N.Y. Provost Named Head of Pierce College

A Philippine-born educator from New York with an eclectic background and extensive academic credentials was appointed president of Pierce College on Wednesday, accepting the challenge of restoring the severely troubled campus to its former flagship status.

E. Bing Inocencio, 60, the associate provost for academic administration at New York City Technical College in Brooklyn and the only outsider among three finalists, was given a three-year contract for the $93,353-per-year job by trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District.

His reaction to the appointment was “a mixed feeling of humility and a sense of challenge because I know it’s a demanding position,” Inocencio said from New York, describing himself as a “cockeyed optimist.”

“I have to be or I wouldn’t be in education,” said Inocencio, a former newspaper reporter, Fulbright scholar and Ford Foundation fellow.

When Inocencio arrives at the Woodland Hills campus in a few months, he will inherit an institution that has deteriorated from a position as the flagship school of the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District to perhaps the district’s most troubled, a campus where even basic facilities such as the electrical and telephone systems often do not work.

Once the district’s largest school, Pierce has fallen to fourth in enrollment this spring with 14,500 students, a nearly 25% decline from 1990. Renewal of its academic accreditation was deferred last year, its facilities are in need of many repairs and it is facing a newly revised $1.4-million budget shortfall this year.

Inocencio will be the seventh president of the school since the late 1970s. The previous acting president, Mary Lee, abruptly left the campus in mid-January after learning she was not a finalist for the permanent job. She has been away from the campus ever since and currently is on vacation leave.

Inocencio, who visited the campus earlier this year to interview for the job, pledged that renovating the deteriorating facilities and boosting enrollment will be among his first priorities. But he also pledged that the college’s students always will remain his top concern.

“The interest of the students is No. 1,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday night from his home in Brooklyn. “Colleges exist because of their students. The colleges that get in trouble are the ones that forget that students are the most important. I hope I never forget that.”

David Lopez-Lee, president of the community college district board, announced Inocencio’s appointment at the trustees’ regular meeting in downtown Los Angeles shortly before 7 p.m., saying the board had voted unanimously some hours earlier during a closed session.

Passed over for the top job at Pierce were two local educators who had formerly worked in the Los Angeles Community College District, the nation’s largest: Kamiran “Kim” Badrkhan, vice president for academic affairs at Long Beach City College, and Christopher O’Hearn, vice president for instruction at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

The appointment came only two days after district Chancellor Neil Yoneji and two trustees, Gloria Romero and Althea Baker, visited Inocencio’s Brooklyn campus on Monday, completing the last of the three site visits to the home campuses of the finalists that the board had ordered in late January.

Inocencio has been a senior administrator at 10,500-student New York City Technical College, part of the 20-college City University of New York system, since 1994. Previously, he held other administrative and faculty jobs and posts in business and government dating to the mid-1960s.

He came to the U.S. in 1963 as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois. He returned in 1966 on a Ford Foundation fellowship at the Harvard Business School, and later earned his master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Along the way, he said he first worked as a newspaper reporter at the Manila Times in the Philippines, served as a business and management professor at several U.S. colleges, and was deputy director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.

He earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 in the economics of communications. And he was recognized as one of the “rising stars in American community college leadership” by the League for Innovation in the Community College in 1993.

District board members took turns praising Inocencio, calling him an energetic innovator who can help modernize the campus and yet will be sensitive enough to get along with a faculty edgy after seeing so many presidents come and go so quickly.

“We selected Dr. Inocencio because we believe Pierce College is facing a challenge of considerable proportion,” said Lopez-Lee after making the announcement. “We believe he is a good selection” who also can help the college work with surrounding businesses, Lopez-Lee said.

Margo Murman, who was on the committee that interviewed finalists for the president’s position, laughed loudly when she heard the choice Wednesday night, obviously pleased with the administration’s choice.

“He’ll make a wonderful president,” she said. “I was very impressed with him in the interviews and I am very much looking forward to him coming.”

Although she liked all three finalists interviewed, Inocencio had one asset the others did not, said Murman, who has been involved in campus issues for more than five years. “He is a fresh person in the district and at the college,” she said.

Murman, a Woodland Hills resident who is president of the community-based Coalition to Save the Farm, was confident that Inocencio will play a pivotal role in helping preserve the school’s 240-acre farm, a subject of much debate in recent years.

“I think we will see a real commitment and turn around for the farm,” she said. “I am very optimistic, very optimistic.”