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Some of our talk today is about leadership but you need movership.
You know one of the things I look for in my own work
and in trying to moving things forward in terms of helping students move the college forward and so on.
So you need prime movers.
You need people who are willing to say you know here’s the wagon,
I hitch myself to it, and I’m pulling the wagon and that’s what each one of you are.
I appreciate the people on staff who have been doing that. It means a great deal to me..
And you know really what you’re doing today, I really want you to think about it as such a special moment.
It’s good to kind of relax in this manner. It’s kinda good to get together with colleagues.
In this context, we usually don’t really get together
but I really want you to think about for a moment how significant this moment is that here you are,
a group of colleagues, a group of faculty, at the uh,
who are willing to come together on a Saturday and a Sunday of all things,
and what you are doing really is founding the college.
The founders of the college in 1924, I read up a little bit about it,
did kinda like this, without the camera, and without the microphones.
That’s what they did. They got into rooms and they thought it up.
Imagine right, here we are the year 2010 and we take the idea of a community college for granted.
It’s just been part of you know, our imagination, a part of our system.
Imagine being in the 1920’s and the idea didn’t exist.
And so that’s where we come from in this college, is a group of people who got around and just kind of thought it up.
So it doesn’t matter if its 1924 or 2010, things happen,
I know things happen from my own experience and also from reading history, the... our own history.
Things happen because a group, not systems, because a group of people like you,
like us, get into a room and think it up.
So uh, in a profound sense we are re-founding the college.
And I mean that, I’ve talked a little bit about the, the vision of where we need to go.
I speak about re-founding the college in a pretty specific way
because the 21st century in community college is very yet to be founded.
The 20, the 20th century community college is withering away,
not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it met a different mission.
Imagine you know, and none of you remember, you know I did my dissertation on carbon sets.
On Xerox electric typewriters which at the time I thought was really cool.
And I started teaching in 7th grade, we had duplication was a mimeograph machine,
that’s it and you got high from the smell. (LAUGHTER).
You know but then here’s the good part,
imagine when there was no email so that in order to communicate with you,
I had to actually bump into you in the hall and have a talk.
I needed to call you on the phone or I needed to write you a note. Remember our office mail?
I need to write you a note and you know, and you read that, back, 8 days later there would be a response.
Remember when we would do those things, circulate them.
You know, circulation, you would put your initials on the top and it would go around and months later...
(Staff Member) The last one would always say trash. (Laughter)
(President Mark Rocha) It’s a little round circle.
But you know the community college that we had was founded in that context
and it wasn’t a, it was a thoroughly modern context,
but it was founded in a context in which human communication could be taken for granted
and now we are in a context in which communication is in a very very different thing
and I think one of our tasks is how do we re-invent the community college
and do it in a way in which human communication is really the core value
and not just batting these emails at each other and so on.
That is what today is about, the human communication about ideas.
Innovation can only happen when human beings are together having coffee, having lunch and just batting it around.
I was talking to David and a couple colleagues the other day and I've talked about this in some of my messages.
It said, what we lack is a common room.
We lack a place where we can just go in and hang out like this.
In order to get you to do it, we have to retreat.
We have to rely upon the good heartedness of you to be willing to spend your Saturday and Sunday.
Look what we’ve done. It should be an in-treat.
You know, we lost having this common room that we’re having today where we can just sit around,
have a cup of coffee and start to bat it around.
And that’s also, I see in terms of my own and your leadership.
That is an essential goal and that is how can we reinvent the way we communicate with each other.
You know I did, David and me were talking, and David said what if we build a house on Bonnie,
you know an Alumni house or a faculty house where we you know,
kind of have that kind of thing where we don’t have to actually make a big deal about coming together and talking about ideas.
We see each other and we meet each other usually only in the confines of committee meeting
and then we aren’t communicating, we’re posturing and there’s a different but the,
you know you don’t hear everybody talk, you don’t hear every voice.
So those are just some thoughts and some challenges that I’m trying to work through
and that’s why I think we came up with the idea of inventing this student access
and success initiative just as an opportunity to you know,
let’s create a fund and lets create some broad goals and that’s about it,
but then let’s get some really good-hearted faculty in the room and say what do we do.
My own vision for reinventing Pasadena City College is what I call a 21st century Global Community College.
It doesn’t exist yet.
We have pieces of it.
They're some very very good community colleges in this state and throughout the country,
who are working in global studies or international studies or whatever it is,
but the first truly 21st century global community college is still out there waiting to be invented
and again it won’t be invented systemically, it won’t be invented by me, it won’t be invented by proposal,
it will be invented by a group of teachers like you.