HCC Kicks Out Head Start Children, etc.
September 4, 2007
Dr. Stephenson:
There appears no entry in the contact list for the Board of Trustees on the HCC home page. This lack makes me ask that you forward this email to the board for me.
I lament ready access to the board. Before I retired, I lobbied the administration to make the board more accessible on the college Web page. The administration still chooses not to extend this courtesy to the public, however. It gives one the impression that either the board does not welcome contact from the rest of the college family and the public or that the administration does not want people except the administration to provide the board information. I infer the latter.
I also can’t find the next board meeting date: pray provide that to me via email. It should be in plain view on the Home Page unless the administration wants to keep people away from board meetings except the administration.
After effort, I got Mr. Huerta to send me public information on the college plan to kick out the Head Start children. I don’t know if it is complete since Mr. Huerta at first emailed me that there was no public information at all on the Head Start children. I had word from one of my GK Deepthroats that Mr. Huerta had been overheard in a hall conference with personnel director Ms. Sue Flaig saying that, if the HCC administration ignored my asking for public information long enough, I would go away.
I won’t.
I wrote Mr. Huerta a follow-up request with a copy to board attorney Mr. Carraway that anything written on a piece of paper would be public information and to send me what he had on Head Start.
I credit Mr. Carraway with persuading Mr. Huerta to honor the public-records law. Any request I make to Mr. Huerta since encountering Le Huerta’s non-responsiveness to public-records requests I now route to Mr. Carraway. As an officer of the court, a member of his firm, and the board, not the administration, attorney, Mr. Carraway is my guarantee to the public record’s law’s being honored by the GK administration, although I would not put it past Mr. Huerta to try to bamboozle Mr. Carraway as well. Mr. Huerta fancies that he possesses a Jesuitical mind.
In reviewing the data in the Head Start file that Mr. Huerta grudgingly sent me, I see that you justify doing away with the Head Start programs at HCC as well as the tennis courts by citing “tremendous” projected growth in student population. You must have a needs study that supports this adjective. May I have a copy of it? Also, may I have a copy of the study that supports your claim of the need for student housing in the form of the apartment complex that will replace the Head Start children’s areas? This is an exotic project for a community college, one infers. How many community colleges in Florida currently provide student housing?
You object to the Tribune editorial’s calling this apartment complex “luxurious”; but it is luxurious compared to the Head Start facilities that the college is doing away with in order to scuttle Head Start children’s modest presence. I am grateful that the Tribune opposed ejecting the Head Start children from the HCC campuses and printed the outpouring of letters from readers opposing the kicking out of these children. This conservative paper does not usually editorialize against inept or callous leadership of public institutions, but the outrageous HCC administration treatment of the community’s poorest children catalyzed even its ethically lethargic editors’ indignation.
I don’t understand why you do not choose as an enlightened goal to connect the college with the community’s needs by folding Head Start into the child-care facilities you cite that the administration plans to build—for which you say you have 70 children on the waiting list. I suggest that you grant Head Start a discrete section under its own responsibility and enfold it into the projected child-care facilities you plan on all three campuses. Head Start has proven record of success since its nation-wide inception and owns the additional luster of Dick Cheney’s voting against it when he was a House member. Its clients, moreover, are mostly Black and Hispanic children in this area—minority populations greatly in need of the helping hand Head Start supplies.
And I don’t understand why you don’t ask the city to split the utility bill for the tennis courts with HCC since citizens use the tennis courts and represent a connection between the college and the community. The administration’s sweeping gestures in its “business plan” evoke the image of bulldozing hither and yon to turn the college into some kind of industrial complex, one that veers widely from its educational purpose. The discussion about contracting with Transmarine for two restaurants and a hotel in the July 12, 2006, Information Updates solidifies the suspicion that the administration veers to commercial ventures, not educational ones.
That HCC chooses to antagonize the community over the tennis courts and to disregard the opinion of a Head Start board, on which politically powerful citizens sit, looks to me to be a venture in inept politics. This is bad town-gown relations that redound to HCC’s disadvantage. Your actions bespeak an administration in a bubble that makes rigid decisions without regard to their broad effect.
HCC’s PR department under Mr. Huerta has a tin ear, and you put too much faith in the non-academic people you have recruited to implement HCC’s “business plan” that appears to be an effort to turn HCC into a for-profit business with taxpayer education-dollars subsidy. Your present core administration advisors want to ignore the educational purpose of HCC and substitute a commercial enterprise with taxpayers’ footing the bill it appears to me.
Such radical change in the purpose of the college is not what taxpayers would support if they had knowledge of it, I believe. The PR department should get the information out in plain English, not in spin and silence, to forewarn the public how you in the administration are deviating from the educational purpose of HCC. That would be honest public relations. That department should serve the public, not the distorted goal of the administration to turn from education to a business model. The board of trustees has a special duty to inform the public of what is going on.
John Huerta as head of the public-relations department at HCC merits scrutiny
I got a call from a male employee at HCC from a pay phone who wouldn’t give his name—nobody ever does for fear of administration retaliation—who said that Mr. Huerta’s sole job is to make you look good to the public. In other words, he is a one-customer, tax-paid PR machine for you, Dr. Stephenson. How astonishing if true. Are your deficiencies so great and your merits so sparse that you need this kind of burnishing? And to what educational purpose does it tend? What good does this cult of personality do the college community and education? A one-client PR effort suggests you have something to cover up.
This information gets credence with me because my efforts at getting public information via Mr. Huerta suggests he didn’t know how to provide it because doing so was a new phenomenon for him. This belief received further confirmation from the overheard hall conference in which Mr. Huerta told Sue Flaig to ignore my requests for public information, that neglect of them would make me go away. My Deepthroat said that such ignoring of public-information requests defined template by which the administration treated these requests. So I infer that Mr. Huerta was not familiar with the procedure of providing public information to citizens since he had never provided it until I was importunate.
Mr. Huerta has a privileged history with the college coincident with yours since you brought him with you and created a job for him that got no advertising. A year before I retired a story circulated throughout the college that someone at Gordon Keller caught Mr. Huerta surfing the Web for pornography on his state-owned office computer. The press heard about this incident as well but did not print it.
Surprisingly, you did not fire Mr. Huerta, nor did you discipline him apparently. If you did, that information did not leak into the rumor mill, the only way the campuses ever find out what goes on at GK. You should have recorded the incident and punishment in Mr. Huerta’s personnel file as a matter of supervisory obligation, and the record of both should remain in his limited-access personnel file unless you have allowed someone to scrub it. If it does not, then one must infer that you did not discipline Mr. Huerta for pornography surfing on state property or that some administration person deleted it from the record with your concurrence if you did.
I find astonishing that Mr. Huerta remains at HCC after this serious offense. I believe such behavior to merit immediate firing. Especially does it invoke double-standard treatment of administration versus other HCC employees for what you consider to be their offenses. A Deepthroat present at a staff meeting heard Ms. Barbara Larsen, your CFO, say she had set up surveillance of the bookstore employees who had come before the board to plead for their jobs when the administration wanted to dump them onto the minimum-wage market without their pensions, DROP, or health care by subcontracting the bookstore to Barnes & Noble to squeeze profits out of that operation: this despite knowing of USF’s already negative experience with the Barnes & Noble’s franchise’s taking over its bookstores. In other words, it’s ok for Mr. Huerta to surf the Web on a state-owned computer for pornography, but it’s a firing offense for other HCC employees to speak out against their mistreatment by the administration.
Compared to Mr. Huerta’s pass on surfing on a school computer for pornography with impunity, any worker at HCC not in the administration inner circle gets subjected to surveillance if s/he shows any tendency to oppose the administration ukases. The administration with its dirty-tricks machine has cowed the entire college family into silence for fear of losing its jobs. This is a wicked way to use education tax dollars in the United States of America. The administration does these vile deeds with impunity because the board chooses not to become aware of them or to intervene and because the faculty and staff are too cowardly to stand up and oppose this tyranny in the open. As Yeats said, “The worst are full of passionate intensity, / The best lack all conviction.”
There is no way to describe this double standard but as sick, Dr. Stevenson. Let me add depraved, perverted, and pathological. I volunteer to argue this point any place, any where, any time. Meet me in the Dale Mabry parking lot at any hour you designate for you and me to debate the wickedness of your administration’s treatment of its outside-the-GK-loop’s employees. I will wipe up the floor with you, ma’am and send you thither to become Beelzebub’s cup maiden.
When one of the bookstore women called me to report the outrage of the administration’s effort to replace the workers after years of faithful service to the college when most had grown old and were not in the best of health—Maida Bello uses a cane after a brain operation for a balance problem, I joined the few who protested the uncivilized conduct of the administration and made myself unpopular at board meetings. I do not care if I am unpopular at board meetings. The board has a duty to listen to members of the public. And a member of the public has no obligation to utter soothing platitudes about the grandeur of the board but to bring its members information affecting the college as he or she sees it. HCC’s administration nor board is impervious to the First Amendment.
These faithful, long-term bookstore employees finally kept their jobs mostly due, I am convinced, to the administration’s underestimating the intrepidity of the members of the faculty-staff review committee in standing its ground and recommending against the betrayal of the old book-store employees.
Tradition has seen the administration pull off the scam of setting up a show faculty-staff committee to fool the board into believing there is college-wide participation in decisions and then twisting committee members’ arms to get the decision the administration wants with intimidation. The administration miscalculated that the customary show faculty-staff committee it fronts in such cases would be docile and bow to the administration’s directions in the bookstore outrage as has been customary.
My hat’s off to the members of that committee. God bless them. Courage at HCC is so rare that I salute every one of them. I understand Ms. Barbara Larsen, who maestroed what she expected to be the usual committee scam, spat out that its members were “bleeding hearts” when they voted against jettisoning the book-store employees. If Ms. Larsen and other of the administration callous overlords stood to lose their jobs, pensions, DROPs, and medical benefits, she and they would be singing a different tune.
The administration began at the bottom with the most vulnerable, least sophisticated employees—the cleaning staff and the lunch-room people—in subcontracting their jobs. Their treatment by these subcontractors, I hear, is not good. I also hear from my Deepthroats that graft takes place between the subcontractors and some of the HCC administrative employees.
A staff member who called me from the college but wouldn’t identify his area and went twice to his door to make sure no one audited him said that staff thought that it would be next after the book-store people were got rid of. After staff, there is only faculty. One supposes the administration will see as a business necessity that part-timers teach at slave wages and no benefits and that tenure becomes a thing of the past.
I have received eight or nine postal mail messages alleging corruption at the college: payoffs, bid-rigging, graft, inventory shenanigans. I mount these on my http://www.HCCDeepthroat.blogspot.com site for the world to examine. So far I have not been able to get an investigation from the attorney general of these charges, but I will continue to try. It took me three years of leafleting government agencies and elected officials to force the city of Tampa and the Hillsborough County sheriff’s department to hire women as police officers and deputies.
A citizen must complain to the government apparatus until it gives up and responds and does its job. The trick is to complain long enough that complaints tap into elected officials’ sense of shame that they are not doing the job they promised the public they would do and their fear that the public will learn of their defection from duty. Getting politicians to react is tough to accomplish since the breed’s skin is thicker than a pachyderm’s when it comes to a sense of shame and obligation to the public. I am, however, sanguine. I may succeed before the Democrats in Congress summon the courage to do what the voters elected them to do: cut off funds for Bush’s war.
I want this pornography-surfing matter put out in the open and laid before the board for its belated acknowledgement and scrutiny. They will not be able to say henceforth that they didn’t know about Mr. Huerta’s putative pornography-surfing history and your response to it. Its reaction will be diagnostic of how seriously the board takes the job of guarding the college against malfeasance and against fostering exotic use of the PR head’s time as image-burnisher for the president as sole employment.
One hopes that Mr. Huerta’s frolicking about the halls of Gordon Keller advising a staff member to ignore a citizen’s request for public information whilst under the protection of your office for the grave offense of using public property to surf for pornography ranks too egregious for even a supine board to pass over.
Public information requests
I want to review Mr. Huerta’s non-redacted personnel file--not the for-show one but the limited-access one. I will do this review on the next board-meeting day (reminder: please email me the date of that event) at one p.m. in Ms. Flaig’s office and mean this email to notify her and Mr. Huerta of this fact.
I want to see as well Mr. Huerta’s job description. I want to know what his yearly salary and perquisites cost the taxpayer.
The pay-phone informant said Mr. Huerta has one job: to burnish your image for public consumption. I am sure citizens wouldn’t approve of that one-customer job for a highly paid porn surfing administration official. I want to know how much taxpayers spend for a one-client PR service if that be, indeed, his sole employment.
I would like also to see copies of the two studies referred to above: the “tremendous” growth study for future student population and the child-care needs study; I would like to review the needs study for student housing as well. Finally, I would like to know the results of the administration’s survey of how many community colleges in Florida provide apartment buildings for students.
Respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare
http://www.HCCDeepthroat.blogspot.com
Dr. Stephenson, it does not add to the dignity of the college for its president to write letters to editorial boards or to others which feature basic writing errors. When I taught at HCC, we faculty lamented the grammar-punctuation gaffes in GK missives that crossed our desks and speculated that no communication should leave GK unedited by a person proficient in basic English. Administration grammar-punctuation errors add yet more confirmation to the academic saw that smart students go into teaching; academic weaklings go into administration.
Always unclear to me has been the puzzle of why people who have not mastered the elements of basic writing end up as presidents of colleges that exist to spread literacy. These marginally literate CEOs usually make $200,000 or more despite the mismatch of their talents with their jobs.
The which leads me to point out that your letter to the Tribune editorial board and other of your community missives in the long-delayed packet on Head Start that I received from Mr. Huerta contain the following basic-writing mistakes for your review:
“Tribune’s editorial”: Italicize a newspaper.
“…Head Start to serve their clients”: its clients (Head Start is one organization.)
“The Tampa Tribune did not feel that this information was germane to their editorial…”: Italicize Tampa Tribune; change “their” to “its” for pronoun-antecedent agreement.
“…the Tampa Tribune characterizes as ‘the little people’.” End-punctuation commas go inside quotation marks: “little people.”
Information Updates to BOT
“HCC staff have been working…” “Has been working” to agree with collective noun “staff” A grammar checker picks up glaring errors such as these for those who know how to use it.
“…that we have been working on with Nova comma which have delayed that admission….” Comma goes before a nonrestrictive adjective clause.
“Contract Officer”: lower case unless you follow it with the person’s name
“…that we intent to end this agreement”: “Intend,” not “intent”
“follow up information”: “follow-up”—hyphenated adjective before a noun
“County”: lower case unless preceded by “Hillsborough”
Letter to Pat Bean
“Lease Agreement”: lower case
“…Dale Mabry Brandon and Plant City Campus”: comma after “Dale Mabry” for items in a series, formal rule observed in classrooms on HCC’s three campuses
“County”: lower case unless preceded by specific county
“…our option”: HCC’s option unless you subscribe to “HCC, c’est moi.”
“Lease Agreements”: lower case
“…Head Start Centers, no comma effective…” Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive elided adjective clause.
Information Updates October 11, 2006
“HCC staff have been…”: “Staff has been”—subject-verb agreement
“…with Nova comma which have delayed…”:comma needed for nonrestrictive adjective clause
…34th Street facility, no comma at the College’s expense: No comma before restrictive prepositional phrase; no capital for “college” unless preceded by HCC
“Contract Officer”: lower case
“…follow up information…”: hyphenated adjective before a noun: “follow-up”
“…the County of our decision…”: No capital unless preceded by a particular county’s name
“…Dale Mabry, Brandon comma and Plant City Campuses.” Another instance of disregarding stardard items-in-a-series comma rule
“The County Head Start staff have expressed their concerns…”: “Head Start has expressed”—subject-verb agreement; its concerns (“Staff” is a singular collective noun here.)
“…provide you with follow up information…”: Hyphenated adjective before a noun: “follow-up”
Informational Updates July12, 2006
“…HCC entered into two (2) lease agreements comma and in 1995 HCC entered into one (1) lease agreement….”: Two-independent-clauses comma rule
“…Dale Mabry, Brandon comma and Plant City Campuses…” Items in a series comma rule
“…with a fenced hyphen equipment playground…”: hyphenated adjective before a noun
“The primary term of the leases are 20 years or until 2014…”: “Term…is”—subject- verb agreement error
“…landscaping, irrigation comma and parking…”: Neglect of the items-in-a-series comma rule
“I plan to contact the county to notify them…”: “Notify it”: “county” is singular.
“…to terminate all three agreements by July 1, 2008 comma and to identify…”: neglect of conventional-material comma rule
“…future plans HCC may have for this site period The master plan…” Period omitted at the end of a sentence
“…a much smaller complex, no comma with our plans for growth in…” Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase.
“However, this has grown to…”: vague pronoun reference: this what?
“…primary term was twenty (20) years or until 2008, no comma with the option…”
Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase.
“HCC staff met….to determine their plans….” Collective noun “staff” is singular: “its plans.”
“The City representatives…” “…any City property…”: Lower-case “city” both times.
“…this site is a community recreational facility comma and any changes will create potential public hyphen relations issues….”: comma for a compound sentence; hyphenated adjective before a noun
My concern is with the utility payment HCC pays annually compared with our limited use, No comma in addition to the future growth plans included in the Dale Mabry Campus Master Plan, No comma that it is not in our best interest to continue this relationship. The commas are both wrong: they cut off a restrictive prepositional phrase. A person who writes a forty-two word sentence must enjoy an ease with syntax not to stumble into comma errors. “Our” should be “its.”
“…to notify the City, No comma so [that] they can… plan ahead, No comma but indicate…” Lower-case “city.” No comma: “so” is not a coordinating conjunction but an elliptical subordinating conjunction “so that.” “They” should be “it” for pronoun-antecedent agreement. No comma after “ahead”: it splits a compound verb.
I propose that Comma once terminated, the City could continue…with the City paying for their utilities…. “Once terminated” is a past participial phrase that commas should enclose. It is also a dangling modifier. It cannot modify “the city” because the city can’t be terminated. The lease can be. The writer should add “the lease” between “once” and “terminated.” “City paying” should be “city’s paying”: possessive before the gerund.
“Readvertised” should be “re-advertised.”
“Transmarine…: we were not able to meet with their representatives and get a follow up with their proposal.” “It,” not “their,” agrees with “Transmarine.”
“follow up information”: “follow-up” information: hyphenated adjective before a noun
“…the Steinbrenner organization. Recently they asked HCC to reconsider but indicated they understood they were late….They also mentioned they had been talking… not to consider their proposal.” Here is a festival of pronoun-antecedent errors. Every “they” should be “it”; “their” should be “its.”
“…we are only considering a restaurant component…” “Only” is a misplaced modifier: it goes before “a restaurant.”
Lee Drury De Cesare
Former HCC Professor of English
C: All members BOT, HCC
Jan Platt
Letitia Brown
Paul Carastro
Norene Copeland
Ted Corwin
Mark Danzl
Ann Dawson
Mary Figg
Daniel Ginn
Denna Glausser
Michael E. Griffin
Gloria Hevia
Senator Arthenia Joyner
Shenna Lucas
Dr. Jan McCarthy
Janet G. McGuire
Gwendylyn Myers
Sally Olsson
Colleen Pruitt
Connie Pruitt
Lynn Raiber
Gina Space
Ben Wacksman
John Wakefield
Andrea White
Dr. Sandra Wilson
Enrique Woodroffe
Mitch Perry
Patrick Manteiga
Mayor Pam Iorio
Pat Bean
George Steinbrenner/Transmarine
City of Tampa Recreation Department
National Head Start
Hillsborough County Legislative Delegation
Senator Bill Nelson
Senator Mel Martinez
Congresswoman Cathy Castor
Congressman Gus Bilirakis
Congressman Adam Putnam
Cabinet Officer and Hillsborough County Resident Alex Sink
Governor Charlie Crist
Rex. T Newman
Board Attorney Carraway
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Dr. Stephenson:
There appears no entry in the contact list for the Board of Trustees on the HCC home page. This lack makes me ask that you forward this email to the board for me.
I lament ready access to the board. Before I retired, I lobbied the administration to make the board more accessible on the college Web page. The administration still chooses not to extend this courtesy to the public, however. It gives one the impression that either the board does not welcome contact from the rest of the college family and the public or that the administration does not want people except the administration to provide the board information. I infer the latter.
I also can’t find the next board meeting date: pray provide that to me via email. It should be in plain view on the Home Page unless the administration wants to keep people away from board meetings except the administration.
After effort, I got Mr. Huerta to send me public information on the college plan to kick out the Head Start children. I don’t know if it is complete since Mr. Huerta at first emailed me that there was no public information at all on the Head Start children. I had word from one of my GK Deepthroats that Mr. Huerta had been overheard in a hall conference with personnel director Ms. Sue Flaig saying that, if the HCC administration ignored my asking for public information long enough, I would go away.
I won’t.
I wrote Mr. Huerta a follow-up request with a copy to board attorney Mr. Carraway that anything written on a piece of paper would be public information and to send me what he had on Head Start.
I credit Mr. Carraway with persuading Mr. Huerta to honor the public-records law. Any request I make to Mr. Huerta since encountering Le Huerta’s non-responsiveness to public-records requests I now route to Mr. Carraway. As an officer of the court, a member of his firm, and the board, not the administration, attorney, Mr. Carraway is my guarantee to the public record’s law’s being honored by the GK administration, although I would not put it past Mr. Huerta to try to bamboozle Mr. Carraway as well. Mr. Huerta fancies that he possesses a Jesuitical mind.
In reviewing the data in the Head Start file that Mr. Huerta grudgingly sent me, I see that you justify doing away with the Head Start programs at HCC as well as the tennis courts by citing “tremendous” projected growth in student population. You must have a needs study that supports this adjective. May I have a copy of it? Also, may I have a copy of the study that supports your claim of the need for student housing in the form of the apartment complex that will replace the Head Start children’s areas? This is an exotic project for a community college, one infers. How many community colleges in Florida currently provide student housing?
You object to the Tribune editorial’s calling this apartment complex “luxurious”; but it is luxurious compared to the Head Start facilities that the college is doing away with in order to scuttle Head Start children’s modest presence. I am grateful that the Tribune opposed ejecting the Head Start children from the HCC campuses and printed the outpouring of letters from readers opposing the kicking out of these children. This conservative paper does not usually editorialize against inept or callous leadership of public institutions, but the outrageous HCC administration treatment of the community’s poorest children catalyzed even its ethically lethargic editors’ indignation.
I don’t understand why you do not choose as an enlightened goal to connect the college with the community’s needs by folding Head Start into the child-care facilities you cite that the administration plans to build—for which you say you have 70 children on the waiting list. I suggest that you grant Head Start a discrete section under its own responsibility and enfold it into the projected child-care facilities you plan on all three campuses. Head Start has proven record of success since its nation-wide inception and owns the additional luster of Dick Cheney’s voting against it when he was a House member. Its clients, moreover, are mostly Black and Hispanic children in this area—minority populations greatly in need of the helping hand Head Start supplies.
And I don’t understand why you don’t ask the city to split the utility bill for the tennis courts with HCC since citizens use the tennis courts and represent a connection between the college and the community. The administration’s sweeping gestures in its “business plan” evoke the image of bulldozing hither and yon to turn the college into some kind of industrial complex, one that veers widely from its educational purpose. The discussion about contracting with Transmarine for two restaurants and a hotel in the July 12, 2006, Information Updates solidifies the suspicion that the administration veers to commercial ventures, not educational ones.
That HCC chooses to antagonize the community over the tennis courts and to disregard the opinion of a Head Start board, on which politically powerful citizens sit, looks to me to be a venture in inept politics. This is bad town-gown relations that redound to HCC’s disadvantage. Your actions bespeak an administration in a bubble that makes rigid decisions without regard to their broad effect.
HCC’s PR department under Mr. Huerta has a tin ear, and you put too much faith in the non-academic people you have recruited to implement HCC’s “business plan” that appears to be an effort to turn HCC into a for-profit business with taxpayer education-dollars subsidy. Your present core administration advisors want to ignore the educational purpose of HCC and substitute a commercial enterprise with taxpayers’ footing the bill it appears to me.
Such radical change in the purpose of the college is not what taxpayers would support if they had knowledge of it, I believe. The PR department should get the information out in plain English, not in spin and silence, to forewarn the public how you in the administration are deviating from the educational purpose of HCC. That would be honest public relations. That department should serve the public, not the distorted goal of the administration to turn from education to a business model. The board of trustees has a special duty to inform the public of what is going on.
John Huerta as head of the public-relations department at HCC merits scrutiny
I got a call from a male employee at HCC from a pay phone who wouldn’t give his name—nobody ever does for fear of administration retaliation—who said that Mr. Huerta’s sole job is to make you look good to the public. In other words, he is a one-customer, tax-paid PR machine for you, Dr. Stephenson. How astonishing if true. Are your deficiencies so great and your merits so sparse that you need this kind of burnishing? And to what educational purpose does it tend? What good does this cult of personality do the college community and education? A one-client PR effort suggests you have something to cover up.
This information gets credence with me because my efforts at getting public information via Mr. Huerta suggests he didn’t know how to provide it because doing so was a new phenomenon for him. This belief received further confirmation from the overheard hall conference in which Mr. Huerta told Sue Flaig to ignore my requests for public information, that neglect of them would make me go away. My Deepthroat said that such ignoring of public-information requests defined template by which the administration treated these requests. So I infer that Mr. Huerta was not familiar with the procedure of providing public information to citizens since he had never provided it until I was importunate.
Mr. Huerta has a privileged history with the college coincident with yours since you brought him with you and created a job for him that got no advertising. A year before I retired a story circulated throughout the college that someone at Gordon Keller caught Mr. Huerta surfing the Web for pornography on his state-owned office computer. The press heard about this incident as well but did not print it.
Surprisingly, you did not fire Mr. Huerta, nor did you discipline him apparently. If you did, that information did not leak into the rumor mill, the only way the campuses ever find out what goes on at GK. You should have recorded the incident and punishment in Mr. Huerta’s personnel file as a matter of supervisory obligation, and the record of both should remain in his limited-access personnel file unless you have allowed someone to scrub it. If it does not, then one must infer that you did not discipline Mr. Huerta for pornography surfing on state property or that some administration person deleted it from the record with your concurrence if you did.
I find astonishing that Mr. Huerta remains at HCC after this serious offense. I believe such behavior to merit immediate firing. Especially does it invoke double-standard treatment of administration versus other HCC employees for what you consider to be their offenses. A Deepthroat present at a staff meeting heard Ms. Barbara Larsen, your CFO, say she had set up surveillance of the bookstore employees who had come before the board to plead for their jobs when the administration wanted to dump them onto the minimum-wage market without their pensions, DROP, or health care by subcontracting the bookstore to Barnes & Noble to squeeze profits out of that operation: this despite knowing of USF’s already negative experience with the Barnes & Noble’s franchise’s taking over its bookstores. In other words, it’s ok for Mr. Huerta to surf the Web on a state-owned computer for pornography, but it’s a firing offense for other HCC employees to speak out against their mistreatment by the administration.
Compared to Mr. Huerta’s pass on surfing on a school computer for pornography with impunity, any worker at HCC not in the administration inner circle gets subjected to surveillance if s/he shows any tendency to oppose the administration ukases. The administration with its dirty-tricks machine has cowed the entire college family into silence for fear of losing its jobs. This is a wicked way to use education tax dollars in the United States of America. The administration does these vile deeds with impunity because the board chooses not to become aware of them or to intervene and because the faculty and staff are too cowardly to stand up and oppose this tyranny in the open. As Yeats said, “The worst are full of passionate intensity, / The best lack all conviction.”
There is no way to describe this double standard but as sick, Dr. Stevenson. Let me add depraved, perverted, and pathological. I volunteer to argue this point any place, any where, any time. Meet me in the Dale Mabry parking lot at any hour you designate for you and me to debate the wickedness of your administration’s treatment of its outside-the-GK-loop’s employees. I will wipe up the floor with you, ma’am and send you thither to become Beelzebub’s cup maiden.
When one of the bookstore women called me to report the outrage of the administration’s effort to replace the workers after years of faithful service to the college when most had grown old and were not in the best of health—Maida Bello uses a cane after a brain operation for a balance problem, I joined the few who protested the uncivilized conduct of the administration and made myself unpopular at board meetings. I do not care if I am unpopular at board meetings. The board has a duty to listen to members of the public. And a member of the public has no obligation to utter soothing platitudes about the grandeur of the board but to bring its members information affecting the college as he or she sees it. HCC’s administration nor board is impervious to the First Amendment.
These faithful, long-term bookstore employees finally kept their jobs mostly due, I am convinced, to the administration’s underestimating the intrepidity of the members of the faculty-staff review committee in standing its ground and recommending against the betrayal of the old book-store employees.
Tradition has seen the administration pull off the scam of setting up a show faculty-staff committee to fool the board into believing there is college-wide participation in decisions and then twisting committee members’ arms to get the decision the administration wants with intimidation. The administration miscalculated that the customary show faculty-staff committee it fronts in such cases would be docile and bow to the administration’s directions in the bookstore outrage as has been customary.
My hat’s off to the members of that committee. God bless them. Courage at HCC is so rare that I salute every one of them. I understand Ms. Barbara Larsen, who maestroed what she expected to be the usual committee scam, spat out that its members were “bleeding hearts” when they voted against jettisoning the book-store employees. If Ms. Larsen and other of the administration callous overlords stood to lose their jobs, pensions, DROPs, and medical benefits, she and they would be singing a different tune.
The administration began at the bottom with the most vulnerable, least sophisticated employees—the cleaning staff and the lunch-room people—in subcontracting their jobs. Their treatment by these subcontractors, I hear, is not good. I also hear from my Deepthroats that graft takes place between the subcontractors and some of the HCC administrative employees.
A staff member who called me from the college but wouldn’t identify his area and went twice to his door to make sure no one audited him said that staff thought that it would be next after the book-store people were got rid of. After staff, there is only faculty. One supposes the administration will see as a business necessity that part-timers teach at slave wages and no benefits and that tenure becomes a thing of the past.
I have received eight or nine postal mail messages alleging corruption at the college: payoffs, bid-rigging, graft, inventory shenanigans. I mount these on my http://www.HCCDeepthroat.blogspot.com site for the world to examine. So far I have not been able to get an investigation from the attorney general of these charges, but I will continue to try. It took me three years of leafleting government agencies and elected officials to force the city of Tampa and the Hillsborough County sheriff’s department to hire women as police officers and deputies.
A citizen must complain to the government apparatus until it gives up and responds and does its job. The trick is to complain long enough that complaints tap into elected officials’ sense of shame that they are not doing the job they promised the public they would do and their fear that the public will learn of their defection from duty. Getting politicians to react is tough to accomplish since the breed’s skin is thicker than a pachyderm’s when it comes to a sense of shame and obligation to the public. I am, however, sanguine. I may succeed before the Democrats in Congress summon the courage to do what the voters elected them to do: cut off funds for Bush’s war.
I want this pornography-surfing matter put out in the open and laid before the board for its belated acknowledgement and scrutiny. They will not be able to say henceforth that they didn’t know about Mr. Huerta’s putative pornography-surfing history and your response to it. Its reaction will be diagnostic of how seriously the board takes the job of guarding the college against malfeasance and against fostering exotic use of the PR head’s time as image-burnisher for the president as sole employment.
One hopes that Mr. Huerta’s frolicking about the halls of Gordon Keller advising a staff member to ignore a citizen’s request for public information whilst under the protection of your office for the grave offense of using public property to surf for pornography ranks too egregious for even a supine board to pass over.
Public information requests
I want to review Mr. Huerta’s non-redacted personnel file--not the for-show one but the limited-access one. I will do this review on the next board-meeting day (reminder: please email me the date of that event) at one p.m. in Ms. Flaig’s office and mean this email to notify her and Mr. Huerta of this fact.
I want to see as well Mr. Huerta’s job description. I want to know what his yearly salary and perquisites cost the taxpayer.
The pay-phone informant said Mr. Huerta has one job: to burnish your image for public consumption. I am sure citizens wouldn’t approve of that one-customer job for a highly paid porn surfing administration official. I want to know how much taxpayers spend for a one-client PR service if that be, indeed, his sole employment.
I would like also to see copies of the two studies referred to above: the “tremendous” growth study for future student population and the child-care needs study; I would like to review the needs study for student housing as well. Finally, I would like to know the results of the administration’s survey of how many community colleges in Florida provide apartment buildings for students.
Respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare
http://www.HCCDeepthroat.blogspot.com
Dr. Stephenson, it does not add to the dignity of the college for its president to write letters to editorial boards or to others which feature basic writing errors. When I taught at HCC, we faculty lamented the grammar-punctuation gaffes in GK missives that crossed our desks and speculated that no communication should leave GK unedited by a person proficient in basic English. Administration grammar-punctuation errors add yet more confirmation to the academic saw that smart students go into teaching; academic weaklings go into administration.
Always unclear to me has been the puzzle of why people who have not mastered the elements of basic writing end up as presidents of colleges that exist to spread literacy. These marginally literate CEOs usually make $200,000 or more despite the mismatch of their talents with their jobs.
The which leads me to point out that your letter to the Tribune editorial board and other of your community missives in the long-delayed packet on Head Start that I received from Mr. Huerta contain the following basic-writing mistakes for your review:
“Tribune’s editorial”: Italicize a newspaper.
“…Head Start to serve their clients”: its clients (Head Start is one organization.)
“The Tampa Tribune did not feel that this information was germane to their editorial…”: Italicize Tampa Tribune; change “their” to “its” for pronoun-antecedent agreement.
“…the Tampa Tribune characterizes as ‘the little people’.” End-punctuation commas go inside quotation marks: “little people.”
Information Updates to BOT
“HCC staff have been working…” “Has been working” to agree with collective noun “staff” A grammar checker picks up glaring errors such as these for those who know how to use it.
“…that we have been working on with Nova comma which have delayed that admission….” Comma goes before a nonrestrictive adjective clause.
“Contract Officer”: lower case unless you follow it with the person’s name
“…that we intent to end this agreement”: “Intend,” not “intent”
“follow up information”: “follow-up”—hyphenated adjective before a noun
“County”: lower case unless preceded by “Hillsborough”
Letter to Pat Bean
“Lease Agreement”: lower case
“…Dale Mabry Brandon and Plant City Campus”: comma after “Dale Mabry” for items in a series, formal rule observed in classrooms on HCC’s three campuses
“County”: lower case unless preceded by specific county
“…our option”: HCC’s option unless you subscribe to “HCC, c’est moi.”
“Lease Agreements”: lower case
“…Head Start Centers, no comma effective…” Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive elided adjective clause.
Information Updates October 11, 2006
“HCC staff have been…”: “Staff has been”—subject-verb agreement
“…with Nova comma which have delayed…”:comma needed for nonrestrictive adjective clause
…34th Street facility, no comma at the College’s expense: No comma before restrictive prepositional phrase; no capital for “college” unless preceded by HCC
“Contract Officer”: lower case
“…follow up information…”: hyphenated adjective before a noun: “follow-up”
“…the County of our decision…”: No capital unless preceded by a particular county’s name
“…Dale Mabry, Brandon comma and Plant City Campuses.” Another instance of disregarding stardard items-in-a-series comma rule
“The County Head Start staff have expressed their concerns…”: “Head Start has expressed”—subject-verb agreement; its concerns (“Staff” is a singular collective noun here.)
“…provide you with follow up information…”: Hyphenated adjective before a noun: “follow-up”
Informational Updates July12, 2006
“…HCC entered into two (2) lease agreements comma and in 1995 HCC entered into one (1) lease agreement….”: Two-independent-clauses comma rule
“…Dale Mabry, Brandon comma and Plant City Campuses…” Items in a series comma rule
“…with a fenced hyphen equipment playground…”: hyphenated adjective before a noun
“The primary term of the leases are 20 years or until 2014…”: “Term…is”—subject- verb agreement error
“…landscaping, irrigation comma and parking…”: Neglect of the items-in-a-series comma rule
“I plan to contact the county to notify them…”: “Notify it”: “county” is singular.
“…to terminate all three agreements by July 1, 2008 comma and to identify…”: neglect of conventional-material comma rule
“…future plans HCC may have for this site period The master plan…” Period omitted at the end of a sentence
“…a much smaller complex, no comma with our plans for growth in…” Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase.
“However, this has grown to…”: vague pronoun reference: this what?
“…primary term was twenty (20) years or until 2008, no comma with the option…”
Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase.
“HCC staff met….to determine their plans….” Collective noun “staff” is singular: “its plans.”
“The City representatives…” “…any City property…”: Lower-case “city” both times.
“…this site is a community recreational facility comma and any changes will create potential public hyphen relations issues….”: comma for a compound sentence; hyphenated adjective before a noun
My concern is with the utility payment HCC pays annually compared with our limited use, No comma in addition to the future growth plans included in the Dale Mabry Campus Master Plan, No comma that it is not in our best interest to continue this relationship. The commas are both wrong: they cut off a restrictive prepositional phrase. A person who writes a forty-two word sentence must enjoy an ease with syntax not to stumble into comma errors. “Our” should be “its.”
“…to notify the City, No comma so [that] they can… plan ahead, No comma but indicate…” Lower-case “city.” No comma: “so” is not a coordinating conjunction but an elliptical subordinating conjunction “so that.” “They” should be “it” for pronoun-antecedent agreement. No comma after “ahead”: it splits a compound verb.
I propose that Comma once terminated, the City could continue…with the City paying for their utilities…. “Once terminated” is a past participial phrase that commas should enclose. It is also a dangling modifier. It cannot modify “the city” because the city can’t be terminated. The lease can be. The writer should add “the lease” between “once” and “terminated.” “City paying” should be “city’s paying”: possessive before the gerund.
“Readvertised” should be “re-advertised.”
“Transmarine…: we were not able to meet with their representatives and get a follow up with their proposal.” “It,” not “their,” agrees with “Transmarine.”
“follow up information”: “follow-up” information: hyphenated adjective before a noun
“…the Steinbrenner organization. Recently they asked HCC to reconsider but indicated they understood they were late….They also mentioned they had been talking… not to consider their proposal.” Here is a festival of pronoun-antecedent errors. Every “they” should be “it”; “their” should be “its.”
“…we are only considering a restaurant component…” “Only” is a misplaced modifier: it goes before “a restaurant.”
Lee Drury De Cesare
Former HCC Professor of English
C: All members BOT, HCC
Jan Platt
Letitia Brown
Paul Carastro
Norene Copeland
Ted Corwin
Mark Danzl
Ann Dawson
Mary Figg
Daniel Ginn
Denna Glausser
Michael E. Griffin
Gloria Hevia
Senator Arthenia Joyner
Shenna Lucas
Dr. Jan McCarthy
Janet G. McGuire
Gwendylyn Myers
Sally Olsson
Colleen Pruitt
Connie Pruitt
Lynn Raiber
Gina Space
Ben Wacksman
John Wakefield
Andrea White
Dr. Sandra Wilson
Enrique Woodroffe
Mitch Perry
Patrick Manteiga
Mayor Pam Iorio
Pat Bean
George Steinbrenner/Transmarine
City of Tampa Recreation Department
National Head Start
Hillsborough County Legislative Delegation
Senator Bill Nelson
Senator Mel Martinez
Congresswoman Cathy Castor
Congressman Gus Bilirakis
Congressman Adam Putnam
Cabinet Officer and Hillsborough County Resident Alex Sink
Governor Charlie Crist
Rex. T Newman
Board Attorney Carraway
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