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  • Educator Makes Local 'Armenian Connection'

    PROFILE STEVE MARADIAN
    Educator Makes Local 'Armenian Connection'

    The new head of L.A. City College spent three years helping steer a
    university in Armenia. His new campus is highly diverse.

    By Andrew Wang, Times Staff Writer


    When Steve Maradian got the call that the American University of
    Armenia was seeking a new vice president, he knew it would be a job
    unlike any other in his more than 20 years in higher education.

    The university had opened the same day that Armenia gained independence
    from the Soviet Union in 1991, three years after a devastating
    earthquake killed 25,000 Armenians. When Maradian was hired in late
    2002, he found a country still rebuilding and still dealing with the
    old socialist mentality.

    "In the Soviet culture, you just didn't do anything," he said. "If
    you did something, you might put yourself out of a job."

    Even so, he had leaped at the chance to go for the first time to the
    land of his grandparents' birth to help the school grow in the mold
    of American universities.

    "It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said Maradian, who has
    spoken Armenian since childhood. "I mean, when do you get to go to
    your motherland and make a difference?"

    Now the longtime higher-education administrator will shift his
    attention from Armenia to a campus in east Hollywood's Little Armenia:
    Los Angeles City College.

    Last month, Maradian, 54, was named president of the college, one
    of nine in the Los Angeles Community College District. He takes over
    from Doris Givens, the interim president of the 16,000-student campus
    for the last two years.

    That the college on Vermont Avenue sits in a sizable Armenian enclave
    is not lost on him.

    "The Armenian connection is important," he said, speaking energetically
    in an accent that reveals his Massachusetts roots. "It's important
    to me to keep that cultural connection - the language, the food,
    the religion."

    But Maradian is quick to point out that he will be the president for
    all students, not just those who share his ethnic heritage.

    The campus enrolls a diverse student body, including many from
    immigrant families. Only about 47% of the students list English as
    their family's primary language. Eleven percent speak Armenian at home,
    22% Spanish and the others a variety of languages, including Korean,
    Chinese, Russian, Japanese and Tagalog.

    Maradian said he planned to apply to his new job the lessons learned
    during tenures as president of colleges and institutes in Texas,
    Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio, as well as his three-year stint in
    Armenia.

    Community colleges, he said, "are really about rebuilding communities
    and people."

    They play a vital role, he said, in training people to perform jobs
    that sustain a community, such as nursing, and provide training for
    local entrepreneurs and workers in local industry. Also, the two-year
    campuses are many students' avenues for transferring to institutions
    where they can earn bachelor's degrees.

    "When a student comes out and succeeds, the community is the
    beneficiary," Maradian said. "I know of no society that can succeed
    without people with skills and talents. It's our job to facilitate
    that."

    As important as day-to-day college administration, he said, will be
    his external role: promoting the school and bringing in funding.

    The president, he said, needs to work with the community "so they
    know what we're doing and so they know where the needs are, so we
    can continue to get support ... to say, 'This is what we're doing,
    and this is why it's important.' "

    In Armenia, where he served as the university's vice president of
    government relations, he negotiated funding from American Schools and
    Hospitals Abroad, an office within the U.S. Agency for International
    Development.

    The money was spent in part on a new wing for the campus business
    center and will be used as well to renovate a Soviet-era hotel as
    a residence for faculty and students. Maradian said he also headed
    efforts to raise funds from various private donors.

    Sylvia Scott-Hayes, president of the L.A. college district's board
    of trustees, said Maradian was the most qualified of the candidates
    interviewed.

    "He displayed a very clear understanding of our student population
    and their needs," she said. "There's a presence about him that the
    students will be able to connect with. He's got a nice style about
    him that's very open."

    That Maradian is an Armenian American coming to head a college in a
    neighborhood with a strong Armenian presence is an unexpected bonus,
    Scott-Hayes added. "He brings a different perspective, and we were
    excited about that," she said. "It kind of takes our diversity to a
    different level."

    Maryanne DesVignes, director of the college's learning skills
    department and liaison between the Academic Senate and the
    administration, said many in the faculty welcomed having a president
    without the "interim" tag, especially as the college enters a period
    of construction.

    "These next couple of years are going to be challenging at best,"
    she said.

    Maradian comes to a district in the throes of a $2.2-billion
    reconstruction effort, in which 455 existing buildings are to be
    renovated and 44 new buildings constructed over the next 10 years.

    City College was allotted $248 million for numerous campus
    improvements, the renovation of eight buildings and the construction
    of six buildings, including a new child-care center, a new science and
    technology building, a new physical education center and a facility
    that will house an athletic field and a parking structure, said Larry
    Eisenberg, the district's executive director for facilities planning
    and development.

    City College's enrollment, a number that is important for state
    funding, dropped to a little more than 16,000 last fall, down from
    18,372 two years earlier and well short of the nearly 24,000 figure
    of 1975.

    Maradian said construction was necessary. The college, he said,
    "in my judgment cannot absorb many more students without the campus
    being developed." But, he added, the school must show the public that
    it has done a good job in building.

    Last year, school officials paved the football field to use as a
    parking lot. The college has drawn accusations of mismanagement from
    city officials, the local community and alumni over that action and
    for leasing 4.3 acres elsewhere on campus, at $120,000 a year, for
    a private golf driving range.

    Maradian said he needed to study enrollment issues more before
    determining a course of action. "I have to look at what's the maximum
    capacity and what the campus can support," he said. "Bigger is not
    always better. Quality is more important."

    He also said it was too early to form specific policies on many other
    campus issues, and he plans to spend his first days there getting
    familiar with them.

    As many community college students are, Maradian said, he and his
    siblings were the first generation of his family to go to college.
    Also, he's a community-college parent: One of his sons attended one
    in Georgia.

    As for what drives him to work in community colleges, he said the
    answer was simple: He loves being an educator.

    "I just felt that it was a calling," Maradian said. "There's nothing
    more satisfying than seeing a student succeed."

    *

    (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

    Presidential facts

    Maradian holds a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in
    education from Northeastern University in Boston. He has a master's in
    business administration from Wheeling Jesuit College in West Virginia
    and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts,
    with focuses on higher education leadership and future studies.

    ~U Before working at the American University of Armenia, Maradian was
    director of federal relations for the University System of Georgia;
    president of Middle Georgia College; executive director of the
    Regional Maritime Technology Center and the Simulation Based Design
    Center at the University of New Orleans; president of Lamar State
    College-Orange in Orange, Texas; and president of Belmont Technical
    College in St. Clairsville, Ohio.

    ~U He's an avid jogger - "I am in my 15th year without missing
    a single day," he said - who last year finished the Marine Corps
    Marathon in Washington, D.C., in 4:48:21.

    ~U Maradian is a single father of two sons - Ross, 27, and Adam,
    26 - both of whom live in Washington, D.C.

    ~U He speaks Western Armenian, a dialect spoken in parts of Turkey
    and in many Armenian communities in Europe and North America.
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