On Oct. 16 Delta College’s Academic Senate met in the Mustang Room to discuss Ethnic Studies being pushed as a General Education requirement, Open Enrollment cutoff, updating Student Learning Outcomes and moving forward from the MyDelta rollout.
Most importantly, how to move forward with issues stemming from the continued MyDelta implementation.
Academic Senate President Kathleen Bruce presented four options to the senate regarding possible courses of action to move forward.
The most talked about option was to bring in consultants with a focus on shared governance to assess the situation and provide further action.
Associate Professor Ricardo Aguilar made it clear that before moving forward, he would like to see a written statement from administration explaining what they have done wrong.
“We need to see a list of things, in terms of what the administration think they did wrong …we have here too many ‘Im sorry’s’ but what are people willing to do, from the administration side, to make it better?” he said.
“I’m here for the faculty and students as well, I want to see a list of things before I vote on this. I need to know what it is that they are going to work on”.
Art Professor Mario Moreno suggested tabling any action until the next semester, which was met with a response from a passionate Bruce who said she would resign her position if this waits another semester.
“If we table this for the next semester, my last day will be the Dec. 2 meeting, and I will be done,” she said. “Because I can not lead anger, all we are right now is anger. I am not going to deal with another year of ‘I don’t know but there is just a lot of angry people’… I can not lead abstractions and vagueness.”
Modern Languages Department Chair Charlene Nunes also commented.
“I think you need to continue that conversation until you have at least the anger subsiding, and people feel like there was some sort of resolution. If we table [actions] it’s just going to sit there and you don’t have any process for solutions for future issues as they come, so everybody will just do what they did for the ERP and we know that is a big disaster, to put it mildly.”
Radio and Television Professor Adriana Brogger supported the idea.
“To keep it internal is not enough, I think we have to bring in a consultant and look at everything that is on the table,” she said.
The MyDelta rollout has hit faculty down to the point where some feel in need of self-healing.
“If this organization is a family, it’s really hard for a family to be able to do major self healing just with themselves. As much as I hate the idea of spending money to bring in a consultant, a consultant is going to have that unbiased approach, kind of our therapist, where we can get the information that we really need… [and look at it with] less emotion and anger,” said First Vice President of the Academic Senate Dr. Josefina Gomez.
Mathematics Professor Jason Broyles added his view, “I just don’t get what we are getting out of [bringing in consultants]. We are going to bring in an outside group to tell us what? We got hosed with a crappy program.”
The motion to table action towards MyDelta was ultimately denied.
“I would like to move forward because this thing has been festering for way too long,” said Second Vice President David Thomas., “We need to have a learning experience from this, it’s no different from me and my son, when somebody has done something wrong I go over it with him and we move on.”
The Academic Senate will meet next on Nov. 6.