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About Me
“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.” Thoreau, WaldenPeople keep going to my LinkedIn page to find out more about me it seems. This is a better source. I never met my dad. I was raised by my great aunt and uncle. My mom didn’t graduate high school—though she had beautiful penmanship her whole life. I grew up as an only child. I grew up in Santa Clara from 2nd grade to community college.
I liked high school at first… but got bored… and then alienated at its apparent preoccupation with keeping kids off the street. I took community college classes in my junior year so that I could escape high school early, but I had no intention of continuing to go to school. Only after frittering away most of the year after high school did I decide to try school again, and to my great surprise, it finally clicked that education could be interesting if the instructor loved their subject and was not preoccupied with policing adolescents. I completed AA requirements at West Valley College in Saratoga, California; I finished my BA at UC Santa Cruz in History and Religious Studies in 1978, and I finished my Ph.D. at UCSC in history of consciousness (History and Politics) in 1989. History of consciousness is an interdisciplinary graduate program for students whose interests overlap multiple academic fields. My own personal interests focus on the shaping effect of religious values and political theory on cultural and intellectual history.
After finished graduate school, I served as Academic Preceptor and lecturer in Stevenson College at UC Santa Cruz from 1991 through 1997. An “academic preceptor” is a general academic advisor. Because my long-term goal was full time community college, teaching, during that same period I also taught at Diablo Valley College (the San Ramon Center), West Valley College, and Cabrillo College. I took a full-time teaching position in Humanities at Riverside City College, where I taught from 1998 through 2016. At RCC, I taught classes in Arts & Ideas (European & American), World Religions, Religion in America, and Death. I also taught World History, Introduction to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, Ethics, and American Government, usually when sickness created a sudden faculty vacancy. I have lived in a house overlooking the Monterey Bay and in the Santa Cruz and San Bernardino mountains. I now live in Santa Maria .
I left RCC in 2016 to be a Dean of Academic Affairs at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria—a big step back toward the coast and the north. I also continued to teach evening and online classes. If one includes the work of teaching assistants, I have been teaching for 39 years; if not, it’s only 30 years. I love teaching. I have been married for 25+ years. My goddaughter tossed a coin at the altar when my wife and I were married, and the bride called heads; she won the coin toss with the consequence that I took her last name and became a Mahon. We have four kids—Nathaniel, Joby, Faith & Blaise—all in their twenties. Our non-human companions have included dogs (currently Rocco), cats (currently Charles), birds, bunnies, and fish—our longest lived non-human family member, Spaz (a goldfish), came home in a Ziplock bag from a 4th of July parade over a decade ago.
As a native Northern Californian, I have never fully adjusted to life in southern California. I miss (real, torrential) rain in winter (though in Crestline I got snow). On the other hand, the California I grew up in is gone. I remember Silicon Valley when orchards were still plentiful and Santa Cruz when little houses not close to the beach didn’t cost a million dollars. My Professional Background I taught Humanities as a member of the department of History, Humanities, Philosophy & Ethnic Studies at Riverside City College; I also taught at the Moreno Valley College and Norco College campuses. I am also credentialed to teach history, philosophy, and political science at the community college level and taught each subject at RCC. I taught history and Philosophy courses at Allan Hancock. I served as president of the Riverside City College Academic Senate for four years and chair of the RCC Curriculum Committee for six, as well as a host of other committees. I chaired the ad hoc RCC Academic Senate committee that created RCC's Honors Program (inspired in part by my experience teaching in the honors program at West Valley and by a visit to Mt. SAC). I am a past member of the RCC/CTA Executive Board and a past president of the RCCD Faculty Association. From 2006 through 2011, I served on the Executive Committee of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. I served on several committees, including Articulation & Transfer, Basic Skills, Counseling & Library Faculty Issues, Curriculum, Educational Policies, Noncredit, and Relations with Local Senates.
I served as a Governor-at-Large on the Faculty Association for California Community Colleges (FACCC) from 2012-14 and I have served on the FACCC policy committee since 2011. I served as an academic Commissioner on the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) from 2012-2018 and have served on the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Senior College and University Commission (“WASC Senior”) since 2018. Why would anybody who loves teaching want to spend so much time outside the classroom going to meetings? It has always seemed to me that I could be more effective in the classroom if more were done to coordinate and provide services to students outside the classroom. Most students work too many hours to invest the time necessary to realize their potential in their classes. If only “the college” could help students understand how successful college students are different from high school students, my experience in my classroom would be better. Course Syllabi Here are syllabi for most of the courses I’ve taught. Though none of my courses is set in stone, I tend not to completely restructure classes. The syllabi for World Religions & Arts & Ideas: American Culture are the most current.
The following courses are ones I taught infrequently or elsewhere.
Personal Loves
Books I would take with me to a desert island: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; the Tao Te Ching and a Bible; Plato and Shakespeare; collected works of Nathaniel Hawthorne & Thoreau’s Walden; a stack of John McPhee books… can you get a New Yorker subscription on a desert island? What I wish I'd read: somehow, I've never read all of Dante's Divine Comedy. I'm still fairly ignorant about most medieval literature. I’ve never been able to make progress in Moby Dick though I love Melville’s short stories, especially Bartleby. I'd love to have the time to read Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (though I’ve taught The Crying of Lot 49 several times). Music I would take with me to a desert island: Bruce Cockburn, Bob Dylan; the Grateful Dead; Stevie Wonder; Stravinsky's ballets & Haydn symphonies; some Thelonious Monk & some Eberhard Weber… Joni Mitchell & Leonard Cohen; Greg Brown & Michael Smith (Michael Peter Smith, not the pop Michael Smith). My favorite music discoveries of the last ten years: Anouar Brahem & the Decemberists.
Movies: I often use film clips in class to illustrate ideas from course readings. You might want to look at the linked page "about Movies." I use clips from the Joy Luck Club in various courses. Among my favorite films are almost anything by Alfred Hitchcock or Éric Rohmer; also Kundun, Once Upon a Time in America, Lacombe Lucien, and Krzysztof Kieslowski's "three colors trilogy" quite a bit (White, Blue, Red, the colors chosen from the colors of the French flag and representing the qualities of liberty (White) equality (Blue) and fraternity (Red)—and also Kieslowski's Dekalog if you can find it—it's a series of 10 one hours dramas made for Polish television loosely based on each of the Ten Commandments and makes an interesting commentary on ethics and modern life. Though not for everyone, I really like Ron Fricke’s non-narrative films Baraka, Chronos, and Samsara. Though the book is much better (as always) I quite like both the book and film of Cloud Atlas.
Places: I’ve had the good luck to live some very beautiful places. I was born in San Francisco, with all its current woes, still a very beautiful city—though I have no memories of living there. The UC Santa Cruz campus is as striking for its architecture as for the seamless integration of the built and the natural environments. The year before I started grad school, I lived on a cliff overlooking the cement boat and the Monterey Bay. I lived in the second growth redwood forest in Scotts Valley and Ben Lomond while in grad school. I lived in Crestline for almost twenty years and never minded the 45-minute drive it took to get to campus or back home. I didn’t even mind it when snow meant that my wife told me not to bother trying to come home after a night class.
I also have had the great luck to teach at Deep Springs College three times (1990, 2009, 2012). Deep Springs is an entirely residential college (not just for students but for staff and faculty as well) in an otherwise unpopulated eastern California desert valley the size of Manhattan.
Other beautiful places I’ve had the luck to visit: the Columbia River Gorge, the Grand Canyon, Titus Canyon in Death Valley, Waimea Canyon in Kauai, Mt. Haleakala in Maui. Barcelona, Naples, Rome, Paris. I also really like Portland (Seattle, not so much), Montréal, Boston, and Manhattan.
Comments & Suggestions: Feel free to send them at the email address above.
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