BY HANK REICHMAN

City College of San Francisco (CCSF) has placed Chancellor Mark Rocha on paid administrative leave effective immediately, the college board’s president announced on Monday. Board of Trustees President Shanell Williams declined to provide a reason for the move. However, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that

An internal auditor told the trustees in January that City College spent nearly $14 million more than it took in as of June 30, causing a 58% drop in the unrestricted general fund. The plunge was so steep that the school’s financial condition was declared a “material weakness,” indicating serious problems. The college has little money in reserve.

Trustees have quietly expressed dissatisfaction with how the chancellor communicated efforts to get spending in line with revenue. Rocha cut more than 600 classes, often springing news of the cuts on students and faculty at the last minute, which outraged teachers and students.

Perhaps the biggest issue occurred last fall, when Rocha tried to double administrators’ salaries and give others hefty raises by slipping the plan deep into the college’s budget a day before the trustees voted to approve it. The college’s lawyer, Steve Bruckman, had cautioned that such a move would appear to skirt open-government laws, which require at least two days for the public to examine documents up for a vote.

Ultimately, Rocha and the trustees canceled the large raises and voted to raise most administrators’ pay by 10% amid the budget crisis.

The board will appoint an acting Chancellor this week, and then an Interim Chancellor to fill the position while the board conducts a search.

Maybe this time the trustees will listen to their faculty, because, sadly, this situation was entirely predictable. As I wrote on this blog when Rocha was hired back in June 2017, the trustees with just one dissent ignored objections from dozens of instructors who warned that he had clashed with faculty at all three California community colleges where he had been president.

“With all respect to you trustees, are you out of your minds? Have we not been through enough hell?” Janet Lohr, an art instructor, asked the trustees, expressing the views of most of the dozens of speakers who addressed the board prior to its vote.

Rocha’s record certainly would seem to validate faculty suspicions. Indeed, his resume seems almost emblematic of the kind of itinerant failed administrator that faculty members everywhere have learned through often bitter experience to recognize and despise. In the 1990s, Rocha was a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where he rose to become an associate dean. In 1996, he was named dean of the college of humanities at Humboldt State University, but left two years later to become provost at Seton Hall University. From there he moved to Santiago Canyon College, where he served as college president for the 2000-2001 school year, departing after a faculty vote of no-confidence. Rocha then became president of the for-profit Argosy University/Los Angeles-Orange Campus in September 2001. He later was the Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs at Los Angeles Mission College prior to becoming president of West Los Angeles College in 2006. Rocha was the president of West Los Angeles College until 2010, when he left the school to become the president of Pasadena City College (PCC).

During Rocha’s tenure at PCC, the Los Angeles Times reported, full-time enrollment at the school, long considered one of the state’s finest community colleges, dropped by nearly 13%. College leadership also came under fire for inviting, and then uninviting, Oscar-winning alumnus Dustin Lance Black as commencement speaker. The invitation was rescinded over concerns about an illegally obtained sex video featuring the screenwriter, but trustees backed off and Black spoke at graduation.

Pasadena faculty took two no-confidence votes in Rocha and conducted an online review of his leadership that produced scathing results, with most respondents saying he had done a poor job of guiding the school. “Fascist approach to leadership,” one wrote. “Rocha is destroying PCC,” said another. The faculty vote showed 92% displeasure with his management. In April 2013, the Academic Senate voted against him 23–0, with one abstention.

Faculty members said they were left in the dark about several crucial issues, including scheduling changes, canceling winter semester and opening a new extension campus. “These decisions have been made behind closed doors,” said Eduardo Cairo, then the president of the Academic Senate. “We keep on telling them that we’re open, we’re here, let’s talk, and they never want to talk.”

In a statement at the time the CCSF faculty union, AFT 2121, also objected to Rocha’s appointment. “Some are saying that hiring Rocha is a calculated risk, and that he’s the only candidate with experience,” the union said. “It’s not a calculated risk to hire Mark Rocha, it’s a guaranteed disaster. His record makes it clear that he stirs up trouble wherever he goes, and is no friend to students, faculty or staff.”

Rocha, of course, is just the latest in a steady stream of unqualified appointments to college and university leadership positions nationwide made without faculty input or in defiance of faculty opposition that end in disaster. As Frank LoMonte wrote in the Spring 2019 issue of Academe, “Short-lived presidencies attributable to inadequate searches are no rarity.” He tallied up a series of failures attributable to secret or inadequate searches, including these:

• Norfolk State University in 2013 fired President Tony Atwater just two years into his tenure and with ten months left on his contract. Atwater had left his prior presidency under a cloud of questions about his spending habits and high-conflict leadership style, but Norfolk trustees had never checked. Because Atwater was hired in a closed-door search, his candidacy was not made known to the public.
• The University of Missouri pushed out former software executive Tim Wolfe three and a half years into his presidency after his clumsy response to racial unrest on campus inflamed tensions and led to the university’s placement on the AAUP’s list of administrations censured for violations of academic freedom.
• Kennesaw State University parted ways with Sam Olens, a former state attorney general, just thirteen months into his tenure, after a mishandled controversy over cheerleaders kneeling to protest racial injustice.

As the song goes, when will they ever learn?

The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, formulated jointly by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges states:

Joint effort of a most critical kind must be taken when an institution chooses a new president. The selection of a chief administrative officer should follow upon a cooperative search by the governing board and the faculty, taking into consideration the opinions of others who are appropriately interested. The president should be equally qualified to serve both as the executive officer of the governing board and as the chief academic officer of the institution and the faculty. The president’s dual role requires an ability to interpret to board and faculty the educational views and concepts of institutional government of the other. The president should have the confidence of the board and the faculty.

On April 8, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, AAUP senior program officers Monica Owens and Hans-Joerg Tiede will lead a webinar on AAUP governance principles around presidential searches and organizing strategies to push for these principles to be implemented on campus. To register for the webinar, or receive a recording if you’re unable to attend, go to https://www.aaup.org/event/webinar-presidential-searches-higher-education.