campus digest - merced college · following the academic senate’s presentation, mcfa presi-dent...

CAMPUSDIGEST

Tech Savvy President Taylor ponders the impact technology has on the teaching and learning experi-ence, as well as on staff work load. Page 2

Full-Time Appreciation Merced College steps out to honor and show appreciation to its part-time faculty in April. Page 3

Manner of Speaking Editor offers a personal essay on the life and legacy of John Ciardi, an important but neglected American poet. Page 7

APRIL 2013A Merced College News Magazine Published by the Office of Institutional AdvancementVol. II Edition 9

Photo by Jay Sousa

Candy’s Dandy

Members of the Associated Students of Merced College were busy raising money one candy bar at a time to fund a trip to Washington D.C. Seven students traveled to the nation’s capitol during Spring Break, including ASMC officer Damaris Raluy, 20, who was found manning the ‘candy window’ in the Student Union Building.

National Poetry Month

Conference Supports Technology for LearningStreamlining Processes and Easing Work Load Ultimately Helps Students

CAMPUS DIGEST APRIL 2013

By Dr. Ron TaylorSuperintendent/President

Dr. Taylor

“April is the cruelest month,” said T.S. Eliot, famously. He was talking about the return of spring and how it de-feats winter, so to speak, and overturns our grim assump-tions about the inevitable march of society into oblivion.

Other poets down through the ages have also spoken about April, usually cel-ebrating springtime as a time of rebirth. (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote . . .” said Chaucer, speaking of the “sweet showers” of rain that refresh the earth and produce abundance. Wouldn’t we like to see a little more rain around here just now?)

But since I wrote about springtime in last month’s Digest, and since it’s a hack-neyed topic anyway, let me see if I can give you a counter-statement to Eliot’s grim picture of humanity’s devastation. (Bear in mind he was writing right after World War I and thinking about mass psychosis.)

To present a brighter picture, I’ll need to set aside my shock at my tax bill, and I’ll also need to disregard for a minute the news that just came out of Boston. But I can do it, and it’s worth doing. Here goes—something about Merced College and the wonderful future ahead of us . . .

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Ellucian Live conference. You may not know much about Ellucian. It is a tech-nology company that was born out of the merger of Sungard Higher Education’s Banner database system and Datatel’s Col-league database system. In other words, it is the dominant company in higher education database systems. To us at Merced College, Ellucian is the provider of our Colleague software through which we register and enroll students, build the class schedule,

run our payrolls, issue payments to service providers, and many other things. It is the heart of our information technology as an operation.

This was a big conference—about 8,000 in attendance. I was one of about 100 col-lege presidents attending their Executive Forum. (My humble thanks to the TIR managers for insisting I go and helping to get me there.) While I have a long history of working with technology, nevertheless, to say that I learned something at the con-ference is an understatement.

What was most pleasing to hear was how serious the technology world is about institutional effectiveness and support for student learning. The folks at Ellucian, and their many partner companies are busy working to develop applications that will help us interact with students who live on their cell phones, for example (a “mobile app” has been rolled out). And they are also busy preparing software that might help us coordinate our institutional planning bet-ter than the combination of Curricunet and web-postings we are now using.

Too often, technology geeks get a bad rap. The stereotype is of a quiet, serious,

isolated individual who is more interested in numbers or cool gadgets than in people. Having spent a little time with a few hun-dred technology managers and support staff, I can assure you that the stereotype has one thing definitely wrong: these folks, as a group, are very interested in our col-lective well being. They want it all to work for students and they want our institutional lives to improve.

If a technology-based solution can streamline a work practice that is taking us extra time and trouble, and causing us to feel frazzled and over-worked, they want to work with us to provide the solution. Speaking frankly, I’m all for it, too. Any-thing we can do to streamline our work and provide service to students more smoothly and gracefully is a very good thing.

We are just about to forward a new Technology Master Plan to the Board of Trustees for final approval. As we do so, I am eager for us to renew our commitment to providing up-to-date technology in the classroom, in the offices of the college, and online.

Have a great month—next month we will be preparing for Commencement!

We have confirmation of our accreditation site visit. Two previous team members (from our 2011 visit) are scheduled to arrive next Monday, April 22.

The team members are: Dr. Sandra Mayo, president of Moreno Val-ley College, and Mr. Raj Bajaj, dean of Institutional Reporting, Riverside CCD.

In a side note, the original team chair, Dr. Jackie Fisher, was recently in a terrible auto accident, and is still hospitalized.

We do not yet have a schedule of interviews for the visit, but I urge you—especially if you are a leader of a governance constituency or a chair of one of the master planning committees—to keep yourself as available as possible on Monday, and to respond quickly if you get a phone call or email. We want their visit to be effective and efficient.

If any questions arise, please contact Dr. Anne Newins or her assistant, Toni McCall.

--President Taylor

Accreditation Team Visit Set for April 22

CAMPUS DIGESTAPRIL 2013

Code Blue Boxes Help in Emergencies

This ‘Code Blue Box’ is located on the east side of the Communications Building.

Photo by Robin Shepard

Located throughout campus, Code Blue Boxes (yellow in color), are provided for emergencies. These are not payphones and should not be used as such.

Al Code Blue Boxes have a RED button for help and a BLACK button for information. Pressing the BLACK button will provide you connecting options to Dial-A-Ride, Merced Taxi, City Express Taxi, or the Operator. Pressing the RED button will connect you to emergency personnel.

Once connection has been established, speak clearly through the receiver, state your name, the location, and what the emergency is—the more information you can provide, the better.

And, more importantly, try to be as calm as possible and know that assistance is on its way.

For non-emergencies, contact Campus Police at 209.384.6054.

Once again April is Part-time Faculty Appreciation Month at Merced College!

All members of our campus community are invited to join in the celebration of our valuable part-time faculty members. To help celebrate, MCFA has offered funding for cohorts and areas to pro-vide activities or food for part-time faculty during the month.

The Academic Senate will also recognize the contributions of part-time faculty members. Each cohort will designate a part-time faculty member for recognition as the cohort “Part-time Faculty Member of the Year.” The candidates will then be presented to the Academic Senate on April 25, which will present these faculty members to the Board of Trustees at the May 7 meeting.

Following the Academic Senate’s presentation, MCFA Presi-dent Keith Law will share a presentation that depicts the contri-butions and the challenges faced by part-time faculty members. Merced College employs approximately 420 part-time faculty members who teach approximately 879 courses.

Beyond the classroom, hard working part-time faculty mem-bers are also located in the Learning Resources Center, Tri-College Center, Workplace Learning Resource Center, Guidance Center, Business Resource Center, Study Central, and in various labs.

Other contributions by part-time faculty members include meeting with students, participating in SLO assessments, and ac-creditation program review processing.

In 2009, MCFA began its campaign to recognize the value of part-time faculty members, many of whom were being laid off due to budget cuts. Since its inception at Merced College, Part-time Faculty Appreciation Month has become a statewide event, as the Sacramento-based Community College Association now pro-motes and helps fund events throughout the system.

Part-time Faculty Appreciation Month was originally con-ceived to bring attention to the contributions of our part-time fac-ulty members, and also to highlight their challenges. For examples, part-time faculty members are required to fulfill the same teach-ing responsibilities as full-time faculty members; however, students have little or no access to them outside of the classroom because they are not compensated for office hours. Part-time faculty mem-bers also have no health insurance, insignificant retirement, and no compensation for work in the areas of grading/prep time, commit-tee and department meetings, SLOs, and other assessments.

Though these challenges exist, we are also thankful that MCFA negotiated a hourly pay-raise, and a new pay structure that includes 10 pay periods and an improved 8 step/5 column salary schedule.

Please join MCFA and the Academic Senate as we share our appreciation of part-time faculty members. We will also rededicate ourselves to improving their working conditions, which also will contribute to the success of students.

Time to Honor MC’sPart-time InstructorsBy Kathleen Brantley-GutierrezReference Librarian


Wayfinding Project NearingEnd of Initial Planning Stage

After almost a year of planning the design of the new Merced Campus signs, the Wayfinding Subcommittee, with input from the campus community, is close to fi-nalizing the plans.

The next step will be approval by the Board of Trustees in May and then prepa-ration of the bid documents.

It is anticipated the signs will be con-

This is an architectural rendering of the new campus monument signs.

Proposition 39 Energy Efficiency Initiative benefits Merced Community College District

Approved by California voters in November 2012, Proposition 39 estab-lishes a new Clean Energy Job Creation Fund. Proposition 39 is expected to ac-crue roughly $2.65 billion in taxpayer dollars for investment in energy effi-ciency and clean energy job creation in California.

For the first five years, Proposition 39 will dedicate half of the revenues recovered to job-creating energy ef-ficiency and clean energy programs. These programs will include projects at schools and government buildings such as installing solar panels, upgrading old heating and cooling systems, swapping out old windows and installing other energy-saving technologies.

Under the leadership of Vice Presi-dent Schultz, Administrative Services Staff is currently working with utility companies to determine the best proj-ects for the Merced Community Col-lege District.

The Proposition 39 funds will be distributed to the states’s community colleges according to their FTES.

Staff will continue to share updates through the Facilities Master Planning Committee and through published doc-uments such as the Campus Digest.

The FMPC website is located on the MC4Me portal and is kept updated on a regular basis. Check the FMPC site regularly for up-to-date facilities plan-ning activities.

Prop. 39 FundsBenefit Colleges

structed and installed by early fall 2013. Also included in the project is a new cam-pus map.

Administrative Services staff is pleased with the planning process and worked hard to ensure that the progress was shared with all constituencies throughout the entire process.

When you look to the east at the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it’s easy to see the tow-ering snowcapped ranges, the wide glacially formed valley, and the abundant and diverse plant and animal life. But how, exactly, did the mountains form? What was the effect of this huge mass of slowly cooling magma on the surrounding rock?

These questions can be explored by ex-amining the minerals that formed in the surrounding rocks, mapping their occur-rence, and trying to determine the changes in the Eath’s crust as the Sierras formed.

Every semester, physical geology stu-dents conduct a field trip to investigate these questions, and the data gathered dur-ing these trips has allowed one student, John Almand, and myself an opportunity to share our findings on the slate beds just East of Planada.

Student to Present Research Resultsat Geological Society ConferenceBy Robert DaviesProfessor of Geology

The mineral that is used to determine the different pressures and temperatures is chiastolite. Chiastolite is identified by dark colored inclusions of carbonaceous mate-rial making a distinctive cross-shaped fig-ure in cross section. Locally, these are called “cross-rocks.”

This mineral is typically formed where a cooling magma body heats up the sur-rounding rock and changes the mineralogy. Geologic maps locate the occurrence of these minerals, and that knowledge is used to refine our understanding of the forma-tion of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Knowledge of a particular mineral oc-currence does little good however, when it is not shared with other scientists; the process of distributing information often includes a presentation of findings at a pro-fessional convention.

This year, the Geological Society of America (GSA) is holding its section con-ference in Fresno, making this a perfect

time to present the information to a larger audience.

On May 22nd, I and John Almand will present findings that extend mapped occur-rence of chiastolite, with hopes of having this rock included in future publications of the Geologic Map of California. This will be the first time Merced College has been represented at the GSA, and it is a chance

See Geology, page 8.


Book Experience EncouragesStudents to Make a DifferenceBy Margaret WithersProfessor of English

progress in math and English, and rates for graduates, transfers and certificate-earners who complete several vocational courses.

The Scorecard also provides details re-garding key performance measures by gen-der, race/ethnicity and age, which helps col-leges identify performance in key subgroup areas, which may suggest opportunities for further investigation and improvement.

“We are definitely making strides in the right direction,” said President Taylor. “We expect to use the ARCC 2013 Scorecard as a baseline from which to measure and improve our performance in future years.”

The Scorecard can be found at http://www.scorecard.cccco.edu and on the Col-lege’s website at http://www.mccd.edu/.

I’d like to tell you about an event which occurred in my class.

My students in English 81 are reading the book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Krystof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book deals with the horrendous issues women (and thus, children) deal with as a matter of their daily lives. It is a painful book, but by the end of each chapter, the authors intro-duce someone who is making a differ-ence, and who lives in the solution rather than the problem, so I feel good asking them to read about such life experiences as rape, sex trade victims, etc.

Facebook recently introduced the “Half the Sky” game and my students are participating as a means to get them to read more as well as to become more technically literate, and in order to help them to see how little it actually takes to be a part of the solution. They love the game! One of my students wrote in his response paper to me a couple weeks ago that he would like to see the class

collect come money and donate to one of the partner organizations (i.e., the UN, Heifer International, GEM) and be part of the solution. I let the classes decide (2 sections) and we named a $2 minimum with a $10 maximum gift for this. I let the students collect the money and they gave it to me this morning, when we had a ‘”giving party” in my 11 a.m. 81 section.

We collected and gave over $250 (with more to come I’ve heard) to 10 of the partner organizations. Nothing but Nets, (which gives people mosquito nets so they don’t get malaria), got $32, The Fistula Foundation got $66, Heifer got $62, shot@Life got $28 (they provide vaccines for children’s vaccines), UNF - Clean Cookstoves got $22, GEMS (girls who have suffered from sexual exploita-tion both domestic and foreign, got $24, Intel, which promotes digital literacy and education to help create change got $17, Room to Read - provides books and education - $21, UN Access Founda-tion - (family planning through the UN) got $11, and Girl Up, a forum to develop leadership skills in U.S. girls so they can do outreach worldwide, got $13.

I think my students are amazing!

April

Guitar Orchestra Concert

Merced College TheaterDirected by Nathaniel DahmanApril 27 at 7:30 p.m.Admission: $10 General, $8 Students & Faculty

May

Student Art Exhibit

Merced College Art GalleryMay 1–16Reception: May 1, 6-7:30 p.m

Guitar Master Class with Marc Teicholz from San Francisco Conservatory

Lesher Room 111Friday, May 3 from 1-4 p.m.Free admission

Jazz Ensemble ConcertSpecial Guest: Matt Finders from the

Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Merced College TheaterDirected by Ken TaylorMay 3 at 7:30 p.m.Admission: $10 general, $8 students & faculty

Concert Band Performance

Merced College TheaterDirected by Mark DoielMay 10 at 7:30 p.m.Admission: $8 General, $5 students & faculty

Spring Chorale ConcertChorale & Chamber Singers

Merced College TheaterDirected by Curtis NelsonMay 17 & 18 at 8 p.m.Admission: $10 general, $8 advance sales

More SpringTheater Events

The state Chancellor’s Office recently released Student Success Scorecards for all 112 community colleges.

Each college is compared against its own past performance using a key metrics.

“The 2013 Scorecard clearly demon-strates Merced College’s improved perfor-mance over time on most key measures of student success,” said President Taylor.

The Scorecard tracks the 2006-2007 student cohort for six years through the 2011-2012 school year and includes a col-lege profile, rates of graduation, transfer and certificate earning, rates of students who enroll in their first three consecutive terms (“persistence”), rates of students who complete at least 30 units, rates of remedial

MC Makes Strides in Student Success


Teaching and Learning Successes Still Mystify

Besides writing this column, I keep my-self busy by teaching part-time at our local college campus. I enjoy teaching, and the process of teaching and learning has in-trigued me since I taught my first course in 1969.

What does it take to be a good teacher? How do stu-dents learn? What exactly is happening at the interchange of teaching and learning?

These are complex, enig-matic questions at any level of education, from pre-school to post-doctoral.

Many people think they have definitive answers, but I think the “definitive answers” are simply “educated guesses.” My perspective was reinforced when I read an opinion in a recently published book by a highly respected educational researcher, Dr. Norton Grubb of the University of California at Berkeley.

The provocative and articulate book, “Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges,” presents the research Grubb and his associates collected while visiting com-munity colleges, as they tried to determine why some college classes succeed while others collapse.

At one point Professor Grubb candidly writes, “With the current state of knowl-edge and data, no one, absolutely no one, has any idea about which reasons are more important than others.”

That conclusion may come as a surprise to some people, since a great deal of infor-mation has been collected and many words written about education over the centuries. But Grubb’s statement didn’t surprise me. I

By Dr. John SpevakProfessor of English

have long believed the dynamic of teaching and learning is largely a mystery.

While teaching a community college class this semester, my belief was reinforced when I realized the students in this class had mastered the information and skills better than any previous group of students I had taught in the same course.

Why did this happen? Am I now a bet-

ter teacher? If so, why? Are the students better learners? If so why? The answer to both questions is, “I don’t know.” In this case and in other classes I’ve taught with different results, I agree with Grubb, that neither I nor anyone else could tell you, with definite assurance, the reasons.

Yes, I could talk about reasonable expla-nations, like effective teaching approaches using constructivist classroom techniques that engage students, with emphases on high expectations and frequent encourage-ment.

Or I could talk about student traits that lead to success, like having clear career goals, being highly motivated, having good academic preparation, showing up regular-

ly, following through on assignments and collaborating with other students.

Such a discussion of plausible reasons would be useful, but it wouldn’t explain with any certainty why this semester’s stu-dents are doing so well.

I’d like to think I’m a better teacher, us-ing more effective classroom pedagogies. Maybe that’s partially true. But I’d be fool-

ing myself if I concluded that was the primary reason.

I could say this semester’s students are better learners, which might be true, but I would likewise be foolish to think I know precisely why.

So what has made this group of students learn bet-ter? Perhaps they were more motivated and goal oriented. Perhaps they were academi-cally better prepared.

Perhaps my students’ lives this semester were less hectic. So many community college students have tumultuous lives. Maybe this group has more time and space to study and learn.

What is the answer? I don’t know. Nor does anyone else, for sure.

But I do know this: Good teaching and successful learning require intense work.

Teachers need to create classes that are stimulating and engaging. Students, in turn, need to participate actively and think extensively.

When teachers’ and students’ intense ef-forts mutually succeed, we may not know precisely why, but we can and should be grateful.

John Spevak has contributed a regular col-umn in the Los Banos Enterprise for 29 years. This column was published in the Enterprise on April 12.

We Salute our Part-time Faculty in April!


On the Anniversary of his Death: In Praise of John Ciardi

John Ciardi died on Easter Sunday in 1986. Having packed his 69 years more fully than most, the acclaimed poet and critic suffered a massive heart attack and fell silent.

When I think of the state of American poetry, I often think of John Ciardi, and when I think of what is needed to reclaim this art from the flotsam and jetsam of postmodern culture, I think of this urbane and erudite mid-century poet.

Author of 24 full-length books of po-ems, 14 books of verse for chil-dren, translations of Dante’s Di-vine Comedy, hundreds of essays, book reviews, and numerous other publications, Ciardi was perhaps our best champion for an intel-ligent, purposeful, and moral po-etry. Though he fell out of fashion by the late 1960s, eclipsed by the beat poets, confessional poets, the Black Mountain poets, and adher-ents of other schools of poetry, he nonetheless remains a lighthouse for later poets like Dana Gioia and Brad Leithauser, whose defense of formalism in the 1980s strained to break the calcified bones of university-sanctioned writing programs.

Ciardi once remarked, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop look-ing at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” The same could be said about later generations of poets who stopped looking at the phenomenological world and focused their attention on ab-straction, symbolism, and surrealism, mak-ing even language itself the subject of their work.

Ciardi would have none of that. He kept his eye on the world around him and the thousand small things that most of us take for granted. And, in the final analyis, poetry should do exactly that, giving the world back to readers who have lost touch with it.

In “Bees and Morning Glories,” from 1964, the poet looks at bees swarming a group of fading plants. His description is

By Robin ShepardPublic Information Officer

both startling and amusing, but it is thor-oughly fresh and new. This is an extended metaphor in which the bees are described as pirates raiding a ship:

“Morning glories, pale as a mist drying, fade from the heat of the day, but alreadyhunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg/hooks have found and are boarding them.”

This is careful observation, a literal im-age transformed by an intense imaginative power. It is the focus of his attention on a single, often commonplace subject, that makes Ciardi a great poet. He forces you to

look again at something you thought you knew, and his imagination allows you to see the world with fresh sensibilities.

A lesser poet, or one who has turned his imagination inward, could never give us the delight of seeing the world as if for the first time. It is this kind of poetry that we des-perately need.

Ciardi, along with Robert Lowell and other poets born in the 1910s and ‘20s, forged a vigorous, muscular American po-etry in the 1950s and ‘60s. While, Lowell plunged headlong into free verse with Life Studies in 1959, Ciardi kept to a supple formalism that seemed better suited to his temperament. He remains best known for How Does a Poem Mean? (1959), which became a vital handbook for an emerging generation of poets in the 60s-70s.

Ciardi is not easily categorized under any school of poetry. He was, however, the consummate craftsmen, honing his art like the edge of a fine sword. He remained a

singular voice throughout his career. From his years as poetry editor of the Saturday Review and through his leadership of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Ciardi’s reputation was matched by few others. Re-grettably, today, his readership has all but disappeared. In fact, you won’t find him in the current Norton Anthology of Poetry, which leads me to cast suspicion on the en-tire idea of anthologies. Who, one must ask, decides which poets are included in college anthologies, and which are shuffled off into obscurity?

Why has Ciardi fallen off the radar screen? Why is he no longer celebrated as one of our great poets? Is it simply a matter

of changing tastes, or is it a result of something else emerging in our culture, a culture that seems tem-peramentally unable to preserve tradition and unwilling to honor an older aesthetic?

I would suggest that this is symptomatic of even greater dis-connections between American poets and a general audience for poetry.

It is supremely ironic that at a time when more people are writing poems, when more call themselves poets, and when more publishing

opportunities are available to them, that the general readership for poetry has all but disappeared. Ciardi had wished for a larger audience for poetry and he did much to advance its presence in American life, but he would not have wanted to witness the paradoxical situation that Gioia described in his 1992 book Can Poetry Matter?

“Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poet-ry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and admin-istrators,” Gioia writes. “Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contem-porary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused in-ward.. . . Not long ago, ‘only poets read po-etry’ was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.”

See Ciardi, page 8.


CiardiContinued from page 7.

GeologyContinued from page 4.

Ciardi abandoned a university teach-ing career early on and pursued poetry full-time. He adhered to a meticulous and measured sensibility and remained a fierce critic of mediocrity. He unleashed his hell-fire criticism on those who could publish poems because of their own notoriety than through any real skill. In his day, it was Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Today it would be Jewel or any number of singers who be-lieve that because they can rhyme words together they can write worthy poetry.

If American poetry is to ever recapture the attention of readers who do not write poems themselves, then poets need to re-turn to a more bohemian, anti-establish-ment mindset. Today’s young poets who are learning their craft will need to get out of their comfortable college environment and move into the real world of hard-fought victories and heartbreaking defeats. They’ll have to develop a sense of their own unique voice. In other words, they should spend their formative poetic years experiencing life alone, isolated from fad and fashion, depending on their own intuition and their own creative compass.

At the end of the day, they’ll have to settle for a quiet space and that prolonged struggle to arrive at clarity. And they’ll have to write hundreds of bad poems, for each one will teach a lesson for the next. Most importantly, the’ll have to learn to please no one but themselves.

I’m convinced that if our poets would denounce the intelligibility that defines contemporary poetry, that if they practice an American idiom, and if they approach the world with wonder rather than catalog the arcane workings of their own psyches, then readers would return to them.

Chue Lee: A Real Class Act

Congratulations to Chue Lee, Merced College’s 2013 ‘Classified Employee of the Year.’ Chue is known around campus as being ‘always dependable, smiling, friendly, a hard worker, and very dedicated to his job.’ Congratulations on a job well done also go to our 1st Runner Up Delia Esquivel and 2nd Runner Up Dolores Ross.

Photo by Robin Shepardto showcase undergraduate research at the Community College level. This presenta-tion is also an excellent chance for physi-cal science students to attend a professional conference, and see the inner workings of the scientific publication process.

campus digest - merced college · following the academic senate’s presentation, mcfa presi-dent...

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