Second look at BCC stories

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Eye on The Record received a comment from an employee of Bergen Community College, disagreeing with the July 20 post that called the firing of President G. Jeremiah Ryan a journalism "witch hunt."

The comment suggests The Record's reporting on Ryan's expense account and his purchase of alcohol for himself and donors was superficial, and that he was given too much credit for raising $3.8 million for the college foundation.


It's especially interesting that Ryan appears to have a bigger problem with alcohol than the stories reported.


The Woodland Park daily's editors should be intimately familiar with alcoholism from all the years they labored under Chairman and former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg.


Here is the comment in full:

Anonymous said...

I worked at Bergen. It was not a "witch hunt" but the removal of an incompetant, usually half-soused sycophant who should never have been there in the first place. His "record" funraising was almost entirely done by someone else who was hired by the college foundation last year, under the guidance of Laurie Francis - not by Ryan - although his taking credit for it was typical. He literally came back in the kind of state that gets you pulled over if you aren't president of a college every day when he left the building for lunch. One of the reasons for the renovation of the executive parking lot two or three years ago was that he needed an over-sized space to manage to park after returning to campus. I used to see him in the obscure elevator to the third floor almost every day, trying to arrange himself to look presentable as he tried to chart a course to sneak down a usually deserted hallway to his office. He bought in people that had no idea how or what to do, from a CIO with a resume so obviously full of mistakes (a man working three full time jobs, all at the same time?) to a PR department head who was dedicated to promoting the President way ahead of students or programs on campus and paid posters (students) to promote a smear campaign against Donovan via comments in the Record. I worked there - as did many others - only to find myself sucked into a program preying on the bad economy by taking employee's desperation to keep their jobs to make them accept lies about all sorts of things to willingly continue to work for 1/2 or less of what they were baited with to take the position up front. Making $20 a hour? Three months later you are told your funding is gone, but you can keep your job for $11 or some similar nonsense. Want to be paid for your time? You have mandatory meetings, mandatory training classes, all of which are on your time and completely unpaid, but you have to be there anyway. People that were transferred to a contract company when the previous administration bought in the contractor to save money had taken cuts in pay to transfer to the contractor's employ. Then the contract was terminated (at a huge penalty to BCC) and the same people were "offered" to keep their jobs at 1/2 of their already cut salary and those that stayed are now working twice the hours to make up for the people that didn't take the bait. Some of these people had been working at the college for twenty or more years because they loved the environment but their loyalty meant nothing. I left when the stunt was pulled on me, promised by HR that they would find me another position (at less money) since I was such a good worker. Never heard a word from them. The Record did not report on 90% of what went on that got Ryan removed - think about what it takes to get people without tenure to make a public vote of no confidence against the man that can fire them in an instant before you imply that it was undeserved. The people of Bergen County deserve a lot better than a constant cult of political personality trying to override the practice of good management at school, bringing fired politicians to take the place of actual educators and bringing in people who were cronies who taught classes by demanding students buy their own book from them (not the school) to take the class. It was THAT bad and a lot of my friends who remain are breathing a sigh of relief that perhaps now the college can get it's focus back to education and promoting BCC instead.