BY HANK REICHMAN
October 1 was the legislatively mandated opening day for California’s new ridiculously named fully online community college, Calbright. But there were no classes. There were no instructors. There were no students. There were, however, some applicants. According to Taylor Huckaby, Calbright’s communications director, about 655 people had started an application, of which 324 potential students were in the process of enrolling, and 11 had already enrolled with educational plans and started the self-paced programs, as of 5 p.m. The school says it will stop enrollment for the first year once the total reaches 400.
Interesting. Eleven students have already started the programs. Really? Do any programs actually exist in more than name? “As of today, as far as I can tell, there are no full-time faculty hires for Calbright, and there’s no faculty contract,” Eric Kaljumagi, president of the Community College Association, an affiliate of the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association, told Calbright’s Board of Trustees at its September 17 meeting in Sacramento, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. “Calbright may be a different type of college, but I’m expecting that the faculty enjoy the levels of autonomy and professional authority that you see elsewhere,” Kaljumagi — a math professor at Mt. San Antonio College near Los Angeles — told the trustees.
College administrators claim to have already hired six part-time faculty “contractors.” They also posted job listings to hire six new full-time faculty instructors on the California Community Colleges job registry. “We need to have a few internal meetings to understand our capabilities,” Huckaby said. “We don’t want to put ourselves in a position that degrades the Calbright learner experience or spreads our faculty too thin.”
Well, the man has a sense of humor.
The new college, a brainchild of former Governor Jerry Brown and community colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, has come under faculty fire from the start, as I have previously reported on this blog. At the September Sacramento meeting, John Stanskas, president of the statewide Academic Senate for California’s Community Colleges, which in an August 5 letter to legislators had expressed “serious reservations regarding this endeavor,” reminded the trustees and Calbright managers that they must support a student government, teach financial literacy and provide mental health services. “Until such time that you have tenured faculty of your own to organize themselves, it is my duty to act as the faculty voice for you,” Stanskas told them. The board went on to talk about “learner device provisioning,” meaning the number of laptops and mobile hotspots they will buy for a lending library so students can take classes from wherever they are. Kaljumagi admonished the trustees for “talking about hardware” without mentioning faculty hiring.
The California Federation of Teachers has threatened a lawsuit, charging that the endeavor violates state laws. “Nothing has improved as far as we can tell,” said Jim Mahler, president of the Community College Council of the CFT, in an email to EdSource. “In fact, our concerns have grown.” Mahler said CFT believes there may be more violations of state law than the ones they initially claimed. He said the union is still gathering information and didn’t want to disclose any of the other violations they have found.
In July Chancellor Oakley assigned the South Orange Community College District to assist Calbright in labor matters. Faculty in that district are represented by the Community College Association. (All California community college faculty are represented by unions, divided into those represented by CCA, those by CFT, and those by one of the California Community College Independents.) It was thus assumed by many that CCA would ultimately represent Calbright faculty, if any are ever hired. But what about the right of faculty members to choose their own bargaining agent?
Oh, and while the school’s “faculty” is still limited to a handful of part-time “contractors,” the Calbright management team, with the recent addition of three new program directors (deans?), is already collectively making nearly $2 million annually. That means educating each of the 400 projected students will cost about $450 in managerial salaries alone. What a deal!
