9 pm to begin hearing presentations on several partnership proposals to assist in the development of the Advanced Technology & Education Park (ATEP) in Tustin, California. Additional presentations will be made at regularly scheduled Board of Trustees meetings until all recommended proposals have been heard.

Someone told me that Park Ranger Kopecky plans to introduce the meeting with a skit involving Yogi, Booboo, Ranger Smith, and a big fucking pic-a-nic basket.

You don’t wanna miss that!

The Drug War Comes to IVC or Meth Lab in the Orange Groves? (Rebel Girl)

Yesterday Rebel Girl arrived on campus with her head encased in its seasonal invisible metal kettle (you know, the kind that descends with a head cold, swollen sinuses, collapsed Eustachian tubes, etc.) and made her way over to the place of refuge and good will, kleenex and common sense dispensed with cheer and wit - the Health Center.


She had during the previous hours at home, used up my own personal supply of Pseudoephedrine (aka Sudafed) and mentholated cough drops and was going to stock up for the day as she was facing 6 solid hours of face time with students and needed all the help she could get.

Imagine her distress when she commented on the slim pickings in the Pseudoephedrine tray and was told that soon it would no longer be available for free to folks like her who stumbled in with their head encased in invisible kettles.

Why? she asked though even as she finished the query she began to sense the answer.



She remembered that last year, Red Emma had tried to do a good turn and buy a case of cold medicine for the local Catholic Worker homeless shelter only to be challenged at the check-out counter at Target. Seems that even over-the-counter cold medicines are subject to restrictions, especially when one is buying in quantity. Who knows what you're really doing with that cough syrup… Long story short, Red actually muscled and shamed his way through the resistance he met at Target, summoning up the specter of homeless kiddies who really needed their Tylenol and Robitussin and carted off his case of the stuff to Santa Ana.

What's the danger in a little Pseudoephedrine? Not much, but apparently a lot of it will allow you to fuel your own little meth lab as a sideline.

So, Rebel Girl stocked up on Pseudoephedrine for the day, resisting the urge to fill her pockets and left some of the little pink packets for the rest of you to share. Hurry, hurry. It's going fast.

~Just another public service announcement from the folks here at DISSENT. Do send us your stories and tips.~

Two All-Beef Patties, Special Sauce, Lettuce, Cheese, Pickles, Onions on a Sesame Seed Bun

"If you want to see a bunch of community-college faculty members roll their eyes in unison, just stand up in front of them and utter the words 'customer service,'" so says Rob Jenkins over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I agree.

In his article, "Your Friendly Neighborhood Instructor," Jenkins addresses this topic in knowing fashion, pointing out the trend among adminstrators to characterize students as "customers" and colleges as "businesses." Jenkins makes a careful distinction:

"After 20 years as a community-college faculty member, I think I can speak for most of my colleagues when I say it's not the "service" part of that thoroughly despised phrase we object to. We all understand that teaching is, at heart, a service profession. That's why most of us got into it in the first place.

What bothers us is the suggestion that our students, while sitting in our classrooms, are customers. Because words have meaning, and that particular word carries some pretty dangerous connotations in an educational context."

To read the rest: "Your Friendly Neighborhood Instructor"

Orange County, county of lights, county of magic

● This morning’s LA Times reports that OC supervisorial candidate Trung Nguyen has been seen where he ain’t, and that’s a problem: O.C. candidate has serious image problem:

The campaign of an Orange County supervisorial candidate, whose slogan is "Honesty, Integrity and Leadership," has been caught doctoring a photo so that it places the politician close to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The photo into which Trung Nguyen was inserted appeared over the weekend in two Vietnamese-language daily newspapers, Vien Dong and Viet Bao Kinh Te. The papers are heavily circulated in Little Saigon, home to the largest Vietnamese community outside Southeast Asia.

Nguyen's campaign variously blamed the alteration on an advertising company and a volunteer.

● Meanwhile, on the “Fuentes’ World” front, former Mike Carona pal George Jaramillo has been sentenced to a year in jail: Jaramillo to serve year in jail:

Former Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo stood somberly before a judge Monday and ended nearly three years of defending himself against public corruption charges with two words: "no contest."

Both the Reg (see article) and the Times (see Ex-sheriff's official gets a year in jail) offer nifty timelines of Jaramillo’s public career.

Gee, I wonder what got swept under the rug?

Student evaluations flawed

MORE TROUBLING FINDINGS regarding “student evaluations” are revealed in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed. In “New Questions on Student Evaluations,” IHE describes a new study by economists at Ohio State University:

Previous studies have found that students are more likely to give good reviews to instructors who are easy graders or who are good looking. The Ohio State study — in many ways larger and more ambitious than previous ones — found a strong correlation between grades in a course and reviews of professors, such that it is clear that students are rewarding those who reward them.

That finding alone, however, may not negate the value of student evaluations. One explanation could be that good students are earning good grades, and crediting their good professors for their learning. The Ohio State study, however, provides evidence for the more cynical/realistic interpretation — namely that professors who are easy (and aren’t necessarily the best teachers) earn good ratings. The way the Ohio State team did this was to look at grades in subsequent classes that would have relied on the learning in the class in which the students’ evaluations were studied. Their finding: no correlation between professor evaluations and the learning that is actually taking place.

In another finding of concern, the study found evidence that students — controlling for other factors — tend to give lesser evaluations to instructors who are women or who were born outside the United States. And they found this despite not finding any correlation between instructor identity and the level of learning that took place.

While there may be ways to improve the reliability of student evaluations, the authors write, “we believe that any student evaluations are best used in conjunction with peer reviews of teaching.”….