Guest Opinion | Todd Jones, Phd: Pasadena City College Is No Longer a Place of Critical Thought

PCC’s faculty are being strained beyond recognition, while a group of disgruntled managers are attacking the Board of Trustees for reasons that are unclear, if not just to revolve around their reverence of PCC President Erika Endrijonas. This is not the PCC that we knew and loved.

The trustee representative from my area is Steve Gibson. In 2022, Trustee Gibson ran on a campaign to fight corruption, advocate for part-time faculty, and stem a 12-year spree of administrative bloat.  He subsequently beat the 12-year incumbent by a landslide.  Gibson, along with the other winning Trustees (who also beat longtime incumbents), are now finding themselves in a viper’s nest of weaponized identity politics. 

At his very first board meeting in July 2022, Trustee Gibson was admonished by the PCC President for asking to see a certain proposal by an event-planning production company for an outreach event on campus.  The contract was for $150,000 taxpayer dollars. He was told to stay in his lane. At the next meeting, he came under an obvious coordinated attack by a sequence of public speakers at the podium.   

Sadly, it’s similarly oppressive for the teaching staff at PCC.   Professors are being silenced, gaslit, bullied or disparaged as they attend college meetings, sometimes with heartfelt pleas to inform the leaders of the college about their struggles.  The meetings are in the public record on PCC’s YouTube channel for all to see. 

At Wednesday night’s Board of Trustee meeting, during her report, the president of the faculty senate Professor Gena Lopez, in no uncertain terms, disparaged professors that speak during public comment. She referred to them as “lone faculty members whose agenda is simply to disrupt, destroy, bully, and complain about the college instead of working to build the college to ensure student success.” This was about an hour after Professor Shannon Maraghy spoke, calling for voting rights for the part-time professors at the college (675 out of 1079 total professors*).

Dr. Lopez insisted that only she and the three other senate executives be considered by the board as the only legitimate voice related to academic matters at the college. Like the managers that had insinuated earlier, Lopez accused the Board of Trustees of “taking meetings” and making “decisions based on the voice of one or few faculty members,”  but failed to provide evidence or details.  As soon as she was done, the managers in the audience clapped like trained seals.   The people that elected the board of trustees expect them to reach out to all members of the campus community in order to inform their decisions, certainly not to just a few elected despots.

Just like with any authoritarian regime, at PCC there is an oppressed class that some insist mustn’t be allowed to spill out from their ranks. Inquiry from, requests made by, or dissent expressed by PCC professors get smacked down by faculty leaders who are in line with the administrative class at the college.   

When professors have asked legitimate questions of their academic senate elected leaders, they are either ignored or scolded. At the March 27, 2023 academic senate meeting, as if to set an example to others should they dare to disobey, several members of the Executive Senate crucified dissenting professors, for publishing a newsletter for faculty and also for speaking about injustices in the senate. The newsletter exposed ongoing issues about accountability and transparency, and was reviewed in PCC’s student paper: https://www.pcccourier.com/news/academic-senate-president-fires-back-at-unauthorized-faculty-newsletter.html

Last month at the Board of Trustees meeting, the 78-member PCC Management Association took advantage of their regular report time to make a 15-minute public comment filled with vague and at times irrelevant complaints, many of which were intended for newly elected Trustee Kristine Kwong. 

At this month’s meeting, with the classified staff leaders now in tow, the managers re-appeared, wearing tight-fitting matching T-shirts that read “Incompetence is Expensive.” (2023-04-19_ Board of Trustees) This time Trustee Sandra Chen Lau was the target followed by complaints about “Board overreach.”  Apropos of nothing, the managers also demanded that the Board extend Endrijonas’ contract by one year. 

On behalf of the thousands of voters in PCC’s district, I am calling on the employees of the PCC administration class to show some respect – to the professors that are educating our youth and to the Board of Trustees that we the community have elected. We elected them not to be the rubber-stamping body it used to be, but to actively oversee and diligently lead the college on our behalf.

*2022 data from the California Chancellor’s Office Data Mart

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfJvgQQ8hrI&t=23725s