Q&A: Ex-College administrator Stephen Herman on court case verdict, and his love for CC

By Joe Fitzgerald
The Guardsman

Stephen Herman, ex-associate vice chancellor at City College finally saw the end to a years-long debacle involving the alleged misuse of approximately $100,000 in college funds for a bond measure that brought the college millions of dollars.

On November 1, 2011, Herman was sentenced five years probabtion by the city of San Francisco, ending a high-profile case that involved Herman, then-Chancellor Philip Day, and former administrator James Blomquist.

With the case finally complete, Stephen Herman contacted The Guardsman to put a bookend on the story that plagued his and the college’s reputation for years.

You were here for 38 years?

Yes.I started teaching in 1972. I taught creative writing. I wasn’t able to get a full time teaching job here in English department because it was impacted. I was one of those… frequent…. freeway flyers? I taught at USF, I taught at Skyline I taught at Naval ships with a program called PACE, and mostly taught officers.

So what got you in administration?

Well you know I loved teaching. The difference between being a teacher and an administrator is that when you’re a teacher you can’t do anything wrong, when you’re an administrator you can’t do anything right! [laughter] There are awards for being an administrator. I think I have a personality that is very forward looking, I’m very organized. I think I was very successful

How were you successful?

I was often nominated and elected by my peers as the co-chair of the administrators association. So I had a lot of contact with the constituent leaders, students, academic senate, DCC, we all kind of worked as a team when things worked well– and we weren’t fighting each other.

Well the bond measure passed didn’t it?
Exactly. We brought $650 million to the college. And what you have is a new wellness center, a new Health Center, a new Chinatown campus. The renovations that have gone on, all the new ADA renovations, the Multi Use Building. $650 million, okay, was brought in through the various bonds Dr. Day spearheaded. So when they pointed out that $20,000 was misstepped, put in the wrong bucket, but not in anyone’s pocket, but helped pass the bonds to benefit the faculty and the students and just the college environment in general. With Kamala Harris out of the office [she is now Attorney General of CA – Editor], there were additional attempts on the part of individuals to make their feelings known about the case and tried to speak with him about getting this over and done with. And there were six judges by the way. It was assigned a judge, and it went to another judge, then another judge… Then Gascon comes in, there was some softening apparently on their part to get this over with. And there was apparently some deal. And we said we want to go back to Judge Lee, because she really has a sense of what this is about. And everyone agreed. She agreed to take it back.

To get some closure?

Exactly, to bring it to some resolution.

So how did the Chronicle or police get it in the first place?

We let it out! I think most of it started with the motorcycle people who rented the lot for training. Jim Blomquist had asked him for a donation for the bond, and somehow he thought it was confused and he thought he could use the rent the guy was using for the motorcycle towards the bond, and raising money on the bond measure to pass.
And the guy got up there and said… and he was innocent… at the board meeting and said “hey you know I never donated to the bond, that was rent.”

So when the investigations first happened, when was your first inkling that this would get out and become what it did?

My job, and I’ve done this before for the DA, was to put all the documentation together. They would send a list of things they wanted to look at and I would organize it… Mr Organization here…. I would pull the files and contracts and organize them into folders for them. And then they started requesting interviews, with me and Dr. Day and Jim Blomquist and Peter Goldstein. And so we started saying “there’s some… pressure here.” And we didn’t think we did anything necessarily wrong, but Dr. Day apologized for some mistakes at board meetings, that were corrected.

Well a lot of that is in a lot of the old articles, but what i’m really interested in is… and pardon my bluntness… when was the real “oh shit moment?” When you knew?

When they came to my office, told me to leave my office, they were locking it up. When I was handcuffed and put into a cell with the chacnellor [Day] and Jim Blomquist and waited while we were fingerprinted and we were filed.

So you had no idea this was going to happen until that moment?

No. No. We knew they were looking at things, we knew they were investigating things. The big question was “who were they going to call, and charge?” There were other people as culpable as we were, for missteps, but somehow, they weren’t included.

How did they choose?

That’s the $64,000 question. And if you get that answer, I would really like to know!

That’s amazing.

Well some people throw people under the bus, if you let them off the hook. And some people believe in their own truths. We never lied about anything, they asked us a question and they told us the truth. Dr. Day said it at board meetings. “This happened, it happened this way.” Everything was open and above board.

So you’re in the jail cell.

I’m in the jail cell, with Dr. Day, Jim Blomquist, someone who was obviously on speed, yakking away. Every time we tried to say something, this guy would insert himself into the conversation.

So you didn’t get special treatment?

No! We were sitting there in San Francisco, and the fingerprint machine was busted and we were waiting for like three hours for them to fix it, with this speed freak. And this other guy, who never said a word. And the next day, in the SF Chronicle, this guy who never said a word writes a letter to the editor saying “I don’t understand it. I heard the chancellor and these other two guys talking, and they seemed like such stand-up guys!” [Laughter] And he wrote this really nice letter. He was arrested for drunk driving. It was funny, and it wasn’t funny. I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go through being handcuffed, being taken to a DA’s office from a jail cell, being photographed and had fingerprints taken. It was so over the top, really. So uncalled for. You know Dr. Day got this really prestigious job when he left here, in Washington D.C. I think his job is distributing millions of financial aid dollars across the nation. And he resigned, because he did not want to go through all of this craziness and put his new board with having to defend him.

You come back to Dr. Day a lot when we’re talking. Did going through this case together heighten your devotion to him?

I have always felt very honored to have worked with him, because of his vision, and what I saw him accomplish in his years here. It isn’t to say that he isn’t a quirky guy, he has a very quirky personality. He would at times in meetings say off the wall things that if you were thin skinned you could take offense to.

What like call someone “shorty?”

He wouldn’t do that because he was so short! [laughter]

So what was the hardest part, if you had to say what was most trying in the whole case?

I think having to had my career ended on such a sour note. And someone like Dr. Day who I admired trashed and spoiled. That was difficult. It wasn’t easy. And on top of it all, my partner is very ill. During the time it happened in 2008, beginning of 2009 he had eight surgeries. He’s just recovering from all of that. It was not a very…. easy time for me personally to be going through that. I had to feed him intravenously at home. He couldn’t eat. I was his caretaker. But he’s beyond that, he’s healed. But it was a very very dark time for me personally. If it weren’t for everyone here at the college…what really sustained me, was the blog. If you publish anything in The Guardsman, I hope you would include a message from me, Day, and Blomquist, thanking the people who signed the blog in support of us. I don’t know if you’re aware of the blog and read the comments people have posted, but there are over 425 people who posted to it. For every person up there there are ten people behind them who spoke to us weren’t comfortable putting their names up there but were supportive. That sustained us through a lot of the difficult times. It was important for us to know the college community supported us the way they did.

[You can see the blog in support of Day, Herman and Blomquist at http://tinyurl.com/86t39fs]

So you and your partner. Did you marry?

Yea we’re married. We met in college dating twin girls.

Isn’t that always the way?

Yea you go “there’s something wrong here…” and now both the girls are missionaries. [laughter] We’ve been very involved in gay rights together, and been together 42 years. And we did get married.

Any parting thoughts?

To come to the end of a career, for both of us really, with that type of a slap, was really unfortunate. He and I have talked a lot since then. We know who we are, we know what we’ve done, and how we’ve benefited the college. And we have a tremendous amount of support from the college community. I’m pleased to say I have a lot of friends here, well not friends. Family, definitely family.