A Trustee Should Be Able to Speak Independently

I ran for the Governing Board in the fall semester of 2022, upon the advice of my attorney. My faculty union leaders at that time refused to represent me. They allowed campus president Sanchez to violate eight sections of the faculty contract to keep me from returning to campus in my role as a tenured faculty member.

At the time, I had already spent more than 30 years serving Southwestern College as a tenured Counselor and Professor. During that time, I had also served my colleagues through the Southwestern Community College District faculty union, SCEA, including as Faculty Union President, Lead Negotiator, and Grievance Chair.

I worked my way through virtually every level of union leadership, serving as Secretary, Treasurer, and Vice President before being elected President.

I had spent decades learning how Southwestern College worked, advocating for employees and students, and building relationships throughout the institution.

My decision to run for the Governing Board was because of the lack of due process rights that the campus president and the then leaders of the faculty union had colluded to deny me. I had spent $55,000 out of pocket to pay a private attorney for representation that paying 30 years of union dues should have guaranteed me by the fall of 2022.

I needed to bring my experience as an advocate, my institutional knowledge of the college, and my perspective as a longtime employee and community member to the Board. If the president of the college and the then faculty union leaders could violate the faculty contract, treating me, an honest, open, transparent, dues-paying campus gadfly, in such a disparaging, racist, and sexist manner, what would they do to other non-experienced, non-extraverted campus employees?

What Happened Before I Ran

Before I ran for the Governing Board, the former campus president, Kindred Murillo, had placed me on “involuntary paid administrative leave” twice. 

The first time was because I had lobbied to have a fellow counselor removed from the hiring Committee for the position of Dean of Counseling. This campus employee had publicly stated that she was on that hiring committee and that she felt the Filipino Department Chair of Counseling was not qualified for promotion to Dean of Counseling. She made this biased statement in a Counseling meeting before the hiring committee had even met.

Murillo placed me on “involuntary paid administrative leave” in 2018 so that she could dictate the outcome of the hiring process for the Dean of Counseling position. She insisted on doing so without any semblance of fairness, equity, equality, or justice. This was the same year that she “canceled” the outcome of the student ASO elections because members of the Black and White campus communities were unhappy that a multicultural slate of student candidates had won the elections, as it turned out, quite fairly and squarely. (SWC paid over $200,000 on the investigation)

The second time I was placed on “involuntary paid administrative leave” was because I had advocated in writing for the Governing Board to consider hiring a qualified Chicano, Latino, or Indigenous leader to succeed President Murillo after she announced her departure in 2020.

SWC had hired three qualified White women presidents in a row. These hirings covered a period of twelve years. There was, of course, a scandal in the hiring process for Murillo, the third person in that series of hirings. The Black and White employee coalition on campus refused to promote the most qualified candidate in the hiring pool. This woman was a long-term campus employee who was deemed unqualified by members of that group because they felt that “Latinas/os can’t do diversity.”

For me, there was a larger issue to consider. Between 2016 and 2020, the percentage of Chicano, Latino, and Indigenous students at Southwestern College grew from 48 percent to 70 percent. 

I believed — and still believe — that leadership should reflect and understand the communities we serve. 

My advocacy was not based simply on my own ethnicity or surname. I was looking at the changing demographics of Southwestern College and at how a “new” majority of students should be served, if only because their family members were contributing significantly to the local taxpayer dollars that were and are coming from our local South Bay communities. 

From a business, marketing, and institutional perspective, I believed that hiring and promoting highly qualified leaders from those communities would send an important message:

Southwestern College should practice what it teaches — that education, opportunity, hard work, and professional development should open doors.

Kindred Murillo spent the four years of her presidency pursuing a reparations policy for members of the Black community. She created a “policy of hiring and promoting from within” that benefited both Black and White campus employees. 

Beyond that, she chose to simply “appoint” people to positions on campus. She did away with establishing hiring committees. The goal of hiring and promoting based on “merit and qualifications” went right out the window.  She simply appointed employees to positions she felt they should have because she “liked” them.

This included the Vice-President for Student Services position. This Vice-Presidential position paid close to 200,000 dollars a year. Even though there were several Counselors with doctorates and lengthy resumes at SWC, Murillo jumped right over them, ignoring their loyalty and professionalism at SWC. The person she appointed later became president of one of San Diego City College’s programs. 

Murillo had no investment or care for her own employees at SWC. She didn’t care about their career goals or the importance of their career pathways. She didn’t care if they wanted to become campus presidents someday. She coldly, callously, and deliberately bypassed them. Many White employees of the campus supported her in these actions. 

She engaged in favoritism and patronage to the extent that she even CANCELLED the outcome of the ASO student elections in 2018 because a multicultural slate of student candidates defeated a slate of Black student candidates. 

The investigator of that trauma charged at least $200,000, finding that the multicultural slate had indeed won the elections fairly and squarely. Two Black employees who worked in Student Activities were found to have aided the Black slate of student candidates unfairly. Murillo gave those two employees “verbal reprimands” while she fired the white Director of Student Activities and the white Dean of Student Services. Her “decisions” resulted in lawsuit/s against the District.

Why did my faculty union allow Murillo to retaliate against me when I was just asking for representation for the brown communities on campus? The newer white male faculty union president and the white male grievance chair colluded with Murillo to the extent that the grievance chair was appointed by Murillo to the position of “Interim Vice-President of Human Resources” from one day to the next. The grievance chair, who was supposed to defend and advocate for me and for honoring our faculty union contract, “represented” himself instead, right into a big raise, a title, power, and status. 

At the end of Fall 2020, two very important SWC GB members stepped down from the GB. Nora Vargas was elected to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, and Tim Nader was elected to the position of Judge. Right before they left, the two of them voted to hire a qualified Chicano/lLatino/Indigenous campus president. (Sanchez). They didn’t have to worry about how being labeled “anti-Black” could impact their election campaigns anymore.