CCP faculty urge board to delay presidential hire

The faculty and staff union at Community College of Philadelphia has urged the board of trustees to postpone hiring a New Jersey college administrator as its next president, pending further examination of his work at a troubled for-profit college in New York.

Donald "Guy" Generals Jr., 57, vice president for academic affairs at Mercer County Community College, is in line to be hired as the college's next president at a meeting Thursday afternoon. Before working at Mercer, he served from 2003 until 2008 as provost of the Katharine Gibbs School, a two=year for-profit post secondary school in New York City.

According to a Jan. 31, 2007 article in The New York Times, the New York State Education Department found fault with the school for having inadequate numbers of full-time faculty and remedial classes and for assigning teachers to areas outside their expertise. Gibbs, which was owned by Career Education Corporation, subsequently was closed after Career Education failed to find a buyer.

"There has been a lot of press, responsible press that has raised concerns about the way Katharine Gibbs was run and Generals was in a position of responsibility during the time that Katharine Gibbs was in trouble," said professor Steve Jones, union co-president. "It's possible that he played a very positive role working against some of this...., but the point is we don't know what his role was. That's why we're asking that be looked into before the board votes."

The union's representative council, made up of full and part-time faculty and other staff, voted unanimously on Tuesday to ask the board to postpone the vote, Jones said.

The board gave no indication it would do so.

In a telephone interview, Generals defended his record at Gibbs, though acknowledged that the school had engaged in "a lot of bad practices." He said he left after the school was put up for sale but well before it closed.

"I was brought in there to turn the place around and when I left, I was pleased with the work I had done," Generals said, noting that he hired full-time faculty, engaged in shared governance with employees and developed new remedial courses.

He said the state education department had acknowledged improvement in the school in a subsequent report after the Times' story, but he did not have a copy of that report.

A New York education department spokeswoman said Wednesday that she would look into the matter but could not provide an answer by the end of the day.

Generals said he planned to attend the meeting on Thursday when the board vote is scheduled.

In a previous interview, Generals had said he preferred working in the non-profit education world.

"The profit motivation was something I realized professionally was not for me," he said.

Faculty, union co-president Jones said, also are concerned that Generals has not been a sitting president. With the exception of the college's founding president, Generals would be the only leader not to have served as a president elsewhere before being hired, Jones said.

Faculty expressed immediate concern with Generals' selection after it was announced last week. A straw poll of faculty showed that only 3 percent of the more than 200 who voted preferred Generals, who was one of three finalists for the job. The majority wanted Gena Glickman, president of Manchester Community College in Manchester, Conn.

The three finalists, including interim president Judith Gay, had been invited to meet with faculty, staff and students.

Faculty also were upset that the college didn't allow it, as in the past, to appoint three members to the presidential search committee.

Wallace had defended the college's process: "The college had a comprehensive search process that invited comments from faculty, staff, students, and community leaders every step of the way. Opinions were invited and considered by the search committee and the board."