By Ken Mason

      Some time ago, I wrote about the need of employees groups to “close ranks,” a naïve allusion to W.E.B. Dubois’s request that African Americans put aside their differences and achieve full equality by supporting America’s commitment in the so-called war to save democracy. Unfortunately, that turned out to be the first of two world wars. On a much lesser scale, for us anyway, “close ranks” was meant to strike some unified employee accord with the then Superintendent/President on issues of shared governance. Since that article there has been a BOT elections, Dr. Piedad  Robertson has  resigned, and the college, well , it went into a kind of “free-fall” of cutting classes, cutting part-timers and struggling to make its enrollment targets. Dr. Robertson’s departure seemed well timed, coming as it did amid serious budgetary deficits, poor enrollment management, and painfully poor planning with city and neighborhood groups over use and access to the Bundy site. It left a befuddled senior administrative staff with a host of problems.

      Events since Dr. Robertson’s departure last winter revealed several troubling concerns. Unlike her bullying past, throughout most of the Spring senior staff adopted policies designed to preserved their prerogatives, including that prickly pear, shared governance. Ostensibly anti-labor, even anti-faculty in their approach, they clearly seek to reestablish their primordial administrative notion in deference to both the anterior and theoretical progressive spirit of AB 1725.  In so doing they constructed yet another  rational argument for administrative supremacy in all matters concerning the college. For unlike AB 1725 (shared governance) which sought to balance rather than uproot administrative dominance, the district’s approach sought to justify administrative decisions as reasonably and fiscally sound.

      To preserve its mandate, and  in spite of well intentioned Academic Senate efforts to paste together a campus wide employee-district planning advisory committee (aka DPAC), senior staff thought it better to spin discord, stoking personality clashes.  Divisive innuendos were floated among

classified and faculty, academic and classified employee groups, suggesting that certain people were bent on destroying the college. It was as if those demanding fair representation harbored deeper, darker intentions. As Dr. Robertson once told me, “faculty want to run the college.”  By flinging obstructions, spouting misinformation and demanding “loyalty oaths” (for example, Board members supposedly undermined district-employee labor talks when they talked to employees) the district only succeeded in demonstrating its reluctance to adhere to the principle of shared governance.

      Other obstructionists booby traps included stalling negotiations over classified and faculty contracts. The district even disagreed with employees groups on what vendor should be entrusted to handle benefits for all employees. It reminds me of Lee Ryan Miller’s Teaching Amidst the Neon Palm Trees , “Now, Lee  didn’t I tell you always to operate from the assumption that everything an administrator tells you is a lie?” Wait a minute. Could it be that Dr. Robertson was not the only problem here?

      One can only conclude that senior staff  is welded to the conviction that shared governance does not work. This reflects an institutional value that would encourage  actions to block or derail a campus wide shared governance committee. Surely senior staff is not desirous of retreating back to past practice, where decision making fell just short of bringing the college to financial ruin. Keeping the conflict going seems to be the by-word, by tying the employee groups in knots bickering over issues – you know, keep them off  balance.

      That was then. Today, late spring, senior staff appears to be in no hurry to do anything, and they have informed the BOT as much.  As SMC embarks on a search for a new superintendent/president, senior staff, and one Trustee in particular, clearly sought to block any input from employees.  Administration seem deter-

mined to dilute shared governance to the strength of near beer. Must we fight this battle all over again? Louis Menand (in his The Metaphysical Club , 2001) had it right when he wrote “democratic participation isn't the means to an end …it is the end. The purpose of the [democratic] experiment is to keep the experiment going.”  If now is not the time to achieve shared governance- then when?

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