Two Los Angeles Film Professors Bilked Taxpayers Over $3.5 Million Dollars

On May 14, 2023 ‘Everything we know about the Van Nuys/North Hollywood Los Angeles Valley College scandal’ hit the wire. This was followed on May 17, 2023 by ‘Van Nuys/Los Angeles College Screenwriting Professor Faked Writer’s Guild Membership’ proving Los Angeles Valley College Media Arts Department Chair Eric Swelstad had lied in his professional bio about being a member of the Writer’s Guild of America – West, for the past decade.

May 5, 2023 ‘Dozen LAVC Cinema Student Narratives challenges Erika Endrijonas’s LACCD Success story’ was published, documenting first hand from dozens of Media Arts students how their education had been negatively impacted enrolling in the Los Angeles Valley College Media Arts/Cinema programs.

But an over-all question remains what drove many of these situations?

At least some of the answer appears to be petty squabbles and infighting between community college faculty, who collected combined salaries of $3.5 million dollars during the period of 2012 – 2021 (as far back as Transparent California’s records go) on the taxpayers dime.

In 1997, recently retired Professor of Media Arts Arantxa Rodriguez also known as Arantzanzu Rodriguez, was hired as a full-time faculty member in the LAVC Media Arts Department. In 2001, Eric Swelstad, current chair of the LAVC Media Arts Department) was hired full-time.

Multiple documents – emails, court declarations, and official minutes of the Los Angeles Valley College Curriculum Committee meetings, suggest Rodriguez and Department Chair Eric Swelstad weaponized academic programs in a malicious manner hurting student graduation and completion, while the Los Angeles Valley College Administration and LACCD Board of Trustees did nothing.

On May 3, 2023 ‘Erika Endrijonas faces new questions in LACCD fraud’ hit the wire, including two student led complaints to the Accreditation Commission of Junior and Community Colleges filed in June 2016. In August 2016, Student 1 received an email from Joseph Dacursso replying to an email Student 1 sent venting that about the mismanagement of the Media Arts Department. The reason being then LAVC President Erika Endrijonas had submitted a reply to Accreditation blaming Dacursso for policies and curriculum in the Department. Dacursso’s baffled reply showed Dacursso was unaware of the accreditation complaint or a fact-finding mission, demonstrating that Endrijonas had lied to the Accreditation Commission and shamelessly submitted yet another fraudulent report.

In one part of his email, Dacursso however specifically confirmed that he had been at odds with Rodriguez and Eric Swelstad for most of the past ten years since stepping down as Department Chair.

START EMAIL

“Since stepping down as Chair by 2007, I have disagreed with several important decisions the Dept. and its Chairmen since have made...as I thought those decisions would eventually weaken our curricula programs (particularly our production course offerings). Though the senior-most member of my Dept., my admonitions, suggestions, and teaching philosophy were pretty-much ignored by my colleagues.”

END EMAIL

This also wasn’t the only instance of infighting in the Department.

In ‘Dozen LAVC Cinema Student Narratives challenges Erika Endirjonas’s LACCD Success Story’, both Student 1 and LAVC Media Arts Student Narrative 10 (April 25, 2016) specifically mention the visible infighting among the faculty.

START EMAIL

“I have been a student with LAVC for 4 years. I was majoring in Cinema and Media arts. I have kept a 4.0 GPA and was offered membership with Phi Theta Kappa honor society. I had to stop coming to LAVC for several reasons. It seemed that a year ago the school canceled the Sound Design class, a class I was hoping to take. I went to SIGGRAPH courtesy of and I was discussing my leaving with one of the teachers. She said she was the Dean who was responsible for cancelling the classes, due to the fact she felt it wasn't relevant. It appears the Cinema/Media department does not care for it's students anymore. That is why I have gone on to LACC. Their curriculum is vastly superior, and the petty squabbles are not as present.”

END EMAIL

Email to cc’d LAVC Academic Senate (April 17, 2016)

START EMAIL

“Now that the Fall 2016 Schedule is out and neither and are scheduled for Fall 2016 - the Department is suddenly able to schedule the same two classes on different nights that don't have a conflict!

There is more then enough documentation that the Department scheduling committee which has consisted of you and Prof Swelstad, scheduled these conflicts with these two particular teachers and now that the classes they taught last semester are being given to the new hire, there is now no scheduled conflicts.

Whatever personal problems that YOU and Prof Swelstad have with your co-workers HOW DARE YOU use the School Schedule in violation of the College's Accreditation agreement and interfere with students ability to finish and graduate!

Give back Photoshop class AND STOP using the schedule and curriculum to settle YOUR PERSONAL PROBLEMS with your co-workers.”

END EMAIL

In 2012, LAVC Media Arts Department founder Joseph Dacursso retired as a full-time faculty member, leaving Arantxa Rodriguez and Eric Swelstad as the only remaining full-time professors in the Media Arts Department. Additional classes were taught by a revolving door of half-a-dozen adjunct faculty members. Dacursso’s retirement also created a job opening, but budgetary approval to hire a new full-time faculty member was withheld until 2016.

Because of union seniority lists, an adjunct faculty member who had previously quit LAVC for a period of time before returning (again due to conflict with Rodriguez) was at the top of the Media Arts Adjunct Priority List. This adjunct had created and taught Photoshop, After Effects and other required classes in the Post-Production Degree.

In 2013, Los Angeles Valley College was the recipient of a multi-million dollar Deputy Sector Navigator Grant to specifically offer these classes. Despite this funding, the classes mentioned in the grant were almost never offered. A month after submitting the Deputy Sector Navigator Grant, the LAVC Academic Senate archived Media Arts 121: Advanced Digital Editing and Media Arts 132 ‘Business of Entertainment’ specifically mentioned in the Grant Application. The remaining classes Media Arts 104 Photoshop, Media Arts 103 After Effects, and Media Arts 110 Sound Design, were offered in one section, once a semester, once a school year for the next four years.

Between 2012 – 2016, the Media Arts Schedule of Classes had been repeatedly made up nearly every year pitting rarely offered, required classes against one another and assigning the same two adjunct faculty members to teach them. In 2015, Career Technical Education Dean Laurie Nalepa made a unilateral decision to stop offering Media Arts 110 – taught by the other faculty member who was ranked as the top adjunct in the Cinema priority lists. In Spring 2016, this situation finally resulted in the first Adjunct's After Effects class being cancelled due to splitting the enrollment between two required classes.

It also threw off multiple students graduation by years yet again.

At the same time Arantxa Rodriguez submitted curriculum changes to further eliminate the classes taught by the first Media Arts Adjunct Faculty member from the Post-Production Degree and replace them with two un-related theory classes that Rodriguez taught.

Both adjuncts faculty members had applied for the full-time faculty position, but in April 2016, Eric Swelstad and Arantzanzu Rodriguez informed a recent graduate that one of the adjuncts had been excluded from full-time position before interviews were even held.

Swelstad and Rodriguez had also not informed the adjunct his/her exclusion from the full-time job, while gaslighting him/her and dissuading him/her from teaching elsewhere.

Ultimately, the adjunct faculty member resigned from Los Angeles Valley College.

Also in 2016, the Broadcasting Faculty petitioned to separate from the Media Arts Department. The reason put forward by Broadcasting Faculty was they were unable to provide adequate training to students under the umbrella of the Media Arts Department and sought to rejoin the Communications Department.

The motion was approved by the Valley College Curriculum Committee and LAVC Academic Senate, but unilaterally vetoed by Erika Endrijonas in her trademark autocratic fashion.

A year later, Rodriguez was a special guest at the Valley College Curriculum Committee, where Rodriguez, Swelstad and Assistant Professor C. Sustin objected to creating new broadcasting classes to offer technical training for students at Los Angeles Valley College, due to a collegial agreement they’d forged too strangle offering Media arts Classes at LACCD Pierce and Mission Colleges in exchange for strangling Broadcasting Classes at LAVC. On the other side of the debate, Broadcasting Faculty Jason Beaton and Betty Ballew argued that the classes would be needed when the Valley Academic and Cultural Center opened. Full-time Broadcasting Professor Gail Nastasia ultimately resigned that year as well.

Only two years after Rodriguez submitted her curriculum changes, all Media Arts curriculum was re-written again by the Department’s Assistant Professor, to correct and change Rodriguez’s curriculum.

During this time Rodriguez and Swelstad collected combined salaries of $3.5 million dollars during the period of 2012 – 2021 for a department with few to no graduates. Meanwhile, multiple low-income students were unable to finish the academic programs they were deceived into enrolling in and exhausted their financial aid at Los Angeles Valley College.