Dateline Pasadena – After years of being wracked by aching controversy, Pasadena City College is dealing with a new flap that may sound like an familiar one. Ghostly pricking points, the type that led to the ouster of President Mark Rocha almost a year and a half ago, have returned to haunt the Pasadena City College campus, critics are saying.
A source tells the newspaper that a supposedly innocuous announcement was tucked into the rear pages of the Board of Trustees’ packet for Monday’s meeting:
“REASSIGNMENT
“From: Associate Dean, Noncredit
“Noncredit Division
“To: English as a Second Language
Instructor
“Effective date: 16 Jan.”
1. The creation of this position ignores the policy and procedure by which tenured professors are hired at the college.
What is behind this reassignment?
Who has made this decision?
Is this cronyism?
Why isn’t the position being made public?
There is a past practice of faculty working as administrators, but they have reassignment “retreat rights” back into being faculty. How can someone who never has worked as a fulltime instructor at Pasadena City College become a fulltime instructor without an open selection process set out by Human Resources, and without being interviewed?
Why isn’t the rigorous and democratic process of deciding which department needs fulltime faculty based on multiple factors such as faculty turnover and fulltime student enrollments being followed?
Installing the current Associate Dean of Non-Credit, one Alice Mecom, as a professor in the Languages Division, violates the Board policy for faculty hiring. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges put PCC on probation for not following policies.
If the Board approves this reassignment, it will continue to violate policies (See blog post Accreditation in the Air about why PCC was put on probation.)
According to the hiring policy for fulltime faculty:
When a faculty position becomes open, before the public announcement, the Office of Human Resources shall distribute an announcement of these openings (via campus mail and email) as transfer opportunities to current faculty. The interview process shall be conducted in accordance with District/PCCFA contract (section 5.8).
1) The informal hiring committee should include at least two faculty from the specific area or discipline in which the new faculty will be hired. e. The division/discipline committee shall recommend to the Office of Human Resources the agencies, professional organizations, internet listservs, individuals, etc. to receive the job announcement, in addition to those normally contacted by Human Resources. The Office of Human Resources shall distribute the announcements of the College’s job openings in compliance with the college’s Faculty and Staff Diversity Plan.
2. Equally disturbing is the information found about Ms. Mecom’s direct supervisor, Ofelia Arellano, a dean who was hired during the Rocha Regime.
“Numerous Workman’s Comp cases, an inflamed faculty, cronyism in the handing out of grants to faculty (with a racial bias), the brutal, illegal treatment of employees, and retaliatory behavior towards College employees…The lawsuits are just waiting to happen over the College’s failure to deal with these matters adequately… Pity that the issues (shared governance, transparency, lack of cohesion and total lack teamwork between campus bodies, Administration, and the president) which have landed the College in such serious accreditation trouble are still being smoothed over and ignored. The mindless protection of seriously flawed administrators (Non-credit Division), non-transparent awarding of grant money under highly questionable circumstances, and the existence of the PCC administration’s old boy network are all set to land the College on the front page of the Pasadena Star-News with questions for the president and Board of Trustees.”
The Pasadena City College administration cannot continue to ignore the problems that Ms. Arellano brings with her from Santa Barbara City College. A thorough administrative review of PCC’s non-credit dean should occur.
The Truth (From the Courier online “New Dean Aims to Make Difference for Students”)
April 17, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Thank you for taking this woman off our hands. To learn more about her administrative style and how she treats people, please refer to the following links:
1. http://www.edhat.com [copy and pasted below]
2. http://www.sbcc.cc.ca.us/accreditation/files/SBCC%20Special%20Report%20March%202013.pdf (see survey comments towards bottom of report). Good luck with her, PCC.
