Sometimes, a business columnist needs more than facts and figures; this month, your Napa Insider is moved to call on literature to help make sense of a loss that stunned the Napa Valley College community on September 22. That’s when college president John Christopher “Chris” McCarthy, who’d led NVC since 2002, was found dead in his apartment after staffers learned he hadn’t arrived at an out-of-town conference. Chris loved poetry; this is for him.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” wrote 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop, in a villanelle titled “One Art.” With a series of deceptively simple lines, Bishop builds her poem from everyday losses—door keys, a watch—to a powerful conclusion: “Even losing you…I shan’t have lied. It’s evident/the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (write it!) like disaster.”
“Write it!” Those words keep echoing in my mind as I grapple with this loss. Just 56 years old at the time of his death—which authorities say occurred September 19 and appears to have been from natural causes—Chris McCarthy was a gifted and popular administrator, a talented musician and writer and a generous soul who, with his wife Carol, rescued German Shepherds and fostered the dogs at their family home in Southern California.
A former English professor, Chris was known and loved for his support of the arts—he never missed an opening night at the college theater or a concert by one of NVC’s musical groups, and he was a regular and enthusiastic participant in the annual Napa Valley Writers Conference. But he was also instrumental in crafting statewide policy on vocational and technical education at the community college level. His key position as chair of the state Economic Development Planning and Advisory Committee—a group of about 20 educators and businesspeople who advise California Community College Chancellor Jack Scott—provided him with a first-hand look at the latest emerging technologies and the jobs that come with them. “It’s given me a better view of the kinds of careers that are evolving, and how we can get ahead of the game in training people,” he told me this summer, in what would be our last interview, for an article in this magazine about emerging green-focused college tech programs in the North Bay [“Education Innovation,” Oct. 2009].
Chris was also my friend. He once got then-U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins to autograph a book to me, and I still read it often. A couple of Tuesdays a month, he’d drop by the Oxbow Public Market for the oyster happy hour, and we’d chat about music; he took me to lunch at Angele just weeks before he died. But first, he was just another part of my beat: When he was hired as college president in late 2001, I was the education reporter for the daily Napa Valley Register, a job that included keeping tabs on NVC.
I still recall his appearance at a college forum when he was one of two finalists for the top job. As he spoke to the crowd—which had already been wowed by his rival, a mathematician and community-college administrator from Seattle—I could feel his listeners becoming engaged with him in a way they hadn’t with the other candidate. He quoted poetry—not by much-anthologized writers like Bishop, but by an obscure, part-time college instructor—and wore his love of teaching, and of community college education, very much on his sleeve. “He has vision, thank God!” one teacher whispered to another.
Once hired, Chris left his position as executive vice president of instructional services at Glendale Community College, which was roughly three times the size of NVC. “I want to work at a place where you can call people by their first names…where you can really make a difference,” he told me in our first interview more than eight years ago. And he went straight to business: Less than a year after he took president’s chair, the college won its first facilities-bond ballot measure since the 1960s. Nearly 61 percent of county voters agreed to tax their properties to raise more than $133 million in bond funds for improvements to the JFK-era campus, including a new science building, library and performing arts center and 21st century, energy-efficient heating, cooling and solar energy facilities.
A follow-up bond measure failed in 2008, largely because of a disinformation campaign by opponents who claimed the college—and particularly, its president—had mismanaged funds from the earlier measure. That assertion was baseless: Bond foes offered no evidence to back up their claims. The damage was done, but Chris didn’t have time to dwell on the falsehoods; he was too busy helping to guide the college through the deepening state budget crisis, even volunteering for a 5 percent reduction in his pay and benefits “as the first cut the college makes,” he told me early this year. “I just think it’s important that the president goes first.”
We all thought we’d have him with us for many years to come. But though this loss may look “like disaster,” as Bishop put it, Chris McCarthy has left the North Bay with a college that’s better prepared than ever to meet the needs of both students and employers in the 21st century. Plans are underway to name the new library building in his honor—an appropriate tribute to the man who did more to transform Napa Valley College than anyone since its founding president, Harry McPherson. And like the original, beloved “Dr. Mac,” he will be missed for years to come.
Amplification
Sometimes a single letter can change the meaning of a sentence. Allow me to share a note from Marc Lhormer, co-producer of the film “Bottle Shock,” which I mentioned in a Napa Insider column about Lhormer’s plan to start a major film festival in the Napa Valley: “Great story…thanks for doing that. One thing I noticed right at the beginning…a typo where you were saying a “fictional” version of the story…but it was printed as “factional”…which isn’t exactly the same thing! It’s actually kind of funny given that there really are factions, like the Mike Grgich faction and the Jim/Bo Barrett faction, etc. Is this something that one addresses, or do you just let is slide??” Consider it addressed, Marc—though I think you meant “let it slide.”
And with that, I wish you all the happiest of holidays and the most prosperous of new years.
