Chancellor Links Success to $1.2-Billion Bond

Marshall Drummond earns a six-figure salary, enjoys a top-floor office in downtown Los Angeles and draws praise from his staff at the Los Angeles Community College District. Yet the 60-year-old chancellor is far from satisfied.

His success at arguably the pinnacle of his career is linked to whether Los Angeles County voters approve a $1.2-billion bond measure next month that would vastly improve the sprawling district’s aging classrooms and other deteriorating buildings.

“This [bond measure] is the single most important thing I will do in my life,” said Drummond, a native of Palo Alto. “We have the power to change hundreds of thousands of lives with something that would cost taxpayers the equivalent of one regular latte a month [about $29 a year].”

Proposals on how the bond money would be spent at the campuses range from a $172-million package including gyms, a parking lot and a fine arts complex at East Los Angeles College to a $111-million plan for a technology building, cultural arts center, classroom building and other projects at West Los Angeles College.

If the measure passes, Drummond can ride off into the sunset of Chino Hills, where he keeps his horses and mules, having restored a measure of glory to the once-model district.

If the bond fails, as did attempts in 1991 and 1996, Drummond sees no way to stop the deterioration that plagues the nine campuses.

The 10-figure bond package dwarfs proposals that voters rejected in 1996, for $205 million, and 1991, for $200 million. Voters turned down the measures because the district mismanaged its money, said Gordon Murley, president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization.

This year’s version also eclipses its predecessors in scope. It would be the first local funding initiative to overhaul 75-year-old classrooms and replace portable buildings that have been on some campuses since World War II.

“This is every bit as big as I’m making it out to be,” Drummond said.

Proponents include the unions representing district faculty and staff. They say bonds, which would not go toward salaries, are the only way to make grand-scale refurbishments before campuses fall into further disrepair.

The only group to publicly oppose this year’s bond, Murley’s organization contends that continued fiscal mismanagement would cause promised projects to go unfinished.

Drummond’s arrival in 1999--making him the district’s fourth chancellor in 10 years--brought him to “the place everyone wanted to be like,” he said.

While teaching at Chabot College and Cal State San Francisco in the 1960s and ‘70s, Drummond learned of a well-run community college district in Los Angeles that served an increasingly diverse student body and set its graduates on highly successful academic paths.

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But Drummond was interested in continuing his career in the Bay Area as long as the jobs could sustain his interest. In the spirit of his father, who had been a Nebraska wheat farmer, car dealer and liquor wholesaler, Drummond dabbled in other industries.

Between academic jobs, he has worked for a telephone company and as an educational software designer and independent consultant. He taught and held lesser administrative positions at Eastern Washington for 13 years before becoming its president.

He resigned in 1998 just hours before the faculty was set to censure him for nearly running the school into the ground. Enrollment had fallen by more than 10%, there was a budget shortfall and professors had begun to flee the rural college.

The varied experiences taught Drummond that the management ways of California academia were not necessarily the best.

“It was really eye-opening to see how different companies and schools were successful,” he said. “While traveling in the East and the Midwest, I tried to pick up the best ideas.”

Some areas, for example, had established statewide programs allowing high school students to take community college courses for credit. The option is available in some California locales, but there is no statewide mandate for it.

Community College Board of Trustees President Georgia Mercer said that, although trustees were aware of the turmoil at Eastern Washington, Drummond’s experience with finance and technology made him the best candidate of three finalists for the job in 1999. Paychecks were still being done on typewriters.

“If he would have just fixed that, I would have been a happy camper,” Mercer said. Drummond replaced the typewritten checks with a computerized payroll system.

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Drummond said he saw the job in Los Angeles as a chance to usher the district he once revered back to respect.

But when he made his first rounds of the campuses, he said, “it was like Jurassic Park,” with buildings on almost every campus in disrepair. After his first visit to Pierce College in Woodland Hills, he thought, “You could see something beautiful was once there, but you wondered, where is it now?”

Furthermore, the once-proud district had lost its ability to attract instructors from other cities. The colleges had narrowly escaped bankruptcy. Even basic tasks, such as writing a check to cover office supplies, were so mired in bureaucracy that bills sat delinquent for months.

“If anybody would have looked at our books, it would have been embarrassing,” Drummond said.

The district needed a quick study who could assess its troubles and make the necessary changes, said Yasmin Delahoussaye, vice president for student services at Valley College in Valley Glen.

“The average person would have looked at the job and said no way,” Delahoussaye said.

The new chancellor appointed Delahoussaye to head a task force that could find ways to get financial aid to students faster. Some students were dropping out because their aid did not arrive in time to cover the semester’s expenses. The task force learned that many instructors had become so lax about reporting final grades--a requirement for federal aid--that they were unwittingly forcing students to quit.

Drummond ordered the task force to cut the average wait for financial aid from 66 days to 30 days. The wait has been reduced to about 45 days so far, he said.

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“He came with a lot of what we need to turn the district in another direction,” said Tyree Weider, president of Valley College. “His background is so varied. And he likes to act now instead of falling into bureaucratic mode. It works for me because I’m the same way.”

Drummond sits atop a rising tide of 100,000-plus students in a district that spends $1 million a day. The district stretches from Agoura Hills to Alhambra to Rancho Palos Verdes.

“It takes a different kind of person to whip a district this size back into shape,” said Trustee Kelly Candaele. “He has the business sense and organization we lacked. He may see himself as a cowboy riding off into the sunset, but he’s our cowboy now. We need him to finish this.”

In a series of moves that would pave a path for the bond campaign, Drummond created a public relations position at the district offices. He also hired a private firm, Fleishman-Hillard, to assist in molding the district’s image, although it is prohibited by law from directly promoting the bond measure.

The chancellor increased the public relations budget from zero to $700,000, hoping to reverse the district’s sagging image and, in turn, voters’ confidence.

“I want to see this happen,” he said of the bond measure. And then, said the chancellor who wears cowboy-stitched blazers over his pressed shirts, he intends to “kind of disappear,” back to the range where he is most at home.