After months of upheaval and negative headlines, trustees of Collin College will face voters on Saturday.
The closely watched election, with three of nine board seats up for grabs, could chart the future of the suburban community college, located just outside Dallas.
Collin enrolls more than 59,000 students on 10 campuses. Its president, H. Neil Matkin, is not on the ballot. But Matkin, whom The Chronicle profiled this month, is a frequent topic on the campaign trail.
The president has enjoyed strong support from most board members. But amid a firestorm of public criticism over the college’s firing of several faculty members, trustees have begun to acknowledge problems.
“Respect comes from the top, and we understand that, so there’s work to be done at an executive management level,” one trustee, Jim Orr, said at a recent candidates’ forum when asked what the college could do to ensure everyone feels “welcome” there. Orr declined to comment when reached by The Chronicle.
Public criticism of Matkin intensified after the recent Chronicle article, in which the president admitted to once wearing a bowl on his head, as a fake yarmulke, while impersonating the college’s previous president, who is Jewish. Matkin said he was “going for a couple of laughs” and quickly realized he’d made a mistake.
The president often speaks in a folksy, joking manner. But some employees complain his sense of humor makes others uncomfortable.
Orr’s challenger in the election, Helen Chang, alluded to those issues at the April 20 candidates’ forum. “Anybody who read that article in The Chronicle of Higher Education knows that the commitment to diversity is not there, certainly not sensitivity to different cultures and ethnic groups,” Chang said.
All three incumbent trustees are white men. All three challengers are people of color, and two are women.
Matkin’s critics accuse the president of ruling the college with an iron fist, creating an environment where anyone who speaks out is dealt with harshly.
Earlier this year, three well-respected professors abruptly lost their jobs. Two were fired after voicing concerns about the college’s Covid-19 reopening strategy. A third was pushed out after criticizing college leaders on social media.
Matkin has declined to comment on personnel decisions, but he has denied that a culture of retaliation exists.
On Tuesday, at a Board of Trustees meeting, the college touted its status as an “Honor Roll institution” in the Great Colleges to Work For program, which is based on a survey of employees at hundreds of colleges and universities.
But at the same time, the board postponed the meeting’s public-comment section. Usually members of the public are allowed to speak on any topic, for 30 minutes, at the start of board meetings. But on Tuesday public comment was delayed until the end of the meeting agenda, forcing those in attendance to wait more than an hour before they could vent their frustration with Matkin and the trustees.
Workplace Safety
Labor leaders, meanwhile, say the recent faculty firings were a form of union-busting, as two of the professors were officers in a fledgling chapter of the Texas Faculty Association, which is similar to a union under Texas law, although it lacks the power of collective bargaining.
In a sign of rising tensions, the head of a national flight-attendant union, Sara Nelson, flew to Collin County over the weekend for a pro-union rally that featured door-knocking for the three challengers campaigning for board seats.
“This is an issue that deserves national attention,” Nelson told The Chronicle. The former professors, she said, “were fired for speaking up for safety in the workplace.”
In its fall-2020 reopening, Collin College emphasized in-person instruction — most courses were taught at least partly on campus. According to The Chronicle’s fall college-reopening tracker, more than half of public, two-year colleges operated mostly online in the fall. Among them: Dallas College, the community college down the road from Collin.
In emails to the staff, Matkin repeatedly dismissed the dangers posed by Covid-19.
“The effects of this pandemic have been blown utterly out of proportion,” Matkin wrote in an August 15, 2020, email in which he also said that the Covid-19 death toll had been “clearly inflated.”
A Collin College nursing professor died of the coronavirus in November, and her family says she caught it in the classroom.
The Board of Trustees election is nonpartisan, but the three incumbents are politically conservative, which gives them an advantage in Collin County. Voters in the town of Plano received a text message urging Republicans to “Make Plano Great Again” in Saturday’s municipal election, while listing a GOP-friendly slate of local candidates. The three incumbent trustees appeared on that list.
But the upstart challengers are encouraged by the surprising interest in their campaigns. Misty Irby, who is hoping to unseat the board chairman, Bob Collins, said she had received a surge of campaign donations after this year’s faculty firings.
More recently, Irby got into a heated back-and-forth discussion with Collins’s wife, who had posted on Irby’s Facebook page. “The fact that his wife is attacking me means they’re concerned,” Irby said. “If they felt like it was a done deal, and they would have no problems at the polls, they wouldn’t be doing all of this.”
Collins, who declined to comment, has been on the Board of Trustees since the college opened, in 1985. In previous comments to The Chronicle, Collins defended Matkin’s track record, calling him an “A-plus” president and saying he “wouldn’t have been offended” by Matkin’s bowl-wearing incident.
Last week Collins defended his “character and values” on Facebook, which he said had been called into question by “published lies.” He did not specify what the false accusations were, or who had said them, but he urged voters to look at his track record and experience when casting their ballots.
“I deeply value the college and every member of the Collin College community,” Collins wrote, “and I will not stand for anyone suggesting otherwise.”
