Larry Buckley, Administrator of the Year

At its last meeting on Thursday Fullerton College's faculty senate voted to give their first annual Administrator of the Year award to Larry Buckley, Vice President of Instruction.

A faculty award for administration is not a totally predictable move. As Ken Collins, faculty senate president, said, "We tend to do battle with administrators."

Nor is it typical to create an award and choose the first recipient all in one meeting. Usually there's a proposal to make an award, a vote on the proposal, an announcement that nominations are being accepted, time for names to be received and studied by a subcommittee, followed by a vote of the senate.

Collins explained why faculty should offer this first award without the usual preliminaries: "We do have a situation that I think Larry in particular could benefit greatly from receiving this if it was awarded and that was sort of why we're rushing at this time."

The situation was never explained in the open meeting. What situation? Why the rush?

Collins did say he'd talked to some members before the meeting, and in fact Buckley was nominated by Jennifer Combs, curriculum chair, before Collins mentioned his name. It looked like an orchestrated move.

The closest I got to an explanation on the record was the suggestion that more information would be forthcoming at the next board meeting Tuesday night.

To be continued...