Federal Court Corrects an Injustice
Since spring 2025, I have written five essays* about Lane Community College, examining its divided Board, troubled governance, strained labor relations, budget choices and loss of public trust. Unfortunately, evidence of institutional dysfunction continues to mount. The latest example concerns the College’s treatment of an outspoken student and a Federal judge’s response. It raises basic questions about free speech, administrative power and accountability.
Richard Riordan is an LCC student who challenged the administration and the Board of Education at public meetings and via email. He questioned program cuts, budget decisions and the data used to defend them. LCC responded by banning him from seven college properties and blocking him from registering for classes. On September 28, U.S. District Judge Michael McShane ordered LCC to remove the registration hold and let Riordan return to campus for academic purposes.
The College called these actions a trespass notice and an enrollment hold, bureaucratic labels that obscure their severity. Riordan risked arrest and prosecution if he entered LCC property. His enrollment hold was set to last until December 31, 2099. In practical terms, LCC had expelled him for life.
This ruling is not final. It is a preliminary injunction, an order that applies while the lawsuit continues. Even so, McShane found that Riordan is likely to succeed on his claim that LCC retaliated against him for speech protected by the First Amendment. That is a serious rebuke to President Stephanie Bulger, her administration and LCC’s elected Board.
I am a retired college administrator and former part-time LCC faculty member. Though not a lawyer, I read McShane’s opinion closely and attended every Board meeting where Riordan spoke during public comment. I found him outspoken, rambling, persistent and often sarcastic. McShane described him as “annoying, long-winded, aggressive, hyperbolic, and grandiose.”
But the judge also found “nothing in the record” showing that Riordan posed a threat. He said Riordan’s statements were hyperbole, jokes and political rhetoric, not real threats of violence.
The court’s account of LCC’s response is troubling. During a campus conversation about an upcoming Board meeting, Riordan told Vice President Shelley Tinkham he was “ready for the spin.” Public Safety Director Lisa Rupp then filed a report on Tinkham’s behalf claiming Riordan had “accosted” her. LCC’s Threat Assessment Team then began monitoring Riordan without his knowledge. Dean Carl Yeh and Rupp later told him to stop sending mass emails and to “be careful,” but did not identify any college rule he had broken.
LCC also relied on an email meme and Riordan’s self-deprecating comparison of his writing to a “drive-by shooting.” McShane found that the College took those statements out of context and turned them into threats. He wrote that LCC’s misrepresentation “approaches dishonesty” and said the College appeared to be “covertly building a case” against Riordan.
The judge was just as direct about the harm LCC caused. He wrote that its actions effectively expelled Riordan and would discourage an ordinary person from speaking out. He called LCC’s safety argument “anemic and unconvincing” and its sanctions “unreasonable and legally unsupported.” He said the College’s conduct looked “much like blacklisting.”
McShane accepted that some officials may truly have been afraid. But feeling afraid is not proof that someone poses a threat. The judge allowed Riordan to return for classes but barred him from attending Board meetings in person or approaching the officials named in the suit. He said those limits were meant to calm the situation, not to suggest LCC’s fears had an objective basis.
That difference matters. LCC must act when a threat is credible. But fear alone cannot turn protected political speech into threatening conduct. Before punishing a student, the College must consider the student’s words in context and separate discomfort from a serious threat of violence. Officials may need to remove a student briefly when there is credible evidence of immediate danger. Any longer campus ban or registration block should require written notice, access to the evidence, a prompt hearing and a fair appeal.
Those safeguards are necessary, but they are not enough. President Bulger is responsible for the administration she leads. If she approved these actions, she must answer for a serious abuse of power. If she did not know senior officials were building a case against a student critic and pushing him out of college, then she failed to supervise them. Neither explanation is acceptable.
The Board should commission an independent review to determine who approved the sanctions, what evidence they relied on, why Riordan was not clearly told what rule he had broken and why he had no fair chance to respond. The findings should be made public, and Bulger should be required to answer them.
The Board must then act on those findings. LCC should correct any unsupported claims in Riordan’s records that could hurt his education or employment. The Board should also determine what consequences, if any, are warranted for the officials responsible.
But an independent review should not become an excuse to delay what is already due: a sincere public apology from Bulger and the Board to Riordan and the community. Accountability requires admitting what went wrong, repairing the harm and making sure it does not happen again. Until Bulger and the Board do that, LCC’s claims to value free speech and student rights will ring hollow.
*Here are links to those five publications.
“LCC Board Vote.” Eugene Weekly, April 17, 2025.
“Solving the LCC Board.” Eugene Weekly, October 10, 2025.
“No Confidence.” Eugene Weekly, November 25, 2025.
“Criticism of LCC Faculty Union Ignores the Deeper Issues.” Lookout Eugene-Springfield, November 2, 2025.
“Higher Education and the Long Shadow of Oregon Ballot Measure 5.” Lookout Eugene-Springfield, June 3, 2026.
What is Leadership?
I frequently Zoom with a friend, CJ, on the East Coast. Our conversations are always stimulating, never boring. We both graduated from the same small-town Midwestern high school back in the 60s but, interestingly, it is only in the past couple of years that our relationship has deepened. Last year, during my trip back to rural Northern Wisconsin for our sixtieth-class reunion, she was one of just a couple individuals with whom I was eagerly anticipating some one-on-one time.
We are both academics, but because we spent almost six decades leading quite different lives, with only infrequent contact, we continue to learn more about each other with every interaction. During our last call, I mentioned that throughout most of my professional life I had occupied leadership positions. She hesitated, then interrupted with a simple but provocative question: “What is leadership?”
(For her own reasons, she’d been ruminating on this question for a while, and was interested in my take.)
I do not recall precisely how I answered. That probably means my response was not especially coherent. You might expect someone who spent decades in higher education administration, earned a doctorate in the field, worked as an academic dean, and has written extensively about leadership in these pages to have a polished definition ready for immediate deployment. I did not; I mostly rambled.
Since then, the question has stayed with me. So I’m here to wander around the topic yet again and to report that with more than twenty years of writing here in Musings, all signs seem to point, consistently, toward the same idea: leadership begins with trust.
A title may give someone authority to make decisions, approve budgets, evaluate employees, or call a staff meeting. It does not guarantee, however, that anyone will have trust in the person exercising that authority. Positional power can produce compliance, at least for a while, but compliance and followership are not the same thing.
When I first became an interim academic dean, I had never been a dean, department chair, or even a full-time faculty member. At my first divisional meeting, I told the story of my personal journey and shared the values I was bringing to the position. I believed that people needed to know the person asking for their confidence.
That experience helped convince me that authenticity is central to leadership. By authenticity, I do not mean turning every meeting into a confessional. I mean allowing people to see an alignment among one’s values, words, decisions, and behavior. That alignment is also how I understand integrity. It becomes most visible when remaining true to one’s values is inconvenient or risky. When words and actions match, people do not have to search constantly for hidden motives. A basis for trust has been established.
Leadership also depends upon listening. “Leaders,” so-called, often “listen” just long enough to formulate an answer or defend a decision. Genuine, active listening accepts that someone else may know something important, including something the leader would prefer not to hear. It communicates respect and makes an organization more intelligent. When people expect dismissal or retaliation, they remain silent, and the person naming a problem can become the problem.
Listening cannot necessarily tell a leader exactly what to do, however. My doctoral mentor, Thomas Schwandt, helped me approach the uncertainty that remains. He asked questions that slowed thinking down: What does this mean? Whose voices are absent? Given what we know, what should we do now? His questions taught me to examine both values and assumptions, mine and others, before acting. They also encouraged humility, since a sincere conviction can still be wrong.
Those habits shaped how I understood authority long before I became a college dean. Earlier, while I was working for the Oregon University System, one of our university presidents described my style as that of a “servant leader.” I had not consciously adopted the term, but I recognized myself in it. I had always believed that leadership was less about exercising power over people than using whatever authority I possessed on their behalf. I often told colleagues that whatever power came with my position amounted, in practice, to the power to persuade. The president had given a name to the way I was already trying to lead.
I have also always thought of myself as a consensus builder. That did not mean requiring unanimity or waiting until every objection disappeared. It meant bringing people into the process, finding common ground, and building enough shared ownership to move forward. Consensus was not an escape from leadership. It was one way of exercising it.
Together, these descriptions explain why I regard administration as a calling to service. A college exists to educate students and serve a larger public good. Administrators temporarily hold responsibility for a mission that will continue after they depart.
Service does not mean passivity, though, and listening does not eliminate the obligation to decide. Participation makes decisions more informed and legitimate, but responsibility cannot be distributed so broadly that no one remains accountable. Presidents must lead, boards must govern, and administrators must sometimes choose among competing interests.
A responsible leader invites the knowledge of those affected, communicates the reasons for change, makes the necessary judgment, and accepts accountability for what follows. Collaboration is not unanimous agreement, but neither is it a ceremonial conversation held after the real decision has already been made.
My recent writing about Lane Community College has tested these convictions from a different vantage point. As a retired administrator and community member, I have sometimes called for decisive action, including the resignation of a trustee and the nonrenewal of a presidential contract. That might appear inconsistent with my emphasis on collaboration, but listening is not leadership’s final act. A process that produces no accountability can become another form of avoidance.
All of this brings me back to CJ’s initial question. What is leadership, anyway? For me, leadership begins with trust, which grows when people experience a leader as authentic and know they are being heard. It means seeking consensus, encouraging collaboration, and bringing people together around a purpose they share. It also means acting when necessary and remaining accountable for the result.
Perhaps that university president had already supplied the shortest answer. Leadership is service. A title may identify who occupies the office, but it tells us little about whether leadership is occurring there. What matters is what a person does with the trust.
Soundtrack Suggestion
He roller-coaster, he got early warning
He got muddy water, he one mojo filter
He say, “One and one and one is three”
Got to be good-looking, ‘cause he’s so hard to see
Come together
Right now
Over me
(“Come Together” — Beatles)
In Memoriam
Thomas A. Schwandt
Thomas A. Schwandt was a teacher in the most profound sense of that word. When he died right before Christmas, at age 77, the news felt to me like the quiet closing of a chapter that began more than thirty years ago.
I received my Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1995, with Tom as my dissertation director. I learned last November, just after his birthday, that he was ill. Even with that knowledge, the report of his passing landed heavily.
In absolutely no uncertain terms, Tom was the center of my IU graduate-student experience.
Tom began his academic life in English literature before moving toward theology, philosophy, and ultimately evaluation. That trajectory makes perfect sense in retrospect. His work was always animated by questions of meaning and moral judgment. My own undergraduate training was in chemistry, a discipline that demands intellectual discipline, analytic precision, respect for evidence, and humility before complexity. Tom helped me see that those habits of mind need not be abandoned when one enters qualitative inquiry; they must simply be redirected. Under his guidance, rigor became not merely technical exactness, but careful thinking about values, human judgment, and what our conclusions require of us.
His courses in interpretive inquiry and evaluation were, without reservation, the most formative of my time at Indiana. He did not merely perform scholarship; he practiced it carefully and deliberately. His classroom was marked by deep, open-ended questions that slowed thinking down: What does it mean to know? What is the validity of this knowledge claim? What are the ethical and moral responsibilities when working with human subjects? He made it clear that evaluation is not a technical exercise conducted from a position of detached neutrality. It is a value-laden and political practice. The task of the researcher or evaluator is not to eliminate values but to expose them, examine them, and reason together about them honestly.
When he agreed to direct my dissertation, I felt incredibly fortunate as well as challenged. Drafts were returned with precise criticism and unmistakable encouragement. He expected clarity because he assumed I was capable of it. That kind of steady confidence alters a scholar’s sense of himself, whether he is twenty-five or in midlife, as I was.
My career moved toward higher education administration rather than the scholarly life Tom exemplified. Yet his questions accompanied me into leadership roles. From policy development and implementation, to budget deliberations, to the never-ending personnel conflicts, I often heard echoes of his voice: What does this mean? Whose voices are present or absent? Given what we know, what should we do now? What is the right and responsible way to proceed?
When Tom retired in 2015, we exchanged old-school, handwritten notes. In mine, I told him that, with four degrees earned across four different decades, I had experienced dozens, perhaps hundreds, of classroom leaders. Students remember their great teachers, try to forget the terrible ones, and grow hazy about most of the rest. “You,” I wrote, “were in a category by yourself. You were not only among the greats, you were simply the best. In the world of academia, I tell people I got to work with a rock star while doing my doctoral work at IU.”
His reply captured his character perfectly: “… it may make you feel good to know that I doubt I have ever failed to mention your Ph.D. thesis in every qualitative methodology class I have taught! … I have always felt that the real rock stars were the students that I had the great fortune to work with.”
That generosity, that instinct to redirect praise, was quintessential Tom. He saw teaching not as performance but as stewardship.
When I read his obituary, and later the tribute from the European Evaluation Society, with their descriptions of wisdom, integrity, faith, and service, I recognized immediately the same man I had known in front of classrooms decades ago.
Now, in retirement, as I concentrate on reading, writing, and reflection, I recognize how much of my intellectual architecture in later life was formed under his guidance. If there is any seriousness to my thinking, any respect for complexity and moral responsibility, it surely can be traced back to his mentorship.
In 1995, I acknowledged and thanked him as an incredible gentleman and scholar. Thirty some years later, I understand those words even more fully.
I remain deeply grateful that I had the privilege to be his student and colleague.
His questions remain with me. Still.
Soundtrack Suggestion
Across the morning sky,
All the bird are leaving,
Ah, how can they know it’s time for them to go?
Before the winter fire,
We’ll still be dreaming.
I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
(“Who Knows Where the Time Goes” – Sandy Denny)
Update on March 11, 2026:
Here’s the link to the video for the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, held for Tom on February 21, 2026, at the First Presbyterian Church in Bloomington, Indiana.
Poetry Selection: Remember Me
To the living, I am gone,
To the sorrowful, I will never return,
To the angry, I was cheated,
But to the happy, I am at peace,
And to the faithful, I have never left.
I cannot speak, but I can listen.
I cannot be seen, but I can be heard.
So as you stand upon a shore gazing at a beautiful sea,
As you look upon a flower and admire its simplicity,
Remember me.
Remember me in your heart:
Your thoughts, and your memories,
Of the times we loved,
The times we cried,
The times we fought,
The times we laughed.
For if you always think of me, I will never have gone.
Margaret Mead
Would You Say a Few Words?
Last Friday (May 10, 2013) I was asked, by our campus president, to “say a few words” at the grand opening of the College of Marin’s new Science•Math•Nursing building. After being introduced by the president, here is what I said:
Thank you very much, President Coon.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is wonderful to see all of you here today on this very special occasion.
You know, I was here back in late 2009 when we broke ground for this new facility, and I’m almost sure I remember one of the speakers observing “what a great day this is for the College of Marin.” Well, I must admit: I think this is an even greater day as we celebrate the official opening of our new Science•Math•Nursing facility.
The building that stands behind me is an amazing space to sharpen our focus on student learning and student success here at the college.
We do talk a lot about student success these days. And rightfully so. I believe that there are a whole range of factors that contribute to student success, and surely a positive learning environment has to rank near the top.
Among the factors of a positive learning environment, I believe, are instructors who are knowledgeable in their content areas, skilled at communicating with others, facilitating student learning, and able to do it in caring and supportive ways. We have a cadre of highly-skilled full-time and part-time instructors in this building who do all of that very well.
Another very important part of a positive learning environment - and I guess I’m talking a little bit about my philosophy of education here - is the physical space where that learning takes place. With the availability of this new science math nursing building, we now have a first-rate facility comprised of classrooms and labs that are firmly situated in the 21st century. We are very lucky. Our already outstanding programs in the sciences, in math, and in nursing have gotten a very big boost with the creation of this building. I would like to thank the citizens of Marin County for extending their vote of confidence in us and in voting for the resources to make this space a reality.
My most sincere thanks to you all.
