Answer to Delta College dysfunction

Written by Sam Hatch / His Voice
Friday, 25 July 2008

English professor says the mess can be cleaned up, but not without citizen involvement.

If the voters care about the institutional health of San Joaquin Delta College, they’ll take a hard look at the record of the college’s current board. They’ll ask themselves whether any of the incumbents deserve re-election.

In March, an accreditation team concluded that the college’s board of trustees was dysfunctional. In the words of the committee, the board has “devolved into a group reduced to infighting and micromanagement of college operations” and “has consistently failed to live up to its own standards of good practice.”

The accreditation team’s conclusions have been confirmed from the two other independent sources. The San Joaquin Civil Grand Jury observed similar dysfunction in the board and indicated it had “no confidence in the Delta College board of trustees as currently constituted.”

In late May and early June, the San Joaquin Delta College teachers voted overwhelmingly for a resolution of no confidence in the board, citing many of the issues raised by the grand jury and the accreditation team.

The board’s public responses to these serious charges have been feeble at best — an uneasy combination of denial and public assertions of their good intentions.

The board now faces a number of problems of its own making. First, the trustees and top administrators have wasted tens of millions of bond dollars on poorly drawn contracts, poorly supervised consultants and indecision. The $250 million bond was never sufficient to pay for all the projects on the board’s wish list. Yet the board, in one of its clear signs of dysfunction, could not make the tough decisions about which projects should be downsized or scrapped completely. While the board dithered, millions of dollars slowly hemorrhaged away on consultants, feasibility studies, and designs — in all sorts of preliminaries for projects that will never be built.

A million here, 2 million there, another 3 million on another project — they mount up to substantial sums when a board goes years without making tough, responsible decisions. Loss of the money is bad enough, but there has also been a more important loss in public confidence in the college and in the delayed construction of vital facilities for our students.

The board has also jeopardized the college’s accreditation by failing to hire, retain and then allow qualified administrators to do their jobs. The result has been drift — a failure to support administrators and faculty in doing the strategic planning the accrediting agency expects of a properly functioning college.

The board lacks what a former U.S. president called “the vision thing.” As a group, the trustees seem to have forgotten how the board fits into the running of the college and who ultimately is served — the students. The board’s job is policy and oversight; implementation of policy is the job of the administration. When board and administration can’t work cooperatively, the students suffer.

Given such clear evidence of dysfunction, voters should ask incumbent trustees to explain and defend their stewardship of the college. Unfortunately, too often Delta trustees have run unopposed, without even giving the public a ballot statement to express their vision of the college. In effect, unopposed trustees have been relieved of the burden of explaining and defending their records.

The mess at Delta College can be cleaned up, but not without significant turnover in the board. The answer to the board’s dysfunction is citizen involvement.

The college needs thoughtful candidates and informed voters. We need you, and more important, the students need you — especially in those areas where trustees run unopposed.

At a glance
• The Delta College board has three openings, one of which represents Tracy. For information on running: Austin G. Erdman, San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters, 468-2885 or www.sjcrov.org.

• Sam Hatch taught high-school English for 22 years and in 2001 joined the San Joaquin Delta College English department. He lives in Lodi and is a graduate of Delta College.

Source
Published simultaneously in the Lodi News Sentinel