New Presidents at Two Community Colleges This Fall

By Jeffrey Heyman, Executive Director, Department of Public Information, Communications & Media, Peralta Colleges

The dog days of summer are a time for changes at our local community colleges. New faces are seen on campus as the colleges prepare for the fall semester and old hands move on to new opportunities. Here are just a few of the changes that this summer brings to Merritt College, Laney College, College of Alameda and Berkeley City College.

Joi Lin Blake, who served most recently as president of College of Alameda, has left the campus and will now lead San Diego's Palomar Community College District as their new superintendent-president.

Frances L. White, a community college educator for 32 years, will take up the reins at College of Alameda while a nationwide search for the next permanent president is underway. White was previously interim president at Berkeley City College and superintendent-president of the Marin Community College District. She also has served as president of Skyline College in San Bruno and as the executive vice chancellor at City College of San Francisco and the interim chancellor of the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District.

Berkeley City College has a new president as well beginning next month. The board of trustees of the Peralta Community College District tapped Rowena Tomaneng to head the downtown Berkeley campus. Tomaneng has been the associate vice president of instruction at De Anza College in Cupertino for the past six years. She oversaw the academic services division, the office of professional development and the Pathways Program and has developed a range of community and educational partnerships. In 2013, she won the statewide Association of California Community College Administrators' Administrative Leadership Excellence Award.

Previously, Tomaneng served as interim dean of De Anza's language arts division, which includes 50 full-time and 140 adjunct faculty members, and offers 85 courses in the English Department, ranging from basic skills to multicultural literatures, as well as the departments of ESL, journalism, reading and speech. She was also English Department chair. Upon completion of her dissertation on the educational dimensions of Filipina migrant workers' activist identities, Tomaneng will receive her doctorate in international-multicultural education, with a concentration in human rights education, from the University of San Francisco. She holds a master's degree in English from UC Santa Barbara and a bachelor's degree in English from UC Irvine.

Leaving the Peralta Colleges this summer is Thuy Thi Nguyen, the district's longtime general counsel. Nguyen has been selected to take the helm at Foothill College in Los Altos as its latest president and is the first Vietnamese-American community college president in California. Nguyen has also served as general counsel for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office and was interim president and chief executive officer of the Community College League of California. She went to Castlemont High School in Oakland and served as a student representative on the Oakland Unified School District's Board of Education. When she graduated on June 23, 1993, then-Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris declared the date "Thuy Thi Nguyen Day" in recognition of her community service. Nguyen has a bachelor's degree from Yale University and completed law school at UCLA.

Don't forget that fall semester classes at our community colleges begin Aug. 22. Next month, I'll have more about the great classes being offered, but it's never too early to enroll to make sure you get the classes you need. Check out autumn schedule of classes at www.peralta.edu.

Contact Jeffrey Heyman at jheyman@peralta.edu and follow him on Twitter at @JeffHeyman; Photos provided by Peralta Colleges