Note to the faculty at MiraCosta College: You ain't teaching at Harvard, so quit putting on airs.

The ongoing campaign by the faculty at the public, two-year Oceanside college to oust the president - appointed by the elected representatives of the taxpayers - seems to hinge on the faculty's complaint that Victoria Munoz Richart isn't "collegial" enough in her leadership style, that she's too autocratic for the lofty halls of academia.

That she doesn't listen to them enough.

The idea - ideal, really - of a "collegial" method of running a university was developed in medieval Europe as a way to create an atmosphere in which the best and brightest minds of a community would pass on the knowledge of the ages to the next generation while working to deepen society's knowledge (and hopefully wisdom). It was based on the surviving writings of Plato, and his Academy in ancient Athens (although there were already academies similar to our modern university in China and India centuries before Plato began learning from Socrates).

But MiraCosta isn't Heidelberg or Oxford - it's a two-year community college in which first-year students are nearly as likely to be taking remedial high school-level courses as they are to be taking actual college-level classes. Nor is MiraCosta doing research into the big bang or string theory, or a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's.

In other words, MiraCosta's faculty may be well-educated (although one needs only a master's degree to teach there), but the school isn't exactly recruiting against Ivy League schools when hiring.

To hold that a public two-year college should be run on the same model as a major four-year research university seems a bit much. I'm sure it assuages the egos of the MiraCosta full-time faculty, but really, shouldn't the more than $100,000 they make on average (according to the National Education Association's Web site; see tinyurl.com/yspvv8) courtesy of the area's taxpayers take care of that?

As to the specific complaint that the college "wasted" money in investigating the now-proven palm tree scam: If the principals involved had been forthcoming (and if the faculty hadn't been running political interference for them all along), the investigation wouldn't have cost so much. Nobody knew how much the taxpayers had been ripped off until the investigation was complete.

To blame the administration for the cost of the investigation is a bit like blaming a burglary victim for not having a better lock on his house.

Yes, MiraCosta College serves an important role in our public education system, preparing students for a career with a two-year AA degree or continuing on to a four-year university.

But it belongs to the taxpayers - not the faculty. And if the taxpayers' representatives - you know, that elected board of trustees the faculty recently slammed with a no-confidence vote - wants an authoritarian president at the helm, the citizens of this community have a fundamental right to a faculty that respects that and works with the president.

And if the faculty can't make such a minimal effort to get along with the public's representatives, then perhaps it's time to actually go work for a living.

- Contact columnist Jim Trageser at (760) 631-6628 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.

On the Net:

tinyurl.com/yspvv8

http://www2.nea.org/he/advo06/special/images/special06.pdf