First in a series
Dateline Altadena – Raging unhappiness over campus conditions, policies du jour and unilateral personnel decisions – emanating from and seemingly singularly imposed by entrenched president Dr. Mark Rocha – brought together organized students and activist faculty members of Pasadena City College last evening. They were seeking to trumpet the avalanche of bad news to the wider Pasadena community.
“We need to be more involved with the community,” said Eduardo A. Cairo, president of the Academic Senate, and a veteran of the broad body of uprising from its earliest days.
It remains questionable how familiar Pasadena residents are with the regularly broadening network of policy and decision-making protests on the PCC campus.
The Town Hall-sponsoring Faculty Assn. put together a diverse six-person student-faculty panel that vigorously aired a bulging docket of carefully catalogued complaints against Dr. Rocha. Problem was, the well-documented protests mainly were heard by people already familiar with them.
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[img]1769|right|Dr. Mark Rocha||no_popup[/img]Present and retired faculty members and students said that Dr. Rocha’s unpopular reign – recently extended to 2017 – has drastically shifted the campus from a student/class-need focus to a kind of amusing daily playtoy for the dreaded president.
Pasadena City College deans, administrators, and a limited number from the allegedly Rocha-compliant Board of Trustees were invited. All passed. Disappointingly to organizers, not a single higher-up appeared.
As for the president, “we stopped inviting Rocha,” a faculty member told the newspaper, “because he is such a pontificator. He loves the sound of his voice. He never stops talking.”
The aroused gathering’s documented protests were intended to form a two-tiered megaphone, to students and to Pasadena residents scarcely aware of the accused sinking conditions and constantly churning turmoil, inside and across Pasadena City College.
Faculty members are both stumped and upset because the community’s ancient newspaper, the Pasadena Star-News, has been more of an impediment than a vehicle. They say they cannot get their views published.
Melissa Michelson, Chair, Ad Hoc Town Hall Committee, said today’s task “will be to get a summary of what happened here to the Board of Trustees and to the campus. We need for the Pasadena community to open its eyes to what is going on here, and the answer may be putting an ad in the newspaper. But it takes money to buy ad space, and our Faculty Senate does not have any. We put on this program by committee donations.
“This,” said Ms. Michelson, “was our first attempt. For the second Town Hall, we would like to take it to another part of Pasadena, using what we learned here.”
Organizers aimed their message at the nearly 30,000 students, many disconnected from the daily heat of PCC politics, and the staid old Pasadena community, known for its stately, century-old mansions, dense, gigantic trees, brahmin history and conservative cultural views.
The Choir
While there was standing room only for the 90-minute Town Hall/spirit rally at the Altadena Public Library, organizers acknowledged the healthy turnout primarily was comprised of insiders, the people most intimately familiar with the daily angst.
When a woman in the audience introduced herself as a community member, she was roundly cheered.
One of the main complaints/storylines of a faculty that says it is harried and students who say their academic needs and desires for classes, counselors, time with their instructors, and a stable semester system, routinely are disregarded, is that the legally protected notion of shared governance has become as irrelevant as the future of Henry Ford’s Model-T. Faculty members and students present contended that shared governance vanished three years ago last June when the career-long controversial Dr. Rocha, a perceived autocrat, abruptly arrived from West Los Angeles College.
One of Dr. Rocha’s most resisted announcements has been a planned 20 percent cutback in classes, blamed on budgetary reasons. Both veteran faculty members and students contend that money lavishly is being spent on non-academic activities across PCC. Following last year’s electoral victory of Prop. 30, there was a presumed influx of funds that they say is unacknowledged. Instead of channeling funding toward student needs, faculty members say the president luxuriously surrounds himself with a phalanx of high-priced favorite persons at his call.
