By Staff Editorial
By Staff Editorial
And the new chancellor is: no one, at least not permanently.
On March 19, the Board of Trustees decided to throw out all three chancellor candidates and conduct a new search.
This decision doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. The Board was under significant pressure from faculty and others to extend the search.
Had one of the three candidates been selected, many instructors would have raised serious concern.
In fact, we almost expected to see an angry mob outside the Board meeting, ready to riot if the wrong person was chosen.
What did come as a surprise was the decision to choose Jim Buysse as the interim chancellor. Even Buysse was surprised. He only learned of his candidacy the night he was chosen.
Buysse is a fitting and capable fit for the interim chancellor. Right now, the plan is to wait until Riverside Community College District attains accreditation determine who the new chancellor will be.
In the meantime, a portion of RCCD will be without a permanent administration.
Former president of RCC, Daniel Castro is gone leaving the position of permanent president wide open.
Linda Lacy is doing a fine job as interim president. Still, the position of permanent president is not expected to be filled until a permanent chancellor is selected.
So here’s the breakdown: We have to get a permanent chancellor before we can get a permanent president. We have to get accredited before we can get a permanent chancellor. And we’ll probably have to wait a year to get accredited.
RCC is handling all the tough decisions one at a time. They’re all tough processes that will have profound effects on the district.
Enough about accreditation, though. Let’s talk about the students.
There is no determining at this point how long it will actually take to finally secure a long term administration.
Accreditation might take as long as one year. Then we still have to begin new searches for both administrative positions.
Once we start the new chancellor search we need to narrow the candidates down.
Finally, someone is selected. We might even have a repeat situation where we have to throw out all candidates and conduct another search.
Then we have to go through the whole process again for the position of president.
RCC is a community college, which means that, ideally, students are only here for two years. Although this is not usually the case, it still poses the possibility that a student might complete their entire student career at RCC without ever seeing a stable administration.
The fact that our administrators are basically running temporary jobs sounds like we’d have a problem on our hands.
Still, the interim administrators will have just as much power as the official administrators do.
Furthermore, Buysse and Lacy seem to be more than able of giving RCC the leadership it needs during this turbulent period of change.
In the end, maybe it seems like dragging out the chancellor search will only be a hassle.
But really, we don’t have too much to worry about. Hopefully, by expanding the time frame, we end up finding the best fit administrators for our college.
