Board of Trustees Meeting Notes — 6/25/09

• The Board put out a proposed timeline for the Chancellor’s evaluation that has the members of the college community being surveyed during March 2010. We look forward to working with the Board to create a survey instrument that is meaningful for faculty evaluating the Chancellor.
• The Board had an extended discussion of the idea to solicit private contributions to sponsor classes and to extend naming rights to those classes. The general tenor of the discussion was that they commended the Chancellor for his creativity and passion and that there were reservations about its implementation. If the idea is to be implemented, it would need a careful process that protected the mission and ideals of the college, its students, faculty, classified staff, and administrators.
  The bigger issue is that we as a society need to fund education more and better than we are. We would not need to ask for private funding if the state was funding the college as it should.
  Faculty members, students, and members of the CCSF Foundation spoke mostly in favor of the idea.
  The Board voted to have the Chancellor develop a concrete fund-raising plan that they could endorse by July 23.
• Trustee Ngo moved an amendment to the proposed preliminary budget that would: 1) reduce the salary of administrators who make $150,000 per year or more by 6% and to use the funds to restore heavily impacted courses and “disproportionately basic skills courses”; and, 2) suggest a voluntary 6% reduction in the Trustee’s salaries and use the savings to restore some EOPS food and transportation vouchers for students that would not have received them because of the budget cuts. The Chancellor supported the amendment and spoke strongly to the need for the administrators to share the burden of the financial crisis. Trustee Wong and members of the faculty suggested that the process should be more respectful of the administrators. The amendment passed.
• Trustee Ngo also aired, but did not move at this time, a proposal to create a Vice Chancellor of Legal and Legislative Affairs. His idea is to combine the office of the Associate VC of Governmental Relations with the office of the General Counsel in one new office. In a discussion with him after meeting in which I suggested that the idea should have wider college discussion, Trustee Ngo said he was happy to be patient and to work with the constituencies on the proposed administrative change.
• Trustee Jackson moved an amendment to eliminate the proposed cuts to our childcare program. The amendment passed.
• Trustee Marks spoke to the process of change in the Board culture that we are clearly undergoing and that, I believe, Trustee Marks is fostering.
• All the Board members, and especially the Chancellor, acknowledged the hard work that all the members of the college community have done on the budget in this difficult financial environment.
• In my opinion, despite at times serious disagreement, the meeting was characterized by a high level of discourse and collegiality.