Like making sausages

You don't wanna know

     RECOMMENDATION TO NONREELECT? Last Monday night, at about 7:55, there were a few tense moments, for me at least, after board Clerk Marcia Milchiker read out the board’s closed session actions at the start of the open session. Something about the way the announcement—about the board’s decision regarding the tenure of IVC instructors Grimm and Boettger—was worded really threw me. I couldn't tell what she said, and that almost never happens.
     So I ran back to the lobby area behind the Ronald Reagan Meeting Room, where (IVC Ac. Senate Prez and union grievance officer) Kathy Schmeidler, Amy Grimm, Susan Boettger, and two or three others huddled. Kathy seemed to be explaining her understanding of the announcement, which produced yelps of glee. I interrupted, asking her what exactly she thought the announcement was.
     Thumbs up.
     Still uncertain, I walked over to Bob C, Saddleback’s Ac. Senate President, who was standing in the doorway only ten feet away, and I asked him what he had heard.
     The same.
     Whew!
     Just now, I listened to the streaming video of the February meeting, and I determined what Milchiker actually read out:

     “On a six to one vote, with trustee Jay casting the negative vote, the board voted to affirm the district’s recommendation to nonreelect two faculty members at Saddleback College and to reject the recommendation to nonreelect two faculty members at Irvine Valley College.”

     Is it just me, or do others find this “nonreelect” language odd?
     Well, none of that matters now.

Sausages can be fun

     ROCKY SAUSAGES. Today, I spoke with an old friend who is a member of that new college “work group” that’s supposed to figure out where IVC can lower costs and increase revenue. (I’ve already forgotten the name of the dang thing.) I’ve heard several less-than-rosy reports about the group’s progress from another member, who seemed to say that getting information from administration regarding where all the money goes hasn’t been easy. Sometimes, they don't seem to know, he said.
     So, today, I asked my friend what she thought. Is it that Rocky & His Friends don’t keep track of where all the money is spent, is that it?
     “Well, that’s being charitable,” she said.
     That sounded too nefarious, I guess. So she then softened the point a bit, explaining that budget people often screw around with amounts and figures, making things look tidy, keeping something squirrelled away for a rainy day, that sort of thing.
     Otto von Bismark once said that laws are like sausages, that it's better not to see them being made. (Just imagine what gets scraped up off the floor!)
     It's getting clearer and clearer that the point seems to apply to Roquemore and Co’s handling of money, too.

And we thought our students were knuckleheads! Red Emma grades Congressman Campbell’s letter (Red Emma)

From Navel Gazing:

In Which A Teacher Writes Back to His Congressman, Gently Correcting His Writing and Thinking Errors

     "In my humble opinion, the real problem here is that there is something societal going on. ... [S]ocietal norms which in the past would have restrained such an extreme level of reactive behavior seem to no longer exist." 

–Rep. John Campbell

A reader detected yet another typo on the IVC webpage; see the last word
UPDATE: Today (3/4), I noticed that the typo was fixed.

Burgundy and mustard yellow balloons

It was his "vision," evidently

Saddleback College celebrates opening of renovated library (OC Reg)

School colors are
oh so important

     Saddleback College on Thursday celebrated the renovation of its Library and Learning Resource Center, a project that college officials say transforms it into a 21st century learning environment.
     It took almost three years to renovate the three-floor, 90,000-square-foot center into a brightly lit, spacious and organized library and resource center that is inviting to students and inclusive of their needs, Saddleback College Dean of Liberal Arts Kevin O'Connor said.
     "The building was generally dark, dingy and uninviting, almost dungeon-like," he said.
. . .
     The renovations cost $17 million, $11 million of which were paid through state grants, according to Saddleback Director of Facilities John Ozurovich.

     Burgundy and mustard yellow balloons that matched the school's colors were tied to the stair handrails that led up to the center Thursday afternoon, marking the celebration.
. . .
     The journey to renovating the center was long. It all began when O'Conner arrived on campus in July 1999.
     "I came into a building known as the library and realized that it needed renovation," he said. "So you might say from that first day, I embarked on a vision and campaign to make the case that Saddleback College needed to renovate the facility."….

RELATED:

• A weird windowless library, alleged marauding flag-swiping Hippies, the protean name, and other district mysteries—Solved! • Saddleback College's "Nutt" Memorial Library • Academic Senate sends "resolution" to BOT recommending that the Utt Library be renamed

Quoting founding trustee Hans Vogel, 1970

You the man

• Former Saddleback student returns as transgender, is told not to go into female restroom (Lariat)

     Natalie Smith was told by campus police that she would be arrested for using the woman's restroom in the girls locker room late January at the beginning of the semester.
     "We can't have men in the women's locker room," said Interim Chief of Police Christopher S.M. Wilkinson….

• Capistrano councilman wants 'In God We Trust' at City Hall (OC Reg)

     Councilman Derek Reeve is proposing that the City Council approve a resolution at Tuesday night's meeting that would display the message at City Hall, but he does not specify where....
. . .
     "I am actually offended by some obscure notion of political correctness that we are supposed to be ashamed of our country or treat God like a four-letter word.”….

• The 10 weirdest members of Congress (OC Weekly)

     By just about any measure, Congress is at its lowest point in history. Only 9 percent of the country has a favorable view of the 535 men and women who make up the bicameral body. One poll even revealed that they're less popular than cockroaches, traffic jams, and that ultimate barometer of public repulsion, Nickelback....

Kirk Gorrie: "So it goes."

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

‑Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

NEWS reached Rebel Girl yesterday that Kirk Gorrie, a longtime IVC adjunct instructor in English, had passed away. He'd been, as they say, struggling with cancer. 

Rebel Girl thinks that Kirk had taught at IVC almost as long as she has—though official reports say 10 years. That doesn't seem quite right.  

Still, however long it was, he was one of her colleagues who she admired and respected for his attitude in the classroom and out, a kind and warm spirit with a distinctive laugh she can still hear.

Kirk taught part time here and at Golden West, Santa Ana and other area colleges. He embodied that slogan: part-time teacher, full-time professional.  Like so many, Kirk, a fine instructor, should have got a full-time position, but that's another story for another time. Kirk certainly recognized the inequities in a system that relies on balancing budgets on the labor of part-time workers.

At IVC, he often taught Writing 2, the final comp class in the sequence and Rebel Girl never hesitated to recommend him to any student who asked because Kirk could teach them all, and teach them well. Not everyone can do that. Not Rebel Girl, for instance. She is not the best teacher for every student. 

Kirk was fond of Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and George Orwell, those big fellas from the last century whose spirits were shaped by what they'd seen during wartime and who came home to write about it. In their last conversation, Reb mentioned to Kirk that she always liked to know that somewhere on campus, every semester, Kirk Gorrie was teaching Kurt Vonnegut to a classroom of students, that this was right and good as as it should be, that it somehow made us more of a college.

Rebel Girl would see his students around campus with their paperbacks of Slaughterhouse 5—in the writing center, in the A-quad, hunched over on some cold concrete bench waiting for class to start, bent over the book, reading, reading, reading. 

     She'd ask them (she's like that): "Which class is that for?"

     She'd get the answer:  "Professor Gorrie's."  

     "How's it going?"

     "Good, real good."

     "How's the book?"

     "Great."

     And they'd go back to it.

"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

"I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."

             ‑Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

Someone is going to have to step up and start teaching Vonnegut so that somewhere on campus, in some classroom, Kurt Vonnegut is being read and Kirk Gorrie is being remembered.

• • •

This poem of Ray Carver's is not perfect for the occasion (Carver was a recovering alcoholic—Kirk was not an alcoholic) but its spirit captures something one of Reb's wise colleagues reminded her of: "Kirk would say that he had 10 years after his first diagnosis, time to see his children grow up. He was grateful for that."

Gravy
‑Raymond Carver

No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."

*

We—and his students—were lucky to know Kirk Gorrie. 

So it goes. 

*

East LA College Chooses their Commencement Speaker: It's Gustavo!

This just in:

Gustavo to Give Commencement Speech at East 

Los Angeles College Graduation!

Gustavo writes all about it this morning (click title above for the whole enchilada, including a link to Arellano's LBCC commencement speech last year, and see below for an excerpt).

Regular readers of Dissent will know Rebel Girl has forwarded Gustavo Arellano and many other worthy candidates (local, smart, articulate, connected to education and O.C.) as nominees for the IVC Commencement Speaker gig for many years now.  

After last year's rather hurried, muffled consideration of candidates, Rebel Girl wishes she had recorded some of the rather dismissive and condescending comments made about certain candidates like Arellano—inappropriate, too, uh, political, not a good fit, etc. Coded language, of course. You know what they mean. You know who is appropriate, whose politics are acceptable, whose fit is just fine (Yes, and Rebel Girl knows what those wags will say about his East LA College invitation—and perhpas you do too: Well, of course they (e.g. East L.A.!  Mexicans!) want him and he is just fine for them. But not us. No.)

This morning's news comes after yesterday's dissemination of IVC Commencement Speaker Committee's list of new nominees—a hot discussion topic in the hallways. It's a very, very, very, very, very, very long list (over 30) and committee members have been directed to rank each candidate.  

Among the names: Tom Hanks, Condoleezza Rice, Bill Gates, Morgan Freeman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Scott Lay, Hilary Rodham Clinton—and yes, Gustavo Arellano. 

Not so long ago, this committee used to meet and sort out the list of nominations that came in from across campus. Call it a feasibility sort. The committee knew, say, that it was unlikely that Steven Spielberg would come to speak at the little college in the orange groves even if we said pretty please, so to "rank" him and others like him (Pope John Paul, Dick Cheney, Beyonce, Seth McFarlane, etc.) was a waste of time and skewed the process. Better to focus energies on a list of more, uh, realistic candidates, people who were likely to say yes. As Rebel Girl recalls, that committee did its work well with a collegial spirit,  meeting a few times under able leadership and generating a list of finalists to forward to the president.  

No, Rebel Girl has declined to serve on that committee this year. She can take a hint. Like her nominees, she is perhaps inappropriate, too, uh, political, not a good fit. She wishes the committee good luck. 

And yeah, ask Tom Hanks. Go for it. Hanks is poised to make his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron's final play, "Lucky Guy." One of Rebel Girl's high school pals is in the cast (behind Hanks in the photo below, black tie).  She knows that they're in rehearsals right now (previews begin March 1!) and that the play is scheduled to run through June. So Rebel Girl advises that perhaps Hanks is just a little too busy to say yes. But you can ask. Why not. The play could be a big flop and close early. It's happened before. 

excerpt:

This will be the second year in a row I've [Gustavo Arellano] been invited to speak at a community college graduation (I did the deed last year at Long Beach City College), and it's a wonderful honor given I'm a product of the juco system, having graduated from Orange Coast College way back when.

*

Past commencement speaker wrangles:

• Plagiarism is a form of theft, Glenn (but all is well, really) - May 30 12
• "Too Political" - May 24 12
• That's some leadership, that leadership à la Roquemore – May 21 12
• News about Gustavo Arellano, who, again, won't be commencement speaker - May 1 12
• Evidently, the IVC Academic Senate cabinet won't agendize whether IVC should support Saddleback faculty's "shared governance" resolution - Apr 15 12
• Commencement speaker choices: the controversial and the unimaginative - Jun 12 10
• What about Gustavo Arellano? - Jan 18 08

Today's forum

     YESTERDAY, I heard tell of a “forum” to be held at the college this week. I took a quick look at my emails, and I couldn’t find announcements about any forum, at least not any sent recently.
     Then, this morning, at 8:09, I received an email from President Roquemore, explaining that this very day there would be an open forum from 1:00 p.m. until 2:30. (The forum will be repeated tomorrow morning, from 10:00-11:30 a.m.)
     OK. I guess they don’t want lots of people to show up to these things. What’s the point of announcing a forum on the day that it’s held? And the A100 lobby might be OK for B-Day celebrations, but it isn’t suited to forums, that’s for sure.
     And, as usual, the forums are scheduled during teaching prime time, when most of us teach. My teaching schedule conflicts with both forum times. As usual.
     Rebel Girl and I decided that we should attend as much of this thing as possible, and so our plan was to high-tail it over to the A100 “lobby” right after our 12:30 classes—which would be at about 1:45. It was a good plan. After all, the forum was scheduled for 90 minutes, and so, with any luck, we’d be able to attend half of the thing, despite missing the first 45 minutes.
     So, today, at the end of my Philosophy 2 class, I headed over to A100 and walked inside. I came upon the forum all right. It was like a wax figure exhibit. No, it was as if everyone had taken a sedative, the way they sat peacefully in their chairs, eyes drooping, and the way that Glenn or somebody murmured almost insensibly.
     I noticed that fewer than 40 chairs had been set up.
     After about ten minutes, Glenn commenced trying to end the program! “Well,” he said, “thanks for coming….”
     --Luckily, Kurt had a question. Something about the controversial topic of full-time faculty hiring this year. Originally, we were supposed to hire ten faculty, but then we got that weird news early in the Fall—something about how there was this pattern of revenue continuing to be flat and expenses gradually creeping up. For some reason, this trend, which evidently was clear for quite some time, produced a kind of emergency, and, in response, Glenn panicked and started talking like, well, there wouldn’t be any faculty hiring this year, that’s for sure.
     Maybe you’ve heard of this “shared governance” thing. Yeah. It’s like Glenn isn’t supposed to make unilateral decisions about important things. There’s supposed to be input and collaboration and such with “governance groups”—the faculty, the classified, students, those geese out on the lawn, et al. So, when it became clear that Glenn was backing off of the faculty hiring plan, right away, faculty leadership reared up with, “Hey, dude! Who are you to make this unilateral decision to toss faculty hiring before the fiscal emergency gods?”

     To make a long story short, Glenn backed off some, though, really, he seemed to be stalling for time. Obviously, if we waited long enough to decide on these hires, it would be too late to advertise and such, and so things would go Glenn’s way, the unilateral way.
     But, before that, it was decided that a new committee would be created in which various shared government reps would think really hard about raising revenue and lowering costs. The committee would issue a report and then decisions could be made—not unilaterally and in a panic, but carefully, thoughtfully, sharedly.
     Meanwhile, Glenn really dropped the ball, slowing the process whereby HR down at the district is told that we’re going to pursue some hires (something we can do even if, in the end, we decided to pull the plug on some of the hires). And so, to their horror, during the between-semester break, faculty leadership learned that Glenn had done absolutely nothing to let HR know that we might do some hiring. Thanks to the immediate outcry, the situation was addressed and so, belatedly, HR got the word about five possible hires. The upshot: if we pursue hiring, we’ll do so at a disadvantage relative to competing colleges, who, obviously, desire to scoop up the best instructors out there on the market. They’re advertising earlier than we are. They’ll be hiring before we do.
     Thanks, Glenn.
     Well, anyway, Kurt asked about the faculty hiring situation, and he got some mumbly-mouthed answer that clarified little or nothing. Later, a friend who had attended the entire forum opined that “these people aren’t really into the Q and A thing, are they?” They’re more into the “we’re here to tell you here’s the way it is” thing.
     Another friend said that, during the forum, he had asked about the possibility of expansion or improvement of services to deal with, well, crazy and dangerous students--a real problem here at IVC. He got some hemming and hawing, I guess. The person up there on the hot seat was desperately avoiding saying, “there’s no money for that,” I guess.
     Pretty soon, Glenn shut this forum thing down—just after 2:00. So much for that 90 minutes.
     Rebel Girl and I wandered over to the “refreshments” area—a plate of cookies plus two beverages: a hideously sweet, sticky, red punch plus icy lemon water (that's good). We talked with a certain faculty member whose job was recently saved from the machinations of dastardly people, owing mostly to the sheer incompetence and cluelessness of, well, Glenn & Co. As we talked, we noticed people wandering into the building late, hoping to join the forum. But they found us and the beverages and the plate of cookies and an empty “lobby” instead. We smiled.
     Rebel Girl just called and reminded me that, at some point, Glenn said something about how it’s OK if we hire late, cuz there are so many people out of work.
     Yeah. Good thinking. It's a good thing you're in charge.