Presidential showdown
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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Who will succeed Rita Cavin as the next president of Linn-Benton Community College?
In a forum last Friday, the two candidates, Gregory Hamann and Darlene Miller, shared with the audience their philosophies on leadership and education. Each survived over an hour answering questions from an audience nearing 100 people.
According to Hamann, president of Clatsop Community College, a leader needs to create a story and passion around their organization.
“[A leader] needs to be the banner carrier for the work that we do,” says Hamann.
Miller, former president of Manchester Community College in New Hampshire, believes that you should surround yourself with people who know more about their jobs than you do.
“Hire good people and get out of their way,” says Miller.
Both candidates expressed a strong desire for open communication with the staff as well as the students. Both believe decisions should be discussed in groups. Hamann likes to have weekly casual meetings over coffee to get to know the staff, and enjoys outside activities with the students. Miller makes it a point to walk around campus in order to talk with people to learn about their concerns and happenings.
Each candidate came across as a very strong choice. According to Marlene Propst, director of college advancement, the Board of Education will use the audience’s comment cards to help make a decision by mid-November. The board meeting will be on Nov. 19.
Here are some paraphrased highlights of the questions asked during the forum:
Question: Talk about a time you’ve faced a controversial proposal.
Hamann: Smoking on campus. It was controversial. We had lots of external pressure. The dean suggested we have an internal dialogue to see what would work for us. We set aside a smoking area, and we unanimously supported that internally. I think we did the right thing for our institution.
Miller: We had an employee once who shared that we had a hostile work environment. We ended up needing an outside investigation because there was so much conflict.
Q: What is the role of a community college president in creating a welcoming atmosphere for people who come from diverse backgrounds; people of color, people who are first-generation college students? How do you welcome, retain, and help them advance?
H: At Clatsop we have five core values, and one of them is diversity. We are not perfect, but we are working on it. The president’s role is first to make sure you have a statement and purpose that affirms the core value. Diversity is about all of us feeling valued for who we are and what we can contribute. We must model this value and we all have to work to personify it.
M: The goal is to create a welcoming and safe environment. The role is to model the behavior and the responsibility is to deal with the situation if it’s brought to your attention that it’s not a welcoming place. It is important to recognize and affirm your own culture and what makes you unique, and to create an atmosphere of open and honest communication.
Q: You’re forced to reduce the budget by 10 percent. Where do you begin?
H: The state just asked us to do that. You have to bring people together to look at your core purpose when you come to that question. That’s what we did. We got the leaders of the faculty, part time, management, classified, and had regular meetings, weekly, to answer that question.
M: We went through a significant cut a year ago, and the budget capital planning team came up with recommendations.
Q: Some colleges are following the trend
of hiring more part-time instructors. Your thoughts?
H: From an instructoral perspective, as opposed to economic, there is a clear advantage to having full-time instructors. But at Clatsop, part-timers do create a curriculum breadth I can’t always have with full time.
M: I don’t like the trend, but I don’t know that it will reverse, given that funding is going in the wrong direction.
Q: If you were a fruit, what kind of fruit would you be?
H: It seems to me that the obvious answer is an orange … but maybe an apple. An apple is really good, it’s basic, it’s not fluffy like a kiwi, it doesn’t spoil rapidly like a banana.
M: I would be a fruitcake. I do like to have fun. I do like to laugh. I take my work very seriously, but I don’t take myself very seriously.
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