CHICAGO
The meeting of the City Colleges of Chicago board here
earlier this month was full of all the pleasantries and light banter of
a typical business meeting.
But while he sat in a room amid his staff, colleagues, and the
board that handpicked him, Dr. Ronald J. Temple, the college’s
chancellor, could not have been more alone.
Temple, the fifty-six-year-old educator who returned to his
hometown four and one-half years ago to a hero’s welcome, had his
career put in a tailspin two days before Christmas when the same board,
in the same room, voted not to renew his contract, which expires in
June 2000.
A board member said soon after the meeting that the system’s
attorneys were discussing a quiet settlement that would end Temple’s
stay as chancellor by the end of the school year.
Just twelve months earlier, Temple had gotten the ultimate
compliment an employee can receive from his bosses — he not only was
awarded his $165,000 salary, fattened even more by a Cost of living
increase, but he also received a $50,000 bonus financed by Chicago’s
business community.
The board’s action — making Temple the third City Colleges
chancellor in a decade to be shown the door — highlights the
complicated demands facing the chancellor of a city college system, as
well as the impatience officials increasingly feel with the problems
plaguing them.
