City College Blacks to Rally Against Demotion of Dean

Black students at San Diego City College plan to protest Wednesday the demotion of the dean of student affairs, who is black, to a counseling position.

Arthur Jackson was terminated from his year-round administrative position as dean in January and was given a position as a 10-month student counselor, City College President Jeanne Atherton said Monday. Atherton said she could not comment on the reasons for Jackson’s demotion because of confidentiality policies regarding personnel changes.

Melvin Taylor, president of the college’s Associated Students organization, said black students will hold an 11 a.m. demonstration to demand that Jackson be reinstated to the dean position because the process used to remove him is “arbitrary, without due process.”

Taylor said Monday that administrators told him that trustees removed Jackson because of unsatisfactory performance evaluations during his three years as dean. But Taylor said such judgments should be made by a neutral party rather than by the college president and trustees.

In addition, Taylor believes that the removal of Jackson in the middle of the school year was a slap in the face of black students who “looked up to” a black man with a doctorate.

Augustine Gallego, chancellor of the community college system, said Monday that the process used to remove Jackson “was a long one, an evolution of things over a couple of years and one that presented trustees with significant documentation.” Administrators work on year-to-year contracts, and they can be terminated by the board without arbitration.

Gallego denied any racial motivation whatsoever in the case. He pointed out that two of the district’s four college presidents are black, that two new Latino and two new black deans have been hired this year and that 41% of the district’s new faculty members are nonwhites.

“But we evaluate people as individuals, not on race, and in this case the board took a responsible position, given all of the documents,” he said.

Board President Evonne Schulze said Monday that she could not comment on the case other than to say the board “never takes any of these kinds of actions lightly.”