LCC board censures director accused of bullying, profane behavior

The Lane Community College Board of Education voted Wednesday, Sept. 3, to censure board member Zachary Mulholland after an investigation concluded he had engaged in abusive and bullying behavior toward others, including the LCC president.

“Mr. Mulholland’s behavior was inconsistent with the Board’s values and expectations of conduct,” reads the official motion to censure Mulholland. “His behavior has undermined the Board’s ability to govern effectively and has disrupted the professional working relationship between the Board and the college administration.” (See the full censure resolution.)

In voting to censure Mulholland, board members agreed his behavior toward LCC President Stephanie Bulger and others was unacceptable. 

The motion of censure was approved by six members of the board: Chair Austin Fölnagy, Vice Chair Jerry Rust, and directors Julie Weismann, Kevin Alltucker, Steve Mital and Jesse Maldonado. Mulholland, who remains on the board, could not vote on the measure. The student representative on the board, Amelia Hampton, serves in a nonvoting capacity.

Fölnagy, who participated in the meeting via Zoom (as did Maldonado and Hampton), said the censure was the strongest action the board could take against Mulholland.  Because he and other members of the board are elected, the board could not vote to remove him. A member of the board can be forced off only through a recall election.

Mulholland offered apologies on two occasions during the nearly four-hour meeting, which drew more than 100 attendees.

“President Bulger, I apologize for my harsh use of language during our leadership meeting and lack of proper consideration … I allowed my emotions to get the better of me, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. … I want to do what I can to help you be successful.”

Mulholland also apologized to other individuals named in the report and said he had mailed letters to each of them.

“To the broader campus community, I apologize that I allowed my frustrations to get the better of me and that my actions created this unfortunate distraction from the important work of the college. I am sorry that I let you down.”

Weismann said she appreciated his apologies, “however, they weren’t full apologies. … Those of us who know what an apology looks like, it usually is recognizing the harm that was caused, … (the) part that I played in it, what I’m going to do about it in the future. Those accountability measures weren’t really represented in the apologies that were given.”

Even though the motion of censure passed without opposition, the meeting — which Weismann characterized as a “mess” — offered fresh instances of the divisions on the board that have been increasingly visible during the past two years. 

For example, Fölnagy read a statement of apology to Bulger that he said was on behalf of the board — but at least three members of the board (Weismann, Alltucker and Mital) said they had not seen the statement before Fölnagy read it. 

Fölnagy said he wrote the statement Wednesday morning and emailed it to board members shortly after 11 a.m.

“No excuses,” he said. “That’s a failure on my part. I should have followed up with everybody on the board.”

A good portion of the meeting was taken up by a discussion involving a board policy that allows the board to, among other things, approve “major substantive changes in the college’s mission, policies and programs.”

Some board members worried that a motion regarding that policy would unduly strip away authority from LCC’s president and administration. The motion — which goes to the heart of a debate among board members about the division of powers between the board and the college’s administration — was tabled until the board’s work session Sept. 17.

Complaints and comments 

The complaints against Mulholland and other board members date from incidents that occurred earlier this year.

Board tensions surfaced in a dramatic way at its April 2 meeting, when Alltucker, then the board’s vice chair, read a letter accusing Mulholland, then the board’s chair, of using abusive language and “attempting to bully” Bulger. Alltucker’s complaint focused in particular on a March 27 meeting in which he — along with Bulger, Mullholland and board secretary Celia Wright — were planning the agenda for the April 2 meeting. 

At that meeting, a discussion about whether to add an agenda item about making an appointment to fill a board vacancy escalated, with Mulholland raising his voice and using profanity. An investigation by an outside attorney substantiated Alltucker’s complaint that Mulholland’s conduct during the meeting “created an unsafe and hostile environment for the President based upon the Board Chair swearing and raising his voice at the President and is consistent with institutional discrimination.”

The attorney’s investigation substantiated two other complaints. One concerned an encounter between Mulholland and a student during a break at the April 2 meeting. The student reported Mulholland approached the student outside and discussed a proposal regarding the turf field for LCC’s baseball team. The student said Mulholland spoke in a “hostile, aggressive and intimidating tone” and was “uncomfortably close” to her — 1 or 2 feet away. The student reported she felt “stressed and disrespected.”

The other substantiated complaint involved the entire board, with the exception of Weismann, at a March 5 meeting. The complaint, filed anonymously, alleged that the board’s discussion about an operating agreement — and a subsequent dismissal and failure to acknowledge Bulger’s feedback — was disrespectful toward the president and would not “have taken place if President Bulger was a white man.” Bulger is Black.

Alltucker, Fölnagy and Mital — who were on the board during the March meeting — said Wednesday they were committed to learning from the report and determined to performing better on the board. (Maldonado and Rust were elected to the board in the May election, after the dates cited in the attorney’s report, so they were not implicated in the complaints.)

The report, which Lookout Eugene-Springfield received through a public records request, triggered reactions throughout the community. Weismann wrote a letter calling for Mulholland’s resignation, and so did the Eugene-Springfield chapter of the NAACP.

The Lane Community College Foundation, in an Aug. 28 letter to the board, lamented “minimal progress in resolving the questions readied by the report” and said it had delayed the public launch of a new fundraising campaign, originally planned for early October, “because of the current dissension.”

The city of Springfield and the Springfield Chamber also sent letters to the board.

“Our community, our employers and most importantly our students cannot afford a distracted, divided board; nor do we tolerate abusive, toxic displays of leadership,” the chamber wrote in a letter signed by Deborah Creager, the chair of its board of directors, and Vonnie Mikkelsen, its president and CEO. 

The meeting included 37 public comments. Although one speaker said he appreciated Mulholland’s service, most of the comments regarding the report criticized Mulholland and praised Bulger and her work.

Two of those commenters were former LCC presidents.

“I feel compelled to ask you to think about how your actions are affecting this college,” said one of the former presidents, Margaret Hamilton. “I can assure you that what we’re discussing tonight is extremely serious and can jeopardize not only the success of this college but your accreditation. Successful colleges must have boards that act as role models to the basic principles of equity and respect.”

Added the other former president, Mary Spilde: “Never in my wildest dreams did I see myself coming back to ask the board to censure a colleague and to implore Mr. Mulholland to resign.” She pointed to a finding in the report that Mulholland and Fölnagy, the new chair, generally believe the college president does not have a role in board meetings because she’s not a board member. “If you persist in this behavior,” she said, “everyone will see it for what it is: a thinly veiled attempt to silence the view of the president, who is a Black woman.” 

Mulholland has said the report contains inaccuracies. Fölnagy said Wednesday he has listened to a recording of his interview with the investigating attorney and the summaries of his comments in the report were not always accurately captured. For example, he denied saying the president did not have a right to speak. “That being said, this is still a failure on my part, as a board member, for these actions to have happened,” he added.

More than a dozen of the speakers were affiliated with unions, and urged the board to instruct administration negotiations to seek fair contracts with both the Lane Community College Education Association and the Lane Community College Employee Federation. Both unions are in the midst of contract talks with the college.

A previous version of this story had one misspelling of Steve Mital’s last name.