Dear Hillsborough Community College Board Members Chair Coton, Vice Chair Nancy Watkins, Gonzalez, Hill, and Huggins:
I understand that this letter is a public document; its complete text is on your Board Web page as attachment.
I understand the time limit to address the Board is three minutes. I ask you to read my comments before the next Board meeting so that I can fill in information that I can not fit into three minutes before the Board.
Three current issues under Board jurisdiction concern me:
Ø 1. Administrative fiat’s causing free-speech imperilment at HCC;
Ø 2. Dr. Stephenson’s refusal to obey the public-information law;
Ø 3. Planned outsourcing of senior book-store employees who have given years of service to the college and who will suffer loss of their retirement benefits with this maneuver.
I write as citizen and former faculty member of twenty-eight years.
When not teaching students to avoid dangling participles, I participated in college life most often by working to advance women’s status.
Examples: I ran around the petition to get the first woman on the Board. Now I note with pride that there are three women Board members, two’s being Black. I don’t recall seeing a Black man or woman on the Board when I first came to HCC shortly after the first president was dismissed preceding Dr. Shanberg’s presidency through the coup he pulled off against the previous president. The first president was reputed to be a decent man who opposed a new campus in Ybor City. The power people of the town favored it and helped maneuver the firing and replacement by Dr. Shanberg, who saw the political opportunity and grabbed it and the presidency.
Dr. Shanberg came to dismissal in his turn, and Dr. Ambrose Garner replaced him. Miami Dade unloaded Dr. Garner on HCC, asserting him to be impeccable, covering up his history of sexual harassment there to pass the problem on to a duped HCC. At HCC Dr. Garner chased secretaries around his desk until Iris Willis rebelled. I helped her get lawyer Steve Hanlon—now head of the Community Affairs Division at Holland Knight.
Only about six people would speak to me for helping Iris with the lawyer for fear of alienating priapic president Garner-–such is the power of ensconced authority, no matter how pathological. But the legal aftermath deposed Garner with the aid of the State Ethics Commission. During Dr. Garner’s time at HCC, I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper complaining about his illiteracy, so ungrammatical and obtuse was his memo writing.
Dr. Palumpis lit down next. He was so autocratic that one of the Board in a public meeting—a Black Board member because, I inferred, no Board white man would perform such a daring deed against authority no matter how corrupt it was—told Dr. Palompis he had to pack up and leave. He did with an $80,000 sop for spending a year at the Plant City campus pursuing his interest in ichthyology, a burning issue in Plant City, to be sure and thus an excellent use of tax money.
Administrators at HCC have been known to augment their exit pay to Riviera-retirement size at taxpayer expense with Board sufferance. The Board has regularly bought presidents out so that they may leave in disgrace but take away compensatory packages to mollify them.
Then came Dr. Hockaday’s interregnum followed by the hiring of Dr. Stephenson, HCC’s first woman president. I retired shortly after she arrived. The college family had high hopes for the lady. A couple of dozen of us faculty met her at the airport shortly after her incumbency begin to applaud some deed she had done on a trip to uphold the college before some regulatory agency.
The faculty and rest of the college family had high hopes for Dr. Stephenson. Alas, her actions described below suggest that she is yet one more president manqué. There is something about the atmosphere at Gordon Keller that brings out the Dark Side in presidents.
History records that the HCC Board has inflicted some of the worst specimens available on the community college circuit of misfits on the college.
Marlene Medina Smith, with whom I graduated from HHS in the Class of ‘51, was first woman Board member. The male politicos who appointed her thought Marlene to be innocuous society matron as wife of American Bar president Reece Smith. She turned out to be the most astute and tough Board member ever.
Marlene’s motto was “Follow the money.” She was expert on budgets and used that talent to insist that the whole college family benefit from tax money. Marlene resisted the funding of GK bloated salaries and GK bee-in-the bonnet administrative adventurism. The purpose of this activity was to certify the administration quidnuncs’ soi disant soaring management acumen and justify their existence. These adventures in new systems always made the faculty’s job tougher.
Many people know the right thing to do but lack the courage to do it. Marlene possessed that courage.
I challenged the college sports budget that, when I began, went one hundred percent to the men. I invoked Title IX.
The late Board member Marcelino Huerta said when I petitioned the Board to correct the sexist sports budget, “What do you know about sports, Ms. De Cesare? You’re just an English teacher.”
Years of fighting for women’s rights taught me not to be deterred by sexist churlishness. Bless the old dear: Coach Huerta fell in line when somebody explained Title IX to him. When I left HCC, the sports budget demonstrated equality between men and women. The HCC Athletic Department assures me today that the college resides in egalitarian compliance with Title IX.
Those are swell fellows in the sports department.
A not insignificant campaign was my “Bust Parity” putsch. The DM Library busts were all male, with one token Black, poet Langston Hughes. I hotfooted around a Bust Parity Petition for women and leafleted GK with it. Women busts appeared in the library to stop the leaflets.
Bust symbolism is important for our students. They need to see women are important enough to have busts in libraries as well as men.
This suggestion of bust parity resulted in hostile y-chromosome levity, but the fail-safe comeback was, “Now, fellows, stop messing around, get out the bust catalogs, and find some women busts for the library.” They did.
While I was walking out the door, I petitioned Dr. Stephenson, new to the HCC then, to fire a DM dean who changed a student grade. I got the impression that Dr. Stephenson would have let the matter slide had I not kept on her about it. I inferred from that incident that Dr. Stevenson’s ethics lacked rigor and her grit ranked feeble.
Another Parthian shot requested that Dr. Stephenson put BOT members’ faces and emails on the Web so that the whole college family and the tax-paying community had access to the Board of Hillsborough Community College.
A major problem that afflicts HCC involves administration isolation and hence Board isolation on a moated island far from the madding crowd of students and faculty, where real college business unfolds. The bona fide business of the college is teaching and learning; the Board’s role is to support those activities. But the administration’s notion is that it is what the college is the center of gravity. These GK denizens in their amour propre have things backwards.
If the administration were right beside a campus lunch room with all the student chatter and ferment, it would get a world of good from the proximity to the center of college gravity. Current polarities—administration and college—would achieve integration at last with the benign din of student lunch-time conversation wafting into administration inner sanctums of bloated egos pondering tremendous trifles peripheral to the real world of education.
Another friend served on the Board whose privately expressed goal was to bring the administration into geographic contact with the college family. Alas, unlike Marlene Smith, this Board member lacked courage to act on her conviction. She feared others wouldn’t like her if she made waves. That was Galileo’s problem.
The administration harbors the delusion exacerbated by isolation that it enjoys superiority to the rest of the college family, a fantasy that would fade with proximity of the gaggle of God’s plenty on the campuses. Presently, moated GK functionaries act on the master assumption that the rest of the college exists to confirm the regal hegemony of the administration by acting as plantation field hands to The Big House—although most of the GK group are C students possessed of degrees from undistinguished institutions in subjects which the bona vide academic world ridicules.
My assessment, based on twenty-eight years of observation and one year as faculty union president, says that the GK functionaries render the Board docile by sanitizing information they feed it. As extra precaution, administration Board handlers stay vigilant to keep the rest of the college family and the public away from the Board in its GK fastness, spoon-fed cooked administrative data to shape its votes for administration convenience.
Unfortunately, the Board cooperates.
My assessment suggests that the administration feels contempt for the Board as a political nuisance to the administration’s exercise of unchecked power. It cozens and flatters the Board to its face to keep it within the administration’s orbit but laughs at it behind Board members’ backs in the corridors of GK to denigrate and diminish its role.
This strategy vitiates the function of the Board, which the governor appoints as political lifeline between the entire college and community—not just the administration--and him. The Board has a duty to maintain open communication with the entire college family and invite public comment despite the administration’s efforts to curtail it. My read says the Board consents to the administration’s starving of this vital function and that nobody reports the circumstance to the governor.
If the Board is interested in bypassing its administration handlers, it would do things such as send out monthly college-wide emails inviting comment on some particular issue the Board will review. A trickle of returns may turn into a freshet when the rest of the college family sees that the Board will not put up with administration retaliation against those who communicate their ideas to the Board. A new day might dawn if the Board insists on hearing from the whole college family, not just its administration handlers.
My first concern of the three cited above at the beginning of this message is administrative stifling of free speech at HCC.
Dictators shut down public and press free speech because knowledge is power. Autocrats know free exchange of information vitiates their hegemony. The GK administration showed its dictatorial urge to suppress free speech in a recent tussle over my access to the college e-mail.
I crafted an email characterized by my usual frank rhetorical zest—a style learned from Thomas Paine and H.L. Mencken--and used an HCC Web-published college-wide list found when I Googled “HCC email addresses.”
One thing I said that may have rankled the GK scholars manqué was that the educational world knows that the academic weaklings go into administration because that’s where the money is.
The sting of this academic truism made GK’s fascist tendencies kick in. Hence, the GK Wermacht shut down my email access at the main frame. Napoleon III would have done the same. Bismark also. Pinochet did routinely. Dictators never like voices of dissent. Only robust democracies foster discussion.
People who occupy college administration aeries should possess sufficient education to combat ideas with ideas, not with the primitive gesture of shutting out dissent at the mainframe. The weapons of those qualified to work in education are words, not primitive gestures such as punching the offender in the nose or shutting down email access to cut off anyone’s expressing opposing views.
In the academic world, one trumps words with better words.
Freud said that civilization began when the first person insulted an opponent instead of throwing a stone at him. The GK email-shut-down big babies should Watch BBC’s Prime Minister’s Question Time to see how this system works.
The most ominous event in a democracy is the abuse of government power. Shutting down my email access was such abuse.
The administration sneaks did not possess enough courage or civility to reveal to me their backstairs deed. They did it and ducked back into their GK bunker. Such is typical GK behavior. Its denizens set off a firecracker and run.
However, a trusty GK Deep Throat alerted me to the cowardly skullduggery (see letter below) as one always did when I was still teaching. Sadly, the whistleblower sent the information snail mail for fear of retaliation.
I can’t tell Board members how many mini-lectures I gave to dispel the ubiquitous fear of the GK administration’s reputed lethal talents. I said the GK gang of dwarves was not evil. Real evil, I assured anyone who would listen, takes talent--little of that’s being extant at GK.
At most, the GK Nibelungen backbite, nip, insinuate, double-cross, skulk, snipe tattletale, grouse, whine, rat-out, and carp. But coming out in the open in the middle of the academic ring, where words are default intellectual weapon, exceeds administration capabilities. I believe that the administration is more fearful of the faculty than vice versa. The faculty is smarter, and GK knows that fact in its craven bones.
The object of GK munchkins is survival and beyond that, they want to bloat their pay and augment the opulence of their office fixtures.
The will and ability to wreak real damage on anyone who stands up to this Wizard-of-Oz crew is minimal. GK C-students have never had the right stuff to do anything but petty retaliation. To perform any bona fide vicious deed of grandeur and scope exceeds their limited abilities.
Come on: Has anyone heard of a GK rubout of a hit-list denizen at the south end of the DM parking lot? What about GK homicide of an Enemies List resident in the Brandon cafeteria? Ok, let’s reveal any administration garrotings in the Plant City water closets.
See, just as I promised: All’s clear on the Western Front and the Ybor outback.
My experience affirms that, like most cowards, GK wannabe-tyrants fold if you face them down out in the open of the world of ideas in front of the door of the Cathedral at Wittenberg by nailing your theses to the door while the street crowd looks on and cheers the dust-up.
Hence, the galloping timidity of HCC personnel at all levels astonishes me. Cowardice is not confined to Davis Islands; it has spread from there and afflicts tenured professors who can cite the Bill of Rights from memory and even parts of The Areopagitica but who can’t bring themselves to construct a memo to some faux ruffian at GK saying, “Wait just a minute, buddy. This isn’t right. Put up your linguistic dukes.” If a college reigns the locus of reasoned or even unreasoned dialogue, let’s have some is my motto.
The constant leitmotif that I heard from faculty in the halls, in the mailroom, in the offices, in the parking lot for twenty-eight years went thusly: “Wait ‘til I get tenure. Then I shall tear loose and wrestle the evils that lurk all around. I shall be veritable tiger for justice.” When they got tenure, they continued as timid as before they had the protection of tenure, alas, alack, and weladay.
Such feeble courage against GK skullduggery makes shine the intrepidity of the people who defied King George to found this country to be rare. We were lucky to have them. Their kind on this earth has largely disappeared—at least none appear at HCC.
I called Dr. Stephenson’s office and left a message to call me and explain the outrage against free speech and academic freedom that shutting down my email represented. She did not return the call. My Southern mother would say such gauche manners mark a person raised in a barn. The president of the college ill represents academic courtesy and leaderly poise when she spurns a taxpaying former professor in such manner.
I evaded the shutdown by establishing another email address. This gesture was not the equivalent of finding a cure for AIDS, but evidently the GK deep thinkers never thought of it. My youngest of ten grandchildren—Ethan’s five—could have outsmarted the GK quidnuncs and done the same thing before his granny did.
The Hillsborough County School Board now has a free-speech lawsuit against it for shutting out emails of people who opposed extending holidays to non-Christian students. I don’t agree with these religious xenophobes’ stand, but I applaud their challenging the School Board’s assaulting their free-speech rights at a public institution.
If we don’t have free speech, we don’t have democracy.
If the somnolent GK legal help doesn’t know about this county law suit, it should. A similar one would open the college to legal bills for the counselors’ professional ignorance. And it wouldn’t hurt for these counselors to keep in mind that HCC functions under the Constitution and that they shouldn’t act as tax-paid hired guns to the administration to feed it legal tricks to prevent the Constitution’s functioning at GK.
Taxpayers would have to subsidize billable-hours for any legal lassitude regarding a free speech challenge, of course. With taxpayer money at GK, it’s easy come, easy go and pile up those billable hours tra la la.
I called and reported my email shutdown to the Division of Community Colleges—whose spokesperson expressed incredulity, never having heard of an email shut-out at a community college before. I then asked my old boss La Gaceta’s publisher Patrick Manteiga to call GK and inquire about this free-speech shutdown of a citizen, former faculty member, and erstwhile La Gaceta columnist. Newspaper people are always solicitous of the First Amendment. Without it, they don’t have jobs.
Meanwhile, the Division of Community College’s spokesperson called HCC and expressed incredulity at the behavior while some inarticulate spokesperson for HCC apparently stuttered an unconvincing excuse.
When Patrick called, he spoke to a Mr. Graham (sp.?), main-frame mechanic. Patrick knew this fellow from his run against Ronda Storms for the Florida Senate. Le Manteiga called me to say that Mr. Graham assured him that all I had to do to re-establish email access was to call him up and request it. Even this capitulation to tyranny went against my grain, but I called.
Barbarism seems a bona fide occupational qualification for GK- mainframe-mechanic status. Mr. Graham barked at me that I must sign a statement confessing that I was a spammer and that I acknowledged that myself liable to the full panoply of legal retaliation for the which. Mr. Graham revels in the habit of never letting a person complete a sentence, his interrupting at warp speed mid-clause with Donald-Duck inflection—another GK denizen raised in a barn. He must have learned this public-relations technique in some Language-OS Hybrids programming seminar.
I told Le Graham that no way would I sign a spam confession and kick-me permission slip. I said further that I was glad that Ronda had wiped him out at the ballot box. If he won’t listen to people who call him about mistakes that he makes on his job, I said he wouldn’t have heeded voters if we had been dumb enough to elect him. Citizens have enough of that sort of regal know-it-alls in public office already.
I re-sent my diplomatic representative Publisher Patrick to Le Mainframe Mechanic Graham. Patrick reminded Mechanic Graham that the college had made the error of putting the address formula on the Web and now wanted to blame me for its error. This represents a trusty, musty GK trick, well known to veteran GK bird watchers.
This HCC computer bureaucrat and failed Florida Senate candidate aimed to penalize me in the cover-up of GK’s computer mess-up. Such is not the kind of robustly logical mind voters needed in Tallahassee or at GK. We have sufficient piney-woods thinkers up there and at GK as it is.
My GK Deep Throat meanwhile sent me another letter (below).
And, tah dah! GK mysteriously reopened my email--- without informing me, of course--after Patrick’s second call to Mr. Graham.
The second area of my concern involves Dr. Stephenson’s ignoring my public-information request emailed on December 16th.
I have received no acknowledgement of the request although Dr. Stephenson had mounted the legal public-information obligation on the Web (see below), so she knows the Sunshine Law exists. This episode models typical GK conduct. Publish the rules but pretend they don’t exist for GK worthies, only for everybody else.
My DeepThroat says (below) that GK ignores the Public Records law. Dr. Stephenson’s behavior make me credit what he, she, it said.
Citizens don’t have to tell why they want public information. They don’t have to beg for it. They just have to get the request to the authorities who have the public information. Those who hold public information must then respond in a timely fashion and make the information available to the citizen. If they don’t, they must inform the citizen in writing why the information is not forthcoming.
The gaggle of lawyers on the college administration and Board payroll should have mastered these data. If they have not, the Florida Bar’s Ethics Board should know this circumstance, and I shall send it if necessary.
My third and final concern is that the college is mistreating veteran bookstore employees in a species off-shoring of HCC jobs. The maneuver replicates having an Indian voice come on the phone when you call your server for technical assistance.
HCC administration’s pitiless plan is to outsource— cruel clinical euphemism--the bookstores to Barnes and Noble. USF’s experiment with this company has presented problems for the students, problems which I urge the Board to review before it makes a decision on this rip-off of long-time HCC employees. The Board can authorize book-store coffee shops, the only desirable thing about the Barnes and Noble set-up.
Most of these bookstore employees about to be tossed overboard are women who have worked in the bookstore for 10 to 20 years. Two have been there for at least twenty, and former faculty member Dr. Bello’s wife, Maida, has been there for seventeen full- and four part-time years.
Dr. Bello donated $7,500 to the HCC Foundation when he retired after thirty-three years from HCC to teach at USF. I have encouraged him to write all members of the foundation and tell them how the HCC administration proposes to mistreat faithful veteran HCC employees.
If Dr. Bello doesn’t, I will. I will write each company’s CEO; then the complaint will trickle down the food chain of authority and get widespread exposure for HCC’s clubbing of bookstore baby seals. The discussion will spread to the Chamber of Commerce gatherings, not to mention the Lions Club. Community businesses that support HCC and those that don’t should know how HCC’s administrators conduct business with no regard for the savaging of long-time employees.
Madame Defarge Sue Flagg, big-hearted GK functionary, convened a meeting with the bookstore dumpees at the GK moated embassy. La Flagg unctuously informed the pushed-off-on-an-ice-flo refugees that they would get three months’ health insurance as their departure trinket. What largesse! Madame Defarge Flagg thought the bookstore people should show gratitude for this GK generosity. She did not deal with the fact that they would lose their pension benefits and drop option.
A Board attorney was present, and one infers approved the proceedings. I want to know this gentleman counselor’s name and to see his notes, summary, and recommendation. I want, in fact, to see under public-information rubric all notes that deal with this off-shore deal to savage the bookstore people—from the ghoulish plan’s inception to its current status—and hence I add this to the public-information-request list that Dr. Stephenson has thus far ignored but which I expect the Board to get rolling.
This dumping of long-term employees as they near retirement while stripping them of retirement benefits is ugly stuff. No wonder our country is becoming another South America, with the middle class downsized into minimum-wage, no-benefits jobs and a few oligarchs at the top. The GK quidnuncs plan to be oligarchs in this new social morphology, of course, and to hell with the little people who work in bookstores. Let them eat cake in their new minimum-wage, no benefits jobs summarizes the attitude of the GK oligarchs.
In the name of the governor, who’s a politician and knows that little people vote, the Board must intervene in this unlovely exploitation to save these faithful HCC employees’ retirement benefits, The Board must insure that any company taking over the bookstores must employ these folks at their current HCC standards until they can retire. Moreover, they must monitor the treatment of the hires that the Barnes Noble people make and make sure that the company does not exploit them in wages and benefits. This provision should appear in the outsourcing contract.
A footnote to the bookstore issue is retaliation. My GK Deepthroat at an administration meeting (below) says that “HCC vice president Barbara Larson while speaking to (Blacked out) said the following, quote: ‘I can see those two bookstore workers who spoke up at the board meeting are going to be a big problem. Start documenting things against them.’” Then she added, “`I’m already on it.’”
The marvel is that Nurse Ratchit Larsen felt free to blab this outrage in an open forum as if it were routine protocol to conduct surveillance on anyone who spoke to the Board in a way that the administration did not approve. The GK SS Guards have been so long at this job of ethical thuggery that they no longer bother to hide their despicable techniques of conducting business like crooks at a publicly financed institution. They air their plans for retaliation in open committees.
This behavior of subsidized sadism that will continue apace until somebody mounts a barricade and screams. Until then, it will be Heil Hitler at the moated lair of the GK Wolf Pack unless the Board does its job and intervenes. It should slap Vice-president Larsen silly and deliver Dr. Stephenson a tongue lashing for tolerating such unprofessional, sadistic conduct. If Dr. Stephenson has a shred of professional ethics, she will fire La Larsen. However, Dr. Stephenson did not fire an administrator whom she brought with her to the job when he was apprehended in apocryphal surfing the Web for pornography. That rumor was still circulating when I retired. I would like to see this administrator’s employment file to see if anything appears about this rumored activity or whether it is scrubbed from the file. If true, this rumor bodes ill for Dr. Stephenson’s dealing with an administrator who trumpets retaliation for people who speak to the Board.
I request that the Board ask for the transcript or audio of this meeting—or take depositions of the attendees (those GK lawyers need to rack up more billable hours)-- and determine if Ms. Larsen did indeed outline retaliation for two employees’ speaking to the Board as my GK Deepthroat asserts. Such behavior in un-American and should be a firing offense.
The Larsen-generated surveillance against the two bookstore employees who spoke to the Board to save their jobs is symptomatic of the administration’s hemming in of the Board to prevent its getting any non-administration-screened data. The administration guards the Board against unprocessed information for dear life and wants only its minions to spoon-feed cooked data to the college’s governing body.
The college’s Board must change this undemocratic pas de deux. If Dr. Stephenson can’t pull off this administrative revolution, a new president can as a condition of his or her contract.
Nor should the Board tolerate harassment of people for coming to state their views to it at the meetings and should hold Dr. Stephenson responsible for such harassment. Grubby sniping as Ms. Larsen engaged in devolves from the top and gives credence to the belief that the administration is villainous in its retaliation.
That Ms. Larsen is a vice president in this administration with a bloated salary to match and a sense of her imagined omnipotence, chortling in open committee about logging any behavioral peccadilloes of bookstore employees so that she can set them up for harassment or dismissal, says a great deal about the quality of help that the president chooses to surround herself with in the Gordon Keller redoubt of mediocrity leavened by a fascism.
Trust me: Ms. Larsen isn’t a Lucco Brazzi; she’s a Howdy Doody. She and the whole gang of pseudo punks would topple if the rest of the college pushed back.
I suggest that the Board site on the HCC Web state in large font that it will not tolerate administration retaliation against people from the college family for speaking up to the Board and that it invite people to speak.
I hope someone will identify Ms. Larsen for me at the next Board meeting. I would like to express in Standard academic English my contempt for her underhanded plan to harass two bookstore women who came to speak to the Board about concerns for their jobs. This conduct on Ms. Larsen’s part is vile ethics anywhere—but especially unacceptable in a college. Such ethics speak ill for the ethos of GK’s tenants.
I understand the Board makes the bookstore decision in the February meeting. Whatever time the Board makes the decision, it must make sure this is not another GK piece of flapdoodle that frees up money for its denizens to waste on twaddle while disenfranchising a group of faithful, hardworking bookstore employees that the union can’t seem to help.
That too many of the bookstore employees have declined to become union members—hence vitiating the union’s influence—has not displayed smart behavior on their part. Not joining the union is as bad as not protesting when the administration exploits people.
If the current Board members think this financial critique presents harsh assessment of the GK crowd when it comes to money, allow me to mention just one instance of GK greed when its own pay and benefits were concerned.
During the Hockaday interregnum, the GK quidnuncs slipped past the Board a scheme they had cooked up in which they got paid for NOT teaching. I am not making this up.
The mangled rationale summoned from the nooks and crannies of the GKers reptilian brains featured rip-off of tax money, of course. The scam was this: they posited with straight faces that because the rule said that GK administrators could not teach, they should therefore make money for NOT teaching—in other words, for doing nothing. Is the class following this labyrinth of nuttiness?
The philosophy department’s criticizing whacko syllogism and affirming that it does not withstand scrutiny casts pearls before swine. Such cockamamie logic, of course, would be equivalent to GK quidnuncs’ affirming that, were they allowed into the operating rooms at Tampa General to perform brain surgery, they would get paid an excellent brain-surgeon income in addition to their already bloated administrative salaries.
This thinking goes under the rubric of if wishes were horses, beggars would ride and emerges from the brain pans of those who reside in the lower quartile of the Stanford Binet. It’s a sample of what the GK quidnuncers can produce from heavy lucubration in the Star Chambers of GK.
When their pocketbooks are concerned, the GK crowd pass an ill-conceived benefit for themselves with a hey nonny nonny and hope the Board is asleep at the switch, but they blithely push overboard long-serving bookstore employees with loss of pension benefits without blinking an eye.
If these GK denizens were my grandchildren, I would say, “Now children, play nice.”
At that time, a Deep Throat at GK—who’s nailed down a condo in paradise for him- or herself with the deed-- leaked this outrage of GK greedy-guts’ being paid for not teaching to me. I set up a racket. I beat on pots and pans at DM between classes. So did others. The Board woke up, and Dr. Hockaday intercepted the GK entrepreneurs’ scheme of pay for not teaching.
GK entrepreneurs were as mad as wet hens. They, of course, all fell instantly in love with me even more so than they had been before.
I plan to drag my husband to the Board meeting on the 15th. He has been my muscle for fifty-one years. He was mayor of our little beach town for ten years and served on boards both in Tampa and Pinellas. He discerns things in public meetings that escape me. I need his analytical abilities for the nonce.
Besides appropriating my old man’s committee brains, I also want to pay him back for requiring my attendance around the state at some of the most boring political conventions on record.
Not one governmental solon ever wanted to talk about Plato’s theory of ideal forms or Eliot’s objective correlative or Dickens’s exposition of lower-class social ethos at these interminable affairs.
That’s the martyrdom of political spouses in the government badlands of Florida: bored out of their minds at political conventions with people who know nothing but who’s running in the next election and who’s not. Such are our leaders.
I thank the Board for its service to the community and college and look forward to my three minutes at the mike.
I argued with my husband for his ten mayoral years plus the four he served as councilperson before becoming mayor that this time limit is not fair, that if people don’t want to listen to voters’ concerns, they shouldn’t run for public office or agree to serve on boards. I think he retired at the peak of his political career to retreat to his Stratolounger and watch the sports channel nonstop to avoid hearing this lecture from me.
I maintained to him and to this Board that if the village bores and pests turn up to offer a public body its animadversions on politics, the Meaning of Life, or any other subject, however tangential, the elected officials and appointed board members should suffer to hear the pest out.
Pure democracy requires this martyrdom of public servants. Nobody said democracy was the easiest form of government. The cul-de-sac of dictatorship that the GK moguls want to cement in place in their moated redoubt is more efficient.
But the insurrectionists for a GK dictatorship must fight a few of us Defenders of the Faith’s quoting the Federalist Papers.
I trust the Board will be Defenders of the Faith as well in confronting the problems cited above.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Retired Professor of English, HCC
Dr. Stevenson:
Can you explain to me the connection between these failed emails and the Deepthroat communication I sent you that said the college was blocking a citizen's emails without notification or giving reasons with reference to the Florida statutes?
Please send me the Board email addresses.
Lee Drury De Cesare
-----Original Message-----
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem [mailto:MAILER-DAEMON@ms-smtp-02.tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Friday, December 08, 2006 2:34 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
The original message was received at Fri, 8 Dec 2006 02:33:32 -0500 (EST) from 71-124.8-67.tampabay.res.rr.com [67.8.124.71]
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hccdeepthroat : first letter from GK Deep ThroatAttachments: HCC copy.tif
H I LLSBOoUGH Community CoIIege• DISTRICT ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES
Lee Drury De Cesare,
P.O. Box 31127
Tampa, FL 33631-3127
Your e-mail reply to Donna Allen caused a major uproar at BRANDON CAMPUS district.
10414 E. Columbus Ddve HCC administrators (and their numerous minions) were
embarrassed by your hard-hitting words. Within 30 minutes of
your e-mail, HCC HR had OTT block future e-mails coming from
you.
I applaud you for telling the truth about the banality of top HCC
administrators.
Several courageous faculty members came out and demanded
your incoming e-mail.
I work at district and have witnessed numerous illegal acts -
Sunshine Law - no such thing at GK. Problem is that no one is
willing to come out and report internal corruption for fear of immediate reprisal.
Since I’m no longer able to receive your e-mails, I will check
out your blog. You can quote me in your blog, just refer to me as
GK Insider.”
I photocopied some internal HCC communications. Please
critique the internal HCC communications in your blog, that will
GK Insider
December 18, 2006
Ms. Larsen:
You have no idea how disappointed I am to read from my snail mail Deepthroat, who turned up out of the blue, a second communication after the administration shut down my email that you are participating in harassing two HCC women with courage enough to protest to the Board the outsourcing of the bookstores. The administration probably wants to throw the bookstore people into the arms of the subcontractors who have the cleaning people in their clutches currently—the ones that pay 3rd-world wages with no benefits.
Does the Board of Trustees know about this despicable conduct on yours and other administrators’ parts? If not, I advise these women to both keep logs and record what happens to them that portends to the administration’s building a case against them to fire them because they dared oppose outsourcing by the administration.
I wish the administration would outsource itself. It wouldn’t be missed is my prediction....
…………………………………………………………………………………….
December 18, 2006
lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
727-398-4142
Government-in-the-Sunshine Law
ADMINISTRATIVE RULES
Title: RELEASE OF INFORMATJON TO THE PUBLIC
Identification: 6HX-1 0-2.06
Page: lof I
Effective Date: 4119106
Authority:
SBE Chapter_119;_1001.64;_1001.65
Si aturelApproval:
PURPOSE
This administrative rule establishes policy concerning release of information to the public.
RULE
Records of the College are open to the public unless exempt in accordance with State or Federal law. For purposes of release of information to the public, the Executive Director of Marketing and Public Relations will serve as the primary custodian of records, appointed for the College. In the absence of the primary custodian, the College Attorney will serve as the alternate. Members of the public may request the custodian of records to provide access to public records. After receipt of the request, the custodian will provide access within a reasonable time, under reasonable conditions and under supervision by the custodian of records or a designee, or explain in writing the reason for denial of access or for delay. Members of the public may request copies of public records. A reasonable charge may be made to cover the actual cost of copies and for the cost of staff time required to perform document search, as permitted by law.
********************************************
Second Letter from GK Deepthroat
History: New
Community CoIIegeH
DISTRICT
Lee Drury De Cesare,
ADMINISTRATIVE
OFFICES
HCC administrators have made sure that your voice is not heard amongst HCC rank-and file faculty and staff.
This past year, the administration has subtly pushed to eliminate hard-earned employees’ rights and benefits.
This past November, (If I gave you exact date/time/location my identity would be revealed; I would face immediate dismissal.)
HCC vice president Barbara Larson while speaking to
(Blacked out) said the following, quote:
“I can see those two bookstore workers who spoke up at the board meeting are going to be a big problem. Start documenting things against them.” Then said the following, quote: “I’m already on it.”
Barbara Larson was most likely referring to the two HCC bookstore supervisors (Beverly Muller and Leann Horwood) who spoke up against outsourcing HCC bookstore operations board meeting.
I enclosed for you a copy of 11/15/06 board meeting
I’ve been with HCC for many, many years, and have witnessed administrators and their eager and willing department heads punish those who speak a differing voice. I fear that those two courageous bookstore supervisors will be punished for speaking out.
Back in 1999, Gwendolyn Stephenson, Sue Flaig and a bevy of managers, made up false charges against a HCC bookstore supervisor Miriam Del Rio. The bogus charges were later dropped (Blacked out) hired attorney John W. Bakas, Jr.), but she was deliberately harassed and eventually had to file a claim with the EEOC. copies of internal HCC documents on that matter.
The lengths to which HCC administrators go to eliminate human decency.
Please post this letter on your blog for others to see.
www.Leedrurydecesarescasting-couch.blogspot.com
www.hccdeepthroat.blogspot.com
www.grammargrinch.blogspot.com
Governor Crist:
By way of jogging your memory as to my identity, I am the Tampa Tiger Bay member who inquired during the campaign when you appeared at the club if you are gay. You said no, unfortunately for gay acceptance. How the newspapers picked up on that question all over the state quite astonished me. My hope is that the day will soon be here that being gay will not be an impediment to being governor.
I append a message to the Hillsborough County BOT about misdoings at the college. The administration has shut down email and stifled free speech; it has ignored the Public Records law; it has run roughshod over the retirement benefits of veteran HCC employees in its eagerness to subcontract the running of the bookstores.
I urge you to have your education person review my letter to the Board. I believe that person will tell you that the Board--which you appoint from now on--must combat these un-American tendencies in the HCC administration, headed by Dr. Gwen Stephenson.
Respectfully,
lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Belle S. Wheelan, Ph.D.
President
2007 Commission Colleges
1866 Southern Lane
Decatur, GA 30033
January 4, 2007
Dr. Wheelan:
I am delighted to see your address is Decatur. I am a Georgia girl, born in White Oak, Georgia. My father’s family is Camden County, my mother’s Jeff Davis. I go back to the dinners on the ground of the family cemeteries yearly.
The boys put up planks for tables, and all my women relatives bring their specialties. There are fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, neck bones and rice (on which my brother always eats himself sick), big hams, black-eyed peas and ham hocks, pole beans and fatback, in fact, beans of every description, crackling cornbread, tomato gravy, peach cobbler, coconut cake with lemon sauce between the layers, chocolate cake with raspberry sauce between the layers, fruit salad, and Aunt Lula’s pound cake, which recipe survives her. She lies close by the spread tables in the family cemetery beside the little wood church my family built in the late 1800s.
If I ate my hometown food every day, I would be as big as a corn crib. As a matter of fact, many of my relatives are as big as a corn crib.
We all need to go back to where we started out from time to time if only to remind us who we are.
I am pleased that you are the first Black woman to head up this organization. Women are beginning to move into places we never saw them before.
HCC has a Black woman president now, and she is the first Black and the first woman. When I was union leader, we picketed the Gordon Keller Board and administration to get an affirmative-action plan. Dr. Morton Shanberg, who thought himself a tough guy, was then president. He stalked out of the GK administration building as the TV cameras gathered, elbowed his way up to me, and said, “All right, De Cesare. You’ll get your damned Affirmative Action Plan.”
So much for tough guys.
I respectfully request that you add the letter I am sending to the current Board of Trustees to the data you review when SACS next reviews HCC. These data need inclusion in your assessment of the college because the attitude of the HCC administration and its Board to free speech, adherence to the law, and humane treatment of its employees are vital components of your agency’s evaluation of the college.
Respectfully,
lee drury de cesare
Former professor of English, Hillsborough Community College
copy to all saccs members:
| Staff Directory General Questions
(404) 679-4501 ext. 573, tlatimer@sacscoc.org Dr. G. Jack Allen, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 524, jallen@sacscoc.org Ms. Donna Barrett, Director of Institutional Finance
(404) 679-4501 ext. 574, dbarrett@sacscoc.org
http://www.sacscoc.org/dbarrett.asp Ms. Rita F. Bell, Executive Assistant for Dr. Wheelan
(404) 679-4512, rbell@sacscoc.org Dr. Tom E. Benberg, Vice President and Chief of Staff
(404) 679-4501 ext. 522, tbenberg@sacscoc.org Ms. Rae Borden, Administrative Assistant for Dr. Lord and Dr. Wilkinson
(404) 679-4501 ext. 526, rborden@sacscoc.org Dr. Cheryl D. Cardell, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 529, ccardell@sacscoc.org Dr. David A. Carter, Vice President and Director of Training and Research
(404) 679-4501 ext. 519, dcarter@sacscoc.org
http://www.sacscoc.org/dcarter.asp Dr. Ann B. Chard, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 518, achard@sacscoc.org Ms. Patricia Dailey, Administrative Assistant for Dr. Hollins
(404) 679-4501 ext. 535, pdailey@sacscoc.org Ms. Bridgette Douglas, Computer Specialist
(404) 679-4501 ext. 563, bdouglas@sacscoc.org Ms. Cecille Hadgu, Administrative Assistant for Dr. Allen and Dr. Cardell
(404) 679-4501 ext. 523, chadgu@sacscoc.org Ms. Taffy Hall, Administrative Assistant for Ms. Luthman
(404) 679-4501 ext. 517, thall@sacscoc.org Dr. Carol S. Hollins, Director of Institutional Support
(404) 679-4501 ext. 534, chollins@sacscoc.org Ms. Mackenzie Hoyt, Staff Assistant
(404) 679-4501 ext. 528, mhoyt@sacscoc.org Dr. Rudolph S. Jackson, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 556, rjackson@sacscoc.org Dr. Michael S. Johnson, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 514, mjohnson@sacscoc.org
http://www.sacscoc.org/mjohnson.asp Mr. Dhimitri Kollar, Director of Computer Operations
(404) 679-4501 ext. 536, dkollar@sacscoc.org Ms. Terri Latimer, Special Assistant to Dr. Wheelan and Administrative Assistant to Ms. Bell
(404) 679-4501 ext. 573, tlatimer@sacscoc.org Dr. Gerald D. Lord, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 521, glord@sacscoc.org Ms. Carol A. Luthman, Director of Commission Support
(404) 679-4501 ext. 516, cluthman@sacscoc.org Ms. Arkla Napper, Administrative Assistant to Dr. Benberg and Ms. Bell
(404) 679-4501 ext. 515, anapper@sacscoc.org Ms. Carole Paciga, Administrative Secretary for Dr. Johnson and Dr. Silver
(404) 679-4501 ext. 555, cpaciga@sacscoc.org Ms. Etta Ruth Parrish, Administrative Assistant for Dr. Chard and Ms. Barrett
(404) 679-4501 ext. 520, eparrish@sacscoc.org Ms. Sarena Riggs, Administrative Assistant for Dr. Carter and Dr. Jackson
(404) 679-4501 ext. 566, sriggs@sacscoc.org Dr. Ralph Russell, Director of Institutional Support
(404) 679-4501 ext. 582, rrussell@sacscoc.org Dr. Joseph H. Silver, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 532 jsilver@sacscoc.org Ms. Jasmine Walker, Senior Secretary for Dr. Hollins and Dr. Russell
(404) 679-4501 ext. 527, jwalker@sacscoc.org Dr. Donna K. Wilkinson, Vice President
(404) 679-4501 ext. 525, dwilkins@sacscoc.org Dr. Belle S. Wheelan, President
(404) 679-4512, bwheelan@sacscoc.org |
Dr. Stephenson: I resend this email for the second time. I have not yet ha a response from you on the public information request. Please note that I add several articles for the list.
I must inform the Board of your being contemptuous of the public-records law and refusing to answer a request for information that it covers.
Ignore my request for the BOT on the HCC Web. I found them.
lee drury de cesare
Dr. Stevenson:
I attach below an email that I received from an anonymous Deep Throat at Gordon Keller by snail mail a few days ago. I saved it in jpg and can't convert it to a text file so attach the jpg image for authentication.
I am glad nobody can trace this Deepthroat mail. I am sure my Deepthroat is right about retaliation for his or her speaking out. Everybody assures me that there was hope that your presidency would dilute the pathology at HCC.
I infer that its not doing so has been the case, more's the pity.
But I am a realist and can hit the ground running in any necessary resumption of fighting crime at HCC. I was the James Bond of the crimefighters while I was there. Nobody will dispute this statement. I had to strap on my armor and write corrective memos almost daily to GK.
I did that job for 28 years in-house and will be better at the chore with an outside vantage with the powers of a citizen to buttress me.
In terms of the shutting me out of the HCC email system, I am sure you have explained to Ms. Donna that the history of academic freedom obtains at HCC, or it would become the laughing stock of the educations world. Ms. Allen is, as I recollect, a second-tier administrator and comes from outside the academic world to HCC from the field of commerce, hence may not have a capacious understanding of the history, reach, and generosity of academic freedom in institutions of higher learning. I trust you to educate the lass.
And I am sure as well that the Board attorneys will explain that citizens' writing emails to a tax-supported institution cannot be shut out merely because citizen comment annoys unsophisticated recipients who may not relish citizen input but whose salaries we citizens pay.
I have couched in Standard English my communications to HCC with no instances of profanity or what my grandchildren refer to as "potty language." My messages also did not contain grammar or punctuation errors, a virtue which I cannot attribute to the communications emitting from Gordon Keller that I reviewed over my years at HCC as English professor. People used to slip illiterate GK emails under my door with the message scrawled in handwriting, "Lee, you've got to do something about this!"
I infer that baleful fact still obtains.
If outside legal comment appears needed to buttress free speech and the robust standing of the First Amendment at HCC, I am sure that a letter from you to the Florida Attorney General for an opinion would lay out the obligation of the college in all its functions to support free speech and that the AG will cite the Florida statutes on open communication pertaining to HCC's special status as one of the state's institutions of higher learning.
The federal grants the college enjoys would probably offer elucidation on citizen rights to comment to the college without the tech department's shutting down the emails because a few fragile souls have not yet reached professional maturity.
Meanwhile, I request this public information under the Sunshine law:
a copy of all emails incoming and outgoing on the subject of my e-mail's reception at Gordon Keller or from any of the branches of the college;
a copy of the Board's policy statement on any questions of free speech and academic freedom at the college;
a copy of the policy statement of the Board on its commitment to academic freedom at the college;
a copy of the section of the Florida statutes that deals with citizen input to a tax-supported educational institution;
a copy of any opinion that the college obtains from the Attorney General of the state of Florida on this issue as it applies to public institution Hillsborough Community College.
The name of the person who heads OTT--referred to in the Deep Throat message and who, I infer, is the head of the Technology Department.
I would like to review the head of the above person's employment folder;
I would like to review the folder of the profiles of the current HCC Board of Trustee members.
I would also welcome your account of your participation in this issue.
A copy of the email addresses of all Board members.
added 1/07/07
a copy of all data on the outsourcing of the college book stores--from the proposal's inception until today;
a copy of the name of the attorney who attended the meeting at GK with the bookstore employees and his coplete notes;
a copy of your employment file;
a copy of Dr.John L. Huerta's employment file;
confirm or deny the rumored use of an office computer to surf for pornography by a GK adminisistrator 8 to 10 years ago before I retired; if true, send me all the data on this incident, especially what punishment it merited.
I trust that my Deepthroat whose remarks I enclose erred in saying the college does not observe the Sunshine Law. The law has serious penalties for any person such as those connected with HCC who violate it by refusing to provide a citizen with public information such as that requested by me above.
It occurs to me that this incident might make a good article for me to submit to college journals on speculation for publication. I doubt that many have ever had the effrontery laced with ignorance and personality aberrations to try to shut down free speech, but the academic world is always curious about primitive thinking in its midst--which they, unfortunately but, alas, too accurately, attribute to institutions of higher learning in the South.
I haven't had contact with HCC in several years. This Deepthroat distress message throws me right back into the heat of the battles that I participated in during my years at HCC in the long-running Faculty versus Administration face-offs.
Memories, memories: My glory day was convincing enough faculty when I was president of the HCC Faculty Union to picket Gordon Keller during a Board meeting because Dr. Shanberg wouldn't file an Affirmative Action Plan.
Dr. Shanberg stomped out amidst us faculty so that we had to shuffle for footing, shift our picket signs to opposite shoulders, make room for him, and cease our interviews with the TV stations.
The then-president of HCC yelled at me, "All right! De Cesare! POTTY LANGUAGE [g--d--n it!] You'll get your POTTY LANGUAGE [g--d--n] Affirmative Action Plan!"
The experience was surpassingly lively and a precedent at HCC. Needless to say, fun was had by all, and the boundaries of free expression and academic freedom gained new luster in the GK parking lot. Never has the First Amendment had such a sprightly airing at HCC before or since.
That glorious event represented one of the college's glory days. History will record so.
Please let me know via email tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com when and where I am to show up for the public information requested above. I infer the place to be the public-affairs office at GK, but I am not sure. You will set me straight, m'aam, I warrant.
I mount the new blog--the third in my series--for this conversation at HCC and any subsequent developments on it or other lively matters about HCC that come to my attention.
I am particularly interested in the last SACS review of the college. And I am sure SACS will be interested in this incident as indicative of the college's commitment to mature behavior befitting at institution of higher learning in such matters.
I want to assure any of the faculty, staff, or service proletariat at HCC that GK's reputation for ability to wipe out anybody with the flick of its wrist is all myth. It didn't wipe me out in spite of its best efforts for 28 years, and I did not wait until tenure to protest evil's wafting from GK as it encountered it between classes.
My first agon with GK was its not giving maids the same salary as janitors because--now listen to this--"janitors have to climb up on ladders." I hollered Title VII, and GK buckled.
My next fight was on academic freedom. There was no Black writer in my English departmental reader, so I added some handout stuff from Soul on Ice as supplement. Plant City Board Member Hilman Bowden hauled me before the Board because of "vulgarity" in the essays, not because of Plant City racism, of course.
But I and the Minions of Light survived that attempt at crucifixion and laughed to fight another day.
Hilman Bowden almost choked me to death hugging me at the Plant City Strawberry Festival when I recently saw him there.
Standing up to pseudo power will not only make you strong, it will also make you popular. No GK Lucco Brazzi has killed any faculty, staff, or service proletariat yet. And Lucco never will. Just hold a cross before you if you see him coming in the guise of Rene Villa, Eric Joost, Walt Ellis, or Leo Diaz.
Somebody please send this to Carolyn Adams-Molloy Whatever. Carolyn has married so many times that I can't keep up with her current sir name. If she had followed my lead and stayed married to the same old guy for 51 years, she wouldn't be in this fix.
lee drury de cesare
January 2, 2007
Dr. Stephenson:
I believe I sent you a list of public-information requests on January 16th. I have not had any communication from you despite your posting on the college Web site the Government in the Sunshine law that says you must respond to these public-information requests from citizen.
This posting shows you know about the law; I infer you are deliberately ignoring my public-information request.
Does the Board know of your lack of compliance with this law? Does it know you don’t answer a public-information request? Have you consulted your legal help to give you an opinion on your public-information duty? Do your staff and Board attorneys say that your ignoring the law is OK?
To that original list of public-information requests sent over three weeks ago, I add these: the employment file of John Huerta, the staff and Board attorneys’ names, the attorney notes and the staff notes and any other written data referring to the bookstore outsourcing project, including the planning stages: in fact, everything in the college records about the bookstore outsourcing.
I would appreciate your responding to this and my previous public-information requests in a timely fashion. Three weeks is not timely: that is the time that has elapsed between my first request to you and today for a list of public information covered by the Government in the Sunshine law.
Respectfully,
lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
