Steve Maradian

Steve Maradian, a longtime higher education administrator currently serving as vice president for government relations at the American University of Armenia, has been named president of Los Angeles City College. Maradian, 54, will be the first permanent president of the two-year campus in East Hollywood since 2003. Interim President Doris Givens, who served two years, will be the interim president at West Los Angeles College.

When Steve Maradian got the call that the American University of Armenia was seeking a new vice president, he knew it would be a job unlike any other in his more than 20 years in higher education. The university had opened the same day that Armenia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, three years after a devastating earthquake killed 25,000 Armenians. When Maradian was hired in late 2002, he found a country still rebuilding and still dealing with the old socialist mentality.

When Steve Maradian got the call that the American University of Armenia was seeking a new vice president, he knew it would be a job unlike any other in his more than 20 years in higher education. The university had opened the same day that Armenia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, three years after a devastating earthquake killed 25,000 Armenians. When Maradian was hired in late 2002, he found a country still rebuilding and still dealing with the old socialist mentality.

Steve Maradian, a longtime higher education administrator currently serving as vice president for government relations at the American University of Armenia, has been named president of Los Angeles City College. Maradian, 54, will be the first permanent president of the two-year campus in East Hollywood since 2003. Interim President Doris Givens, who served two years, will be the interim president at West Los Angeles College.

Santa Monica College has announced that it has narrowed its choice for a president to four people, including current Vice President Rocky Young. All will be interviewed by the college's board of trustees and will meet with the public and college employees later this month. The four finalists are Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Aid to Education in New York City; Steve Maradian, president of Lamar University-Orange in Orange, Tex.; Piedad F.

Players representing one of the most successful community college men's basketball programs in California took issue this week with a pregame speech from their school president, contending in a strongly worded letter faxed to The Times that it "reeked with the stench of blatant racism."

The championship banners dating to the 1940s were already removed for safekeeping, the glass backboards already torn down. Still, the Los Angeles City College men's basketball team gathered recently for one last practice in the school's Art Deco gym. Before the fall semester begins, the gym, built in 1935 and home to one of the most successful community college basketball programs in the state, will be demolished to make way for a library.