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<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/after-controversial-faculty-firings-collin-college-trustees-will-face-voters#>
After Controversial Faculty Firings, Collin College Trustees Will Face
Voters
By Michael Vasquez
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/michael-vasquez>
chronicle of higher ed, APRIL 29, 2021
VasquezCollin-043021.JPG
MATT STRASEN
Helen Chang, now a candidate for Collin College’s Board of Trustees,
speaks to the board at a public hearing in March.
After months of upheaval and negative headlines, trustees of Collin
College will face voters on Saturday.
The closely watched election, with three of nine board seats up for
grabs, could chart the future of the suburban community college, located
just outside Dallas.
Collin enrolls more than 59,000 students on 10 campuses. Its president,
H. Neil Matkin, is not on the ballot. But Matkin, whom/The
Chronicle/profiled
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/that-man-makes-me-crazy>this
month, is a frequent topic on the campaign trail.
The president has enjoyed strong support from most board members. But
amid a firestorm of public criticism over the college’s firing of
several faculty members, trustees have begun to acknowledge problems.
“Respect comes from the top, and we understand that, so there’s work to
be done at an executive management level,” one trustee, Jim Orr, said at
a recent candidates’ forum when asked what the college could do to
ensure everyone feels “welcome” there. Orr declined to comment when
reached by/The Chronicle/.
Public criticism of Matkin intensified after the
recent/Chronicle/article, in which the president admitted to once
wearing a bowl on his head, as a fake yarmulke, while impersonating the
college’s previous president, who is Jewish. Matkin said he was “going
for a couple of laughs” and quickly realized he’d made a mistake.
The president often speaks in a folksy, joking manner. But some
employees complain his sense of humor makes others uncomfortable.
Orr’s challenger in the election, Helen Chang, alluded to those issues
at the April 20 candidates’ forum. “Anybody who read that article in/The
Chronicle of Higher Education/knows that the commitment to diversity is
not there, certainly not sensitivity to different cultures and ethnic
groups,” Chang said.
All three incumbent trustees are white men. All three challengers are
people of color, and two are women.
Matkin’s critics accuse the president of ruling the college with an iron
fist, creating an environment where anyone who speaks out is dealt with
harshly.
Earlier this year, three well-respected professors abruptly lost their
jobs. Two were fired after voicing concerns about the college’s Covid-19
reopening strategy. A third waspushed out
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/fired-for-tweeting-a-professor-says-she-was-cut-loose-in-retaliation>after
criticizing college leaders on social media.
Matkin has declined to comment on personnel decisions, but he has denied
that a culture of retaliation exists.
On Tuesday, at a Board of Trustees meeting, the college touted its
status as an “Honor Roll institution” in the Great Colleges to Work For
program, which is based on a survey of employees at hundreds of colleges
and universities.
But at the same time, the board postponed the meeting’s public-comment
section. Usually members of the public are allowed to speak on any
topic, for 30 minutes, at the start of board meetings. But on Tuesday
public comment was delayed until the end of the meeting agenda, forcing
those in attendance to wait more than an hour before they could vent
their frustration with Matkin and the trustees.
Workplace Safety
Labor leaders, meanwhile, say the recent faculty firings were a form of
union-busting, as two of the professors were officers in a fledgling
chapter of the Texas Faculty Association, which is similar to a union
under Texas law, although it lacks the power of collective bargaining.
In a sign of rising tensions, the head of a national flight-attendant
union, Sara Nelson, flew to Collin County over the weekend for a
pro-union rally that featured door-knocking for the three challengers
campaigning for board seats.
“This is an issue that deserves national attention,” Nelson told/The
Chronicle/. The former professors, she said, “were fired for speaking up
for safety in the workplace.”
In its fall-2020 reopening, Collin College emphasized in-person
instruction — most courses were taught at least partly on campus.
According to/The Chronicle’/s fall college-reopening tracker, more than
half of public, two-year colleges operated mostly online in the fall.
Among them: Dallas College, the community college down the road from Collin.
In emails to the staff, Matkin repeatedly dismissed the dangers posed by
Covid-19.
“The effects of this pandemic have been blown utterly out of
proportion,” Matkin wrote in an August 15, 2020, email in which he also
said that the Covid-19 death toll had been “clearly inflated.”
A Collin College nursing professordied of
the<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/one-of-us-a-presidents-message-stuns-faculty-after-their-colleague-dies-of-covid-19>corona
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/one-of-us-a-presidents-message-stuns-faculty-after-their-colleague-dies-of-covid-19>virus
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/one-of-us-a-presidents-message-stuns-faculty-after-their-colleague-dies-of-covid-19>in
November, and her family says she caught it in the classroom.
The Board of Trustees election is nonpartisan, but the three incumbents
are politically conservative, which gives them an advantage in Collin
County. Voters in the town of Plano received a text message urging
Republicans to “Make Plano Great Again” in Saturday’s municipal
election, while listing a GOP-friendly slate of local candidates. The
three incumbent trustees appeared on that list.
But the upstart challengers are encouraged by the surprising interest in
their campaigns. Misty Irby, who is hoping to unseat the board chairman,
Bob Collins, said she had received a surge of campaign donations after
this year’s faculty firings.
More recently, Irby got into a heated back-and-forth discussion with
Collins’s wife, who had posted on Irby’s Facebook page. “The fact that
his wife is attacking me means they’re concerned,” Irby said. “If they
felt like it was a done deal, and they would have no problems at the
polls, they wouldn’t be doing all of this.”
Collins, who declined to comment, has been on the Board of Trustees
since the college opened, in 1985. In previous comments to/The
Chronicle/, Collins defended Matkin’s track record, calling him an
“A-plus” president and saying he “wouldn’t have been offended” by
Matkin’s bowl-wearing incident.
Last week Collins defended his “character and values” on Facebook, which
he said had been called into question by “published lies.” He did not
specify what the false accusations were, or who had said them, but he
urged voters to look at his track record and experience when casting
their ballots.
“I deeply value the college and every member of the Collin College
community,” Collins wrote, “and I will not stand for anyone suggesting
otherwise.”
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