Hundreds salute Frank Chong on eve of his retirement as Santa Rosa Junior College president

Nearly 500 business, academic, cultural, and political luminaries gathered Thursday to send off Frank Chong, president of Santa Rosa Junior College, who is retiring in July after 11 years at the college’s helm.

The event, billed as the President’s Address and Celebration, took place around the same time of the year that Chong — and his predecessors leading SJRC — would traditionally review the state of the college and preview its future.

But Thursday’s event was all about saluting Chong, 66, the college’s fifth president since its founding in 1918.

“He's been an incredible inspiration, bringing new energy, new passion and a real focus on reentry for students as well as those in the community who have been not part of the college,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin as people mingled before a catered dinner.

“He's been incredibly welcoming and ensuring that we have folks knowing that they can enter the junior college, graduate from the junior college, and finding the resources so they can do that,” said Gorin, herself an SRJC graduate.

The warm tribute to Chong’s tenure, which started in 2012 while the college was still reeling financially from the Great Recession, was grounded in a crowd-pleasing video that traced Chong’s life from a modest start as the son of immigrants in New York City’s Chinatown, through his time as a social worker, and as an aide to legendary California politician Willie Brown. He then served as president of Laney College in Oakland, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Community Colleges under President Barack Obama before he became the first nonwhite president in SRJC’s history.

The 20-minute video highlighted successes, including a $410 million bond measure that passed under his leadership in 2014, the development of a 352-bed student housing building, his support for students and faculty in the wake of the 2017 wildfires in Sonoma County, and a $2.6 million initiative to boost the number of Latinos receiving associate’s degrees and transferring to a four-year university.

Chong shared some light remarks. He thanked a host of family, friends, mentors, former employers and supporters, including former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, who was in the audience at the college’s Warren G. Dutton Jr. Agricultural Pavilion, at Shone Farm in Forestville.

Chong wore a lei of purple and white flowers over a blue suit, joked -- to uproarious laughter and applause -- that his “Asian brothers and sisters in the room have doubled the size of the Asian population in Sonoma County tonight,” and emphatically saluted both his staff and the student leaders in the room.

Then, bringing his comments to a close, Chong paraphrased the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, saying: “It goes something like this: ‘Ask where man’s greatness begins and ends, and tell them that I had such friends.’”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay