On Monday, November 4, a majority of the association representing Chaffey College’s faculty registered a vote of no confidence against Chaffey College President Henry Shannon and two of the institution’s senior administrators.
The Academic Senate, representing the community college’s faculty – professors, teachers, lecturers, lab supervisors, instructors and adjunct professors – debated with regard to official action to be lodged against Shannon and associate superintendents Lisa Bailey and Alisha Rosas over the course of multiple meetings in September, October and this month before committing to taking the no confidence vote.
At issue was discontent with regard to hiring and promotional practices at the college, together with concern about decisions on conferring tenures or placing professors on tenure tracks, actions about which the faculty has been given no say. Some faculty members have alleged, and it now appears a majority of their colleagues have come to believe, that favoritism, cronyism and nepotism have tainted both hiring and policy decisions made by the college administration going back several years.
Shannon has led Chaffey College since 2007. Bailey has been associate superintendent of business services and economic development since 2013. Rosas, the who began at Chaffey in 2015 as the director of marketing and public relations, in 2020 promoted to associate superintendent for student services and strategic communications.
The no-confidence vote was taken despite Shannon being on an extended medical leave, from which it is not anticipated he will return until next year. Bailey, since August, has been serving as Chaffey College’s acting president/superintendent.

In the resolution relating to the vote of no confidence that was first previewed at the Academic Senate’s October 8 meeting, Shannon was excoriated for having ignored Title 5 § 53021 relating to recruitment by appointing Bailey, Rosas, and Associate Superintendent of Administrative Services & Emergency Operations Troy Ament to the college’s executive team without conducting internal and external searches and providing faculty constituents with opportunities to provide input to select high level administrators.
The resolution also cited “a series of erratic and short-sighted decision making around career services. In March 2023, the Career Center was abruptly shut down and a new Workforce Innovations and Entrepreneurial Development Department [WEID], that would include career services, was announced via email. In violation of participatory governance principles, Career Center employees were not asked for input on how best to implement this structural change. Then, less than a year later, in January 2024, WIED was suddenly dismantled, in yet another significant reorganization, once again resulting in insufficient infrastructure to support federal work study and student employment.”
Furthermore, according to the resolution, “Associate Superintendent of Business Services and Economic Development Lisa Bailey and the Associate Superintendent of Student Services and Strategic Communications Alisha Rosas, under the supervision of Superintendent/President Dr. Henry Shannon, over the last 5 years have perpetuated the systemic abuse of recruitment and hiring practices that violate the spirit of Title 5 § 53021 through the overuse of interim positions, increased vacancies, and internal only appointments. This lack of strategic planning and cost-saving at the expense of our college mission has increased in non-instructional areas.”
The resolution maintains Rosas and Shannon created “an overreliance on interim positions and a lack of transparency in hiring practices that has exacerbated perceptions of nepotism and cronyism.”
Moreover, according to the resolution, “infrastructural growth has occurred only in student services, while instructional infrastructure has been significantly diminished. In 2019, 36% of management positions were in student services and 64% were in instruction. As of 2024, 59% of management positions are in student services and 41% are in instruction, resulting in inadequate management infrastructure in instructional areas.”
According to the Academic Senate, administrators have threatened to take legal action against faculty members for simply making reference to issues about which they are unsatisfied. These threats came in the form of letters written by a law firm employed by the community college district that were paid for with public funds, faculty members say.
Efforts by the Sentinel to obtain, through the Chaffey College administration office and then Rosas’s office a response from Shannon, Bailey and Rosas were unsuccessful at press time.
Information available to the Sentinel is that at least two Chaffey College administrators, including one who was formerly a faculty member, have added their weight to the protest with regard to the way in which the college is being managed and administered. In addition to its main Alta Loma campus in Rancho Cucamonga, which has been in place since Chaffey in 1962 left its Ontario campus that has since been converted entirely to Chaffey High School, the community college, with a total of just under 29,200 students, has satellite campuses in Fontana and Chino.
There have been minor disputes with regard to the management of the satellite campuses.
Officers with the Academic Senate have been in communication with members of the Chaffey College Board of Trustees and have requested that they look into the allegations of nepotism and cronyism at the college, and seek increased accountability and transparency from the administration.

One roiling issue is the personal enmity that appears to have developed between some faculty members and Shannon. Shannon, faculty members point out, is well beyond traditional retirement age and has manifested signs of impatience that often accompanies old age and physical ailments that leave an individual in constant discomfort. One example of that came during the October 22 board of trustees meeting when Shannon, participating by means of an electronic video/audio hook-up, after several faculty members weighed in with regard to issues they wanted redressed, snapped, “If you don’t like it, too bad.” Some college professors have told the board that Shannon should be given the option of resigning and that if he does not choose that course of action, the board should force his hand by terminating him.
There has been a history of tension involving the faculty and the administration at Chaffey College going back some two generations. The differences have involved faculty factions, backed by some elements of the administration, pitted against other faculty factions, backed by other elements of the administration.
One of those involved the 1975 wholesale firing/purging of several members of the Chaffey faculty, a minority of the professors teaching there, who were actually communists, socialists, radicals and ultra-progressives, or were deemed to be by other members of the faculty who constituted the majority of the college’s professors.
Similarly, in 2013, which was prior to Bailey or Rosas going to work at Chaffey, there were accusation that the college’s hiring policy was shot through with nepotism. Ultimately, the faculty member leading the charge on that matter, Stefan Veldhuis, a political science professor, was fired. It is the contention of some of the current faculty members that the problems referenced during that chapter of the college’s history have not been resolved.