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September, 2003 Volume 14, Issue 1 - The Road to Perdition |
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By Ken Mason
There are two “guardians of culture” on this campus (to paraphrase Henry F. May), the cheerful and the gloomy. The cheerful comprise the classified, faculty and students. They are the optimists who wish to see SMC remain the premier transfer institution, with vigorous academic and vocational offerings, and an array of programs responding to the needs of the community. The gloomy are those who view the college as a business, employees as workers, and students as products.
At Factory SMC, buildings and products take precedence over community needs and employees. Rather than refer to themselves as adminstrators or superintendents, they much rather prefer terms like CEO, CBO, and manager. Like much of corporate America, with its out of date top-down management style, the rights of employees are merely tolerated as long as such rights do not interfere with production which translates into revenues and corporate comforts. Because, as we are often reminded, they care more about their products, the students, than the workers who produce them. While the cheerful stress quality and first-rate education, the gloomy see only the numbers. One must, as William James wrote, be exposed to what is excellent until one learned to “smell” the difference between the first-rate and the mediocre.
It is within this context that most of us suspected, as far back as last winter, that SMC’s problems were only indirectly tied to the state budget crisis, and had more to do with the top-down mismanagement style and poor decision-making here on campus. The state’s crisis became a convenient way to paper over the problem, while incidentally keeping nosy classified and meddling faculty out of the room, encumbered with delays, or burdened down with misleading accounting ledgers and conflicting and often useless information.
In any event, honest attempts to have open meetings to discuss fiscal matters have always been painfully difficult for the District. At Budget Committee or Coordinating Council meetings, if you disagreed you were regarded as ungrateful, if you insisted on having input you were said to be crude, rude, or worse, uncivil. It became clear that shared governance was when the District has it their way, while classified, faculty and students stood around smiling, pumping their heads up and down, like so many oil wells that dot Baldwin Hills. This is what a CEO means by participatory, while the administration orchestrated reductions in course sections and significant part-time classified and faculty lay-offs.
Then, during the spring it became really interesting. Even after the Governor’s May Revise turned out to be not as sadistic as the District predicted -- about $8 million at SMC, later another $1.5 million was mysteriously discovered bringing the total to $9.5 million-- the administration announced, like corporations usually do, it would continue with its worst case scenario and its down-sizing plans. It would mop the plate clean: programs, classified staff, and more part-timers would lose their jobs. The last year of the decompression salary adjustment (from the 50% lawsuit settlement) would also have to go. Every alternative suggestion from the well meaning “cheerful guardians” was brushed aside. No quid quo pro.
SMC employees and students reacted swiftly, strongly and angrily. No other community college had adopted such dramatic measures. No other community college had jettisoned its vocational programs. Even districts that issued May 15 letters to all its faculty relented and brokered deals to save jobs, classes and student services. Why was SMC in worse condition than other community colleges? It just didn’t make sense
But the District was adamant, boasting that if the Faculty Association had agreed to give up its pay raise (sic) all of this would have all been avoided. “You have to understand, Master Niketas,” Baudolino explains, in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, “an emperor has to act like an emperor and forget about feedings.” At Factory SMC the CEO thought it more appropriate to say: the Governor made me do it!
Frustrated, but forever the optimists, classified, faculty and students made one last appeal: a summit, to restore the programs and resolve the crisis. At the pre-planning session, chaired by one of the trustees, the cheerful “outsiders” would be barred from the summit. Then the select group that gathered was suddenly surprised to discovered the $9.5 deficit, was really more like $15.5 million!
Where did that additional $6 million deficit come from? Was it an accounting error? Did the District over spend? Under fund? What?! They didn’t say, at least not in language that anyone from this solar system could understand. However, one thing was clear: the District wanted even more employee sacrifices. Give up your jobs, and more of your salaries and programs have to go!
For eight long and torturous years the cheerful and the gloomy have been steeped in one brawling mud fight after another, all because actions were often made without consulting or caring what classified, faculty or students think or want. Eight years of skirting the 50% law, reorganizing departments, contradictory administrative directives, threatening and intimidating coordinators and counselors, undermining part-time faculty re-employment rights, vindictive and disingenuous public remarks, incorrect payroll checks and character assassinations of complainers in that Romanesque public arena that passes as Board meetings, all apparently performed by reasonably good men and women serving the will of the CEO.
Perhaps it was always about edifices. Rumor has it that an obelisk is being erected on the Madison campus, no doubt acknowledging the chief’s grand achievements and triumph over employees and students. The Board gladly extended her contract and, as a bonus, “a six-week paid professional development leave for the purpose of professional growth and enrichment to be taken any time…” The Board granted more perks for a job badly done while the college has yet to explain how it got into debt. As for those “good” people serving dutifully, they should be mindful that corruption begins quietly, and it begins, as Lincoln Steffen’s wrote in his autobiography, “…with that first tip and proceeded so gradually in an environment where it was all a matter of course that …[one]… never realized what he was doing till the…exposure...”
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