Student Groups File FPPC Complaint against LBUSD Board Candidate, CSULB, and Professor

8 minute read
Long Beach Unified School District Board of Education, District 3 Candidate Juan Benitez
Long Beach Unified School District Board of Education, District 3 Candidate Juan Benitez

Two student groups have filed a complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) alleging that a professor at Cal State Long Beach assigned students to phone bank for another faculty member, Juan Benitez, who is running for a seat on the Long Beach Unified School District Board of Education.

The allegations stem from an assignment made by Rigoberto Rodriguez for a class he taught last semester called “Latina/o Populations in the U.S.” The assignment directed students to “join the school board campaign efforts of the Teachers Association of Long Beach.”

TALB—a union representing teachers and other school staff in the LBUSD—voted to endorse Benitez in October and since then has been campaigning exclusively for him in the race. 

The assignment was due just over two weeks before the primary election for the board’s District 3 seat took place, which had two other candidates on the ballot, Eduardo Lara and Cesar Armendariz.

Benitez would go on to win the election on April 10 with 46 percent of the vote. However, since none of the candidates surpassed the 50 percent threshold, Benitez will face Armendariz—who received a third of the primary vote—in a runoff election Tuesday.

According to a rubric given to the class, the assignment was a way for students to make up the class’s service learning requirement for those who had not yet fulfilled it. The assignment required students to spend eight hours at the TALB offices phone banking for Benitez and would count toward 20 percent of their grade.

The rubric itself does not mention the names of any of the candidates in the education board race.

One point of contention the students bring up in the FPPC complaint is that all assignments involving service learning work—such as the one in question—are coordinated by the university’s Center for Community Engagement, which is headed by Benitez, according to the school’s website.

In their unsworn complaint, the student organizations asked the agency to investigate what role, if any, Benitez played in assigning students in Rodriguez’s class to phone bank for his own campaign.

At the time of publication, the university’s Public Affairs Department had not yet divulged how much Benitez’s role at the university intersected with this specific assignment, a question we posed to them on May 25.

FPPC Communications Director Jay Wierenga confirmed that they received the student’s complaint filed on May 21 and said it could take up to two weeks for the agency—which investigates political campaign malpractice in the state—to decide if it will open a probe into the matter. Though the agency is cognizant of election dates, the duration of an investigation depends on the complexity of the case, he said.

The complaint was filed by Nathan Carbajal—a CSULB student who was not in Rodriguez’s class—on behalf of La Raza Student Association and the Young Democratic Socialists of America.

It was another student-member from La Raza who submitted the original grievance to the university after she attempted to complete Rodriguez’s assignment and found it “disturbing” that he never mentioned any of the candidates in the education board race except for Benitez.

“I am bothered that a professor discretely managed to use his authority to promote a specific political agenda,” the student wrote to the university’s Dean of Students Piya Bose.

The student chose not to comment for this story, citing a fear of reprisal.

Rodriguez and Benitez appear to have a close working relationship at the university. The Daily 49er in 2011 reported that the pair were in charge of the university’s Community Scholars Program and both are currently faculty members in the school’s Chicano and Latino Studies Department.

Rodriguez has also liked several posts made by Benitez’s campaign Facebook page.

FORTHE Media attempted to contact Rodriguez via email, asking, among other questions, how he would characterize his relationship with Benitez, but he did not respond. Two phone calls also went unreturned.

Rodriguez, an associate professor of Chicano and Latino Studies, is also a Santa Ana Unified School District board member.

We also reached out to Benitez’s campaign for comment and on Saturday, they issued a statement to us saying that the FPPC had not yet notified them about a complaint filed against Benitez.

“We cannot comment about an alleged complaint until we have seen it,” the statement said.

After we sent the campaign a copy of a letter from the FPPC dated May 23 notifying the Benitez campaign that a complaint had been lodged against them—and which contained the original complaint—they did not respond to follow-up questions.

Tomisin Oluwole
Fragmented Reflection I, 2021
Acrylic on canvas panel
24 x 30 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

Benitez has taught at CSULB for 22 years.

The complaint goes on to allege that Rodriguez violated a law barring state employees from using public resources for campaign activity and that the university violated the state education code mandating that public universities remain neutral in regard to political campaigns.

For its part, the university said it was aware of the complaint and that an investigation had been conducted by its Academic Affairs Department.

“We’ve looked into it and haven’t found any wrongdoing as it relates to these allegations,” said CSULB Associate Vice President of Public Affairs Terri Carbaugh.

When asked if any disciplinary action was taken by the university in this case, she said she couldn’t comment on the specifics of personnel-related investigations.

“We take such allegations seriously. The campus has policies and procedures in place governing the use of state resources and community service learning,” Carbaugh said in a statement later emailed to FORTHE Media.

Carbajal said a number of students completed the assignment by phone banking for Benitez’s campaign but could not provide an exact count.

The complaint also accuses Benitez of violating a state campaign fairness law that requires a candidate who “receives contributions from a state or local government agency” to “report receipt of those contributions,” including the salary of a state employee engaging in partisan campaign activities.

A review by FORTHE Media of Benitez’s campaign finance disclosures from 2018 did not show that any such public contribution was reported.

The disclosure documents do report in-kind donations related to phone banking by TALB.

The Executive Director of TALB, Chris Callopy, said student volunteers are a typical part of the union’s campaigning operation.

“When we get volunteers here we don’t ask where they’re from, we’re just happy to get them,” he said.

Callopy said that all of the candidates throughout the race have used students from a variety of schools as volunteers, including Benitez’s runoff opponent Armendariz.

However, the allegations in the complaint aren’t that the assignment contained campaign work, but that it’s design was inherently partisan.

When asked if any of the students campaigning for Benitez during the time in question voiced anything like the allegations contained in the complaint, he said he did not remember any who did.

“I don’t have any knowledge of anyone forcing anyone to do anything as a volunteer,” he said.

Benitez’s opponent in the upcoming runoff, Armendariz, explained that he’s had former students volunteer for his campaign but never any of his current students. 

“Oh my god, no. I am shocked. That is something I would never do,” the high school teacher said when asked if his campaign had engaged in practices like those alleged in the complaint.

It’s important to note that Benitez is not accused of employing his own students as campaign volunteers, but that the assignment given to the students in Rodriguez’s class was under the purview and was likely coordinated through a university department headed by Benitez.

Still, Carbajal and the student groups behind the complaint feel that if Benitez had a hand in pushing the assignment, it could be considered undue influence in the outcome of the primary election, which would have implications outside of campus.

Carbajal said: “This behavior could affect the community as a whole, seeing as it’s a school board election.”

Contact The Author

[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition