More money, no tuition hikes for state colleges and universities (EdSource)

     Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal boosts funding by more than a billion dollars for all three public university and college systems, although that’s not as much as California State University and the University of California had hoped for.
. . .
     But that money comes with conditions. In exchange, Brown expects the colleges and universities to show measurable evidence of improved student success and a promise not to raise student fees. Between 2007-08, when the economy began to tank, CSU raised tuition by $2,700 to its current level of $5,472 for California residents. UC undergraduates pay $12,192, more than double the amount from five years ago. During that same period, community college fees jumped from $26 to $46 a unit.
     Community College Chancellor Brice Harris called the budget welcome news “after years of budget cuts forced us to turn away hundreds of thousands of students.”
     The community college system will receive a 11.4 percent increase, for a total state allocation of $11.6 billion next year. That includes an additional $200 million from Proposition 98, the voter-approved school-funding guarantee. The money must be used for programs to help boost the success rates of underrepresented students by strengthening and expanding counseling, orientation and other programs and support services.
     “I would say that we’re encouraged by the proposal because it reflects the work that the colleges are doing to restore access and improve student success, and address the population that often seems to fall through the cracks,” said Beth Smith, president of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges….

He had some doozies

California Governor Seeks More Money for Higher Ed (Inside Higher Ed)

     California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, will present his 2014-15 budget plan today, and a leaked copy suggests a continued recovery in state support for higher education -- especially for community colleges. The University of California and California State University systems would each receive a 5 percent increase, contingent on continued adherence to a deal with the state to freeze tuition rates. State funds for community colleges would increase by more than 11 percent….

Antimicrobial remediation in progress

 Rebel Girl sent me these phone pics today from the hallway of building A200 at Irvine Valley College.
They document the recent activities of a secretive crew informally known as the IVC "Day-Late-and-Dollar-Short" Squad (DLDSS).
They tend to show up, um, a few months after you really need 'em.

 As you can imagine, faculty avoid campus like the plague during the period between Fall and Spring semesters. No doubt the Reb was there to take care of English Dept. business (she's one of two chairs).

It appears that part of the hallway next to my and Reb's office is sealed with, um, paper. The zone includes the office door of our next door neighbors, two Spanish instructors. They found some little mold monsters in that office a month or two ago. (See Hallway Blather.)

 That's the office door of the Film and Humanities instructors at right, I think. Pretty intense, man.
About two months ago, the college Maintenance guy (JE) held a meeting just down the hall about remedial efforts to deal with the building's new "mold" issues. During the meeting, I noted the "dilapidation" of the wall and doorway at the end of this hall, which opens up to the outdoors.
The wall behind this paper wall had weasel shit (or something) piled up at its base. —No, it was cricket shit. Yeah.
One day, a month or so ago, the Reb found one of the three bolts that held the outside door. It had somehow popped out of its hinge and it lay on the grass. The Reb contacted Maintenance about the problem; she said she'd keep the bolt in our office, but the maintenance dudes never came around to fetch the dang thing. I guess they figure two out of three (working hinges) ain't bad.
UPDATE: Rebel Girl writes: "Roy - FYI: A nice fella did come out and pick up the bolt and fixed the door. But a few days later when light panels fell out of a lighting fixture in the quad and pierced the lawn, I picked them up and called the incident in, - however no one came and picked them up. They are still in our office."

That's our (Roy and Reb's) office door at right. It's just what you'd expect, I guess.
Spaceballs?
--I take it back. That's the film/humanities office door. Yeah, there's nothing about spaceballs on our door. We've got slogans about justice and shit.

Remembering Tom Fuentes: the world is leaving him behind, I hope

 

 

"Every lesbian spear chucker in this country is hoping I get defeated." 

— OC Rep. Bob Dornan, to a Los Angeles television reporter in 1992 re a female challenger during the primary

Tom supported the notorious
 John Schmitz

     Been thinking lately about Tom Fuentes. As you know, the fellow died a year and a half ago while still a member of the SOCCCD board.
     He prayed a lot.
     Been thinking in particular about Tom and his hatred of women.
     Here in DtB, I never got around to mentioning a remarkable old article in which a prominent local political advisor—and women's advocate—blasted Fuentes and his inner circle for being, well, profoundly sexist (Dornan Primary War Leaves One Bitter GOP Hangover, by Dana Parsons, LA Times, June 17, 1992).
     I correct that lapse here.
     The occasion was Judith Ryan's failure to unseat Rep. Bob “B-1” Dornan. You remember him. Dornan ran for President in ‘96. He was (and is) a flaming asshole. (He eventually lost his seat to Democrat Loretta Sanchez, in 1996.)

Quoting the Bobsters

     Defeating Dornan and replacing him with a female conservative: that had been the goal of political advisor Eileen Padberg (no, not Nancy: Eileen).
     You'll recall that, back in 2000, Padberg, a staunch Republican, was the paid campaign consultant for the anti-Board Majority “Clean Slate” (Shane, Loeffler, Hochmuth, Lang vs. Fortune, Fuentes, Williams, Davis). At the time, Fuentes chaired the OC GOP.
     Sadly, among the Clean Slaters, only Lang prevailed. (A few years later, for the sake of his political ambitions, Lang reversed gears and became Fuentes' chief ally on the board. Once Raghu Mathur's chief critic, Lang became the fellow's chief apologist. Lang's betrayal of earlier supporters—mostly at IVC—was profound. When challenged about his curious reversal, he had nothing to say. Eventually, Fuentes did back Lang in his bid for OC Treasurer, but the effort was disastrous.)
     Q: Why had the conservative Padberg backed the more-or-less moderate Clean Slate against a slate that included the GOP chair? A: She hated Fuentes and all that he represented.
     Eight year earlier, she was steamed, in particular, about the exerable B-1 Bob's victory:

     Eileen Padberg is toying with a Cobb salad over lunch while providing sparkling conversational theater. Equal parts anguish, earthy humor and vitriol, she's apparently decided not to trifle with merely burning bridges and opted instead to strafe them, rig them with TNT and personally push the plunger on the detonator.
. . .

Meant to say "[little] 'Judas' not [little] 'Jew'"

     …Judith Ryan's failed campaign to unseat Rep. Bob Dornan—a campaign in which Padberg was highly visible from the start—still has Padberg fuming.
     She's angry at the "little men" who she says pull the strings in county Republican politics and is particularly unhappy at what she sees as a personal campaign against her in the wake of the Ryan candidacy.
     She reserves her special dislike for party chairman Tom Fuentes and a small circle of powerful local Republicans, who are largely unknown to the public but have a lot to say about what happens in this county….
. . .
     Padberg says she's never been one to sit around with the power elite and listen to each other talk about how smart they are. In that sense, she understands that she's not a "player" in the inner circle.
     Fuentes and a couple other heavy hitters visited Ryan after the election and said it would be nice if she congratulated Dornan. Padberg says Ryan told them to forget it. Padberg continues to say that Dornan doesn't "deserve" to represent the district.
. . .
     While she found the Ryan campaign invigorating, the county party's response disgusted her, she says. "This party sucks," she says. "I can't believe that these guys have the balls to do this—they do it only because we're women. But they picked the wrong two women, they really did. The pressure we got before Judy filed was unreal. I got threatened, Judy got threatened." 

Eileen Padberg today

     I had been dancing around it, so I ask her flat out: Is it because you're a woman?
     "These people are very insecure," Padberg says. "I'm not a sexist, but they're very insecure about women, very insecure about people who are not like them."
     So, it's your feminine presence around them that makes them uncomfortable? That you're challenging their male power base? "I believe they know that I know they're (intellectual) frauds, and that's what drives them crazy," she says.
     "It isn't their power base. I can't do anything to their power base. I can't cause them grief. They can only cause me grief. . . . They're despicable people who are very intimidated by women. They think women should be doing something else.
     "All I can tell you is that there are other consultants who do what I do and they don't get threatened, ragged on, or beat up," she says.

"This party sucks"

     Uh, gee, Eileen, this isn't how Republican campaign consultants generally talk about the Mother Ship.
     "I know," she says, "but it's like I've had enough and I was not going to take it anymore. I have walked away every time and decided that it's just a small group of people, and who cares what they think."
     But the truth is, it does bother her. "I'm like anybody else," she says. "I don't like to be hated."
     I called Tom Fuentes for reaction, but he didn't call back. Greg Haskin, the county GOP's executive director, started out diplomatically. He said the party doesn't have it in for Padberg, but then he dropped a subtle reminder about Padberg's recent track record in campaigns. (Before the Ryan-Dornan race, Padberg was Sheriff Gates' consultant for last year's failed county jail initiative.)
     Oh well, a dig here, a dig there….

     For an account of an episode of knuckle-dragging sexism in the SOCCCD, read Turning point. For more of Tom's curious reputation among Republicans, see Tom Fuentes, Caspers' "bagman"? And don't forget DtB's the Fuentes Files.
     The truth is out there.

Too much?

Temporary reprieve for City College of San Francisco

New Life for CCSF (Inside Higher Ed)

     Supporters of City College of San Francisco have won a temporary reprieve in their quest to prevent the college from losing its accreditation in July.
     A San Francisco Superior Court judge on Thursday granted a partial injunction to block the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) from yanking the college’s accreditation until after a lawsuit filed by the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, can be resolved.
     Herrera last August filed a legal challenge to the accreditor, claiming that political bias, improper procedures and conflicts of interest improperly influenced its scrutiny of the financially mismanaged college. Faculty unions also filed a separate lawsuit to halt and reverse the accreditor’s actions.
. . .

     The City College tussle has become heavily politicized, and is being watched closely in Washington. The court’s ruling this week is the latest of several dramatic and unusual developments in the accreditation saga.
     For example, the U.S. Department of Education last year sent a harshly critical letter to the commission [i.e., the ACCJC] for its handling of the college’s review. Faculty and students subsequently called for the commission to lose its federal recognition. They were joined in those calls by two Bay Area members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
     But last month a federal panel gave the accreditor a year to come into compliance with the Education Department’s standards….

City College of San Francisco Will Fight in Court For Accreditation; Major Win For School (University Herald)

Scenes from a mob movie (the absurd fire)

     In my Intro course lectures on Free Will, I sometimes imagine a world in which “action events” randomly occur, just as—or so I’m told—electrons suddenly and inexplicably change their energy states down there in atom land. “Why did that happen?”, we ask, only to be told “there is no why. “That’s just the way it is, universe-wise. Shuddup.”
     The point is that such actions, if they were to occur, wouldn’t be “free” any more than a coerced action (“Gimme your money or your life!”) would be free. These action events are absurd, not free.
     On the other hand, I kind of appreciate absurdity, at least up to a point.
     Lately, here at good ol’ IVC, it’s become the land of absurd fire—i.e., the land of getting fired—mysteriously, opaquely, and so on. Perhaps not for those who are actually getting fired—well, we just don’t know about them—but certainly for everyone else, looking and wondering WTF just happened.
     But, of course, these firings are highly non-random. There’s definitely a “why,” but, in this case, we just don’t know what it is. And it’s not because the universe is being weird again; it’s because certain people are determined to keep the cause obscure. Darryl C, we’re told, is required to maintain silence as per some agreement. No doubt the same is true for Helen L.
     But wait a minute. It just won’t do—will it?—this business of harsh things happening to people and then deliberately turning these events, for all observers, into pseudo-action events or electron firings. Among human beings—moral, decent creatures—such brute factual absurdity is at least disconcerting, morally. In the moral universe, we need to know what happens to people, and why it happens to them, so we can know that what's happening to them isn’t wrong.
     The absurd fire. Why do people do such things? And what are the grounds for complaint about them?
     Part of the answer comes up in a piece that appeared two days ago in the NYT: Fired? Speak No Evil. It’s about an editor who is suddenly fired and is told to sign a document—or else no severance:

     What brings me up short is clause No. 12: No Disparagement. “You agree,” it reads, “that you will never make any negative or disparaging statements (orally or in writing) about the Company or its stockholders, directors, officers, employees, products, services or business practices, except as required by law.” If I don’t agree to this nondisparagement clause, I will not receive my severance — in this case, the equivalent of two weeks of pay. Two weeks? Must be hard times out in San Francisco, or otherwise why the dirt parachute — and by the way, is that the sort of remark I won’t be allowed to make if I sign clause No. 12?
. . .

     ...[A]s quaint as this may seem, giving up the right to speak and write freely, even if that means speaking or writing negatively, strikes me as the unholiest of deals for a writer and an editor to accept. Though such clauses don’t technically violate the First Amendment — I’d be explicitly agreeing to forfeit my right to speak freely if I signed clause No. 12 — such a contract has a paralyzing effect on the dissemination of the truth, with all of truth’s caustically cleansing powers. To disparage is but one tool in a writer’s kit, but it’s an essential one. That a company would offer money for my silence, which is what this boils down to — well, I’ve seen many a mob movie about exactly that exchange.
     The increased prevalence of nondisparagement agreements is part of a corporate culture of risk management that would have us say nothing if we can’t say anything nice. And yet it occurs to me that if a company isn’t strong enough to be reproached, then it simply isn’t strong enough, period.
     Mind you, I’m not looking to disparage Byliner. The company has made a few mistakes in my view (firing me perhaps being a relatively minor one), but what fledgling enterprise does not screw up from time to time during its shakedown phase? It’s not that I necessarily want to disparage, but I want the freedom to do so, to be able to criticize, to attack, to carp, to excoriate, if need be. I want to tell the truth, even if it isn’t pretty.
     That’s why I won’t sign clause No. 12. Byliner can keep the money. I’ll keep my self-respect.

     Darryl and Helen aren’t editors or writers, and so I’m not suggesting that they have no self-respect. Just no job.
     But the action, the coercion for silence, demanded by a mob, is about the same.