By Bob Hicks

At Oregon Music News, Dot Rust has been shouting an alarm over what she considers an administration/board attempt to shut down or severely curtail the internationally lauded music program at Mt. Hood Community College. She’s written two long posts about it (the one above is the second, and links to the first), and her assertions, if accurate, are worth raising an alarm about. You can lose yourself inside this thing, following the comment threads and considering the many implications of hobbling what has been for decades probably the college’s cover-image program.

Chris Botti, Michele Mariana, Gary Hobbs, Patrick Lamb, Marilyn Keller, Phil Baker, Jeff Uusitalo, Lindsay Wagner, Sandin Wilson — the list of people who’ve gone through the MHCC program and made their marks locally and internationally in jazz, classical and pop circles goes on and on. Further, the MHCC program has attracted a lot of talent to the Portland area that otherwise probably would have landed elsewhere. So it’s a fair question: What’s up? And why kill the golden goose?

Rust is herself a product of the MHCC music program, and teaches there, so she has a dog in this fight. Doesn’t mean the fight’s not real. Flip on over to Oregon Music News and see what’s up.