President’s Report to the Senate

As per the Senate's request, I had a meeting with Dr. Laguerre
on November 23, 2009

The major themes that I wanted to address were institutional trust, accountability, and adherence to process

I shared with Dr. Laguerre that Solano has had difficulty in the past because decisions had been made without a clear understanding of the particulars: rationale, data, evaluation, etc… around those decisions. I brought to his attention a series of recent personnel actions that raise concern at a time when Solano needs reliability and dependability. We have had Dean positions become Directors that go through Shared Governance but then when a Director position is changed to a Dean, it does not go through the process. We've had Executive Coordinators become Special Project Grant Writers when there is a Strategic Proposal for a Grant Writer/ Researcher position that has had to go through the Integrated Planning Process. In the wake of VP Field's departure the Interim CISO position goes before the Board and is filled while the other half of the VP of Technology and Learning Resources' job description, the Interim Dean of Library and Learning Resources, won't be filled until July. I explained that there is confusion among the Senate about where, when and how the proposed Dean of Enrollment Management will be filled. We need consistency and transparency.

I also shared with Dr. Laguerre the Senate's concerns about the Vallejo expansion. I passed along your concerns about following process, a lack of information (are there other alternatives to the current location?), input and buy-in by faculty. I mentioned the Senate's concern for how this expansion would affect Measure G prioritization. He did share with me that while the College had thought that we would be able to use matching funds from Measure G to build a new library, that money is, or more specifically, never was available. Our MG funds are currently around 15 million. When I expressed concern for the 1300 building, he assured me that that project will go forward. When I asked how buying a piece of property two city blocks from our current location, that is designed primarily for an automotive program we don't have at Solano, become a priority? He assured me that we were only looking into, not purchasing, the property and that there would be plenty of time for input down the road. I re-iterated our concerns for how this site and its potential programs would impact our current hiring practices. Finally, in regards to the Vallejo expansion, he assured me that nothing has been decided, that the Board is exploring options to potentially solve our "landlocked" status in Vallejo.

I was reminded of the words of Julia "Butterfly" Hill who said the distance between word and action is integrity. Solano must support its emerging process if we are to succeed.

The last item I shared with Dr. Laguerre was that after his presentation I believed that it would be good to have a timeline for implementation and a visual aide to clarify when changes will ocurr and who will be affected by them.

Our Distance Education Coordinator, Sandy Rotenberg, presented the following report during the last Senate meeting that I thought you might want to access here, too.