The SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT —
"[The] blog he developed was something that made the district better." - Tim Jemal, SOCCCD BoT President, 7/24/23
My county pen pal emailed me today, reminding me that his efforts to secure OC Public Administrator/Guardian John Williams’ timesheets have run into a roadblock, namely, the assertion that “elected officials do not have to fill out timesheets.” (Williams seems to spend an extraordinary amount of time travelling at taxpayers' expense. One wonders if his records for his two gigs—he's also an SOCCCD trustee—add up.)
Pen Pal sent me a page from a law book evidently cited by the "no can do" County people. I looked at it. It made no sense to me.
Pen Pal notes the following difficulty with the County’s argument: OK, elected officials don't have to keep timesheets; but 75% of Williams’ pay concerns the “Public Guardian” part of his job, and that part is not an elected position; it is appointed.
OK, sounds good, Mr. Pal.
Pen Pal is also pursuing older records (of Williams’ travel/expenses) from the SOCCCD. At this point, he has only received relatively recent records, which we have posted here on DtB. Those data alone paint a remarkable picture.
Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, the Voice of OC (VOC) today reports similar trouble that its reporters have experienced, attempting to gain access to public records for a story on federal foreclosure relief dollars:
I needed to review records relating to [Santa Ana's] foreclosure relief program and had contacted Shelly Landry-Bayle.... Landry-Bayle wanted me to set up an appointment to review the records ten days hence.
Landry-Bayle did not specifically cite the provision in the CPRA that allows an agency ten days to respond to a request for public records. She just said that the first available time she had for me to view the records was in ten days.
I couldn't wait that long. And [my colleague Tracy] Wood, who has fought public records battles in California for decades, said I didn't have to. Cities are allowed a 10-day response period to respond to records requests when the request requires that they gather records that aren't readily accessible, Wood said….
Wood's position is based on the section of the law stating that "Public records are open to inspection at all times during the office hours of the state or local agency and every person has a right to inspect any public record..."
So Wood and I decided to go to city hall during normal business hours and demand to see the records. We were met by Santa Ana Assistant City Attorney Lisa Stark, who told us we had to make an appointment for another day. We held firm, citing the relevant section of the law.
Stark was none too happy with our response, and, citing Santa Ana's policy on public records, repeatedly insisted that we come back another day. But after realizing that we weren't going anywhere she relented and brought us the records within an hour.
Later, Elmahrek and Wood put the question to CPRA expert (and VOC consultant) Terry Francke, who wrote back:
There is no provision in the California Public Records Act (CPRA) authorizing a public agency routinely to tell requesters to "come back in 10 days”….
. . . … [T]he Act states that state and local government records "are open to inspection at all times during the office hours of the state or local agency and...except with respect to public records exempt from disclosure by express provisions of law, each state or local agency, upon a request for a copy of records that reasonably describes an identifiable record or records, shall make the records promptly available...
It also states that no provision of the Act, including the 10- and 14-day periods, "shall be construed to permit an agency to delay or obstruct the inspection or copying of public records."….
Rat bastards.
Pen Pal reminded me that Colleen Callahan is running for Public Administrator at the next election. She seem to really have Johnny's number.
Although China’s university system has long been known to be racked by plagiarism and ghostwriting, a study by a professor at the University of Wuhan, in eastern China, has shown how rampant the practices are, the Associated Press reported.
Commercial sales of ghostwritten dissertations and journal articles were worth nearly 1 billion yuan (or more than $146-million) in 2009, a 500-percent increase over 2007, according to the study, by Shen Yang. And businesses produce only a small portion of the plagiarized papers in circulation.
Professors and senior academic staff members frequently use graduate students to ghostwrite papers, publish junior colleagues' research as their own without citation, or pluck material from published sources.
This morning’s Inside Higher Ed reports an instance of the sort of thing this blog has railed against: The Fix Was In. IHE refers to an article in South Carolina’s “The State,” which reports
In a move that's been called unprecedented, [U of South Carolina] canceled all bids to hire an architect for its new $90 million Moore School of Business so a donor could pick a design firm of her own choosing.
While no state spending rules were broken, four Columbia firms and their national partners spent months of labor and an estimated $100,000 each hoping to win the project before the school abruptly canceled the bids in a two-sentence memo sent April 2.
Instead, the business school's private foundation will pay an estimated $4 million or more to a New York firm chosen by the school's benefactor, Darla Moore.
Moore, a Lake City financier for whom the school is named, sits on the foundation board. The firm chosen, Raphael Vinoly Architects, was a finalist for the contract but was not going to win it, a source close to the bidding told The State newspaper.
. . .
"In the history of the AIA, it is a rare event that a project is advertised and that our members go though the process of trying to get shortlisted and to have that pulled from the public process," [Adrienne Montare, president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Institute of Architects] said "I'm not sure there is a precedent in the state."
. . .
She estimated the firms would have spent about $100,000 each preparing their proposals.
"It can be very, very expensive," she said. "And it's all done in hopes that you will be short-listed and the state procurement process will be adhered to."…. (continued)
This sort of thing—where good faith competitors, including the “winner,” are simply taken out of competition at end of the process—is rotten enough. But imagine a hiring process (say, for an administrator or faculty) in which the fix was in from the very beginning!
That's seriously rotten.
SOCCCD
Even when a dishonest process manages to hire the best X for the job, it's still dishonest; it's still a morale killer. Who wants to work at such a place, where good people are treated so foully? I'm not referring to the current SOCCCD Chancellor hiring process, though I am concerned about some potential hiring processes.
Reminder: a couple of months ago, the SOCCCD board decided to move forward with the Chancellor hire ASAP. Further, the President of the SOCCCD board of trustees offered strong reassurances that the Chancellor hiring process will be fair and professional. I am not aware of any reason to doubt those statements. Since then, the district has decided to hire a consulting firm and has done so. (They chose Community College Search Services.) The consultant no doubt will have some sort of presence or involvement even in the early stages of the process. How that will square with the district's Chancellor hiring policy (4011.6) remains to be seen.
Academic pay has been squeezed by the recession, according to the annual salary survey by the American Association of University Professors.
Over all, salaries for this academic year are 1.2 percent higher than last year, the smallest increase recorded in the survey’s 50 years — and well below the 2.7 percent inflation rate from December 2008 to December 2009.
The survey found that average salary levels actually decreased this academic year at a third of colleges and universities, compared with 9 percent that reported lower average salaries in the previous two surveys. Private and church-related universities reported shrinking average salaries more often than public institutions.
And the academic pay situation may be even worse than the survey indicates, according to John Curtis, the association’s director of research and policy.
“A lot of faculty are losing ground, and the data probably underestimate the seriousness of the problems with faculty salary this year, because we’re only looking at full-time faculty and, as we’ve seen for several years, there’s an increasing number of part-time faculty, who are not included,” Mr. Curtis said. “Also, the survey doesn’t capture the effect of the unpaid furloughs a lot of faculty were forced to take this year, because the numbers we have are the base salaries agreed on at the beginning of the year, not the actual payroll results.”….(continued)
240 Register readers have taken the poll thus far (at the time of this writing).
Here are the results (in percentages):
31% The Economy 29% Unemployment 19% Federal budget deficit 8% Environment/global warming 7% Healthcare 5% Terrorism 2% Situation in Afghanistan
Naturally, these percentages might not represent Register readers in general. Presumably, both groups (Reg readers and those who took the poll) skew "conservative."
For comparison, Norman provides the results of a recent Gallup poll of American voters:
Percentages: “extremely” or “very” important:
The economy: 93%
Unemployment: 87% Healthcare: 84%
Federal budget deficit: 78%
Terrorism: 76%
Situation in Afghanistan: 70%
Environment/global warming: 46%
Looks like Reg readers tend to disagree with much of the rest of the country concerning the importance of “Healthcare” as an issue.
Naturally, some Reg readers left comments. Unsurprisingly, they tended to carp about the absence of "immigration" as an issue option. Sometimes, they got, um, colorful about it:
c1143 says:
Where is the “Strengthen the border” issue??? English Defence League says: immigration? Gary S says:
Without private sector jobs, there will be no money to pay for all of these new programs that are being forced down upon us by our imperial masters. Taro says:
Why wasn’t immigration included in the survey???
Those illegals are taking the jobs away from American citizens.... antarez says:
I totally agree, Wait till Obama tries to force this Amnesty BS next. Time for us to vote out all his supporters in the next elections before he can totally ruin the Country. Spring. says:
Its been proven over and over, illegals only take jobs that normal americans dont want. Even in the recession, i know people that dont have a job, but they dont want to go in gardening or McDonalds. Thats their problem. So as far as im concerned, i dont care about illegals, besides, the government knows they are benificial, they will NEVER do anything to stop it. rjs says:
it is SCARY out there, THE COSTS OF TAKING CARE OF LATINOS AND WHAT THEY GOBBLE UP !!!!!! STOP HAVING SEX, there will be nothing left in a few years !!!!!!!
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN A FAN of libraries, but you’ve got to admit that the stature and love of Libraries is seriously bolstered with bullshit. –You know, like most things.
“Books are wonderful.” –Well, no, most of ‘em are shit. Lots of ‘em are indeed wonderful, of course. But let’s not overdo it. Like we always do.
“Libraries are full of wonderful books.” –Well, in my experience, public libraries seem pretty indiscriminate, book-selection-wise (and otherwise). At the local library, seriously shitty or mediocre books sandwich the occasionally excellent ones. Libraries are like the internet or a mall bookstore: point anywhere, and one is more likely to spot chaff than wheat.
“Physical books are important. Libraries keep that tradition alive.” –Well, physical books do seem to be important to geezers, but not to most of the kids in college these days. If they read at all, typically they do that on the internet. Increasingly, to them, books are weird.
And most of what they read is crap.
“They’ve proven that FDR caused the Depression.”
“Huh? That’s nonsense. Where’d you read that?”
“It’s on the internet.”
Physical books? You watch. Gizmos like Kindle are gonna replace physical books, and much else, bigime. The writing is on the wall–er, on the iPad. Already, I see students spotting a geezer like me with a book, and they immediately get that look they get when they encounter a Selectric. "WTF?"
For oldsters and semi-oldsters, there’s a romance about books, and it is only enhanced by the tattered, musty, and worn quality of old specimens. One rescues such artifacts and then seeks to sit quietly in a cozy spot to just read, preferably while bespectacled and accompanied by a glass of good booze.
It's a quiet thing. It’s somewhat ritualistic. It’s a fine way of winding down and enjoying oneself, by oneself. And yet it is concordant with thought and the development of wisdom (or self-deception, natch).
Books are great, but I’ve never really understood librarians. They exhibit an odd quietude and they look like refugees from activity-of-any-kind. If they love books, its very hard to see what good that does ‘em. What are these people experts at? I have no idea. The Dewey Decimal System?
How come college libraries are still full of physical books (and VHS tapes)? I don’t get it. Aren’t these things available digitally and online somehow? Nowadays, for better or worse, the younger generation is almost exclusively online. It’s their default position (along with indifference). And books and magazines and references are often now available — you guessed it — online.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Plus online connections are cheaper than buying and displaying physical books. Way cheaper.
So what’s with all the goddam books? I say: start selling ‘em. Get ‘em into the hands of fading geezers while they can still read and hold stuff up to their faces. In thirty or forty years, it’ll all be over, like family dinners and attention spans.
There’s a funny piece in yesterday’s New York Times about changes in the ambiance of libraries. Check it out:
The library of my youth…was a tomb of peace, where the only sounds were shuffles, whispers and the occasional shush — delivered with an index finger crossing the lips of a bespectacled, cardigan-wearing librarian.
These days, at my local branch…, I have to play an MP3 file in a loop — a sound bite of a hair dryer blasting between my ears — because without the white noise, I would not be able to think straight.
…When did libraries become a cacophonous combination of cafe, video store, music store, computer lab and playground?
Twenty years ago, I was able to research my high school term papers in silence, but now the communal desks have been transformed into an open forum for children and adults to chat away as if they were hanging out at Starbucks.
Back in the day, there was such a thing as your “library voice”…. Not anymore. When fellow patrons walk through the doors and make a beeline for the DVD section, when they are clacking the discs’ plastic cases and lecturing on the savvy beauty of “Mad Men”…, I can hear their every word across the room.
One of the bigger libraries near me has a listening station for CDs, and the other day, two teenage girls sat down, clamped on headphones and proceeded to talk to each other while enjoying their music. Have you ever tried conversing with someone wearing Princess Leia-like headphones? You have to shout. Which is also what kids do when they log on the public computers to watch their favorite YouTube videos while opening up 15 windows of Instant Messenger. They may be quietly typing “LOL,” but they are also literally laughing out loud.
Meanwhile, tykes are burning up the carpet. I cannot remember the last time I went to my library when children were not playing hide-and-seek in the stacks, shrieking as they chased one another. The parents are usually nowhere to be seen, maybe playing a little hide-and-seek from their offspring. If this were story hour, I could understand, but it seems as if every minute of every day is now playtime.
Even librarians seem to be getting into the act, talking on the telephone as if sitting in a living room, letting everyone know that the plumber is arriving during lunch…. At one point I had to turn up the dial of my hair dryer symphony to 11 because two librarians were discussing the location of a particular audio book — while standing at the opposite ends of the room….
We oldsters need to face reality. "The book is dead; long live the book." We’ve got to face the music and get with the program.
On the other hand, in some ways, the new program stinks. There was something very good about physical books and the way we were with 'em. And there’s something bad about kids (or anybody) staring at a computer screen all day, comfortable with flash and ephemera and uncomfortable with thought or the notion that one is responsible for helping to fix the world. (Have you noticed that displays of torture are now simply a form of entertainment? God, we're idiots.)
You see, the fundamental wisdom of conservatism is this: we have a way of being and doing, and we know that some of that “way” is good and valuable — and easily lost.
So we should try carefully to preserve it. We shouldn’t let the entire younger generation run like hell after baubles and prodigies of unknown merit. Who knows what gems will be lost and what folly created?
Go forward, into the future. But slowly, carefully.
We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and variety
We are the Desperate Dan appreciation society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
We are the draught beer preservation society
God save Mrs. Mopp and good old Mother Riley
We are the custard pie appreciation consortium
God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded them
We are the Sherlock Holmes english speaking vernacular
Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula
We are the office block persecution affinity
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliate
God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
My telephone never rings
She'd never call me
I hate myself today
But I can see through this bitterness and sadness
And so I won't die
Someday I think I'll be dignified and old
Well my friends say that I deceive myself
And that I contradict myself
And I can't say if they're right
But I'm not ashamed
Oh I can take a challenge
And so I won't die
Someday I'll be dignified and old
I know it
And I say hey kids (Hey kids)
I said hey kids (Hey kids)
I say someday we'll be dignified and old
That's right
I said some day we'll be dignified (Hey kids, Hey kids)
Someday we'll be dignified (Hey kids, Hey kids)
Someday we could be dignified and old together
Well now
Look at the mountain
My girl and I used to stand on the mountain
And the sun shines, she's dead, and I cry
But I can see through this death and the sadness
And so I won't die now
Someday I wanna be dignified and old
Well now, see the desert
I sit all alone in the desert
And no girl understands me
But I can see through this bleakness and grey and sadness
And well I won't die now
Someday I'll be dignified and old
I say, you, don't die now
Someday we'll be dignified and old together
Raghu Mathur isn’t the only rotten Chancellor set to vamoose in June. This morning’s Contra Costa Times reports that Chancellor Elihu Harris of the Peralta Community College District in Oakland is in serious hot water, and the district just hopes the guy will go away so they can quietly take care of some grave fiscal issues:
The incoming Senate Republican leader has asked Attorney General Jerry Brown to investigate Chancellor Elihu Harris and his leadership of the Peralta Community College District.
Reports by the Bay Area News Group have raised questions about possible corruption and financial misconduct at the Oakland-based district, wrote Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, in a letter to Brown on Thursday.
"It is extremely disconcerting that Mr. Harris may have abused his position of trust during his six-year term as chancellor," Dutton wrote….
Among the issues reported were a $940,000 no-bid contract awarded by the district to Harris' longtime friend and business partner and a vacant lot the district bought from an Oakland developer for $300,000 five years after officials had deeded away their interest in the land.
Harris has refused to answer questions about any of the issues, and Peralta is appealing a judge's order that the district hand over to the news group an internal report about the chancellor's involvement in awarding of the no-bid contract. Peralta trustees this year declined to renew Harris' contract, which expires in June.
"Rather than responding to these allegations with transparency, (the district) has spent nearly $100,000 to block public disclosure of the report by Peralta's inspector general," Dutton wrote. Peralta's "legal expenses are mounting even while its education services are being reduced."….
. . .
Peralta leaders have called in consultants to organize the district's chaotic finances. The district recently dismissed its top two budget officials, has yet to close its financial books for 2008-09 and has not yet adopted a budget for the fiscal year that ends in June….
Back in early September we noted that according to the news group, Peralta’s “Trustee Marcie Hodge had used a taxpayer-funded credit card to buy thousands of dollars of clothing, hotel stays and other personal items.”
Gosh, maybe Peralta CCD is, like, a parallel universe or something to the SOCCCD. I'll check to see if Harris is part of some corrupt and ruthless political machine up there. That'll clinch it.
ALSO:
I recommend reading the following story, which illustrates some of the hazards of relying on alleged “common sense” thinking:
A Dutch nurse given life for murdering seven people in a killing spree that never happened will hear about her appeal on Wednesday. Will the people who jailed her apologise?
. . .
The case against Lucia was built on a suspicious pattern: there were nine incidents on a ward where she worked and Lucia was present during all of them. This could be suspicious but it could be a random cluster, best illustrated by the "Texas sharpshooter" phenomenon: imagine I am firing a thousand machinegun bullets into the side of a barn. I remove my blindfold, find three bullets very close together and paint a target around them. Then I announce that I am an Olympic standard rifleman.
The amazing Eartha Kitt; my parents played this a lot when I was four or five
Pen Pal is also pursuing older records (of Williams’ travel/expenses) from the SOCCCD. At this point, he has only received relatively recent records, which we have posted here on DtB. Those data alone paint a remarkable picture.… [T]he Act states that state and local government records "are open to inspection at all times during the office hours of the state or local agency and...except with respect to public records exempt from disclosure by express provisions of law, each state or local agency, upon a request for a copy of records that reasonably describes an identifiable record or records, shall make the records promptly available...
