The hiring committee for President Dr. Robert Agrella’s replacement has hit a couple of rough patches along the road. The AFA feels it should have been specifically included in the committee and Associated Students wasn’t happy about the Academic Senate having more seats than other groups represented on the committee.
The Board of Trustees put together the hiring committee to advise the Board throughout the hiring process and to represent the diverse groups with vested interest in the new college president. The committee includes the Academic Senate, the Associated Students, SEIU, the classified staff union, the administration department and members from the Board.
The Board gave each group two seats to each group to appoint their representation on the committee, except the Academic Senate, which was given four seats.
AFA feels its omission from the committee is critical because AFA is the group familiar with faculty salaries, benefits and working conditions, AFA President Warren Ruud said. “While there is no official standing of shared governance with AFA, there is a traditional one.”
In an informal survey of other community colleges, Ruud said AFA couldn’t find an example of a president or chancellor being hired by a college without the faculty’s bargaining unit represented. AFA is the bargaining unit for SRJC faculty for salaries, benefits and working conditions.
“We need someone on there with negotiating experience,” Ruud said. Someone who is familiar with the recent history of the budget at SRJC is crucial to preserving the college’s legacy of excellence, especially since the college will be replacing at least 75 percent of its regular faculty in the coming years, Ruud said.
“[This will] make any collaboration in the future more difficult, but we are going to try our best,” Ruud said.
By policy and protocol, the Academic Senate is the body that makes faculty committee decisions, Board of Trustees President Rick Call said. “We left it up to the Academic Senate to work that out,” he said about AFA’s presence on the hiring committee.
“We have our committee,” Call said. “The less we talk about the past, the better for the future.” Call wants to move on and get down to the actual business of finding a new president for SRJC. “We don’t need to keep regurgitating this issue.”
Hiring the president is in the hands of the Board, Call said, and they could do it all by themselves, but they want to include all areas of the campus community. The board is not required to include help from any group on campus and they are not required to give an equal number of representatives to each group they do decide to include.
The Board decided to add two Academic Senate seats to better represent the diversity of courses and faculty at SRJC. The Academic Senate has appointed AFA members to the committee with the extra seats.
The additional seats for the Academic Senate caused Associated Students President Amanda Swan to question the ethics of fair representation on the hiring committee.
“This creates an imbalance within the group and eliminates the original intent to have all bodies represented fairly and equally,” Swan said in a letter to Call asking the Board to reconsider granting four seats to the Academic Senate. Associated Students wasn’t upset that faculty received two extra representatives, but that any one group received more representation than the others.
Some people, like the Board, might not empathize with those who are not represented, because to the Board it is not a big deal, said Student Trustee Taylor Anderson-Stevenson.
Like Call, Anderson-Stevenson wants get on with the hiring process. “We all want the same thing. We want to spend all the time we have and commit to hiring someone that represents us all,” Anderson-Stevenson said.