Pay Called Secondary Issue : Saddleback College: Teachers Waging War on Chancellor

Saddleback College is a kingdom of superlatives.

Its gleaming Mission Viejo campus is in the heart of Orange County’s liveliest growth area. The north campus, in Irvine, draws from a wealthy, upwardly mobile city. While enrollment is declining in Orange County’s other six community colleges, it is increasing at Saddleback.

Incomes in the community college district are far above the county, state and national averages. Surveys show the area’s young people are intelligent, and are attracted to the offerings of Saddleback College.

The college, in turn, has made available to these students a distinguished faculty that is the best paid of any community college district in the state. (The average teacher at Saddleback earns $38,000 a year, according to the administration.)

But there has been trouble in this collegiate kingdom for more than two years now. The faculty and the administration are locked in a civil war that shows no sign of ending.

The dispute is centered on Larry Stevens, the chancellor since 1982.

Although budgets and teaching schedules are also at issue, the most frequent subject of faculty complaints is Stevens himself. The teachers accuse him of being “militaristic and dictatorial . . . aloof and uncommunicative.”

Stevens’ supporters on the college board of trustees counter that such charges are baseless, and that the teachers are attempting to seize power.

The unrest has erupted into political activity. Petitions to recall three of the seven trustees are being circulated in south Orange County, and the faculty union says the intention is to force the firing of Stevens.

Stevens has kept a low profile throughout the controversy. He says he has been caught in the cross fire of the two-year-long teacher-contract talks.

“During difficult labor negotiations, it often happens that the district chief executive officer is singled out by the union as the focal point for expressions of displeasure,” Stevens has said.

Teachers reject this explanation, however. “The recall never had anything to do with the contract,” said Sharon MacMillan, president of the Saddleback Faculty Assn., in an interview last week.

She said that even though union and administration negotiators managed to hammer out a tentative agreement last week, the union will continue to press for the recalls even if a new contract is ratified.

The tentative settlement, which must be accepted by both the union and the trustees, would raise salaries 8.5% over the life of a contract that would be retroactive to last July and run through the end of 1985. The offer is well above the average among collective-bargaining settlements in the past year, but union officials are less than thrilled with it and have not endorsed it.

“We’re not happy with the contract, but we settled just to get it out of the way so we can go on with other things, including the recall,” said MacMillan.

Three Recall Targets

The objects of the current recall effort are Robert L. Price of Laguna Hills, Robert Moore of Irvine and William Watts of Santa Ana. The three were singled out after they would not agree to fire Stevens, and faculty union leaders decided it would not be feasible to seek the recall of all seven trustees.

Price, Moore and Watts are accused in the recall petitions of mismanaging money. The specifics of the charges, however, are directed at Stevens.

“This whole recall thing is because they want to get rid of Larry Stevens and take control of the college,” Price said in a recent interview.

‘When Do We Strike?’

MacMillan agrees that the real target is Stevens. “I haven’t found any faculty member who likes him,” she said. “Even the most conservative of teachers now ask, ‘When do we go on strike?’ ”

Stevens, in an interview last week, shook his head and wore a look of pain on hearing a recounting of the faculty union’s charges.

“I was hired to be an agent of change,” he said. “I had to take some actions that angered the faculty.”

Those actions, he said, included a crackdown on teaching loads. Some teachers, he said, were making as much as $70,000 a year through such “overloads,” and educational quality was suffering as a result.

Stevens is a tall, athletic-looking 50-year-old who appears 10 years younger. In interviews, he seems intense but affable.

Faculty leaders say that image is a charade. “He’s autocratic,” said Robert Kopfstein, a reading instructor who is the faculty association’s political action chairman.

Seen as ‘Autocratic’

Kopfstein added, “It wouldn’t be so bad if he were just autocratic, but he’s autocratic and doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Stevens, who holds a doctorate in community college administration, holds that many of the complaints about him are barbs directed at his military background.

“I don’t try to wear my military affiliation on my sleeve,” he said, “but I’m certainly not ashamed of it: I’m a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve.”

Kopfstein said it is not Stevens’ military affiliation that irks the teachers but the way he tries to command a college along the military model.

“I think one of the things he (Stevens) has discovered is that teachers make lousy troops,” said Kopfstein.

The board of trustees repeatedly has expressed its support of Stevens, while the faculty has taken two votes of “no confidence” in him.

Started With Scheduling

The friction first surfaced in November, 1982, about two months after Stevens became chancellor, when he addressed a faculty assembly and announced that he would revise the teaching schedule.

In the recent interview, Stevens said the teachers’ old schedule was top-heavy with classes Monday through Thursday, leaving Fridays very light. A larger problem, he said, was the extent of “overload”--the teaching of extra classes for extra pay. The practice is similar to overtime pay for a wage earner, but it usually involves only half pay, rather than a time-and-a-half rate.

Stevens said he found teachers on the schedule who were making more than $70,000 a year because of “double loads” of teaching. He said academic quality was suffering because teachers cannot be expected to be at peak form when they work so many extra hours.

The teachers, he said, wanted to hang onto the extra pay. “They were very angry when I said I was going to make changes.”

MacMillan, of the faculty association, denied that the teachers had a strong money interest in the “overload” issue. “We agreed to a cap on overload in the (proposed) new contract,” she said.

Downplays Overload Issue

“Actually, in most colleges, it’s the faculty associations that are trying to hold down overload.” MacMillan said. “That’s because colleges, including this one, use overload as a cheap way of getting more classes.”

Stevens was president of Tacoma Community College in Washington before coming to Saddleback. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, he was the target of faculty criticism--and a vote of no confidence--at that college.

In the recent interview, Stevens said the teachers at Tacoma were unhappy because Washington state budget cuts were putting a squeeze on community colleges there. “I came to that college after my predecessor had been fired and just as the finances were getting tight,” Stevens said.

“But the talk here about my having to leave that college is absurd. I still had three years on my contract there.”

Adding to the unease at Saddleback has been the lack of a contract. The faculty has been working without one since July 1, 1983, and Stevens said he thinks the situation will be “less tense” once a new one is resolved. A faculty vote on the latest proposal is set for next Monday.

But Stevens acknowledged, wearily, that the rift between him and the faculty is not going to end with a contract settlement.

“My boss,” said Stevens, “is the board of trustees. It isn’t the union.”