Trustees to Choose OCC President Today

After searching for more than a year, trustees of Orange Coast College today will choose a new president to lead the 25,000-student campus.

Trustees of the Coast Community College District have interviewed more than a dozen candidates for the vacancy created when David A. Grant resigned after 6 1/2 years to pursue other interests, officials said.

College sources said Tuesday that the two finalists for the position are Christopher O’Hearn, Orange Coast College’s vice president of instruction; and Margaret Anne Gratton, a longtime faculty member at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Ore.

O’Hearn, who has been at Orange Coast for five years, was an instructor and dean at Harbor College in Wilmington from 1980 to 1991. Earlier this year, he was a finalist for the position of president at Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

Gratton has held a number of positions at the community college near Portland and has been its dean of instruction since 1974.

Jan O’Dell, a spokeswoman for Mt. Hood Community College, said Tuesday that Gratton recently resigned her administrative post to seek new opportunities.

Neither O’Hearn nor Gratton would comment Tuesday.

The trustees will make their final selection at a meeting tonight.