Peralta College Chancellor Elihu Harris out - The Black Hour

Photo: Sustainable Peralta

Peralta Colleges Chancellor Elihu Harris will leave the community college district after his contract expires this June.

Trustees opted not to renew Harris’ contract at Tuesday night's Board meeting and announced the search for a new chancellor. Abel Guillen, the Board’s new president, declined to discuss the decision further.

The decision follows a series of damaging reports by the Bay Area News Group (BANG) last summer that led to increased scrutiny of Harris -- and the Peralta Board. The Oakland Tribune later ran a front page article calling for Harris to be fired, but has not criticized the Board since. 

The Board was scheduled to approve its annual budget Tuesday, but pulled the item from the agenda prior to the meeting. At the Peralta Board's December 17 meeting – when the approval of the budget was postponed due to inaccuracies and public complaints – students demanded Trustees wait until the January 26 meeting to vote on the budget. Students' rationale was that the spring semester begins January 21, and approving the budget while students and staff were on winter break would not be transparent. 

In addition to all managers being placed on one-year contracts at Tuesday's Peralta Board meeting, Vice-Chancellor of Finance Tom Smith was placed on administrative leave and escorted off the Peralta premises by Peralta Police Services (Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies). 

Harris is a former Mayor of Oakland, a state assembly member, and has been the Chancellor of the four-campus Peralta Colleges since 2003.

Read the complete report by The Black Hour Radio Show.

Barack Obama - The Journal Of Blacks In Higher Education Endorses Obama For President

The Journal Of Blacks In Higher Education Endorses Obama For President and in so doing Theodore Cross, representing The Journal, wrote an article that calls into question Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's genuine commitment to African Americans.

If you read it, it's damning of Clinton, for example..

In her campaign to lock up black support, there are no qualms about playing the race card. Senator Clinton scored with black voters when she declared in a June debate at Howard University that the country would be more worried about HIV/AIDS if the disease were disproportionately affecting whites instead of blacks. The powerful political impact of her statement was not diminished by the circumstance that her facts were incorrect. The annual federal budget for HIV research is $3 billion. This is more than the nation’s entire appropriation for research on either heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or breast cancer. But Clinton’s assertion that racism drives white-controlled government decisions on the allocations of disease research stoked anti-white anger and won her acclaim among black voters.

And if that's not enough, there's this....

Probably no one at the Howard University event, black or white, was aware of the fact that in August 2006 Hillary Clinton was the only one of 20 senators of the Republican-controlled Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee to vote to gut a plan that would have redirected more AIDS funds to heavily black communities in the South. Her vote prompted the National Black Chamber of Commerce to publish full-page newspaper advertisements denouncing Clinton as being “two-faced” on the issue.

And Cross points to Senator Obama's more clearly defined set of urban policies:

Here in more detail are the Obama proposals as outlined in his campaign position paper:

• Increased funding for the Community Development Block Grant program which provides housing, job training, and other services to impoverished urban areas.

• A $1 billion, five-year expansion in job and career training programs for low-income Americans.

• The creation of a series of “Promise Neighborhoods” across America patterned after the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City. Low-income families in these promise neighborhoods will be offered parent counseling, childcare, job training, healthcare, financial advice, afterschool programs, technology training and other services to help them escape the cycle of poverty.

• An expansion of the Head Start program for preschool children in high-poverty areas.

• An increase in the maximum Pell Grant award for low-income college students.

• Expansion of the Nurse-Family Partnership where nurses visit low-income expectant mothers at home to ensure that they receive proper prenatal care.

• An increase in the earned income tax credit which will allow low-income working families to keep more of the money they earn.

• A proposal to increase funding for the Jobs Access and Reverse Commute program so that low-income workers can get to their jobs at a reduced cost and the children of these workers can receive free public transportation to childcare facilities.

• The establishment of an affordable housing trust fund that will produce 14,000 new units of affordable housing for low-income families each year.

• Increased access to capital for blacks and other minorities through Small Business Administration programs.

• Job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling, and employment opportunities for people who have been incarcerated. Since blacks are five times as likely as whites to have been in prison, these programs will disproportionately benefit African Americans.

• To further raise the minimum wage rate and the child tax credit.

Makes one wonder why Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums endorsed Clinton over Obama! Oh, I forgot, Clinton made a promise to Dellums! Excuse me!

Geez!

I could go on, but you should read what Cross has put together. It's a doozy!