Judging from the candidates running for Washtenaw Community College’s governing board, the school’s faculty union is unlikely to achieve its goal of removing president Rose Bellanca. “We’ve not rescinded our [2014] vote of no-confidence,” says union president David Fitzpatrick, “but that was all we had [to use against her].”

That year, the union also endorsed three candidates who won seats on the board. Yet the board voted unanimously to extend Bellanca’s contract in 2015, and did again this year by a five-to-two margin. And neither of the candidates the union is endorsing this year seems likely to target the school’s president.

In a crowded field of ten candidates for two seats, the union interviewed seven. Real Estate One agent Greg Irwin “politely declined to be interviewed,” Fitzpatrick says, while DTE exec Charles Wolfe and jeweler Angela Davis “never responded even after we sent them multiple emails.”

The union interviewed retired AAPS custodian and Democratic Party activist Rod Casey, EMU women’s and gender studies prof Suzanne Gray, WISD exec Holly Heaviland, AADL staffer Marisa Rader Huston, and SPARK business development manager Anna Zinkel–but ended up backing U-M administrator Dilip Das, who was appointed to the board last year, and commercial Realtor Bill Milliken.

“Das struck us as fair-minded and very knowledgeable by asking good questions of the administration,” Fitzpatrick says. The union hopes that will be true of Milliken as well–Fitzpatrick notes that he’s served on the board of the school’s foundation and “is very well connected politically”–his father was governor from 1969 to 1982. “But the thing that put him over the top was that [former WCC president] Larry Whitworth endorsed him. Whitworth says he’s a fair guy who’ll make fair decisions.”

The union chief acknowledges that removing Bellanca would be “a gargantuan step for the board as currently constructed” but says that may change as new members are elected. And whatever happens with the president, “we fully expect if Dilip Das and Bill Milliken are elected we’ll have a board that’s more interested in providing oversight than rubber-stamping what the administration wants.”