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The three candidates vying for the vacant president’s seat at PCC addressed the community at open forums held in the Westerbeck Recital Hall this week where the public was able to submit feedback to the Board of Trustees on each candidate.

According to Board President Berlinda Brown, this will help the board make a decision on who will be selected for the position.

“We encourage the public to submit feedback,” Brown told attendees at one of candidate Rajen Vurdien’s open forum on Monday. “This forum is part of the selection process for the board for picking the next president.”

Attendees were able to submit questions before each forum and a moderator presented each question to each candidate. The most prominent question asked in the forums seemed to be about shared governance and how the three candidates would deal with the tension between the faculty, administration and board.

“One of the reasons I was appointed interim president of Sacramento State College is because I was able to work among groups of very divergent opinions and bring them together,” said Patricia Hsieh, president of San Diego Miramar College, on Tuesday.

When similar questions were asked to Vurdien, Fullerton College’s president, he said that he had dealt with similar problems when he first arrived to Fullerton.

“The person who gets this job has to make sure that he or she can work with all the constituent groups to create a climate that will promote student success,” he said. “Through transparency, I was able to improve the climate at Fullerton… I feel that at PCC, I could do the same by being just as transparent.”

Interim President Robert Miller, who was appointed to his position after Mark Rocha retired last August, said that with accreditation pending, it was up to the entire school—himself included—to try and work on the climate.”

“It’s the collective responsibility that we all have to work on this and it’s only if we trust each other and respect each other that we begin to move forward,” Miller said at his open forum on Wednesday afternoon. “It was said that we were the most functional/dysfunctional college the accreditation team had seen… Our issues are significant but very solvable if we just choose to work better with each other.”

According to Brown, the board hopes to make its decision by the end of April.

Hsieh is in her tenth year as school president for Miramar College. She also serves on many local and national boards, including the San Diego Maritime Museum Board, the Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA), the National Coalition of Certification Centers, and the National Asian Pacific Islanders Council.

Vurdien has been the president at Fullerton College since 2010 and before that was vice president of instruction at Saddleback College for six years. He also currently sits on the executive board of the California State University Fullerton Doctor in Education Leadership program.

Before being selected as the interim president of PCC, Miller was the senior vice president of Business and College Services. He is also PCC alum, having graduated in 1975 with an AA in telecommunications. Miller will be president of the 2021 Rose Parade and Rose Bowl Game.

Philip McCormick
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4 Replies to “Presidential candidates speak at open forums”

  1. C’mon Courier, aren’t we tired of focusing on the same old ‘let’s get along’ slant? If everyone stops talking about the perceived tension ‘between faculty and administration and board’, maybe we can really start to move forward. The Courier doesn’t give any examples of the tension or truly details or investigates any possible causes, nor does Miller go into detail, nor any of the APL crowd who cry over such catch phrases as “civility, inclusion, collegiality”and the like.

    Why doesn’t the Courier start reporting on what the student government is up to, rather than paying so much attention to what mommy and daddy are up to.

    1. With the new Senate leadership coming in, there won’t be any disagreements whatsoever with the administration or Board. The fighting will be amongst faculty – and that’s exactly what the administration wants. I wonder who the 4 people were that forgot to vote, which was the number that Foster won over.

      Bob Miller joked today about using over-sized social science classrooms to pay for music department upgrades. Not cool. PCC needs to be careful of Miller, who says one thing to one group, then says the opposite to another. I didn’t believe for a minute that if he gets the job that he would tell the Board the things the Board doesn’t want to hear. He’s been working at PCC for this long, since when did he do that at all?!?

      1. Miller talks about choice–but he keeps choosing to continue a Rocha-esque style of leadership (witness the calendar mess). He keeps saying that we need to “move forward,” but he continues to run things in the same way that got us into this mess. More and more, it looks like “move forward” means “Just shut up and stop complaining already.”

    2. The kind of candid, investigative reporting you seek stopped when the instructors were hushed years ago. Today it’s a cluster of kids doing the best an 18 year old mind can muster without guidance, Expect no more..
      .

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