First in a series
[Editor’s Note: See pdf below for a copy of the president’s contract.]
[img]1769|right|Dr. Mark Rocha||no_popup[/img]Dateline Pasadena — The campus of leafy, once serene Pasadena City College, where students and faculty have engaged in bitter daily war with the dreaded president, the early summer mood resembles a woman who is eight months and 40 days pregnant.
Something must happen any hour, must it not?
Next Monday is believed to be the witching hour.
That is when the anxious PCC family expects to learn whether Dr. Mark Rocha, possibly America’s most ardently unloved community college president, is leaving. He is one of three finalists for the same position at Kingsborough Community College of Brooklyn.
As members were walking out of yesterday’s Academic Senate meeting, one of them told a reporter “We will be ready if and when Rocha leaves.”
If the president loses his bid and returns, no one, including the president, amazingly, knows when classes will resume.
No starting date has yet been established for the fall term.
“I cannot believe we don’t have a start date for next semester,” one professor said. “No calendar. All colleges have their start dates years in advance.”
“This is typical of the chaos that has marked the Rocha regime, which seems to make up policy on a daily basis,” said one of PCC’s harshest faculty critics.
When another longtime professor was asked if Dr. Rocha’s inherent opposition to shared governance was his main fault, he quickly said no. “His penchant for lying is much worse,” the gentleman said. “He does not tell the same story to two people in a row.”
A link to Dr. Rocha’s agreement with PCC:
(To be continued)
