[Editor’s Note: Infuriated by the latest outburst from Pasadena City College President Dr. Mark Rocha, a longtime Santa Monica College professor delivered an extraordinary rebuttal of Dr. Rocha’s anti-shared governance style at last Thursday’s meeting of the PCC Board of Trustees. He preferred not to disclose his name.]
Re “Rocha Off on Another Tirade: ‘PCC Doomed to Be Small, Decrepit’”
Members of the Board, members of the PCC community:
I have been a teacher in community colleges for over 20 years, in states all across the USA.
For the previous16 years, I have been teaching at Santa Monica College. I have, in the past, admired the role that Pasadena City College has played as a leader in education in the greater Los Angeles area. But no longer. I am speaking to you tonight because I believe it is important for you, as Board members, to hear how this institution is perceived by those outside the local Pasadena echo-chamber.
When your administration's leadership decided to unilaterally discontinue winter and reconfigure your calendar, expressions of disbelief arose everywhere. It was clear to everyone else in the Los Angeles area that you would lose considerable enrollment and that student success would suffer, along with transfer rates. This has been shown to be true in the intervening years, and continues,
catastrophically, today as you scramble and fail to attract students. Surrounding college districts, including the Los Angeles Community College District and SMC, are happily welcoming the students that you are under-serving. Our enrollments keep growing strongly, strengthening our local budgets. I personally have seen senior administration leaders at Santa Monica College shake their heads upon hearing that you have not yet finalized your academic calendar and that you are persisting to hold onto the ill-conceived no-winter model. SMC has already finalized its 2016-17 calendar.
I ask you, how can robust institutional planning take place when no one even knows the shape of the following academic year? Financially and academically, this is a glaring problem. Unfortunately there appears to be a willingness to say, “Let's look at this next year,” but then to put off meaningful discussion until it can again be said, “Well, our timeline is too short to fix this now. We will deal with this next year” — and so on…
Yet another example of a decision made by the administration that has only led to chaos and confusion is the debacle surrounding your ongoing college-restructuring. Departments were informed that they would now be having department chairs, with no clearly defined roles, no meaningful faculty buy-in, and no academic rationale for why such a shift would increase student success. No one knows when, how or if this will be implemented. Contradictory information is being disseminated. This should be seen as unacceptable.
These things point to a serious failure of institutional leadership. The greater Los Angeles area needs a strong PCC, focused on student success, but from the outside, the college seems to be merely stumbling from one crisis to another, with absolutely no ability to plan ahead and no willingness to correct past mistakes.
