U.S. District Judge Cindy Jorgenson found earlier this year that Pima Community College Chancellor Lee Lambert violated the civil rights of former chemistry instructor David A. Katz. The finding demonstrated to many people that Pima Community College will not escape controversy until members of its controversial Governing Board are gone.
Despite his culpability in denying Katz his protections under the Fourteenth Amendment, and the environment of secrecy that persists under his leadership, the PCC Governing Board has stood by Lambert. Observers compare the lack of critical oversight on the part of Board members to that on display on the Tucson Unified Governing Board.
Katz, who was well-liked and well-respected by his colleagues, had been a full-time instructor in the Department of Chemistry at the West Campus since 2002.
The 69-year-old Katz was denied a new contract for the 2015 school year by the Governing Board upon Lambert recommendation.
No other Governing Board member has earned criticism as much as appointed to the board, attorney Martha Durkin. Durkin, who is up for election this year, “went along with all of the others and voted to give Chancellor Lambert a raise and extend his contract with full knowledge of the fact that the Chancellor was ruled against and castigated by a federal judge for infringing on—indeed not recognizing—the guaranteed 14th Amendment right to due process of a full time faculty member,” say members of C-FAIRR (Coalition for Accountability, Integrity, Respect, and Responsibility).
The fact that Durkin, a former attorney with the Tucson Unified School District, knows that Pima County taxpayers might have to pick up the bill for Lambert’s lapse, yet still supports him has disappointed many people. That disappointment is based in part on the finding by Judge Jorgenson. She wrote:
“On these facts, the Court cannot find as a matter of law that Chancellor Lambert acted reasonably when he provided no due process, including notice, to Plaintiff regarding the rescission of approval for a new contract offer.”
“Because a reasonable but mistaken determination is protected, if Chancellor Lambert acted in a manner that he reasonably believed to be lawful, he is not personally liable,” noted the judge. As a result, the judge concluded: “The Court will deny Chancellor Lambert’s request for qualified immunity at this time and deny summary judgment to the PCCCD on this claim. The Court also declines to dismiss punitive damages claims as this time.”
Unfortunately under the current Board Katz wasn’t the only one cheated. The Board voted this year to increase tuition and fees for local students while substantially decreasing rates for wealthy foreign students.
And what do those students get in return? Katz describes conditions for staff and teachers on his website. He writes:
What did I do at the college that brought about this attack on my character, the threatened loss of my job and the likely end of my career? In short, what I did was to expose laboratory problems at the West Campus, where thousands of dollars of laboratory equipment and instrumentation were disposed of without consulting anyone in the chemistry department. Also, under our former dean, the infrastructure of the West Campus chemistry department had crumbled. Instruments and electronic apparatus were not serviced or repaired, anything inoperative just sat on a shelf until it collected enough dust, then, they were disposed of. There was no replacement budget even though there were thousands of dollars in lab fees we could not touch.
In September 7, C-FAIRR filed a formal complaint with the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) alleging violations of the accreditor’s policies by Pima County Community College and Arizona’s Open Meeting law by members of the Governing Board.
In their letter to Dr. Barbara Gellman-Danley , president of the Higher Learning Commission, the group presented evidence, which the group claims shows “that the history of the College’s lax governance and mismanagement documented by the Commission in 2013 is ongoing.”
In an article for the Arizona Daily Star, Lambert’s effectiveness a key issue in Pima College election, Carol Ann Alaimo reported that Durkin praised Lambert for “notable strides in areas such as workforce training and classroom upgrades and said she’ll push to keep improvements on track if elected.”
For the members of C-FAIRR and other education activists, if Katz’s complaint is any indication of the current situation, the College is on track to go over a cliff.