Mark Drummond is coming back to L.A. after finding that the job he had in Sacramento, as chancellor of the state's 109 community colleges, wasn't high-profile enough for him. Drummond will now serve as chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, a job he left in 2004. A crucial link between the K-12 schools and places like UCLA and USC, the LACCD has nine campuses, about 200,000 students, and $2.2 billion worth of bond projects.
You wouldn't tell by what L.A. media tells you, but Drummond does not have a spotless reputation. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2004 that Drummond resigned abruptly in 1998 from his presidency at Eastern Washington University after the faculty senate there was poised to censure him for attempting to influence tenure decisions. Once he took the state post in Sacramento, Drummond came down hard on the troubled Compton Community College District, making the unprecedented move to take-over the campus, stripping the locally elected board of power. I detailed the questionable nature of the state take-over of Compton College in this LA Weekly article, published last June:
For people in Compton — the people who vote for local trustees, pay local taxes and use Compton College as a source of education and civic pride — it means being stuck in the middle of competing forces that seem to be speaking to one another, but not really listening. Tara Bonner, the outgoing Compton Community College District student trustee, put it bluntly in an interview a few months back: "This is all a bunch of bullshit. They know as long as they’re present here, we can’t have the school accredited."
It's easy to rag on the circus that is Compton politics, but something was amiss with the state take-over of the college since the beginning. Anyway, Compton College is now the "El Camino College Compton Center." Swell.
Related: The Public Policy Institute of California last year released a report highlighting the low-rate of degree completion among the state's community college students.