First in a series
[img]1769|right|Dr. Mark Rocha||no_popup[/img]Dateline Pasadena – On a single point as miniscule as the head of a pin can the grim-faced army of Mark Rocha’s fiercest critics and his mutely stepping legion of defenders grudgingly agree:
Dr. Rocha’s days as the distractingly controversial president of Pasadena City College are numbered.
Before a conquering smile can be summoned by his populous field of opponents, it must be understood that, like most aspects of Dr. Rocha’s lifelong under-siege career, “days are numbered” is a flexible phrase. It is not intended in the traditional sense of an abbreviated future.
A thousand days is the best guess on the tenure of the former West Los Angeles College president.
That is how much time remains on his fleshy three-year contract. In mid-term, the seemingly sycophantic Board of Trustees erased his original $230,000 base salary and awarded a new agreement that is said to make him the best-paid community college president in the state, even as flames of bitter warfare crackle frighteningly close to his well-tended self.
“Rocha always has been a smooth talker, and now he is desperate man who will go down,” vows an optimistic onetime faculty member. She talks of a carefully devised strategy for ridding Pasadena City College of a man who has trailed huge personnel, personal and professional; problems in his wake for years, say campus sources.
Mightily determined anti-Rocha forces, drawn from all streams of the PCC community, are galloping through clouds of dust – even, or especially – this summer in sizzling pursuit of his carefully coiffed locks.
Commonly described by veteran faculty members and students as a robotic, power-crazed autocrat, he looks unstoppable.
One-Man Rule
Barring a bizarre incident – odds always are short if Dr. Rocha is involved – the alienated and the yet-to-be alienated concur that he will not bid adieu:
Unless he wants to walk out the door.
On his terms.
As the supreme symbol of invulnerable authority on campus, he is said to have shrunk the malleable Board of Trustees to pedestrian status as the most obvious symbol of his one-man rule.
Three votes of non-confidence.
So what?
The impenetrably dapper president has flicked them off his dandruff-free shoulders as if they were crippled horseflies in their death throes.
Disheartened current and former faculty, along with not only exasperated but angered students, charge their pockmarked leader with shamelessly adopting a scorched earth policy. They accuse him of restlessly destroying, reversing, rewriting campus policies as he simultaneously roars through and flies over the PCC campus like a bullet-proof black cloud.
Even as the hundreds whom Dr. Rocha has alienated marshal their modest power base, the president is as silent and unworried as an immutable monarch who laughingly observes his frustrated peasants scrambling below.
Because he believes he controls all the ammunition in the kingdom, he is said not to have produced a single bead of perspiration in years.
Isn’t it ironic, said one PCC campus observer, that even though Dr. Rocha’s cup of confidence is overflowing, his past is so problematically littered that he may not be able to purchase one cup of coffee for $100 from either of his last two employers?
Unless he deputizes a gofer.
(To be continued)
