Before the questions start, Dr. Eric Bishop nods at the recorder on the table. When student reporters from Viewpoints, the campus paper at Riverside City College, call to interview him, he tells them to do something most reporters learn only on the job. Start the recording, then ask permission. "Start the recording, and then ask me if you can record me. If I say no, you stop. If I say yes, you have it on record." He learned it teaching journalism. The president of the college still thinks like a newsman.
The habit is close to the center of how Bishop, whom the board voted on June 9 to make RCC's permanent president, effective July 1, after a year in the job on an interim basis, understands the work he now does. He trained as a journalist, believed early and seriously in the press as a voice for people who do not have one, and has carried that belief into an open-access institution built on a similar promise. He arrives at that conviction by way of a college that had run through presidents, and that tapped him to steady it on an interim basis, then kept him on after he spent a year proving he intended to stay.
He did not set out to lead anything. School came easily to Bishop until it didn't, and his first year and a half of college were rough, because school had been easy enough that he never built study habits. He was flailing, by his own account, and casting around. He had thought for a while about law, which is part of what drew him to a journalism class at the University of La Verne, where he would eventually earn all three of his degrees, a bachelor's in journalism in 1988, then a master's in communications and a doctorate in organizational leadership. "There was this belief in the fourth estate, in the checks and balances on government and big business, in being the voice for the voiceless. Protecting the citizenry, being their representative voice. That really resonated with me." He stayed, and he loved it. He came back to La Verne as a journalism professor and the adviser to its student paper.
He still carries the proof of what that training made of him. As a student columnist, Bishop wrote an opinion piece that angered a new campus president, and his own faculty adviser, loyal to that president, pressed him to publish a retraction. Bishop refused. He met with the president, told him the column was an opinion and that he stood by it, and would not take it back. "I said no. I stand by what I write, and what I wrote is an opinion piece. To stand up to the president like that was a really big deal. I refused. I am not writing a retraction." The president did not force the issue. "He understood the nature of the beast, and the nature of students. He understood that you can let a story die or you can make it bigger, and that certain moves give it more life than if you just let it go." The two later became friends. Bishop tells the story now without bravado, but it is plainly a moment he measures himself against.
That instinct turned out to be portable. There are days, Bishop says, when he thinks the journalism degree was the one he was always meant to have. "One of the things I carry from that is the need to see all sides, to think from everyone's perspective and keep that objectivity. I don't have to win. What's the right decision?" He describes a discipline that is reportorial. He will reconsider any decision on its merits, he says, and say plainly if he is keeping it anyway. What he will not do is shut someone down to protect his own authority. It is the student columnist's lesson, grown up and turned around.
He needed some version of it when he arrived. In 2020 he became the seventh president of Ohlone College in the Bay Area, its first Black president, hired entirely over video during the shutdown, before he returned to Southern California in 2022. Bishop walked out of the board meeting that confirmed him at RCC on the night of August 19, 2025, and started the next morning, the first day of faculty flex. "I was approved August 19th, and my first day was August 20th. I walked out of that board meeting saying, my interview starts tomorrow. And that morning I told myself, my interview starts today. Meaning I just need to come do the job, and do it the best I can." He came into a college that had asked, more than anything, for stability. The two presidents before him had each lasted about two years, and each left under pressure. Gregory Anderson was removed in 2022 after the district's faculty association voted no confidence in his leadership. His successor, Claire Oliveros, was terminated by a unanimous board vote in June 2025, with no public reason given.
"I can want to give stability, and I can try to give stability. But the previous two presidencies lasted two years. So until I cross that two-year threshold, there is no stability." The words people reached for to describe the place when he got there were not gentle ones. "Some of the words that were used when I got here were 'traumatized,' 'stability,' 'trust.'" So he spent his first months trying to be known. On his desk he keeps a short reminder he reads every morning. "There is a quote on my board that I look at every day. It says, 'Stay within yourself.' It is real easy to get egotistical and think you have done something, so I remind myself regularly."
The same discipline shows up in a smaller rule he gives the campus. If you see the president and he is not smiling, you are supposed to tell him so. "If I'm on campus and you see me and I'm not smiling, you have a responsibility to come tell me. I may get caught in my head. But I want people to know that I love what I do, and I love where I do it." He explains it as part psychology, part message. A president who looks like he would rather be elsewhere transmits exactly that, so he makes himself smile. "Once you do it, you cannot help but feel a certain way, because you are making yourself smile." The same idea, scaled up, is the initiative his chancellor singled out in naming him permanent president, what RCC calls its Standard of Care. Announcing the appointment, RCCD Chancellor Wolde-Ab Isaac called Bishop a driving force behind raising the standard of care at the college. Bishop's version is plain. "It's to ensure that every student belongs, and knows who they belong to. They know who their counselor is, who their educational advisor is, who their department chair is, so they don't slip through the cracks. Sometimes people just want to know if anyone actually sees that they're not here anymore." That is harder at a community college than at a university, he argues. A four-year campus screens its students in. An open-access college takes everyone, the full-time student and the person here for a single class, and cannot wait for them to ask for help. It has to reach them first.
Where that reach is going next is partly a matter of concrete and steel. RCC is spending the Measure CC bond, and Bishop is most animated about the Inland Empire Technical Trade Center planned for Jurupa Valley. "It is an opportunity for us to change economic narratives. We can work with our labor markets and create new ways to get our community into the workforce, cheaper and faster." He talks about meeting employers where they are, asking what skills they need so the training exists locally. He has made the center's earn-and-learn model central — paid apprenticeships meant to remove the tuition barriers that keep people out. When people say trade school, he wants the term claimed, not ducked. RCC trains for the trades and everything else, he argues, and the schools worth resisting are the for-profit ones that load students with debt to do what RCC does for the same $46 a unit. "I hate that definition, because I will argue that we are that, and we are everything. We can prepare you if you want to be a doctor. We can prepare you if you want to be a mechanic, a chef, a paralegal. You don't have to go to a school that's going to charge you and put you in debt." One of his guiding aims is simply to shorten the time. "You don't have to have a bachelor's to be a lawyer. So if we can do an associate's and get you into law school, you save two years of cost, and you add two years to your lifelong earnings. How do we remove the time and the hurdles it takes students to get there, so they can get there faster?"
He is wary, too, of the easy story about the Inland Empire economy. When the conversation turns to logistics, the warehouse-and-distribution engine that drove a decade of regional growth and has lately been shedding jobs, Bishop pushes back on the framing. "I don't know that it's declining. I think it's declining in people. We're still moving goods. It's the need for so many individuals to move them that's changing." What that demands of a community college, in his telling, is nimbleness: reading where the city is heading and building training for the jobs that are coming rather than the ones that are leaving. He frames it as a question of equity as much as economics — whether a fast-growing Riverside grows in a way that reaches everyone — and points to the hundreds of thousands of adults across the region who started college without finishing or never went at all. "If our job and our mission is economic mobility, pulling people out of poverty, then there is a lot of work, and a lot of opportunity to do it."
The UCR housing partnership is the same idea in another form. The first year of the arrangement, which for the first time opened a University of California campus's residence halls to community college students, is behind them now. The district holds about 326 of the complex's below-market beds, Bishop says, shared across RCC, Norco and Moreno Valley, and it placed 248 students there in the first year. He calls it a collaboration still finding its footing, two institutions on different academic calendars learning each other's rhythms, and he frames its low-income housing as something that can change a life, because a student who is not scrambling for a place to live can put that energy into a degree. "Because of its low-income requirement, it can be a game changer for someone who would otherwise be scrambling to find a place to live. The longer it takes someone to get there, the harder it gets. This gives access to a degree."
Running an open-access college also means leading an unusually wide crowd. Counting students alongside staff, Bishop notes, RCC spans something like five generations at once, from the last of the boomers through the youngest students now arriving, each with its own assumptions about how to work and how to learn. "That is a real interesting mix in how people approach the way they want to work, and the way they want to learn. The institutions that are most adaptable can look at that and understand it, instead of just getting frustrated with people." The better instinct, he says, is to understand the difference and meet it — the same adaptability the institution has to practice as the economy and the city shift underneath it.
If there is a single phrase that organizes how Bishop thinks about the college's place in the city, it is one he says more than once, almost word for word. RCC should be part of the community, not apart from it. "One of my models is that we are a part of the community, not apart from the community. We are a community member. We support the community. We are not an institution that just sits and takes up space." He means it geographically and pointedly. The college should not be the downtown college or the Wood Streets college but Riverside's college, present in all seven wards, seen and known on the east side and the north end and the west, not just inside what he calls the half-mile moat around the campus. "We need to be everywhere, so everyone recognizes we are their college. It doesn't matter the ward. We need to be in all seven." He has noticed, as a relative newcomer, how sharply Riverside draws its own internal lines. "There are clear lines and boundaries drawn in the city that separate the communities. You can feel it among the electeds. They draw their lines to their wards." He is careful to say he has not decided yet whether those divisions are a strength or a problem. "Riverside has so much development and growth ahead of it that it has a choice. It can be a bunch of enclaves, or it can be one city." The college, present everywhere, might be one of the things that helps it choose.
Ask him to write next year's headline about his own first year and he does not reach for a building or a budget. "A year from now, RCC will have transformed the perception of access to higher education." As the father of a 16-year-old, he has a parent's close view of high school, of his daughter and her friends and the pressures bearing down on that whole age, and it has sharpened how he thinks about who the system leaves behind. The path to a four-year university is unforgiving, he says, and a student who finds their footing a little later — who is simply living through the ordinary turbulence of being a teenager — can discover that on paper they are no longer admissible to a UC, through no failure of ability. That, he says, is where a community college earns its existence. "When you start here, you start at zero. It doesn't matter what you did in high school. It doesn't matter your history. You get to be judged on your work here, not on what you did when you were thirteen or fourteen." The dream is still available, because the place exists to keep it available.
It is, in the end, the same faith he found in a journalism class, that everyone deserves to be heard and accounted for, no one written off, turned now toward every student who walks through an open door. As the interview wound down, he said he does not much like to talk about himself. "I'm not someone who likes to talk about myself." He would rather talk about the college, and the city, and the work. "I want people to see us, and to see me. That is my mission. To have a thriving community here, and to be part of the thriving community we belong to." A community member, not a building that takes up space.
