ERRARTIC BOARD GOVERNS
TWO-YEAR COLLEGES

By William Trombley

Meetings of the statewide community college Board of Governors have taken on a surreal quality, as board members indulge in personal enthusiasms and petty peeves that seem to have little to do with the major problems facing the two-year public colleges.

Community colleges must figure out how to accommodate hundreds of thousands of additional students over the next decade; how to teach basic skills to increasingly underprepared students; how to adapt vocational and technical programs to meet the job needs of a high-tech society; and how to find the money to do all of this and more.

Instead of focusing on these major issues, however, the board has spent much of the last two years either plotting against now-departed statewide Chancellor David Mertes or promoting various pet projects.

For instance, at a meeting of the board's educational policy committee last May, Vishwas D. More, a retired engineer who was then board president, asked that $2 million be added to the colleges' 1997-98 budget request for "globalization."

During the discussion that followed, it became clear that few people in the room had any idea what More was talking about.

"We're having a problem knowing how to get our arms around this," said Rita Cepeda, vice chancellor for curriculum and instructional resources.

Board member Julia Wu pointed out that many of the 106 community colleges already have active study programs in foreign countries. She questioned the need for a statewide "globalization" effort. Others suggested that the money could be put to better use.

But More persisted. "If Saddam Hussein had gone to an American school, or had been involved in an activity like this, then that war ("Desert Storm") never would have happened," he announced to a startled audience. "I truly believe that."

The president then appointed Yvonne Bodle, one of his board allies, to head a "globalization" task force, and the $2 million item later was added to the budget request.

"This was typical behavior," the director of a statewide community college organization said afterward. "A board member has a pet project, refers it to a committee, a task force is appointed and off they go."

In addition to this kind of logrolling, board members sometimes interfere in the management of the statewide chancellor's office and of local campuses.

"They have a grossly inappropriate understanding of their role," said a veteran community college president who spoke only on condition that he not be identified. "They don't understand the difference between policy making and management"

Philip G. Bardos, a southern California business consultant who was a member of the Board of Governors from 1990 to 1994, said some of his colleagues "thought they were operational types."

Vishwas More and others make frequent trips to local community college campuses and district offices, where they collect complaints and bring them back to the statewide chancellor's office in Sacramento.

More, who boasts of having visited more than 50 campuses since joining the board in 1993, said this is the only way to get "bottoms-up input" about local problems.

More said the visits have taught him that "each campus is different...We cannot treat 106 campuses the same way, because their needs and requirements are so different."

Few would quarrel with that observation, nor complain about governing board members getting to know the colleges better. But problems arise when board members try to deal with issues that should be handled by the statewide chancellor's office or by local administrators.

Officials in the chancellor's office said More and Bodle, after campus visits, have tried to move certain building projects up on the priority list, disrupting agreements that had been worked out between the statewide office and local colleges.

More and others "would bypass the chancellor and work directly with staff," Bardos said. "It was pretty clear that they had in mind getting involved in the day-to-day operation of the system."

The 16 board members are appointed by the governor. There are 11 public members, two local community college trustees, two faculty representatives and a student. Most serve six-year terms.

Although there have been some excellent appointments over the years, the general level has not been high. Governors of both parties have tended to appoint political supporters or contributors or their spouses.

The board that was assembled by former Governor George Deukmejian in the late 1980s was considered by many community college observers to be one of the best.

But Bardos said board behavior began to change in 1992 and 1993, when several of Deukmejian's appointees were replaced by those of Governor Pete Wilson. The new members included More; Alice Petrossian, a Glendale school administrator; and Joe Dolphin, a San Diego businessman. In addition, Wilson reappointed two faculty representatives-Larry Toy, an astronomy instructor at Chabot College, and Yvonne Bodle, who teaches business at Ventura College. This group formed a board faction known as the "Gang of Five."

"The board changed dramatically, and for the worse," said Tim Haidinger, a San Diego real estate investor who was a member of the Board of Governors from 1987 to 1995. "There were lots of secret meetings by this group. It was never clear to me what their goals were, other than getting rid of Dave Mertes."

The Gang of Five was displeased with the soft-spoken Mertes, who had been statewide chancellor since 1988, because he did not heed their directives.

More praised Mertes as "one of the true gentlemen I know," but said he "relied very strongly on his own people, rather than getting involved himself...Sometimes you need to get involved in the team as the person in charge, as the quarterback, and that wasn't being done."

Larry Toy said Mertes allowed issues to wallow in the consultation process forever, without bringing recommendations to the board for action. He said the board appeared to be engaged in micromanagement because Mertes failed to carry out their instructions.

Toy also said Mertes failed to communicate adequately with board members.

"In the first five years I served with Dave, we might have gotten five or six communications from him-perhaps one call a year on average," Toy said. "That criticism existed from the first days I was on the board. Other board members would say, 'Well, he needs to work on that,' but nothing ever happened."

But Mertes says he quarreled with the "Gang of Five" because they politicized the board.

"They purported to speak for Governor Wilson," the former chancellor said in an interview. "They would often say, 'This is what the governor wants.' But I pointed out that was not their role. They are supposed to be an independent governing board, pursuing policies that are in the best interests of the colleges, not messengers for the governor. That was the core issue I found so objectionable."

As the Gang of Five's influence grew within the board, the effort to oust Mertes intensified. He was told to spend more time in Sacramento and less in Washington, D.C., where the California chancellor had become something of a national spokesman for community colleges. The governor's office was persuaded not to pay for the Washington trips.

Mertes said he was told by Alice Petrossian not to meet with Governor Wilson unless at least one board member was present. Board members insisted that their own names, not the chancellor's, be on proposed legislation, Mertes said, as well as on joint statements by the University of California, the California State University and the community colleges.

"The problem was their meanness," according to former board member Tim Haidinger. "I've served on a lot of public boards and I expect policy differences. I think that's healthy. But this was just petty meanness-small-time grudges."

When More and Petrossian were elected president and vice president of the Board of Governors in November 1995, Mertes realized the battle had been lost, and he resigned.

The board's treatment of Mertes left a sour taste in the mouths of many and made it difficult to find a replacement. Despite strenuous efforts (and the expenditure of $50,000) by the management recruiting firm of Korn-Ferry International, few able candidates could be persuaded to apply.

There were other reasons. The job pays less than chancellors earn in large districts like Los Angeles and San Diego. State financial support for the chancellor's office has been cut by almost 50 percent in recent years, and the number of employees has dropped by one-third.

Perhaps most important, the statewide chancellor, unlike the UC president or the chancellor of the Cal State system, has little authority over local colleges and districts, whose chief executive officers are hired and fired by local governing boards.

Still, a prestigious job like chancellor of the California Community Colleges should have attracted more interest than it did, and it is widely believed that many able candidates were reluctant to apply because of the Mertes affair and the erratic behavior of the Board of Governors.

After almost a year, the board abandoned its search and appointed Tom Nussbaum, the system's 48-year-old general counsel, who had been acting chancellor since Mertes' departure, to a two-year term.

Nussbaum acknowledged that the board has been "somewhat dysfunctional" in the recent past, but said the situation is changing.

"This is something they are trying to grow out of," he said in an interview last December. "I think there have been significant improvements over the last several months."

Nussbaum said he and Alice Petrossian, who has replaced More as board president, have agreed to "reconfigure the board meetings," which are held every other month, so more time can be spent on "big policy issues."

They will meet as a "committee of the whole," instead of in smaller, subject-matter committees, the new chancellor said, "so they will know collectively what they're doing and not base their actions on the desires of two or three members."

Nussbaum implied that there would be no more "globalization" sideshows, no matter how much they might contribute to the enlightenment of Saddam Hussein and other world tyrants.

Even if the eccentricities of these particular board members can be curbed, however, larger questions will remain about the governance of the colleges, which have been described as "less a system than a federation of warring tribes." But there is little agreement about how the structure should be changed.

Some think a stronger central governing board and chancellor's office are needed.

The statewide Board of Governors, created in 1968, has less authority than the Cal State Board of Trustees, and far less than the constitutionally protected UC Board of Regents.

The board and the statewide chancellor distribute state-appropriated funds to local districts, watch for districts that are financially shaky, set capital outlay priorities and play a number of advisory and coordinating roles. But the colleges are run by locally-elected boards that are only sporadically responsive to statewide direction.

Some large districts maintain their own lobbyists in Sacramento, who may or may not coordinate their efforts with those of the statewide chancellor and the Board of Governors.

"I think we would be a stronger and more effective player at the statewide level if there were more centralization," said Grace Mitchell, president of Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, and current president of the statewide organization of chief campus officers.

But Mitchell also acknowledged that most CEOs don't favor centralization. "We tend to wish for dollars with no strings attached, so we can keep them (the chancellor and the Board of Governors) from meddling," she said.

Even CEOs who oppose a strong central office would like to see statewide collective bargaining, instead of the present system of separate negotiations with various unions by each of the 71 community college districts. They say it makes little sense for each district to bargain separately now that the state, since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, largely determines how much money each district is to receive.

"A statewide salary schedule would relieve a lot of the pressures" on local college administrators, said Tom Von Groningen, who was chancellor of the Yosemite Community College District for 18 years. "But it would be very hard to do because the unions would oppose it and the different districts are all over the board in terms of wages and benefits."

Nussbaum, the new chancellor, pointed out that strengthening his role and that of the Board of Governors would not be in the best interests of the many organizations that have sprung up around the two-year colleges-unions, faculty organizations, associations of trustees and administrators, the Community College League of California, and others.

"Just approach it rationally," he said. "If you are an interest group that operates at the system level and in the Legislature, do you really want a strong chancellor's office? In a shared governance environment, if the chancellor's office is relatively weak, you have potentially more influence."

Many community college leaders suggested in interviews that a regional governance approach would work better than the present system

Some would keep the local governing boards, while others would reduce them to the status of "advisory committees," and still others would abolish local boards completely. Colleges would be grouped into several geographic regions (suggestions range from three to seven or eight), each with its own governing board and chief administrative officer.

David Mertes, the former statewide chancellor, supports the regional idea but thinks there also is a need for a coordinating office in Sacramento to deal with the governor, the Legislature and state agencies. "People in Sacramento like to have one phone number to call," he noted.

Piedad Robertson, president of Santa Monica College, is among those who think the two-year public colleges should be merged with Cal State campuses in regional clusters. They believe such an arrangement, among other benefits, would smooth the path for community college students who want to transfer to Cal State.

Some would merge all three public systems-UC, Cal State and the community colleges-into one, like the State University of New York or the City University of New York, but they know the University of California never would agree to such a plan.

However, Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz seems to be open to the idea.

"Clearly, the situation can be better than it is now," Munitz said. "Whether some more formal arrangement with Cal State is the answer, I don't know, but I certainly think it is worth some serious consideration."

There is little doubt that any new effort to regionalize community college governance or to reduce the role of local governing boards would be met with stiff resistance.

"I can't see any value in regional boards," said Peter MacDougall, now in his 16th year as president of Santa Barbara City College. "I agree there should be more cooperation among the colleges, but that can be done without regional boards. This idea might sound good from some theoretician's standpoint in Sacramento but it's not practical."

Local governing boards are important because "they connect the campus with the community," and because "they bring an external view" to college affairs, said David Viar, executive director of the Community College League of California, which represents trustees and CEOs.

Nor is the Legislature likely to abolish these boards, which provide hundreds of Californians with prestigious positions and, in some cases, lucrative stipends.

It seems likely that the present community college governance system will be retained, and that little attention will be paid to critics like Constance Carroll, President of San Diego Mesa College, who said, "We're much too large to keep making this up as we go along."

-William Trombley