BY HANK REICHMAN
At their spring meeting May 10, the 22 members of the Board of Governors of the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) took a unanimous vote of no confidence in the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. It was only the second such vote in the organization’s 66-year history, the last coming over twenty years ago. FACCC has issued the following statement:
The Faculty Association of California Community Colleges Board of Governors has lost confidence in the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. It came to this conclusion as a result of the office’s lack of transparency, disregard for shared governance, lack of prior consultation with faculty and other stakeholders on major initiatives, deficient oversight and fiscal accountability with the online college, and administration of a punitive funding formula that has created a system of winners and losers.
“The faculty have attempted to offer their input and expertise to the Chancellor’s Office, but efforts have been largely ignored,” stated FACCC President Adam Wetsman. “Rather than engage us early in policy conversations, faculty have been forced to react to an onslaught of initiatives that haven’t moved the needle for our students. This prescriptive approach has been to the detriment of our colleges, as we can see with the chaotic rollout of the funding formula and online college.”
FACCC shares the vision of increasing student success and equity, but we will never get there without a constructive partnership between faculty and the system office. This partnership does not exist today and the board has lost faith it will change under current leadership. FACCC will continue to advocate to ensure every student at our existing 114 community colleges is equally supported as they strive to obtain their educational goals.
California Community Colleges cater to the top 100 percent of students. These students enter our institutions with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and goals; consequently, success varies from student to student. FACCC will continue to advocate for all forms of student success and oppose rigid and punitive measures that leave most students behind.
The California Community Colleges, comprised of 73 districts and 115 distinct colleges (including an online college set to open in the Fall), is the largest higher education system in the nation, serving over two million students annually. The system employs over 60,000 faculty members, of whom about 19,000 are on the tenure track. Although FACCC membership generally hovers at around 10,000 its influence extends beyond its membership, as it works closely with and is supported by the system’s three main union groups, the Community College Association (CTA-NEA), the California Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the Community College Independents, and often collaborates with the Academic Senate of the California Community Colleges.
FACCC’s no-confidence vote followed similar votes in 12 of the state’s 73 districts. In addition, faculty delegates at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), one of the country’s largest two-year schools, are expected to take a similar vote today. “I’d be shocked if they don’t vote yes unanimously,” Jenny Worley, president of CCSF’s AFT Local 2121 told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“We’re at the point where it’s a crisis, and things have to change,” said Evan Hawkins, FACCC executive director. The organization, headquartered in Sacramento, lobbies on behalf of faculty. It has been a strong voice in support of academic freedom and shared governance.
Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley’s administration has been viewed with increasing skepticism by faculty leaders almost from the start. Two issues in particular have prompted opposition. First, and perhaps foremost, was the initiation of a new funding formula based on what many believe to be flawed performance metrics. Whereas previously the state funded schools strictly on enrollment, the new system will take into account graduation rate, the number of vocational certificates awarded, how many students have transferred to four-year colleges, and other metrics intended to move students from start to “completion.” The new system, faculty charge, compels colleges to prioritize students who are young, capable of attending full-time, and better prepared for transfer at the expense of those who cannot move quickly through school because they have to work, care for a family, or who are enrolled for reasons other than earning an associate’s degree or certificate.
In California, 38 percent of full-time students complete a certificate, degree or transfer, whereas 12 percent of part-time students do so. But many faculty leaders have pointed out that focusing on completion could undermine important functions played by community colleges. They say the system should study and invest in the needs of the adult population and those students who have no choice but to go part-time. “You’re spending more money on a very limited percentage of the population,” former FACCC executive director Jonathan Lightman said. “If you say the community college is open to the community, then you have to figure out the strategies to meet people where they’re at. We’re not going to get people in an older demographic — the [25-year-old plus] — to go full-time.”
The formula was heavily promoted by Oakley and former Governor Jerry Brown and approved by the legislature, although many Democratic representatives expressed skepticism and reportedly voted for the proposal only under pressure from the governor and chancellor. After a transition period the formula was to go into effect this fall, but Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget would extend the transition by another year. There is speculation that Newsom is more receptive to faculty criticisms of the scheme than was his predecessor.
The second issue is the creation of the independent totally online college, one of Brown’s pet initiatives. In the 2018-19 budget approved by the legislature last June, the state allocated $100 million to get the online college going. It will then spend $20 million annually on the venture. Lightman said at the time that the plan “has the appearance of a solution in search of a problem.” Faculty unions also voiced opposition, as did the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, which complained that “the administration does not identify specific root causes responsible for low educational attainment among some groups. As a result, it is unclear if an online college would address these root issues.” There was also concern that the effort could duplicate or destructively compete with existing online programs offered by individual colleges. Critics also questioned the hurried quality of the proposal and the tight time line the legislation mandated for implementation. (I discuss the proposal more fully in chapter 6 of The Future of Academic Freedom; see also the critique in “Does Online Reinforce the Color Line?” by Christopher Newfield and Cameron Sublett.)
The college is due to open October 1, but as the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month, the effort does not even have a management team in place yet, although it does have a president, Heather Hiles, a technology entrepreneur with no prior college or university experience. Hiles earns a base salary of $385,000, with a $10,000 annual car allowance and increasing yearly bonuses that begin at $10,000 and grow to $40,000 in the fourth year if she meets goals. She is the fourth-highest-paid community college leader in the state. Hiles pushed the Board of Governors to approve a no-bid contract for a friend and politically connected recruiter, whose job is to bring in key executives over two months. Several board members criticized the move.
According to the Chronicle, by July 1 college planners must:
Set up three online programs leading to professional certificates in medical coding, cybersecurity and information technology. Write a business plan. Complete a seven-year implementation plan. Create personnel policies. Explain in writing how teachers will teach and how students will be recruited and hired. Figure out how to get accredited. Come up with an outreach plan for potential students — including non-English-speakers — across the state. Describe how “instructional support” and “student experience activities” will work. Find a way to recognize students’ prior academic experience.
There is no evidence suggesting that faculty members have even been invited to assist in these efforts.
Oakley denies that his office has failed to consider faculty perspectives and run roughshod over shared governance. But few community college faculty members agree.
I enrolled one of our kids in Santa Barbara City College some years ago but after spending two weeks there, pulled him out. He went on to a fine Big Ten as an honor student. SBCC had a wonderful positive culture but the physical infrastructure was effectively delapidated although some new building programs were active. But there were other problems. Compared to say, Illinois’ College of DuPage which looks like an effective NASA space center as far as the quality of infrastructure, it is hard to reconcile California’s CC system status. Part of the problem resides in California’s unique state corruption and its refined incompetence in fiscal government. But this example also highlights the encroachment if not capture and infiltration of the broader university system in the US, by the corporate financial model, and its undermining effects on higher education policy and performance by a new breed of administrators who fancy themselves executives. In this regard, readers may appreciate an opinion I wrote in the Financial Times this past Fiday on higher education problems: https://www.ft.com/content/2676282a-70f1-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5
Otherwise “catering to the top 100%” is beautiful but more true generally of the modern university complex than may be appreciated: selectivity is a marketing and financial yield program for entry–on exit however, all are ranked equally and all are welcome, as donors. All universities are in effect if not in fact, community colleges.
Regards.
Interesting. Santa Barbara City College has the reputation (deserved or not, I cannot say) as one of those CC’s where a middle class family might send a kid who couldn’t get into a prestigious UC with a good likelihood of transfer to UC for upper division work and a four-year degree. That, of course, is precisely the demographic further privileged by the new funding formula. As far as physical plant and funding are concerned, while the state has funded community colleges by enrollment (until now), local districts may enact taxes to supplement. Hence there can be considerable differences between districts, not dissimilar to differences among K-12 districts. As for serving the top 100%, the figure stems from the California Master Plan, which assigned UC to serve the top 12.5% of high school grads, the CSU the top 33%, and the community colleges to be open to all. Because of that community college programs have not been overly focused on preparing transfers for the two four-year systems. That’s what Oakley and Brown are in effect moving to change.
Much of the policy preference bias toward transfer candidates in the junior college system, is due to explicit economic interests stemming from the larger university institutions such as UCLA (or its “pull” effect in their catchment area) and their specific professional self-interest and motivations (it is very much like the airline industry that uses “feeder” regional airlines for load factor and revenue in order to cover enormous fixed costs in the “hub” campus including subsidizing its higher labor costs in an otherwise tiered labor system in union scope clause contracting). Much of that, comes from the California education and related governance system, its constituency (including labor), the pension fund sector, and fixed overhead cost subsidization demands (such as campus real estate operations) that require a constantly refreshed inventory of machinery candidates. The preference for transfer “path” programs is explicitly in service to this institutional (versus educational per se) interest. Indeed, the terminal AA and AS degrees are even subordinated to the transfer function, which does not ratify a 4-year logic, but only subsidizes it in a degree bias channel. This in part also explains the relative de-emphasis on terminal MA/MS/MPhil degrees in the US, in favor of PhD programs and their impact on academy economics, labor program subsidization, and institutional self-perpetuation. As for SBCC, my experience suggests that it more represents the “1%” who are actively solicited as families with second homes in SB, and from foreign families, both of whom pay enormous tuition premiums, while favored by local enterprise for their disposable income in the local economy (including real estate, retail, travel, entertainment and others) and both of whom dislodge more traditional, local CC candidates. Brown serves these special interests including Labor, in his policies and preferences, which have little to do with higher education or any professed social capital ambition or social welfare development, and more to do with state revenue opportunism in a desperate, financially unbalanced state in the grip of political monopoly. Thank you and Regards.