New Pierce College President Faces Shrinking Rolls, Budget

Pierce College’s new president is a 42-year-old man who has scaled Mt. Whitney and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in a tiny Malaysian town.

But the latest challenges for David Benjamin Wolf are of the less exotic, dollars-and-cents variety. At Pierce, Wolf faces both an enrollment and a budget that are shrinking, afflictions common to community colleges in recent years.

Wolf, who for the last 14 months has been vice president of academic affairs at Harbor College in Wilmington, was appointed to the Pierce presidency Thursday night by the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. He begins work Monday, three weeks before the start of the fall semester at the Woodland Hills campus, which has 20,000 students, the most of any school in the nine-college district.

Strategy Outlined

Wolf said his strategy for dealing with Pierce’s problems will include soliciting donations from business and community groups.

“Pierce has been serving the community for 40 years and constantly performed very well,” he said. “It’s time now for the college to appeal to the community based on its performance over the years and appeal for help in a difficult period.”

The man with the difficult job is described by associates as a straightforward administrator. “When he disagrees with you, he tells you straight out that he disagrees with you,” said Martin Hittelman, chairman of the teachers’ union at Harbor. “He’ll fight you out in the open, he won’t go behind your back.”

Wolf also is a man with academic and personal interests as varied as a college catalogue. He has degrees in engineering, education and economics. When he’s not at school, he plays a mean game of racquetball, tinkers with old cars and enjoys a good climb--he plans to return to the Sierra later this year to ascend Mt. Whitney again.

Controversial Incident

The board of trustees named Wolf to succeed the retiring Herbert W. Ravetch on a 4-1 vote. Chairman Dr. Monroe Richman cast the no vote, saying he objected to Wolf’s handling of a controversial incident at Harbor College in which a student journalist wrote several articles questioning whether millions of Jews had been killed during World War II.

Some Jewish leaders wanted him to remove the student from the newspaper staff, but Wolf, the son of a prominent Los Angeles-area rabbi, said he could not do that under district rules.

Despite his criticism, Richman called Pierce’s new president “bright, energetic . . . very capable.”

Wolf began his career in the Los Angeles Community College District in 1976 as an assistant dean at Mission College in San Fernando. He later became acting president of West Los Angeles College and president of the now-closed Metropolitan College, which offered courses for military personnel overseas. He took the Harbor College job in March, 1984.

Wolf said he “very much believes in the concept of a community college as a social agency, performing a very under-appreciated but vital role in American education.”

At Pierce, Wolf will have to contend with district plans to cut the number of part-time instructors in order to whittle away part of a $6.8-million budget deficit, according to Sid Elman, a political science professor and chairman of Pierce’s chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

Although not yet familiar with the plan’s effect on Pierce, Wolf said he will push for a more active role for the Pierce College Foundation, a support group organized by Ravetch to solicit donations.

Associates at Harbor College predicted that their departing vice president will be up to the challenge at Pierce.

“He’s outstanding,” said Hittelman, whose only complaint about Wolf was that “sometimes he acts strongly without what we think is proper consultation.” Hittelman said that Wolf agreed to involve Harbor in an honors program with UCLA without first speaking with teachers.

“We have to stop him and sit down and talk with him, and usually it gets worked out,” he said.

Wolf said he had little time to consult with all groups in the college that might be affected before losing the opportunity to participate in the UCLA program, which will begin with the fall semester.

“Without Wolf having this on a high agenda item . . . it could well have gotten by us,” said Robert Standen, Harbor’s dean of instruction.

Wolf, who lives in the Los Feliz area with his wife and two teen-age sons, received his own education entirely in California.

He has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering as well as a master’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. After an internship at the National Institute of Education, he obtained a doctorate in education from Stanford University. While a student, he repaired BMW automobiles in a Bay Area shop he helped open.

“I prefer the old ones, mostly because they have a great deal of character and a lot of interesting mechanical gimmicks on them,” Wolf said.

During the mid-1960s, Wolf and his wife worked as Peace Corps volunteers in northern Malaysia. Before starting his career as an educator, Wolf was a marketing and research manager for Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp.