Q & A : Teach, Learn or Get Out of His Way

Richard Moore, 57, president of Santa Monica College.

Claim to fame: During his 17 years as president, the college has grown to 24,000 students and become the leader in the state for transferring students to the University of California. It has also instituted innovative programs, including an Emeritus College for older students and an ambitious College of Design, Art and Architecture.

Background: A Seattle native who grew up in Los Angeles, Moore has a Ph.D in economics from Claremont Graduate School. Far more colorful than the average academic administrator, Moore hosts a weekly talk show on the campus radio station, KCRW, and mandated that the entire non-academic staff take time out each week to read on the job.

Interviewer: Times staff writer Patricia Ward Biederman.

Q: What do you see as the role of the community college, particularly in Los Angeles?

A: To start with, the other segments of higher education have a whole set of entry requirement rules which basically are barriers, and we don’t have barriers. Basically, we are the free-entry place for higher education.

Second, four-year institutions are designed as a single voyage toward a bachelor’s degree. And that was a really good idea 25 years ago. But what’s happened since then is that there is no such thing as a four-year education that’s going to take care of you for life. Ideally, we end up going to school all our lives. And the community college is that unique institution that welcomes one for different types of education and training and experiences all of one’s life.

So we’re actually quite different from other institutions both in terms of the barrier levels and in terms of who attends. One student in five at our college--we are a two-year college--already has a four-year degree. Those people are obviously not here to get the first two years of a four-year education. I think that’s very important.

Let me give you a little slogan: Every five years you either take a course or teach a course. You either teach a course in your area of expertise or specialization or you take a course in something you’re interested in. And you do that all your life. The world is changing so fast one simply has to go back and keep learning and also sharing with other people.

Q: Can you cite an example of something everybody should know today?

A: Take the computer revolution. If you’re not computer literate, you probably won’t make it. In any field. Everybody should have at least word-processing skills on a computer, and yet 90% of people do not know how to use a computer that way. I think proficiency on the computer is more important than the economics course I’m currently teaching.

I’m about to have my own little campaign to shoot the typewriters on campus. I don’t want anybody to get near them. People have to get on computers. With a computer, for example, you learn how to footnote. When I first took courses, when you wanted to add a footnote, you had to retype the whole paper!

Computer literacy is an important, primary skill. If you don’t have that skill you’re not going to make it in college. You’re not going to make it in the work world. You’re not going to be a good attorney. You’re going to be a lousy doctor. The president of a college has got to know how to work a word processor, change four paragraphs around, have fun, do it fast. We’re judged by performance. Performance can be radically improved with a computer. Not to learn is silly. It’s like saying, “I’ll write with my left hand.”

Q: I assume you don’t intend literally to blast the typewriters on campus.

A: No, I’m not going to shoot them. I’m just going to get rid of them. I’m taking the typewriters out of the library. I’m not going to let students get to a typewriter. We’re building Mac (Macintosh computer) labs all over campus. There is one up, there is a second literally being built at this hour, and a third one’s coming on-line in another month.

Q: You keep talking about the Westside. What do you think is unique about this community?

A: We have so much talent. We have so many bright, intelligent, high-energy people living on the Westside of Los Angeles. The whole entertainment industry, most of the art community (and) the design community sits on the Westside of Los Angeles. The educational community basically sits on the Westside--the institution might not be here, but the faculty lives here. The aerospace industry sits on the Westside.

You have all of those different industries with all their professionals here. And the common thing among them all is education. So it’s like playing Bach in Bach’s hometown. They all believe in education. They’re all an educated group of people. So it’s a fascinating town.

That’s one slice of it. The second slice is (more problematical). If the racial frustrations, fights, angers, humiliations can’t get solved on the Westside, they probably won’t get solved. There are some really marvelous experiments going on with different cultures and different groups--ethnic populaces sitting here trying to figure out who the others are and what they are doing here and what their contribution is. I think we’ve got some of the brightest people working on the puzzle. And if these bright people can’t figure out how to do it, I think the only other resolutions are violent, emotional resolutions.

I think a college campus is a really good place for these struggles to get heard and felt and experienced, so we spend a lot of energy getting different cultural groups here. This is not a white male college. We’re almost 60% female.

The town of Santa Monica is predominantly white, and it’s bordered by some places which are predominantly nonwhite. So we’ve gone out of our way to make certain that people from these other regions, not just Santa Monica, go to Santa Monica College. That took a legislative fight. I had to take on the whole L.A. Establishment, which said they owned those students and, by God, all inner-city students are required to go to inner-city colleges.

And we said, “You’re crazy!” We fought them. And today, we’re running about 45% nonwhite, which I think is a marvelous change from where we were. When I first came here we were around 16% nonwhite.

Q: You have said repeatedly that Santa Monica actively recruits great teachers. Tell me about that.

A: The L.A. Times will run a feature on great teachers. I cut those out. I send those to deans and say go find that person, sit in their classroom, see if we want ‘em. I wait to see who is awarded teacher of the year in the state of California. We go check out every one of those teachers.

Q: Why is good teaching so important?

A: The reputation of the college is built on three people--the parking security officer, the admissions and records clerk and the teacher. Most people will come to our college and take one class. They’ll judge me on those three people. So I have to retrain the police force, I have to retrain my admissions office, and I have to retrain or get the best faculty there is. Period.

You’ll never meet an administrator, but you will meet my police officers. LAPD trains them to start with, so they’re not going to get killed, and I have to retrain them to become basically . . . Do you remember the Laguna Greeter? There was a wonderful old guy. Sort of a drunk. Stood on the corner in Laguna Beach and simply waved to every car that went by and said hi. And they thought he was a big embarrassment until they found out that people drove from all over to go past his corner to find a human being that would say hello.

The police officers are my greeters. We have 50 of these people. Security is extremely important and just by their presence they deter crime. It took me a two-year battle to convince them to wear white uniforms and to stand under street lights at night. I don’t want them in a black uniform. Then they’re hiding. I make sure my security officers can be seen. We deter crime. We are an extremely safe place. And if you feel safe, you will come.

And there’s a whole training program on admissions and records clerks. We actually have the admissions and records clerks sit on the side of the counter with the student so they are together working the computer to beat the system. I hate bank systems where there’s a high counter and you don’t know what they’ve really got on the screen. We actually spent several years redesigning admissions and records so that it was user-friendly.

And then, finally, I’ve got to have great teachers. You judge the whole place on your teachers.

Q: What have you done in your 17 years at Santa Monica College you are the proudest of? What do you think your legacy here will be?

A: I think there’s a positive sense that we solve problems. That we can actually make a difference in the world. We are not a whining institution that says we can’t do things because somebody didn’t give us something. For example, we just had a $5-million cut in a $55-million budget, and my faculty does not have a big morale problem. What we actually got out of that problem is extremely high morale among a staff that says we can solve that problem. They dived in and figured out the resolution.

For example, instead of hiring temporary staff to do summer registration as we usually do, 100 staff people went over to admissions and records to help. My secretary left this office and spent 12 hours every week in admissions and records. A hundred staff members did that, and they saved us $50,000. They didn’t have to do it. Their union let them. In fact, the union gave them pizza. Now that’s a group pulling together to solve problems.

Sometimes we have people who come in here and they think the way to make their way is to whine or complain. It’s not the way to win here. This is a family that can do anything. The only thing you have to really figure out is what you want. Because the problem is you’ll get it. The issue is not, “Can we afford to do it?” The issue is, “What is the best dream we can concoct?” What is that dream and how do we start taking the steps to get that to happen?

Q: You haven’t hesitated to take on the big boys of higher education on occasion, most recently, the UC administration.

A: I am intensely angered that the promise has been violated between the community colleges and UC. UC deliberately thwarted one of the things we set out to do at Santa Monica. We decided, as the best community college in the state for transfers to UC, to literally double our number. We hired counselors to do it. Challenged the faculty to do it. Set up scholars programs to do it. Engineered a five-year strategy to do it. And UC just summarily dismissed it all. They simply doubled the entry requirements and said we’re still going to take the same number of students.

And that’s a violation of all those students who did all that extra work and had the hope they could transfer to UC. I’m really angry that somebody can cavalierly change the terms of the deal. That’s a cheat. These people worked hard, did the deal and then got had by an arrogant group.

Q: How would you like to see public education reformed?

A: If I was the education President that Bush wants to be, and I wanted to do something that would cost me nothing, I would say to these institutions, “Do what you want to do badly.” Maybe a high school wants to give an AA degree. Do it. Maybe a two-year college wants to give some four-year degrees. The universities want to do research. Let them. It didn’t cost you any money. The trick is to get all these governmental workers happy and excited about showing up every day. Doing their stuff. It’s mostly a matter of releasing them.

So one of the tricks that we did at our place was to play a mind game on ourselves. We said: “Let’s just assume that Pete Wilson or Deukmejian sent us a telegram that said, ‘You are now a four-year institution. Congratulations.’ ” OK, what would we do differently? It’s a mind-set issue.

So we said, “Let’s see, we’d probably start a literary magazine.” So we started a literary magazine. And we have a great literary magazine, Santa Monica Review. And we said, “What else would we do?” Well, we would probably have mentor students in a whole bunch of fields. So we set up mentor programs all across the board. The business department said we could prepare people for the (Certified Public Accountant examination). I said, “What do you need to get a CPA? You’ve got to have a bachelor’s degree and take courses.” So if you’ve got a BA from somewhere else and take our courses, we’ll almost guarantee you’ll make the CPA.

So we set a mind-set on ourselves. We said, “In 1984, we became a four-year college--now how do we act?” We started acting that way. So if I had a magic wand, I would get Bush to unwrap some of the monopolies. Because a lot of places can take off.