Fourth in a series
Re “The Classroom Is His Favorite Arena”
[img]1341|left|Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh||no_popup[/img]Like many collegiate executives, Nabil S. Abu-Ghazaleh, the first-year president of West Los Angeles College, began his career in the classroom, a setting for which he has retained abiding affection.
The distinction between administering and operating in the classroom, said Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh, “is a skill issue. One of my mentors once told me, ‘When you interview for an administrative position and people ask, ‘Do you still teach?’ you say ‘Every day.’ And indeed it is.
“Many of my colleagues in administration look at the work we do as an interpretation that is going to help me explain what the priorities are to bring people along.
“It is teaching work at a different scale.
“As I went through the various administrative posts – from an interim dean to now a president – I think about serving a larger number of students, obviously having a smaller and smaller impact on each student because of the lack of direct contact.
“Administrators still are trying to facilitate the same thing, student learning, student development.
“What we do is hard work. It’s challenging. The only reason many of us do it is because at the end of the tunnel, we see a little light for the students we are serving.”
A Matter of Time
When it comes to feeling rewarded, said Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh, “the time scale is the difference between being a classroom teacher and an administrator.”
Surveying his high-ceilinged office on the leafy, enclosed campus, he said that “the work I do doesn’t have an immediate impact on the little light bulb above a student’s head – that day, that week or even that semester.”
When a mesmerized visitor sits with Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh of an afternoon on the West L.A. College campus, he soon appreciates the uncommon fineness of the character of this low-key Middle Eastern immigrant who has seamlessly accommodated himself to a homeland he adopted when he started college in San Diego in the 1980s.
He speaks with an utter precision and a well-bred refinement seldom seen this side of a Swiss timepiece.
Administrators traditionally are consumed big-picture thinkers, but Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh is different.
Thinking Sensitively
“When you think of a classroom,” he says, “some people teach in it. Some help clean it. Some help build it. Some help equip it.
We all are creating different pieces, contributing that environment. No one person can do all of it. And so we each play our part in making it happen.”
Every time West L.A. College’s presidential carousel pauses to install yet another new president, as it often has in recent years, there is renewed hope that the latest hire will be a longer-term fit than his predecessors.
And so it goes with Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh, an orator of promise because of both his charismatic style and his message.
“I would love to do more public speaking,” he said. “I don’t do enough. That almost is an admission of guilt in the sense that part of the job I should be doing to create a better environment is to connect the college better with its community.”
Then he turned to the often bumpy relationship between the college and its neighbors.
(To be continued)
