Peralta board in free speech fight
College district trustees table measure to censure ‘rogue’ member over comments about alleged mismanagement
Free speech does not apply to California’s elected community college boards, a trustee in Oakland insisted as he explained his effort to censure a colleague who has alleged fiscal mismanagement and other problems in the Peralta Community College District.
“We don’t have the right to the First Amendment, as it applies to the community colleges,” said Bill Withrow on Tuesday. He’s one of seven trustees who manage the college district of 50,000 students.
The Peralta trustees were to vote Tuesday night on whether to censure Trustee Nicky González Yuen for “publicly criticizing the chancellor and the institution in the media, with the obvious intent to diminish the public image of the institution.” The resolution, brought forward by Withrow, labels Yuen a “rogue trustee” and criticizes him for being too bossy in his interactions with fellow trustees. Instead, the trustees voted 4-3 to table the measure and attend mediation.
Yuen has been warning of widespread financial and managerial problems in the Peralta college district, and has said the trustees and Chancellor Jowell LaGuerre
are unable or unwilling to address them.
“We are on the edge of bankruptcy,” Yuen said Tuesday. “Peralta is in deep trouble” in almost every aspect of administrative functioning, including how it has spent parcel tax money, implemented technology, managed staffing levels, maintained facilities and addressed morale problems that have contributed to high turnover.
Yuen told The Chronicle in September that his “fellow trustees have been asleep at the wheel” by allowing millions of dollars in student fees to go uncollected and then reporting the bad debt as financial reserves.
Laguerre has denied mismanaging the district and has defended spending decisions.
In July, Moody’s, the bond credit rating company, found weakened financial performance in the college district and noted that its reserves have steadily declined. As a result, Moody’s revised the outlook for some of Peralta’s lines of credit from stable to negative, indicating the possibility that its credit rating could be downgraded within two years, said David Jacobson, a company analyst.
Peralta officials reported to the state that enrollment dropped by more than 2,100 students from 2012 to 2017, a 4 percent loss, while the number of administrators rocketed up by 45 percent, to 74 from 51.
Similarly, a recent audit of a parcel tax approved by voters in 2012 for “core academic programs” showed that tax spending on books and supplies dropped by 25 percent in the year after the current chancellor arrived in 2015, and tax spending for faculty salaries plunged by nearly two-thirds.
Meanwhile, the district hired a Sacramento law firm to look into allegations of legal violations and professional misconduct in the district, which were collected in a 2016 whistleblower report brought by Jeff Heyman, who served 18 years as Peralta’s spokesman. The firm, which was paid $150,000 by the district, cleared the chancellor and trustees of all allegations.
Yuen has spoken out about all of these things and said, “they should be publicly discussed.”
As college trustees, “we have a special role to uphold freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry and academic freedom,” he said before the censure vote. “The role of dissent is critical to the healthy functioning of a democracy.”
Agreeing with Yuen were Loni Hancock — a former state senator representing parts of Alameda and Contra Costa counties — and her husband, Tom Bates. Both have served as mayor of Berkeley, and wrote to the Peralta trustees expressing surprise at the effort to censure Yuen and urging that it be tabled.
“Where would democracy be if members of the U.S. Congress were expected to keep quiet and support all decisions taken by the majority?” they asked. “Too often, the real problem is the exact opposite of this resolution: Elected people succumb to peer pressure, keep quiet and ‘go along to get along.’ ”
But Withrow said Hancock and Bates made a fundamental mistake: “State laws that apply to the governing boards of community colleges don’t give the freedoms that apply to congressional districts,” he said, referring to the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. “We just don’t have that right.”
A Chronicle reporter asked Withrow which state law restricts college trustees’ free speech.
“Education Code 70902,” he said.
When a reading of that law revealed no free-speech restrictions, Withrow directed a reporter to look instead at the trustee handbook on the Peralta college district site.
None were there, either.
So a reporter turned to a state community college spokesman and asked if members of Congress have a greater right to speak out than do college trustees, and if trustees are barred from speaking freely about their colleges outside of trustee meetings, as Withrow also said.
“No and no,” said Paul Feist, spokesman for state Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who oversees California’s 114 community colleges.
But Withrow said Yuen had crossed the line in his complaints about Peralta and needed to be censured. So a reporter asked Withrow to examine a recent Chronicle article in which Yuen described Peralta’s problems, and to point out anything he shouldn’t have said. Withrow said Yuen should not have said there was “an atmosphere of fear” in the district.
Yuen had said that people in the district feared retaliation for speaking out.