“Paranoia runs high, and morale runs low,” WCC faculty union president Maryam Barrie told the college’s trustees at their April meeting.
As Barrie went on to charge that the school suffers from a “closed atmosphere” and a “lack of transparency,” board chair Rick Landau twiddled his thumbs and checked his watch. The body language was dismissive–and consistent. Landau, a lawyer elected in 2000 and now serving his third six-year term, did the same thing when Barrie spoke to the board in March.
When an Observer reporter asked Barrie about the chair’s reaction afterward, she replied, “I’m not surprised. Before he was the chair, he spent a great deal of time at meetings looking at an iPad.”
Yet Barrie’s remarks at board meetings are one of the few ways the community college’s board and president, Rose Bellanca, hear from the faculty these days. Bellanca all but stopped a meeting with the faculty leadership two years ago–earning her a vote of “no confidence” from the faculty union last year.
Landau agrees faculty-administration relations weren’t good after the board hired Bellanca in 2011. “I don’t know that I’d call it poisonous,” he said after the March meeting. “There was certainly a lot of conflict. But it seems to be improving. President Bellanca has done a great job in mending fences.”
That’s not how new trustee–and former faculty union president–Ruth Hatcher sees the relationship. “The president talks about wanting it to be better, but in more than a year she’s had one lunch meeting with two union people,” she says. “That doesn’t count for much.”
New trustee Dave DeVarti describes the relationship even more bluntly. “Trust has broken down between the administration and the faculty.”
Hatcher, DeVarti, and Christina Fleming were elected in November in the biggest turnover the board’s ever had. All were endorsed by the faculty union and criticized the outgoing board’s decision to give Bellanca a raise and a one-year contract extension just before the election.
The new and old trustees first met at the board’s November retreat. “They invited us to come and learn,” explains Fleming, a recent WCC graduate.
Hatcher came to learn–but also to ask questions. “My first was ‘who can I trust: the administration, the board, the faculty? I don’t who to trust.’ And I still don’t know who I can trust.”
DeVarti made his own mistrust of the administration clear at the March meeting. After finance VP Bill Johnson proposed three ways to meet revenue goals over three years–all starting with a 1.5 percent tuition increase the first year for county residents–DeVarti suggested no increase at all for in-county students and a 6 percent increase in tuition for online students.
Only Hatcher supported DeVarti’s idea at the time, but at the April meeting he formally introduced it as an amendment to the administration’s budget. “If you put something on the table that is going to be popular among the electorate, it becomes a lot harder to vote against it,” he predicted beforehand. The other two newcomers voted with him, but the amendment was defeated by the four holdover trustees.
The new trustees believe, however, that there’s been the start of real change on the board. “It might look bad now, but it’s gonna get better,” says Fleming. “It might not be fast. Our options are very limited now, but if people care enough to vote, it’ll change. I’m the first Gen Xer on the board, and we need the Gen Xers and Gen Yers to come out. If they do, we’re good.”
DeVarti hopes change will come sooner rather than later but warns, “if it doesn’t happen evolutionarily before the next election, it will happen at the next election.”
That’s set for next year, the same year the college’s millage comes up for renewal. Both old and new trustees say they expect it to pass. “We’ve never lost a millage,” says Landau, “and I don’t see that happening now.”
Faculty union president Barrie isn’t so sure. “I worried last year with the vote of no confidence that taking action would jeopardize the millage, and I was hoping things would be better by now. But I still don’t have any confidence. No trust.
How do you get trust? We’re willing to rebuild trust, but you can’t do that in a vacuum.”
Let me get this straight, Landau said that there has been conflict since the president was hired? In 2011? It seems like he is admitting this now since there are two new board members who don’t agree with him that things are going as well at WCC and Landau thinks. It could be that the president was a bad hire in the first place. The faculty have been unhappy for years and now we start to hear the real story because the board has changed members. What other secrets are they hiding? It sounds like a change at the top is in order – the president and some board members.