Deans Council Says Full-time Football Coach Is Now Top Instructional Priority

Susan Bell, former instructional dean---now full-time computer science and math instructor---passed this on to the MPFA and to the Ukiah Daily Journal. She was present at a recent meeting of the Educational Action Plan committee which received the list of full-time faculty hiring priorities from the Deans Council.

 

By Susan Bell

In case you are not familiar with the most recent alphabet soup entrees from the Mendocino College administration, it"s now DC instead of IA. "Deans Council" has replaced Instructional Administrators. The DC is led by the Executive Vice-president for Academic Affairs, and includes the five deans and assistant deans of instruction. By any name, the people who manage the college educational program have come up with a real . . . Well, you judge for yourself.

After what they claim was an exhaustive analysis of two thick New York City phone directory-size volumes of program review documents, the DC guys have determined their top priorities for new full-time faculty positions. And the winner is Football Coach.

That's right. After the recently-vacated mathematics and business positions are filled, the DC asserts that the top instructional need at Mendocino College is a football coach. First runner-up is a new theater arts instructor, with foreign language perennial second-place finisher an also-ran on the DC list.

No second to the motion to accept the recommendation

The ranking recommendation was handed to the joint administration/faculty Educational Action Plan committee Tuesday morning. If the VP thought this one was going to sail right on past the faculty, he misjudged his audience.Not that the admin team didn't try. The DC team swore to the "purity" and "objectivity" of the review process, that the student numbers and needs determined the outcome. The VP's guys gave it their best shot, claiming to have made the recommendations based on the committee's own guidelines. And, at the two-minute warning, one dean even made a motion to approve the recommendations as presented. It died a loud, silent death for lack of a second. The peasants had at least for the moment revolted and stood their ground.

It's not that the entire MC faculty is completely opposed to hiring a full-time, head football coach. Other California community colleges (usually smaller, less athletically-ambitious ones that don't view football and other athletic programs as key student recruitment tools) have them. They are sometimes very well paid, but they are almost never full-time, tenured faculty. You see, MC has a long history of hiring teachers who are also coaches and vice-versa who later tire of coaching, and get absorbed into the full-time teaching ranks. This reassignment has resulted in a goodly number of faculty who have to teach classes outside of their primary academic areas. This has also been the case in reassignment of discarded former administrators to full-time teaching. At a small school like Mendocino College with it's tiny full-time classroom teaching staff (part-time instructors teach more than HALF of all MC classes) the effects of such practices are magnified many times.

Diversity?

Of course, there are other considerations that may have contributed to faculty unwillingness to swallow the DC recommendations. For instance, "diversity" and programs that serve diverse student populations are mentioned among the criteria that are important in selecting new staffing. Football has proven to be a program that encourages great diversity, considered from a geographical angle. Certainly, most of the players are from outside of the district. This year's team, for instance, includes more than a half-dozen student athletes from Hawaii. But from other perspectives, it is somewhat less serving of diverse student populations. Females, for instance, have not appeared on the MC football rosters, and are unlikely to do so in large numbers. And, unless Goldie Hawn (remember the 1980s movie "Wildcats"?) is currently looking for a coaching job, the candidate pool for this faculty position will be exclusively male. Another criterion that was supposed to be considered by DC was "district-wide implications." Well, unless Ruth Lincoln at the Lake County Center and Mark Rawitsch at the Willits Center are willing to add parking-lot touch football classes, it's difficult to see how hiring a football coach will improve their instructional programs.

What next?

This isn't the end of the story. The Educational Action Plan committee will have to come up with some recommendation about faculty hiring soon. If past history means anything in this case, the administration will find some way to cut deals, make tradeoffs and get what they want in the end. Mendocino College faculty expectations have been lowered to the point where standing firm on principle is only a distant memory. By this time next month, maybe personnel will be advertising a new position in the Ukiah Daily Journal, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the SF Chronicle and the LA Times: "Full-time Faculty: Football Coach." We'll see.

Copyright MPFA 1999
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited