Rocky Young

Darroch “Rocky” Young had it made.

A popular community college administrator, he was widely admired for his fund-raising and management skills while working at Santa Monica College.

While there, Young was credited with dramatically increasing that school’s enrollment and forging partnerships with nearby residents and businesses.

So why would he leave it all to take over as president of Pierce College?

Although enrollment showed a promising increase this summer, the Woodland Hills school has about half the students it had a decade ago. Buildings are in disrepair due to budget constraints, and neighbors are upset over a controversial proposal to turn a campus farm into a golf course. (The Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees will vote Aug. 25 on a staff recommendation, disclosed Thursday, to scrap the proposal until a campus master plan is created.)

The Times talked to Young recently about why he came to Pierce and the challenges of his new job.

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Question: At the time you were selected for the Pierce job, you said you were motivated in part by the community college district’s commitment to decentralizing authority. Why was that an incentive?

Answer: The perception was that so much of the decision making was centralized in the district office that the college presidents were relatively impotent to make change and correct situations, that they always had to get approval from a vice chancellor or a chancellor or a board. I think it’s not very attractive to be a college president if you don’t have any sense of autonomy.

Q: So now you have a great deal more authority to do things as you see fit. Does that include financial authority?

A: They have an allocation model and you’re given a budget and you have to live within the budget, but how you live within the budget’s up to you.

Q: At Santa Monica College, you were singled out for your ability to foster relationships with nearby residents. Are ill feelings over a proposal to convert some of Pierce’s farmland into a golf course going to hinder your ability to foster such relationships here?

A: The [golf course] issue has been polarized. It makes it difficult to try to reach out and involve the community in other things. If the board decides to [start over], we will then go through a full master plan process. Through a master plan process, I was able to bring people together in Santa Monica.

Q: Have you made up your mind about the golf course?

A: No. I think everybody’s taking a timeout while an independent assessment is being made on lots of critical questions: What is the economic feasibility? Is it the best use of the land given the conditions? Will it be appropriate for the agricultural program? Are the alternatives being suggested the right ones? We would use the master plan process as a vehicle to try to bring people together and agree on a solution.

Q: Is the revenue situation at Pierce so critical that it could influence the golf course decision?

A: Clearly, the college has to find alternative sources of revenue. And I think that’s unilaterally understood. Whether there are other solutions for uses of portions of the land or whether there are other things that can be done to generate income, something has to be done. You start from a premise that everybody is pretty much in agreement on. It’s when you get to the mechanics of the solution that it falls apart.

Q: What about the agricultural department? Is it an idea whose time has come and gone?

A: Clearly, there’s a place for the agriculture program. And remember the agriculture department has a diverse offering, from landscaping and horticulture to large animal development. I think there’s a place for all of that, especially the aspects related to plant propagation and crop production because of our proximity to Camarillo and the whole Oxnard plain. I was at a meeting with Cal State Channel Islands administrators and they were talking about wanting to have an agricultural component. So there’s a good possible partner for Pierce College.

Q: Enrollment, which has been in decline, is up this summer. Can you maintain that momentum in the fall?

A: I think there are misperceptions about Pierce. The school has gone through all these financial difficulties, and in the last three to five years, it’s been pretty grim. In the process, a lot of functions have been eliminated. There’s no public information officer, there’s no marketing going on. So there has not been any kind of positive portrayal of Pierce because they’ve not been putting anything out. The whole focus has been on negative stories. So one of the tasks I have to do is to actually tell a much more complete and accurate story about Pierce. I think there are incredible things going on here that people simply aren’t aware of because they haven’t been getting the story.

Q: Will that help enrollment?

A: That is one of the things that has to be done. Another is that Pierce does not have a full-blown high school outreach program, but all of its competitors do. So you go into a local high school and you’ll find Santa Monica College, Valley College and Moorpark College but no Pierce College. One of the things we’re talking about doing is putting back into place all of the high school outreach programs. Without being too negative about my predecessors, it looks to me like Pierce has operated pretty much in isolation for an extended period of time. Besides the high schools, I don’t think they have developed a relationships with the business community. This college ought to be in close partnership with Warner Center and everything that’s going on in Warner Center. It’s adjacent to us. There are enough major employers in that Warner Center property to keep us busy for quite some time.

Q: Santa Monica had a large and successful outreach to foreign students. Do you intend to institute similar programs here?

A: Because we don’t have a lot of resources to do overseas recruitment here, it has to be done through printed material and word of mouth. When our current students go home for the summer, they would take materials, they agree to talk to others, that sort of thing. Santa Monica has a huge program, one of the biggest in the country. But we’ve got to build up enough momentum before we can really afford to do overseas recruitment. The ultimate goal is to keep building the international student programs here. I think they are a wonderful addition to the college. It’s not just money, but these are good students, they provide another whole context to the school. There’s nothing better than to have contact with all these people from other countries. And that reminds me of another little gem I found here, the international business program. It has a wonderful connection to China, and they in fact take a group there every summer.

Q: What about improving the physical plant?

A: We are starting to turn the corner on that. We are in the process of finally air-conditioning Pierce. All these years, Pierce has essentially operated without air-conditioning. Apparently some historic rule when the college was built, or when it was being developed, stated that if you were within 10 miles of the ocean as the crow flies, you didn’t need air-conditioning. And of course, we are within 10 miles as the crow flies. But virtually all the classrooms will be air-conditioned soon. It will make a huge difference. That has been one of our problems.

Q: How are you paying for it?

A: We’re getting some conservation money because it’s an energy-efficient system. But basically we’re going to be paying for it over time. It’s one of those things that’s just a critical piece that had to get put in place, and we’ll absorb the financial consequences of it. We’re also installing a new irrigation system for all of the grass areas. That should be done in hopefully a month or so. And a full new telephone system and a telecommunications backbone are being put into place.

Q: If you’re successful in increasing enrollment, do you have the physical space to handle more students?

A: Sure. It’s just a question of creating the demand. And I feel pretty confident. The quality of the education here is pretty exceptional. I think there’s a heck of a faculty. And that’s sort of a two-edged sword. We have a very large percentage of offerings taught by full-time faculty, more so than probably any of the neighboring colleges. The downside to that is, of course, it’s expensive. And so a big part of our budget is tied up in full-time faculty. The upside is that they probably deliver a higher quality of instruction, which I think was shown recently in transfer numbers. [Pierce sent a greater percentage of its students to California’s public universities in 1998 than any other community college in Southern California.]

Q: What about fund-raising? Is there a Pierce College foundation?

A: There is a foundation here. It’s been, like everything else, dormant. I need to recreate the foundation board. And then eventually try to raise enough money to bring in someone to actually work on the fund-raising parts of it. Apart from the farm / golf issue, there is actually a community that likes Pierce, and so I think there’s going to be a lot of support from the community once we get organized and start to solicit from them. I don’t think I have any problem that I can’t solve with money.

Q: Any other priorities?

A: The institution [has] changed presidents six times in 10 years. That creates problems. I hope to stabilize the institution, see if we can’t get some sense of common vision.