“I am embarrassed, ashamed and disappointed to be hearing the ridiculous and pathetic answers and explanations that are coming from this faculty,” Dean Mellas said.
“These students are our future. One day there are going to be opening our hearts and flying our airplanes; how dare we say ‘Do all that but don’t be on my hiring committee’?”
The faculty senate member and associate professor of computer information science ended the Faculty Senate meeting held on Tuesday in the board room with a round of applause from those who attended.
The Associated Students of Cerritos College has come to learn that human resources composed a full-time faculty employment selection procedures draft where it excludes and eliminates a non-voting student representative, appointed by the ASCC.
The draft states that the non-voting student representative is now considered optional, meaning it is up to the first level committee (the committee that interviews the candidates first) of the department that is hiring to determine whether or not the non-voting student will be allowed to be part of the committee.
After attending the Faculty Senate meeting to voice their opinions on the matter, students, like ASCC president Oscar Franco, found that Mellas’ quote was inspirational and exactly the kind of support the ASCC is hoping to receive from the rest of the Faculty Senate, as well as anyone else who is opposed to allowing a student from ASCC be part of the full-time faculty selection committee.
Though the full-time faculty employment selection procedures draft was the main topic of the Faculty Senate agenda, it was the selection committee composition part of the draft that was clearly the most anticipated and controversial topic of the meeting.
Franco stated, “(Faculty Senate) spent most of its time discussing other subjects of the draft when it knew that all the students that showed up for the meeting were there for one reason and one reason only, and that was to talk about the student voice being eliminated from the hiring process.”
ASCC Vice President Rosa Castaneda and student hourly Jessica Cos were the ones who displayed the students’ anguish and anticipation when they interrupted the meeting by asking if the faculty senate was going to continue skipping around to other subjects or where they going to go in order and finally address the seventh topic in the draft, which was the selection committee composition.
