Carpenter hopes to build relationship with faculty

Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004 | 11:01 a.m.

Richard Carpenter's start as the new president of the Community College of Southern Nevada has not been a smooth one.

He took the position as his predecessor, who was fired behind closed doors, fought to keep the job. And last week a memo in which Carpenter was critical of his new institution was met with angry e-mails and accusations of his own cronyism.

But on Monday, if there had been any hard feelings they weren't evident as Carpenter gave his first public speech to 600 CCSN faculty and staff. In fact the audience, initially filled with nervous excitement, became enthusiastic as he laid out his vision for the college of 35,000 students.

"I believe he brings a very fresh message to us and we need that," Al Valbuena, vice president of information technology and strategic planning, said. "A message of change, a message of dynamism."

The need for change throughout the community college was at the core of Carpenter's address, which lasted more than an hour. He said the future of education belongs to those institutions that can continually reinvent themselves to meet the needs of students, and he proposed a college structure that would "permit new ideas to flourish and let old ideas die a timely death."

"Stability is dead," Carpenter said. "Education must therefore educate for an unknowable future."

To do that, Carpenter said, the community college needed to streamline its administrative system, develop more defined, uniform and widely disseminated policies and put in place an information management system that will give all employees the data they need to make good decisions.

Carpenter only touched upon the problems he had enumerated in his memo to Interim Chancellor Jim Rogers and the regents last week: nepotism, excessive bureaucracy and cronyism. Instead he gave a more complete state-of-the-college address that listed CCSN's strengths, weaknesses and challenges.

Throughout his speech, Carpenter stressed that the community college had "world-class" faculty and staff and "world-class" facilities, but that some of the administrative structures currently in place have made it almost impossible for any of them to do their jobs.

"Ninety percent of management consists of making it difficult for people to get things done," Carpenter said, quoting nationally known business consultant Peter Drucker to loud applause.

Applause and laughter often rippled through the energetic crowd as Carpenter used quotes from other leaders to illustrate his own vision and goals for CCSN.

The faculty and staff members cheered Carpenter when he ranted about the college's shortage of state funding -- more than $3,000 less per student than the other community colleges in the state -- and when he made closing that gap one of his top priorities.

"We can't be quiet about this," Carpenter said.

They applauded in agreement when he ridiculed the college's "organizational fiefdoms" that fail to communicate with one another and the excessive layer of bureacracy that leads to cynicism and mistrust.

And the majority of the crowd roared in agreement when Carpenter bluntly told the faculty and staff members that some of them "don't play well with others."

Anytime anyone at the college has a problem with anyone else, Carpenter said "you send them a nasty e-mail and you copy everybody.

"That makes your problem everybody else's problem," Carpenter said, and it develops more animosity rather than finding a solution to the problem.

Carpenter said much of the college's problems could be solved if employees followed the Golden Rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," rather than the current mantra of "Do unto others before they do unto you."

The faculty and staff members at the speech also loudly applauded Carpenter's plans to promote ongoing professional development for all faculty and staff at the college, his support of online education and his insistence on developing policies in collaboration with all of the stakeholders at CCSN.

The insistence on collaboration came as a great relief to several faculty members, former Faculty Senate chairwoman Mitzi Ware said, as they had feared his memo to regents last week meant the college's cherished shared-governance would fall by the wayside.

"I think he made a very strong push to show people they would be included," Ware said.

Newly appointed Faculty Senate Chairman Terry Jones encouraged his fellow professors to support Carpenter and the college, and to be involved in the changes soon to take place.

"Guess what, boys and girls? We're in the same boat, and we sink or swim together," Jones told the group.