(See pdf here.)
[img]1769|right|Dr. Mark Rocha||no_popup[/img]Of all peculiar events that have haunted the Pasadena City College campus during the four-year tenure of disliked President Mark Rocha, the leaked Rocha memo accompanying this story likely is the prize winner.
In a bizarre April 17 memo to his “senior leadership team,” the raging Dr. Rocha refers to PCC, faculty and students the way an angry husband blisters his soon-to-be ex-wife.
Oddly, almost unaccountably, he talks of the school he has led for the past four rocky years as doomed to return to its “previous” state, “small and decrepit.”
Stunningly, Dr. Rocha says in another passage – that sounds as if he is storming from his therapist’s office – he never has been more optimistic,
A PCC family member, who obviously did not want his name disclosed, told the newspaper this morning:
“Mark Rocha blames everyone but himself for all the problems of the college.
“Most disturbing to me were these statements:
1) “PCC is not a good college” because it had horrible success rates with black and Hispanic students.
2) “Because there are better colleges out there, students will end up leaving PCC to go there, that we are competing with them somehow. This isn't a business!
3) “As students leave or choose not to come to PCC, our revenues will shrink and we will lose money. I didn't know we were in the Education Business.
4) “He claims that he now has the best management team because he's gotten rid of all the bad administrators.
5) “He claims that democratic shared governance processes didn't work because they got in the way of him imposing a Winter-less calendar, a new college structure, the Pathways program, etc. — all programs they established without following state policy of mutual agreement and status quo, or PCC's own policies
6) “He blames PCC teachers for the problems at the college.
7) “According to Rocha, it is a matter of time before the college becomes “small and decrepit.”
“Mark Rocha refuses to take responsibility for causing so much harm to Pasadena City College.”
