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Dr. John B. Clark, Interim Chancellor
SUNY
State University Plaza
353 Broadway
Albany, NY 12246
Dear Dr. Clark:
I’m sure that many of my fellow teachers have sent you this SOS. Add my name to the
large and growing list of faculty/staff/students/community members who are extremely
concerned about the way our presidential search is being handled by our Board.
But beyond that, many of us are also very concerned about our Board itself. I attended the
3/24 Board meerting. Put aside the blatant political maneuverings that added two well
known local but patently unqualified political and business people to the short list for
MCC’s next President. We all expected that. We don’t like it. And we will find a way to
overcome it. But we expected it.
What we – or at least I – did not expect was the level of arrogance displayed by several of
the Board members, notably Mr. Parrinello, and to a lesser extent, the Chair, Mr. Guon,
and Mr. Mackey.
The event was wellcovered by the local media, but unless you were there, you cannot
appreciate the overall impression this Board left with the audience: there was an aura of
arrogance, selfimportance and condescension on their part that was truly breathtaking. I
have 40+ years of business experience: I’ve written speeches for the president of Kodak,
sat in meetings with the board of Dow Chemical, interacted with dozens, hundreds of
very senior executives of companies large and small.
I was honestly stunned by the behavior of the MCC Board. (I initially wrote ‘our Board,’
but erased it. I don’t want to claim most of these people.) I have never, ever seen
disrespectful behavior of that level in public meetings. Many of the Board members
clearly have absolutely no regard for civility, no appreciation for the competence of
people with competing ideas, zero respect for the presidential search process and the
people involved in it.
And, apparently, little or no regard for the very institution that they are supposed to be
leading.
And they certainly showed it that Monday night.
And this week Mr Parrinello convened a meeting to discuss canceling the search
altogether! That motion was voted down, as of course it should have been.
By my Lord! Where do we send the big floppy shoes and the bright red noses that go
honk when you grab them?!
And so I have to ask: How did people whose behavior is so bad, so inimical to the
furtherance of the goals of what is generally regarded as one of the best community
colleges in the nation, get on the Board of that institution? How in the world did people
who so clearly do not believe in much less understand community colleges get the
power to help run one of the very best in existence?
How is this possible?
More to the point, how is it that they get to keep their jobs? I’ve been on a couple of
boards over the years. If I behaved that way, I would expect to be fired: instantly,
unequivocally, irrevocably.
While many of these people have undisputed business and legal credentials, and are
rightly recognized for their achievements in their respective fields, they have conclusively
demonstrated to many of us that they do NOT belong on our Board. Their interests are
very clearly not the interests of the institution and the several thousand faculty and staff
and the many tens of thousands of students who depend on us.
You should be looking very carefully at excising these individuals. They are unmistakably
a cancer that needs to be removed before they can do any more damage to MCC.
Let me make it very clear: these people need to be fired.
I hope you can help make that happen.
Yours for more civility and critical thinking,
Michael J. Doolin, BBA, MA
Adjunct Associate Professor
English/Philosophy, Chemistry/Geosciences, Business Departments
Advising and Counseling Department
cc: Mr. Carl T. Hayden, Chairman of the SUNY Board of Trustees