0:00:05.9 BROOM: Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications, the Higher Education Coffee and Conversation Podcast is dedicated to exploring issues of importance to staff and faculty who work at community colleges and universities. In this episode, I speak to a community college trustee who has won five elections, serving his college for nearly 20 years. Mark Evilsizor started off as a retiree looking to teach part-time at Palomar College, and that experience led him to join the board of trustees and serve his college and community in new, exciting ways. I've always wanted to ask a trustee questions about their job, their role at the college, and how college employees and administrators can best serve them. Mark was kind enough to answer these questions, plus give tips for those of you out there who may one day want to run for trustee yourself. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Well, welcome to the podcast, and I'm thrilled to have you on. I've known you from a distance for many years and seen your tremendous contributions to Palomar College, and thought you would be a perfect guest to have on the podcast to share with our listeners what it's like to be a trustee and what brought you to being a trustee and maybe ask you some questions that people are scared to ask their college trustees.
0:01:30.1 EVILSIZER: Hey, that sounds terrific. Let's go ahead and open up the session and begin...
0:01:35.4 BROOM: Well, you start by telling me a little bit about yourself, your background, and what brought you to Palomar College.
0:01:42.2 EVILSIZER: This is a story I shared with many of the college students that they crossed paths with... In some of the high school students that I interact with, I was in my first year of college, and Elisha had just graduated from high school. And we got married that June of 73. We had a daughter, Kimberly, and nine years later, we were blessed with our son, Timothy, and now we're grandparents to three granddaughters and one grandson, we're very blessed in that arena, and we're still together. If I can share one thing, I'll just say it's been a blessing to have a lifelong partner for that long and grow from young people into older people, and making all of those transitions together, I think that's just a wonderful thing, and I really hope that many of your listeners can experience such a life-long journey as well. So, graduating from high school, I immediately went to Cal State University, Long Beach. I wanted to be a marine biologist. I had an abrupt change in careers when I found out that having a child, I had to support a wife, I had to basically stop attending college full-time and go part-time, and so I would go during the day and work evenings, pumping gas at gas stations, I waited tables at Bob's Big Boy as a waiter, I remember counting quarters at our kitchen table every night bringing home all that tip money and she'd take it and go buy groceries, I...
0:03:26.1 EVILSIZER: I worked for TWA, it's part-time, and what I didn't realize was that I was a strike breaker, apparently they were on strike and I was a scab, for lack of a better word, and it was a very non-illustrious job, it was cleaning the plates that came off of the airplanes that had old food on them... I was a dishwasher. What I wanted to share there was that I was always willing and able to do whatever it took to put food on the table and pay rent for an apartment, and I guess my father-in-law, God bless him, he felt so sorry for me that he was working at Northrup Grumman, and he saw how I was struggling. So, he got me an interview, and I was hired on January 15th, 1974, and my starting wage there was 3.33 an hour. And that was wonderful.
0:04:38.2 BROOM: You were happy with that?
0:04:39.4 EVILSIZER: I was happy with that at the time, and we were able to make ends meet. I mean, gasoline was only 30 cents a gallon. I started in manufacturing on the factory floor, and from there I was able to transition into a shop load position, then that led into a system analyst position, which lent itself into becoming an industrial engineer. And from there, I was able to work on some of our nation's most exciting programs at the time, my 30-plus years, an aerospace afforded me a very nice pension, and an opportunity to retire. I retired early at 63. We are supposed to be retired, but I'm not really retired. Because I'm a trustee. My experience at Palomar began in 1996. I was hired as a part-time faculty member. And I typically taught evening classes to people wanting to become supervisors or managers, that really accorded me an opportunity to witness first-hand how community colleges played such an essential role in our community and in our society for providing them with skills and tools and knowledge and an educational experience that helped them become better, and I was connected to that because I benefited from higher education, I finally graduated from college, I finally went to graduate school and I got my graduate degree, and I saw what opportunities I was provided because I had a higher education it's interesting because after I left General Dynamics, I had a period where I thought I'd try higher education as a career option and maybe start would be getting hired as a part-time faculty member, but as a part-timer, I realized how I wasn't accorded the opportunity for any benefits, I saw how part-timers were considered less than our full-time faculty and really weren't paid at similar hourly rates as they were, and it's almost like they were second tier or second status faculty.
0:07:07.3 EVILSIZER: And at the time, this is the late 90s, Palmer College did not have a faculty union for all these years, the college was founded in 1946, they had a meet and confer process and labor unions just, I guess, weren't able to take a foothold at Palomar. I saw this disparity between full and part-time faculty, and I got involved with organizing faculty at Palmer, it was started with the part-time faculty and giving them to signed union cards and petitioning to form a faculty union. I became a union nd spokesperson for the earliest stages of founding a faculty union.
0:07:59.1 BROOM: And perhaps you were paying penance for crossing that picket line 40 years before.
0:08:09.1 EVILSIZER: You know that might have been the case, but actually it was a wonderful experience, and the full-timers came on board with the par-timers and collectively formed a single union that represented both part-timers and full-timers, and they've had that union since I was elected to the governing board at the college in 2002.
0:08:38.0 BROOM: So, what led you to want to run for election, was it your involvement in the union, were you asked to run... What was the initial...
0:08:47.1 EVILSIZER: Exactly, I was asked if I would be willing to run. And when I was asked, I really didn't know what that position was about, or what responsibilities get encompassed or entailed, and a lot of people didn't think I could win with a name like Evilsizor, and I'm still amazed that I've been able to be re-elected elected five times now.
0:09:14.9 BROOM: What is it like to run for election? Is it difficult, challenging? Most of us think about... Or at least I... When I think about elections, you think about presidential elections and mailers and flyers and phone calls, is it a difficult part of being a trustee?
0:09:31.7 EVILSIZER: Well, you know, I think for someone who has financial support, and in my case, I had the financial support and the coordinated support of the faculty at Palomar, and so that was a great opportunity for me, and that it afforded me the luxury of not having to worry about money, because let's face it, money is the mother's milk of politics, so it does take money to run, just the filing fee at the time for Palomar College alone was nearly a couple thousand dollars, and then of course it entailed, campaign signs and phone banks and going towards a door ending public events, like Fourth of July public events, and visiting all the various cities within your district, Palomar College is a 2,500 square mile district, so that encompasses a lot of area in a lot of different cities. So, I went to a Valley Center, Escondido, San Marcos Vista, even a part of Oceanside as part of our district, Camp Pendleton, where the United States Marine Corps has a huge training facility. It taught me a lot about what it takes to run for public office.
0:11:01.1 BROOM: It's true in politics. Money often wins, and I think that I would envision that would be a difficult part of anybody wanting to step in and become a trustee, is how to raise money and how to get support and overcoming that obstacle to be able to contribute to a college.
0:11:21.0 EVILSIZER: Yeah, and you know, I'm enlightened or quite surprised by the fact that we had three board members elected to our governing board just in November, all three of these people are newcomers, only one of them was backed by the Faculty Federation, the other two... I come to find hardly spent much of anything beyond their own filing fees, because I think now the online marketing opportunities available, podcasting, Facebook ads, all of these other mediums are now available that you can get done inexpensively, of course, for a local government position like a school board or a college board, your campaign or your statement that appears in the ballot statements of candidates is so vital and so important, because that really gives you an opportunity to tell each voter what your platform is, what you stand for, what you hope to accomplish, and so if you're going to focus on any one thing, I think that's the most important thing to focus on, is that valid statement that goes to every registered voter in your city or in your district, whatever the case might be.
0:12:59.0 BROOM: Yeah, I think that's true. Even reflecting back on how we voted, my husband and I sat down with our pamphlet, and you're voting for judges and school board officials who you've never met and never heard of, and maybe outline, but yeah, what they've written in that... And that pamphlet is going to... It's critical. Yeah, critical. Well, peeling away a little bit, like taking back the curtain of being a trustee, I always worked for the superintendent president who reported to the trustees for me, a trustees were like... They were my boss's boss, so we always wanted to make sure that we kept them happy and informed, but from your position, sitting up at the dias, how do you see your role, what role do you play in the grand scheme of the college’s operations?
0:13:54.3 EVILSIZER: Well, it's taken the 18 years probably to fully recognize the role of the trustee legally, and as defined by a number of ed codes. Our role is to provide fiscal oversight, fiduciary responsibility, if you will. We are also authorized to hire or terminate the Chancellor or President, Superintendent of a community college district, and we're able as a board, not as individuals, to direct the CEO of the institution toward certain goals and accomplishments, and we set policy, and so really... That is our limited but very important role as a governing board member.
0:14:48.4 BROOM: Has it been difficult? You know, are going on 20 years, so maybe it was difficult at first and not be more, but I know that it's a struggle for some colleges where the trustees really want to be involved in the day-to-day operations of a college, and I've heard many colleges have struggled with defining those lines of where being an elected official ends and being an employee begins. How have you dealt with that? Is that a challenge for the new trustees or for you... Any tips to colleges?
0:15:24.9 EVILSIZER: For new trustees, I think there is a certain naivete about your role, and I remember as a young new trustee just going on to the campus and I was going to meet with faculty and I was going to do all this stuff, and I did not give the courtesy or professional notice to the president of the college that A, I was coming on to the campus, the whom I was speaking with and giving them a heads up, no surprises, that really should be the mantra of a trustees don't undercut or surprise your one employee and that's the CEO. You’re partners in your relationship, you’re partners and leading the institution, and really the CEO is the only one employee that has a relationship with the board. You cannot direct staff. That is the job of the president, the vice presidents, the deans, etcetera. There's a certain hierarchy or authority, so I think as a new employee, new trustee, it took me a while to learn that, and now 18 years later, I appreciate the reason for that, not having... Or not surprising your CEO, not undermining them in any way, your partners, just keep them apprised to keep them informed, they're not going to mind that you're on campus and they're not going to mind that you're talking to whomever, but you should give them the professional heads up of what it's about...
0:17:10.4 BROOM: And I know when I was at MiraCosta I worked with lots of trustees over the years, all such wonderful people, and there's one trustee who liked to contact our department regularly, so I would always make sure to let the President know we got another request, and he would say, Okay, let me handle it.
0:17:33.2 EVILSIZER: Because I think trustees, it takes a while to learn that individually, we don't have authority to do much of anything, maybe listen, and the only true authority comes through the board, by that I mean through the majority of the board members, if you have a majority vote of the board, you can direct the President to do whatever, but you can't do that as an individual, you have to do that with and through the board, and I think it takes a little while for trustees to understand that
0:18:10.1 BROOM: Or... I ask you the next question, mark, I hear some... A little bit of wrestling. I don't know if you have papers on your desk...
0:18:16.3 EVILSIZER: Well, that's probably me scratching my beard, I'll talk to it...
0:18:21.8 BROOM: I might keep that comment in the podcast 'cause that is really funny.
0:18:26.9 EVILSIZER: Sometimes bears get a little dry and it all... Stop it. Probably a nervous tick. Right.
0:18:33.0 BROOM: Well, you would be surprised when we're editing podcasts, everybody has something, it's either the word um or a task or some word that they use over again, and now we know that you're nervous tick is that you scratch in your beard, so a lot of our listeners are communications professionals and I know that Palomar, I don't live in your district, but I live right next door in Oceanside, so I've watched your news over the years, and you've had some really difficult issues that you've had to deal with as a college, and I think that any large institution has difficult issues over the course of their existence, and you've served in the capacity of President before... Correct. You've been board president and what is your role when it comes to difficult times for the college or... Public relations crises, what role does the board president or the board as a whole play?
0:19:31.4 EVILSIZER: Typically, the President speaks on behalf of the board. So that is one role that we confer upon a chair or a board president to be that spokesperson and a spokesperson will not speak until they have conferred with the CEO, typically the President, Superintendent and the communications person, because you have to be very wise and knowledgeable about what type of message you're trying to convey, and how do you want to best communicate that without raising misinformation or fall arms or legal challenges. So, it's a real team, and we're very cognizant of an appreciative of our communications director to help the board and the CEO to orchestra public messages that go out to the media and the newspapers, the news media, and let them help us manage the messaging, because you're trained to do that, you know how to connect with various media news outlets, try to control the messaging as much as you can, not let them control the message, if you will.
0:20:58.9 BROOM: Is there anything that would help you do that part of your job better, is there training you have gone through or you wish you had, because I think it's a very unfamiliar role for a lot of trustees as having to speak for a large organization that's not something most people ever have the opportunity to do...
0:21:22.2 EVILSIZER: Yes, and thank you for asking that question. The Community College League of California is our educational resource for trustees and CEOS, and they do wonderful jobs three times a year of having conferences that have wonderful educational workshops, and part of that training includes knowledge of the Brown Act, how to be a good board chair. And we've had presentations from communications directors up and down the state on the dos and don'ts of being on the board and being a spokesperson for the institution and increasing your understanding and knowledge of what all is entailed in that.
0:22:15.9 BROOM: And that's great to hear, and I think that's so important. Even as a communications person myself, I went through a training once, I think it was with OSHA, I don't remember some government organization and we went through having to be a spokesperson, a crisis, and they recorded us on camera and we'd watch ourselves, and it was really painful to see, even as a professional, that ongoing training is necessary, it's critical, but I would think particularly for people like you who have had significant careers as engineers or as faculty members or wherever the background trustees come from, having that communication training, it's really important because you do you speak for the entire college, you represent the college, and I think that's a skill that is definitely worthwhile honing in on...
0:23:09.2 EVILSIZER: Yeah, and I think it's worth noting too that crises are inevitable, and we're all going to experience a natural disaster, whether it's a fire here in Southern California, for example, or a flood or an earthquake coming here on just a number of natural catastrophes that you have to communicate to your communities on... For example, when we had the wild fires raging, our campus was used as a housing overflow, if you will, we opened up our gymnasium for families, we had to set up kennels for small animals like cats and dogs, and I think we had made arrangements with equestrian facilities in our district, to help people with livestock and horses, so you do serve with the Red Cross and disaster relief in a circumstance such as that, and again, messaging and out the proper information to the community is critical.
0:24:15.6 BROOM: Yes, it definitely is. I cash those wild fires I was at MiraCosta to when those happened and talk about just turning your college upside down, I mean, they were incredible, and I think Palomar, you had to cancel commencement, you rescheduled it. A difficult decision. Any other things that you remember, times you remember where you were challenged or things you were proud of?
0:24:42.2 EVILSIZER: One of the things that was very challenging back in the 2009-2011 time frame was the economic recession that California in the nation were experiencing, and I remember that as people became unemployed in large numbers, a lot of them are coming to the community college to re-tool to learn a software program or pick up new skills that they needed to re-track their careers, and they came to the community colleges. The problem was that because of the economic recession, we were not provided the funding by the state to scale up our course offerings, and as a result, we weren't able to meet demand, that was heart breaking, and I'm fearful that we're going to find ourself in a similar situation now, when we do emerge safely from this pandemic and people are able to come back to a community college that we're not going to have funding to accommodate that need, so we're going to work very closely with our state legislature, with the California Community College Chancellor's Office, and all of the full up and down the state, working together to ensure that we're able to meet that demand. Because as I've learned, California Community Colleges are true economic drivers for their communities, we train the nurses, the police officers, the firefighters, the EMTs, wastewater management, welders, all of these things, people come to the community colleges for that training, we need to make sure that we have the resources there to accommodate our citizens.
0:26:42.8 BROOM: Yeah, that's interesting, I know with the pandemic, we had so many people initially think that maybe there would be a surge of people who have lost their jobs would want to come and take online courses, and of course, we've seen the opposite happen that enrollment is down 15 to 20% institutions across the nation, but looking forward, you're right, we might see a surge come back once people are able to get back in the classroom and their lives have kind of taken on some normalcy after what we've all gone through.
0:27:16.9 EVILSIZER: Yeah, you know, one thing I've seen is that not everybody is enamored with online instruction, I for one, took an online course... at your old college, MiraCosta, in Excel. I wanted to learn more Excel skills, and it was an online class, and I just didn't thrive in that environment, personally, I just feel I needed to be in a classroom, being able to raise a hand and having an instructor come over and talk to me, and me show me something. And that wasn't easily done online; however, I see younger students, I'm looking at my grandson, we give him one day a week and he's doing online instruction, and they seem to adapt much more readily and easily to online, so I don't think there is impacted as our older students are, especially my age, older students, but I think that definitely is playing a role in the diminished attendance that are colleges right now, and I really feel that once we're able to get people back on campus that... That'll increase enrollment.
0:28:35.1 BROOM: Yeah, I tried online learning too, I had taken the graphic design software that we use in marketing that a lot of people use… Adobe Creative Suite, and I took... There's three portions of that software, and I took one on campus and two online, and the two online courses I took, I cannot remember how to use that, the software I learned in those classes, but the one I took a lot around person... I can still use it, I'm proficient. So, you're exactly right. Some people thrive, and that's a challenge for others, my 12-year-old is thriving in online learning, but that's 'cause he can run around the house with his headphones on, so he doesn't have to sit all day. So, for some people, maybe it's the... they're not confined to a chair, he's like dug up our lawn, hitting golf balls all day, so. Well, as we wrap up our conversation, what are your big takeaways from being a trustee, I think we watch you from the outside, not fully understanding the calling to serve in that capacity, or the responsibility that you have, so if you could educate people about what you do and why? What would you say?
0:30:03.7 EVILSIZER: Well, I think I've come to appreciate the role of trustee and how we are in certain terms, role models, and we should be setting examples that are good examples, or conduct and civil discourse and analytical thinking in a civilized way. When I've seen trustees lose their cool or attack a colleague or verbally abuse a speaker or a faculty or staff member, it really reflects badly, not only on the individual, but on the entire governing board, we have to realize that we help set the tone of leadership at our institutions, now we really need to show a strong alliance in partnership with our CEOS because together we're the team that helps lead the direction of the district, and we have to be respectful and ethical and mindful of all of our actions and even the words that we use so I think that's something that's become increasingly important to me to be aware of...
0:31:29.3 BROOM: Yes, and we've seen quite a different political environment the last four years at
0:31:37.2 EVILSIZER: On the national stage, we can see how important the of words and actions are and how it can either motivate or disparate people...
0:31:48.7 BROOM: It's such great advice. When I had first come to my college, now it's been 17 years ago, I was a classified staff member, and my role was, I was basically a writer for the college, that was my first role, and I went to a board meeting because the Director of Communications... I was her right-hand person, and when she would be on vacation or out, I would have to attend the board meeting and sit next to the reporters, and back then reporters actually came to the board meetings, there was a table for the reporters, and I would sit next to them. And our first meeting, she said, these meetings are so wonderful, we call them love fests, and then the next meeting, like everything fell apart and there was a giant scandal, and it was no longer a love fest, and for years, the board meetings were scary. And it didn't change the tone, the tone of the board changed the tone of the campus, and it took a couple of years to recover.
0:32:56.3 EVILSIZER: Yes, and of course, the media loves a story that a scandal attached to it, or even as an innuendo, and they're all over it, so... Yeah, I can remember a couple of incidents for MiraCosta and and the Palomar, there's just no way you're going to keep the news media away and you find out as much as we can about it. Right. Oh.
0:33:23.6 BROOM: Yes. And then so my former boss quit in the middle of it, or retired early, but she was like Not having it, so I started her position and I worked very closely with the board on messaging, and it took... It took a lot of years, but that... We see it nationally, and we see it locally with tone at the board sets that our elected official set permeates throughout the institution, so I think that's a really key point that you make.
0:33:52.0 EVILSIZER: And in our democracy, in journalism is such an important safeguard and has such an important role to play in our society, and of course, freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech, those are well-earned and hard-fought for rights. And we have to preserve those. Putting a hat on like a communications director at is akin to putting on a firefighter hat sometimes, you know, only have to enter a burning building or a really hot story, but you want to do it as a train professional who knows how to safely navigate those troubled environments and come out at the end successfully, they're putting out a fire, or at least getting the facts known for incidents that occur because they're going to happen, and we're going to have things pop up that seem like turmoil, but if you manage them properly in the... And things usually turn out... Okay.
0:34:59.6 BROOM: Very, very true. So you have been a trustee now 18 years, so you have two more years. Until you're up for a re-election.
0:35:08.2 EVILSIZER: Yeah, and I'm going to announce here, this is going to be my last term, I think 20 years is a great longevity cycle for an elected official. I love being a trustee, I love helping students, I enjoy so immensely seeing them succeed and graduate and transfer and become the nurse or the police officer or the EMT that they want to become, that's the true mission of our community colleges, and that should be... The true mission of all employees at community colleges, how our students succeed in their educational paths.
0:35:47.9 BROOM: Definitely. Well, congratulations, man, 50 years of marriage, 20 years as a trustee, you're definitely someone who when you commit to something, you're in it for the long run...
0:35:58.9 EVILSIZER: Yeah, all while being safely secured in our home here and not able to travel during covid, but we're making the best of it.
0:36:07.7 BROOM: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. I think our listeners will have learned a lot about how... What your role is and what your responsibilities are, and what trustees need. And I think it's a wonderful peak into the world of the community college trustee. So, I thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
0:36:29.1 EVILSIZER: Sure, and maybe in the future, we can pick another topic and dive a little bit more deeply into a subject matter that your listeners might find interesting.
0:36:39.0 BROOM: Of course, love and I have two years to track you down before you leave. That's right. So, I will be in touch. You can count on that. Okay, Cheryl, work. Well, thanks again.
0:36:52.9 EVILSIZER: And thank you for the opportunity to share my experiences.
0:36:58.2 BROOM: Thank you for listening to Higher Education Coffee and Conversation. If you like the podcast, please leave me a five-star rating and discover more great higher education-related content, make sure to visit us at graduate communications dot com, and with that, I'm going to say thank you for listening, thank you for the hard work you do for students, each and everyday.