The SMCCCD Dumpster Fire

For this next blogpost, I was originally planning on writing about the adverse effects of online education on students, but in light of some troubling events at my college and district over the last few weeks, I decided to pivot. Just a few weeks ago, the College of San Mateo community found out that our college president, Dr. Jennifer Taylor-Mendoza, would be leaving our college for a college presidency elsewhere in the Bay Area. She left the CSM presidency after just two years and after a total of twelve years in the district, in which she served and excelled as director of the CSM learning center, as a CSM dean, and as a Skyline vice president. The topic of this blogpost, then, really comes down to one question: why would a talented, high-performing new college president leave her position for a lateral move as a president at another college in a very similar district (e.g. community-funded or “basic aid”)? Answering this question honestly is an important practice for equity and justice-minded educators and professionals, especially considering Dr. Taylor-Mendoza is a Black woman.

Part of answering this question is acknowledging the wave of Black professionals who have left the San Mateo Community College District (SMCCCD) in the past four years, from faculty to directors to presidents. So Dr. Taylor-Mendoza’s departure is not the first instance of a high-achieving, Black educator inexplicably leaving the district. If it were just one or two instances, maybe we could just shrug our shoulders, but they are leaving the District en masse. Of course, our District administration is taking the “colorblind” approach and blaming these departures on the “Silver Tsunami” and other outside factors, but the fact is that my District has created an environment that is toxic for employees of color, especially Black employees. This is institutional racism and anti-Blackness in action.

As my friend and co-author, Dr. Jeremiah J. Sims explained during a SMCCCD Board of Trustees public comment on July 26, 2023, “the soil here at SMCCCD is unhealthy. More pointedly, it is diseased.This disease is anti-Blackness” (1:30:30). An anti-Black organization is, in part, one in which its policies, processes, and leadership undermine the success and well-being of its Black employees. It can be deduced simply from public records that this is the case with SMCCCD.

Recently, the Board of Trustees adopted revisions to the District Chancellor screening (hiring) process. Normally, all positions within the District (besides the Board members themselves) go through a screening process in which a committee comprised of all constituencies “screens” applications for a specific position, interviews candidates, and chooses 3-5 “finalists” who are then interviewed by the hiring manager. In the case of the Chancellor, the hiring manager is the Board itself. However, rather than respecting the District’s long-established hiring process, the Board created a “back door” provision that allows them to hire any candidate despite the recommendations of the screening committee. In other words, they can hire anybody who applied for the position (even if they weren’t chosen for a first-level interview by the screening committee). Unfortunately, this is also a very long-established practice, as it represents a long tradition of back room handshake deals that have allowed white folks (especially white men) to bypass proper hiring channels. This is, if we are honest, a form of the “old boys club,” at best, and white supremacy, at worst (if these two scenarios are even different). Moreover, the Board of Trustees is 80% white, so this “back door” hiring policy is troubling, especially when we consider that not one of the white Board members could be bothered to sit through an equity panel during our District opening day. In other words, we can’t trust this Board to make a hiring decision that is rooted in equity and social justice. This change to the Chancellor hiring process is one example of how the Board has, as Dr. Sims noted, “continued to talk about cultivating equity and justice without addressing [our] rotting soil.”

These types of policy changes demonstrate the Board’s lack of commitment to equity and justice and have created the toxic environment that has driven Black employees, like Dr. Taylor-Mendoza, from the District. When we look at the Board’s and District leadership’s interactions with Dr. Jennifer Taylor-Mendoza, we start to see that they were actively impeding her work for the college. For instance, over many months, Dr. Taylor-Mendoza’s team had worked diligently to bring $5 million in rental money to the campus through an agreement with Castelleja School, an all-girls, private school in Palo Alto with several families from San Mateo County (she recused herself from the planning since she is a Castelleja board member). As a result of this partnership, some of the young women from the high school had even registered for CSM courses. Moreover, this would have been a short-term rental agreement utilizing vacant CSM space while Castelleja’s campus was renovated. The CSM leadership worked closely with both Castelleja and the District to ensure everything was done by the book, and in the eleventh hour, the Board killed the deal in a closed session without inviting anybody from CSM to present or share information or without explaining their rationale to the college.

Seems isolated, right? Well, the $5 million from this rental agreement were to be used to help fund much-needed renovations in the CSM Library. Again, while Dr. Taylor-Mendoza and her team applied for state funding to renovate the library, the Board and District leadership set up a number of hurdles for the college, from requests for last minute documents to unattainable demands from the state chancellor’s office (CCCCO). As of this writing, the future of the CSM Library is still in limbo. In fact, the District has very recently taken the unprecedented step of consolidating all facilities planning and prioritization at the District office, a responsibility typically held by the college president in consultation with college leadership. This is just one more example of how SMCCCD is threatening the colleges’ autonomy and centralizing all authority within a group of individuals who do not reflect our students (they are predominantly white) and who are not educators (none of them came from the faculty or classified staff).

In fact, I’d go as far as arguing that these steps are an attempt to not only seize control of the college planning processes and governance but an attempt to erase the legacy of a Black female president who was helping the college make huge strides in equity, facilities upgrades, and community engagement. As you will see below, Dr. Taylor-Mendoza’s existence as president is slowly being erased. In an attempt to find the exact date when Dr. Taylor-Mendoza was appointed as CSM President, I scoured the CSM and SMCCCD news sites. I did not find a press release on either the college’s or district’s website, and I started to wonder if the original press releases had been deleted because both college and district news sites had press releases for other administrators. An electronic archive of both websites (obtained through archive.org, an independent web archive) documents the original press releases for Dr. Taylor-Mendoza’s appointment, the ones which have been removed from both news pages (the screenshots below will demonstrate this). As I hope is apparent, the loss of so many talented Black leaders goes far beyond a wave of administrative retirements. SMCCCD has created a toxic, anti-Black, racist working environment that punishes Black excellence and attempts to erase these leaders’ achievements. And both the Board and District leadership are complicit and directly involved.

This erasure is further demonstrated by the District’s “covert” attempts to quash CSM’s Half Moon Bay Satellite Campus. Since being appointed president, Dr. Taylor-Mendoza worked closely with the town of Half Moon Bay, which is geographically isolated from CSM but an important predominantly Latinx community in CSM’s service area that Dr. Taylor-Mendoza championed. Collaborating with the community, Dr. Taylor-Mendoza and her team worked to design and open a satellite campus that would offer coast side students degree pathways, career education programs, ESL coursework, and food and social services. However, members of the District leadership actively questioned the work while quietly contacting local officials to either halt the deal or postpone its opening. The problem is that Half Moon Bay is a small town, and it desperately needs the satellite campus, so of course, these attempts were not so covert. Whatever the motive, this is just another attempt to undermine a leader of color, and fortunately, the Half Moon Bay satellite campus is still moving forward. I am not hopeful, however, that the College of San Mateo community will have much participation in its operations.

The actions of the SMCCCD Board and District leadership is the antithesis of equity and justice, and their virtue signaling and self-congratulatory behavior is not going to prevent the inevitable “brain drain” accompanied by the loss of talented administrators (and even faculty). No offense to my friends and colleagues at City College or Peralta, but SMCCCD is on a crash course to becoming the next community college pariah. The smell of the dumpster fire at the SMCCCD district office is stinking up the county, and I only hope that the staff, faculty, administration, and community take the District Office to task for its incompetence, willful ignorance, and white entitlement.

The Online Education Hydra (Part II)

The Online Education Hydra (Part I)

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