You gotta love that "plague of despair"

☞
THAT'S RIGHT. We've been up sh*t creek, sans paddle, since December of '96, when the original "Board Majority" took charge. The Accreditors call it our "plague of despair." Really, they do. (Plagues then and now.)



UNFAMILIAR with the three-ring Cirque de Dismay that is the South Orange County Community College District? You might want to read:

Trustee Fuentes' Spanish Adventure: yes, bigshot Republican Tom Fuentes stirs up a hornets' nest. Spain, he says, has "abandoned" our fighting men and women! Therefore, no Study Abroad trips to Spain! Shit hits fan.

IVC faculty prohibited from discussing the war: yes, it's true. April 2003. We're not making this up!

Trustee Frogue invites Holocaust deniers to campus: The board thinks that's just swell, and, despite warnings, gives Frogue the green light. The excrement really hit the fan that time! Overnight, Saddleback became the college that invites crackpots and lunatics (and maybe Nazis, too)!


Is Trustee Frogue a Holocaust denier?: apparently so. See the evidence.

Hangin' with bigwig Republicans while Nazis hide in bushes: local GOP consigliere Mike Schroeder embraces the Frogue recall. Everybody who's anybody was at this event—Loretta, Bob—and Nazis too!

Bauer's court victory: the district ruthlessly tries to shut down a faculty critic—but the federal court says "nope" plus "what were you people thinkin'?" Lots of bad press. What a board!

"Liberal busybodies!": Libertarian Don Wagner pulls the colleges out of the American Library Association! More bad press.


The Howard Hilton: one of the great harebrained schemes of all time. Wagner, Mathur, and Gensler hope to build a Hilton Hotel (w/ lake) at Irvine Valley College! The plan goes "poof" among never-ending whoops of ridiculosity.

The Board's unlikely secret allies!: in 1998, a faculty union finances the successful trustee bids of two conservative Republicans. (And those two are still here!) Only in South Orange County!

Check out the UFOs!: we witness a flying Fuentes; plus mold pie.

"Kill it & Grill it" and other FUENTEIAN titles: Tom Fuentes is into publishing—publishing anti-intellectual crap, that is.

The replacement Clock Tower adventure: a popular favorite. Chunk, Reb, and Red have some fun with news of the demolition of our beloved Clock Tower.

My cat Sunny evidently contemns that Tom Fuentes

☞
SUNNY lobbied to go outside this morning. I said, "OK, we're going out there, little girl, but we've gotta watch out for coyotes and stuff." She got all twitchy and then yammered. She never meows. It's always squalling, and howling, and yammering. No meows.

When I opened the door, the darned fool bolted toward freedom, running idiotically into the sunlight in all directions. That's Sunny all over. She's like a goddam caffeinated weasel.

It was an incredibly beautiful day. It was—it continues to be—the kind of day in which the air feels beautiful. I checked out Modjeska Peak before me. It shone in the sun. The day just sparkled.

Sunny's no fool (well, actually she's a total fool). Anyway, she, too, seemed to appreciate the super-fine weather. She checked out everything.

She ate some grass. She was mighty particular about the blades she ate. She rejected most of 'em. I don't get it.

She took a dirt bath. Check it out.


She found a sunny spot and planted her chin on the dirt. She kinda rested like that for a while.

After about twenty minutes, I called to her, and she ran indoors like a lunatic. Standard stuff.


I had some clippings over in the corner. One had a picture of Tom Fuentes on it. She started retching, like she does. I started to get a rag.

She puked all over Tom. I walked up to clean up her puke ball. (I always call 'em "puke balls.") I looked at the hideous thing, leaking through the paper, distorting Tom's image, stinkin' up my room.

"Well, you got that right, Sunny Girl," I said. "You sure got that right."

I scrunched the clip and the rag together and threw the entire mess, first, into a plastic bag, then into the trash barrel outside.

"You are one sweet cat, Sunny girl!", I shouted. Don't know if she heard me. I think she's deaf or something.

Spring Break Special: BEST OF Dissent's Comments

~

YES, it's Spring Break. This means no board meetings, no bored students sitting on rooftops and, perhaps for Rebel Girl, no stressed-out surreal dreams inspired by her workplace.

In other words, no material.

We here at DISSENT have decided to commemorate Spring Break by reviewing our archives and retrieving and presenting the very best of the comments we have received since going online. Some fun. Really.

Readers may not realize that there is more to DISSENT than our nationally-recognized graphic style (University Diaries describes the blog as "a visual treat") and our witty reportage (professor zero declares, "I love them!"). Indeed, a click on the COMMENTS at the end of every post reveals the other dissenting voices out there.

So sit back, relax and enjoy THIS WEEK in the BEST OF DISSENT's COMMENTS (some of which, we hope, were written by YOU). (First in a series.)

IT WAS late last year when this reader posted, at the very end of the blog post entitled: DISSENT'S VERY SHORT HISTORY OF THE DISTRICT'S TROUBLES (1996-2005).

The reader's comment appears below, verbatim.

Anonymous said...
"MATHUR AND THE DOOR KNOB"

My original opinion of this blog portraying the follies of “Mathur’s journey from IVC President to mighty District Chancellor" was negative at first. I thought this blog to be a gathering of disgruntled employee’s on a mission to get their “just desserts.” However, this all changed over a door knob conversation with a janitor at IVC.

I myself, a student at IVC that works and helps out with the adaptive P.E. program (handicap person’s Physical Therapy program), was taken [a]back when I had an unlikely conversation with a janitor and his bad experience with Mathur back in his day as President of IVC. Last week, while working with a student in a wheel chair, part of a handle broke off a piece of equipment. I flagged down a passing maintenance person in charge of delivering mail and other items around the campus. I asked him if he could tighten two screws in the handle, so we can get back to doing our exercises with the disabled.

Out of nowhere, the guy said it’s an easy five minute fix, but the last time he tried to fix a simple door knob (or similar item) for a teacher, the President of the school (Mathur) filed grievances against him for [violating] policy. In short, the guy was scared to simply tighten two screws because he almost got fired ... for helping someone out with a door knob. I had to make an official request and wait a long time for the “official correct” person to tighten two screws. When the official “Screw Tightener’s” of IVC showed up, they actually had to take the handle to a secret location ... (so far it has not come back to the gym).

[I was] truly amazed to the see the absolute fear this maintenance guy had on his face. You can tell he really wanted to help out these handicap students.

If you mention Mathur’s name to the people that emerge from the shadows at night (maintenance people), they really don’t care for him. ... [H]ow can a President running a whole college (or district) possibl[y] have the time to be picking constant fights with faculty members and staff over pointless battles. Common sense, if there is any out there, would want a leader that is truly concerned with the best outcome for his students, not creating skirmishes that achieve absolutely nothing.

December 10, 2006 2:52 PM

Nits better left unpicked, deals better made in the sunshine

☛
(The Holocaust denier resigned, only to be replaced by TOM FUENTES, hater of Spain, contemner of faculty, prayer of prayers.)

1. Consultation, Schmonsultation

As you know, faculty in the SOCCCD tend to complain about the administration & trustees’ failure to consult with them. And no wonder. Remember the faculty lawsuit, a couple of years ago, over the district's unilateral imposition of a new faculty hiring policy? The courts voided that policy. Tsk-tsk.

SOCCCD faculty tend to complain about board secrecy, too. Again, no wonder. A few years ago, owing to some faculty initiative, the courts ultimately ordered the SOCCCD board to cease its "persistent and defiant misconduct" secrecywise. (See sidebar.)

At the time, the district's lawyer was named "Covert." I kid you not.

But, hey, faculty get pesky about secrecy and failures of consultation everywhere, not just in the South OC. Take the profs at UC Berkeley (“Cal”)…

From yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle: BERKELEY
UC faculty critical of BP deal: Professors rail on lack of transparency, academic freedom, by Rick DelVecchio.

UC Berkeley's $500 million energy research deal with oil giant BP took a pounding at a faculty forum Thursday, with a host of speakers critical of the unprecedented partnership—some bitingly so.

The forum, sponsored by Cal's Academic Senate, was the first gathering of campus promoters, skeptics and curious onlookers since the deal was announced on Feb. 1.
The result was a spirited exchange that drew more than 250 people and shifted the focus of the energy deal from the scientific challenge and social mission of creating alternate fuel sources to what it means for the values and culture of the world's top public university.

The deal provides for $50 million a year in research spending…The money will fund a broad range of research aimed at creating new technologies for carbon-neutral liquid fuels, such as ethanol. The sponsors stressed Thursday that the research will include a parallel analysis of the environmental and socio-economic problems related to a major shift in fuel consumption patterns worldwide.

The meeting put top university officials, including Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, on the defensive as critics said the administration has jeopardized faculty trust by failing to adequately explain the implications of the complex deal for academic freedom and for the university's image.

Anthropology Professor Paul Rabinow cited the 1998-2003 research deal between Swiss biotech firm Novartis and Cal's Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. That deal, which provided for $5 million a year from 1998 to 2003, was intended to develop genetically engineered foods. It sparked campus protests and was criticized at the time by faculty members who felt it was implemented without collegial debate.

"The way the university handled it was completely, recklessly stupid," Rabinow said.
The same mistakes are being repeated with the BP deal, he said.

"It should have been transparent, there should have been consultation," he said. "This is silly. You should have given us more time to debate this."

Art history Professor Tim Clark voiced deep misgivings about the lack of discussion on the conflicts that may occur in a research agreement between a public university and private corporation.

"The tension between one imperative and the other ought to be explicit in whatever deal the university strikes," he said. "The deal ought to be open to inspection."

Faculty governance should have a place of power in the arrangement, he said….


2. Nits better left unpicked

Lately, the state's community college system has been getting some seriously bad press. The system oughta hire a good PR firm, if you ask me. They wouldn't have to lie or hire Tiger Woods or anything! Just wave the facts under people's noses, is all.

From yesterday’s Sacramento Bee:
Nitpicking community colleges, by Dan Walters.

California's highways are congested and crumbling, its prisons are overcrowded and close to being taken over by a federal judge, its elementary and high schools do only a mediocre job of educating students, and its parks and other public facilities are in ill repair.

Does anything work very well in California anymore? Yes. Its three systems of public higher education still provide high-quality and relatively low-cost instruction—not perfectly, certainly, but more efficiently and effectively than most other big public programs.

The state's 109 community colleges are an especially praiseworthy institution, providing both college level classes and technical, job-related training at very low cost to students—their fees are the lowest in the country—and to taxpayers.

…[W]hile community colleges are educating the equivalent of 1.2 million students for $6 billion, a much-troubled prison system is spending $8 billion-plus a year on 170,000 inmates, seven times as much per capita. …K-12 schools have six times as many students as community colleges, but cost us 10 times as much.

Walters goes on to ask: “Given these positive facts about our community colleges, why do so many folks want to beat up on them?” It’s a case, writes Walters, of blaming the system “for circumstances that are beyond their reasonable control.”

Check it out.

The boys of Spring Break

☛

WELL, for the two benighted colleges of the South Orange County Community College District, it's SPRING BREAK. That's when things get especially wacky.

I shall provide two very recent examples.

I. The stupid kid on the roof

My day was done, and I started walking out to the parking lot. It was quiet at Irvine Valley College.

Then something caught my eye. A small crowd of students were looking up at the roof of building A400—the one that reeks of formaldehyde. There was some kid up there. He was sitting, doing nothing.


I asked: "What's that guy doing up on the roof?"

"We don't know."

"Well, did anybody ask him?"

"Um— No."

I came closer.


"Hey, kid. How come you're up on that roof."

"I dunno. I'm just up here."

I stared at him. I took a couple of snaps.


"Kid, maybe you should get down off the goddam roof now."

Long pause. "Yeah."

He got up. He walked to the north end of the building and then, somehow, he shinnied down (I wasn't watching). The same small crowd of students followed his progress.

When the kid finally returned to earth, he ran and whooped and hollered like an asshole.

The crowd cheered.


II. Love that Bob!

This morning's post about the ATEP meeting ("A pitcher, no catchers") inspired lots of peevish commentary, but it also got lots of hits, especially for a Friday, which tends to be sleepy, at least for us.

Why all the hits? I dunno, but, in the past, whenever I've included photos of "Park Ranger" Bob Kopecky of ATEP, our numbers have shot up. I guess the guy's dreamy or something.

OK, ladies. —More Bob!



This one's from a couple of months ago. That's Tere F, ATEP's Director of Public Information & Marketing, to the right.

A pitcher, no catchers

☺

IT SEEMS THAT SOCCCD Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur is in a big hurry to secure faculty “buy-in” with regard to the ”Advanced Technology and Education Park,” the hopeful name given to sixty-eight acres of abandoned Navy dirt & dilapidation in Tustin. Provost Bob Kopecky and his team have labored for years now to bring the ATEP project to a propitious point, for the parcel is undoubtedly valuable, and thirteen parties—some of them well-heeled—have submitted “partnership" proposals. Each proposal-maker hopes to serve his interests (namely, use of primo real estate!) while seeming also to serve the SOCCCD's interests (namely, creating special voc ed opportunities).

No doubt owing to this recent emergence of Big Money and potential Technicolor spotlightitude (roll all the proposals together, and you’ve got over a Billion Bucks!), Mathur has finally noticed ATEP.

Naturally, he’s grabbed that ball and he’s running like hell with it.

In the meantime, faculty, at least at Irvine Valley College, have generally expressed annoyance (or worse) concerning their evident and unexplained ATEPular out-of-loopitude. It has seemed to faculty that this ATEP deal, with its manifest implications for curriculum and program development, is being defined by Raghu and the Big Money Men—sans faculty. It's yet another instance, they say, of Mathur and the board ignoring the faculty’s rightful role.


Yesterday's IVC all-college meeting:

Yesterday afternoon, Mathur arranged for a special meeting at Irvine Valley College to update everybody on ATEP. As these meetings go, it was a success. It was well-attended and the presentations were, well, good.

There was a problem, though. Lots of administrators and classified employees showed up. But only three faculty showed.

At a college, faculty are important. They're crucial to any project that concerns, well, education.

But they didn't show for Mathur's ATEP meeting.


I confess

Let me confess from the start that, unlike most of my colleagues, I am an ATEP booster. I like and trust Bob Kopecky. I think this ATEP thing could be great, not only for the colleges, but for the county. Listening to the many ATEP possibilities yesterday, I was genuinely excited, and not for the first time.

Hell, I’ll even say that Mathur’s part in yesterday's presentation was excellent. Really.

—Except, of course, for that moment when he responded to a faculty comment (no, not mine) by saying that it “appalled” him. (It appalled him a “little,” he said.)

That’s the petty and ugly side of Raghu. Long-time denizens of IVC know it well.

Can such a man lead?

—Still, essentially, as far as I can see, this ATEP deal sounds at least very promising. If handled intelligently and carefully, it could be great.

But none of that matters. For a a project like this to work, you’ve got to get faculty buy-in. But, at least at IVC, faculty refuse to be led by Raghu. They just don’t trust him.

Can you blame them? (To learn the many reasons for faculty distrust, simply peruse Dissent’s archives. Start with 1997.)

In brief:

So here’s what happened at yesterday's meeting. I’ll be brief.

Chancellor Mathur spoke first and at length (in truth, he hogged almost all the time). He explained how ATEP must be funded. The money can’t come from the two colleges—they can’t spare a dime. It can’t come from basic aid (i.e., money derived from local property taxes), which wouldn’t be enough anyway. The only option is to invite “partnerships” in which private entities pony up the needed bucks.

Bingo.

Raghu explained the short- and long-term plans for ATEP. Short-term, ATEP will open in the fall with a modest set of course offerings (30-35 sections). Classrooms will be ready in two months; a dean will be hired within a week or so.

Long-term, we’re pursuing the aforementioned partnerships. Owing to Kopecky & company's hard work, thirteen proposals have materialized. They add up to a huge amount of money.

That’s “not a shabby start,” said Raghu.

After the “executive council” (Mathur, the VCs, the two college presidents, Kopecky, et al.) interviewed the proposal makers, 5-7 of them were invited to make their pitch again to the board (December through February).

Now, a “team,” led by Vice Chancellor Gary P, will pursue negotiations with the parties.

The district faces a deadline. We’ve got to show the City of Tustin that we’ve got a master plan and that we’re making “significant progress” in implementing that plan by April of 2009.

During the negotiations process, the district will be advised by: a law firm that is experienced in such negotiations, a “master architect” (who will work with the the proposal makers' architects), an experienced financial advisor, and experts among our own ranks (Serban, et al.).

In the meantime, Vice Chancellor Serban and Provost Kopecky will work with faculty, et al., to identify programmatic and curricular needs, etc.

The latter work must be accomplished within the next few months, said Mathur. Anyone who wants input can have it, he said.

The Chancellor explained the “Camelot” proposal. The Camelot Group proposes a film/TV/soundstage/studio complex with a radio and, possibly, a TV station. CSU Fullerton has a film (production?) program, and they, too, are very interested in using any studio/soundstage facilities we might have.

CSU Fullerton has a bio-tech program, too, that it would love to house at ATEP.

Raghu emphasized that the proposals are exactly that: proposals. These parties have explained what they want. We need to be clear about what we want (we want to train students) and adjust our approach to negotiation accordingly. It is a mistake, said Raghu, to suppose that any proposal maker will get precisely what he or she has asked for.

Raghu also explained proposals of the SEIS Group (robotics), ADM Works (rapid prototyping, product design), EBD (assisting minority entrepreneurship), and the Young Americans (400 young people, singing/dancing/taking classes).

The county faces a growing shortage of nurses, said the chancellor, and so we might wish to extend Saddleback College’s nursing program to ATEP. “Culinary arts,” too, can be housed at (extended to?) ATEP.

Briefly, Bob Kopecky spoke. He reminded the audience of his notion of “imbedded education” (student training/education must be truly imbedded in anything we do with our "partners") and his hope that we can launch a “21st Century campus” in which students work “shoulder to shoulder” with business people, technicians, and so on, using the "latest and greatest" equipment.

At the end of the presentation, Mathur made another pitch for involvement from members of the campus community. He did the best job I’ve ever seen him do in asking folks to get involved.

Hell, he had me going.

But faculty were not in the room.

P.S.: AS I WRITE (Friday morning, 8:00 a.m.), Mathur and Co. are preparing for a repeat performance at IVC, but that is likely to attract a far smaller audience.

At yesterday's presentation, a member of the School of Humanities & Languages--the unit most associated with opposition to Mathur--raised this question: lots of energy and money is going into this third campus, but there's so much that still needs to be done at the two colleges. For instance, at IVC, long-promised and much-needed buildings have yet to materialize.

"What building are you talking about?" asked Raghu.

"The Humanities building. We all know what building we're talking about," said the faculty member.

Back in 1980, said the faculty member, a Humanities Bldg. was promised, but it kept being put off. In recent years, the project seems to have even disappeared from planning altogether. The English department, she said, is the biggest dept. within H&L, and it doesn't even have its own classrooms.

"We can't even get the basics," she said, "for the largest school on campus."

That's when Mathur went off the rails a bit. The faculty member had a point. Indeed, during one of Raghu's visits to the School of H & L a year or two ago, he expressed sympathy for this very complaint. He even suggested that he'd look into it and try to do something about it. (We never heard back from him.)

At yesterday's presentation, however, he responded with hostility. At first, he kept his cool. But then he said: "I'm a little appalled by your comment."

Appalled?

Perhaps he thought better of it. Later, he did say that "we will do our darndest" to help with the space issues at the two campuses.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: Get Rid of Death. Celebrate Increase. Make it be Spring

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We here at Irvine Valley College, once known as the little college that could, the little college in the orange groves (Remember the days when the students raised $$ via orange picks?) are teetering on the edge of Spring break – the felicitous event runs this year from March 12-16. Rebel Girl expects that by the time she leaves campus tonight around 10:30 or so, the college will be all but abandoned, except for the midnight crew in the bio labs who spend the late night hours with sharp instruments poised above the skinned and prone cadavers of small animals. Meow!

Yes, the semester has reached its official half-way mark. We're almost there folks. Hang on.

Last week, a student arrived in my office with the good news that begins about now: acceptance into the department of English the nearby UC, home of the fighting deconstructionist anteaters. I was, the student told me, happier about the event than either of his parents had been. I took him on a victory lap – cruising the hallways looking for the open doors of colleagues and staff so I could show him off and he could see that he had done good.

Meanwhile, both Captain America (b. 1941) and Jean Baudrillard (b.1929) have passed away. Captain America, who first emerged as an anti-fascist agent in WWII had recently been become a leader in the resistance movement to the federal Superhero Registration Act. Capt. America was gunned down by a sniper on the steps of the federal courthouse Wednesday. Baudrillard, French cultural theorist and philosopher, claimed that we live in a world where simulated feelings and simulated experiences have replaced reality. In 2005, he told the New York Times, “All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom.” Baudrillard died after a long illness in Paris.

And now, some poetry. Yes, I know it's March, but here's a poem entitled "February,"—for the Spring that is just around the corner and for International Women's Day, which is—though few know it—celebrated today.

From that wonderful and fierce Canadian, Margaret Atwood:

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and the pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.