Guest Opinion | Ellen Finkelpearl: PCC Board of Trustees Needs Change, Not ‘Consistency’

After reading Robin Salzer’s Guest Opinion in Pasadena Now 5/31, I am mystified and rather alarmed that the writer apparently believes that any challenge to the three incumbents currently running for re-election to the Pasadena City College Board of Trustees is a move by upstarts using the position to launch a career to a higher office, and an undertaking merely for personal gain. These are elected positions, not appointments for life! In a democratic society, we have elections to hold officials accountable, to bring in new voices and give voters choices about who they feel is most qualified to represent them. We should treat this like any other election and respect the challengers, not treat them as if they are interlopers with the wrong intentions.

I write as the mother of a PCC graduate, a college professor of many decades, and a supporter of Steve Gibson for PCC Board of Trustees district 3. First let me say that Robin Salzer’s use of the restaurant business as an analogy to running a college underestimates the complexities of an academic institution. In a business, perhaps it is fine to take an item off the menu, but the ramifications of cutting a popular program (as the PCC Board did with screenprinting and graphics), or of radically reducing faculty in a department (as with ESL this past year, cut from 13 to 5 full-time faculty) are far-reaching and affect students, faculty and staff in interconnected ways. Colleges serve students and hence the community, and looking at them as if they were businesses that exist for profit is a damaging practice.

Further, we are all proud that our local college, PCC, ranks consistently at the top of California community colleges. Let’s keep it that way! But all is not well when the Faculty Senate and subsequently a majority of participating faculty (163-95) ) support a vote of no confidence in the administration.

Salzer seems to regard this vote as a peevish act on the part of a few rabble-rousers, and regard it solely as a dispute over whether to return to in-person teaching, rather than as a serious rift in communication and break-down in shared governance between faculty and administration. The rosy picture in Salzer’s piece is also contradicted by a petition through change.org signed by 2500 students begging the administration to postpone in-person teaching for a few more weeks.

I support Steve Gibson for district 3, partly because I believe PCC needs a change in leadership, with many of the trustees serving for over ten years, but mainly because I know him and have worked with him on political causes and have found him to be an active and effective leader who generates ideas.

He atttended PCC himself after an earlier life of activism and went on to earn a PhD in Education, with a dissertation on job-satisfaction of adjunct faculty. He is the author of many books and an educator. But beyond that, he is someone who understand how to listen and work with the community.

When some of us were running on a slate together to be Assembly District Delegates, Steve organized several “town halls,” researching issues and finding appropriate speakers and ultimately gathering substantial Zoom audiences—on such topics as the efforts of Uber drivers to unionize and Black Lives Matter.

Most telling was my experience canvassing for him in my neighborhood; I was running through my talking points when the woman I was speaking to saw his photo. “Oh!” she said, “Him. I see him everywhere, when something happens and people are turning out. I’ve seen him in Robinson Park and at the Villa community center; he’s always there for the community.”