In for the Long Haul: Mike Claire and the Class of 1988
Incoming faculty re-enacted their welcome photo after 25 years of achievement
On the first day of the 1988 school year, five new full-time faculty, fresh-faced and happy, sat for district photographer Isago Isao Tanaka for an image for the campus newspaper. They were Liz Smith, who taught nursing; Janet Black, art/art history; Susan Estes, speech/English; Cathy Kennedy, computer science; and Michael Claire, business/accounting.
“They took a photo because it was an occasion to celebrate,” Black remembered. Though the first day of class was always marked by an opening ceremony, College of San Mateo, buffeted by Proposition 13-related funding cuts, had not hired new full-timers for several years.
The photo proved to be an all-star lineup. Ten years later, Kennedy was named the nation’s community college Professor of the Year for her creation of CSM’s networked computer curriculum and lab. Susan Estes became CSM’s dean of language arts and vice president of instruction, while Michael Claire became dean of CSM’s technology division in 1992, college president in 2007, and chancellor of the San Mateo County Community College District in 2019.
Except for Kennedy, who left CSM to work in educational assessment at UC Berkeley, all the new hires in the 1998 photo were still working for the district 25 years later. At CSM’s 2013 celebration of employee service awards, the four still on campus re-enacted the photo. Black’s husband, Michael Terner, took the shot.
Together, they illustrate not just CSM’s attractiveness as a workplace but also the changes in teaching and learning the era’s faculty helped enact as they moved CSM into the 21st century.
Estes was instrumental in forging the interdisciplinary bonds that today underlie CSM’s learning communities. Under her leadership, CSM was one of the first U.S. community colleges to pair classes—for example, social science with English and English with math—enabling students to deepen their learning and to see all sides of a complex issue clearly.
Kennedy not only brought CSM’s computer-science curriculum up to date with new programs to teach PC networking and web design, but she also acquired for CSM an entire networking technology lab through donors in the computer industry.
Black developed CSM’s library of art images and later led its digitization. When she arrived on campus in 1988, students learned art history via slides projected in lectures or illustrations in books.
“I was a stickler for good images,” Black said. “You need thousands of slides. You need more than what’s in the textbook. Fortunately, the College was supportive of projects.”
Black was the first in the District to offer all the art history courses online, making them available for all students to complete general education requirements for graduation.
By the time she retired in 2019, she could tap a wealth of digital resources that show students artworks virtually and in detail from their home devices, such as Smart History, which gives a flyover view of ancient Rome.
Smith and her colleagues helped design CSM Nursing’s facilities in the LEED-certified Health and Wellness Building that opened in 2010, giving the department its first dedicated space since the move to College Heights nearly 50 years earlier. The new facilities greatly improve the student experience by putting nursing labs, lecture halls and faculty offices under one roof.
“When I started, our labs were in Building 21 down the hill,” Smith said. “It was really old and falling apart. Our hospital beds were in the classrooms there, and we’d have to move them out into the hallways for testing.” Because nursing lectures are scheduled around clinical rotations and thus held at different intervals than other academic subjects, Smith and colleagues scrambled to schedule lectures wherever there was space on campus.
“In the new building, they built us a beautiful lecture hall,” she said. “We finally had control over our lecture times. We had private offices. You didn’t have to have painful conversations with a student while an officemate was in the room.”
In the 1990s, Smith also helped institute competence-based testing in CSM nursing education. Rather than simply undergo a teacher’s evaluation of their skills, future nurses now learn more thoroughly by watching videotapes of their own performance and critiquing them with faculty and lab partners.
“For example, I have students interview a mother with a baby,” Smith said. “They learn how to take a medical history. Then we look at the video together. I might say, ‘Look at how she’s closing her arms across her chest... The mother is not comfortable.’”
“It’s wonderful because we have new simulation and video rooms that bring the experience much closer to what students will find in a real-life setting. That’s important because they have to learn things like bathing and transferring patients using lab partners as subjects, and that can be intimidating at first.”
Michael Claire is the last of the five people pictured to remain with the College District. As dean of CSM’s technology division, he supervised new career and technical education programs including digital media, network cabling, instrumentation and process control systems, a paramedic apprenticeship program and a full POST-certified police academy. As CSM’s president, he oversaw more than $350 million in construction and renovation projects, including the Health and Wellness Building and the dramatic new Student Center, Building 10. Claire announced he will retire at the end of the 2022-23 school year.
Claire is especially proud that CSM was identified as an Aspen Institute Top 150 community college under his leadership. He credits the people and the special environment they have created at CSM for that honor.
To Claire, the “now” and “then” pictures remind him of a quote heard within the context of parenting: “The days are long but the years are short.”
“I can certainly say that about my time at CSM,” Claire said. “It’s true: the years have been short and my advice is to enjoy the entire experience, even when the days get ‘long.’ I enjoyed every minute of my time at the College and I loved the people that I worked with.”
“CSM is such a special place and the College will always be a part of me. I will be forever grateful to our amazing students and to the wonderful colleagues that I have known over the years. It has been the honor of my professional life to have served as the president—it’s the best job that I have ever had.”
