BY HANK REICHMAN
In a sudden and unexpected move, Heather Hiles, president and CEO of Calbright College, California’s new online community college, has resigned after less than a year on the job. The college’s board voted unanimously yesterday to accept a separation agreement with Hiles, who will step down effective March 31 but be on leave until then. The board plans to hire an interim president while searching for a permanent replacement. The ridiculously named Calbright, an initiative pushed through the legislature by former governor Jerry Brown, has been under fire from faculty groups from the start, as I have previously reported on this blog (see here and here).
In a statement Debbie Klein and Evan Hawkins, president and executive director of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC) said:
We wish Heather Hiles the best in her future endeavors. FACCC and other faculty groups have not been shy about sharing concerns about Calbright since its inception. We continue to question the value of Calbright. The college has already received $140 million of state funding while violating the Educational Code with duplication. Its per-student funding is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as our other colleges receive the lowest per-student funding, and the college is now without leadership only months after opening its doors to students.
Unfortunately, new leadership alone will not fix this inherently flawed use of state resources. FACCC will continue to advocate for expanding the funding of our existing colleges to fulfill the Chancellor’s Office Vision for Success and the mission of the California Community College system.
Calbright’s official start date was October 1, 2019, but at that point it had no faculty, no students, and no classes. It now reports about 300 students in three programs. [UPDATE: According to the San Francisco Chronicle the college has 22 students enrolled in its programs, and another 454 students signed up for its basic math skills and reading comprehension courses. It has no full-time faculty. “The trustees learned that, contrary to established hiring practices, Calbright officials ignored the recommendations of the statewide Academic Senate for community colleges and selected five full-time faculty members on their own. The trustees rejected the choices and required Calbright to start the hiring process over, this time including the Academic Senate.”]. Last summer the Academic Senate for the California Community Colleges informed legislators of its concerns about serious problems with accreditation and duplicative programs. The legislation establishing Calbright promised it would not duplicate programs already in existence at other colleges in the system. But Calbright’s announced areas of study are already offered, both in-person and online, at several other of the state’s community colleges. In a December letter to the Academic Senate president, Kimberly Reiser, chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Community Colleges, wrote that faculty concerns raise important issues of shared governance that put “the integrity of the California community college system” at stake.
Hiles, a technology entrepreneur with no prior college or university experience, earned a base salary of $385,000, with a $10,000 annual car allowance and increasing yearly bonuses that would have begun at $10,000 and grow to $40,000 in the fourth year had she met publicly unspecified goals. She was the fourth-highest-paid community college leader in the state. Shortly after her appointment Hiles pushed the Board of Governors to approve a no-bid contract for a friend and politically connected recruiter, whose job was to bring in key executives over two months.
In a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education Hiles wrote that she had recently submitted a more-than-200-page report to the legislature “detailing the road map for building and operating” Calbright. With a business plan in place and a core staff hired, the statement read, “Hiles feels the time is right to resume the professional work in which she was engaged prior to being recruited.” However, the Chronicle reported, “As recently as December 13, the president was confidently discussing 2020 plans with a Chronicle reporter for using Calbright to improve students’ career prospects, by focusing on forging ties with employers.”
It is unclear whether the report addressed the serious concerns about the school raised by the Academic Senate, FACCC, and faculty unions.
On May 1, FACCC, supported by a grant from the AAUP Foundation’s Academic Freedom Fund, will hold a conference on academic freedom at Pasadena City College. A previous conference, held at Berkeley City College and also supported by a Foundation grant, was highly successful. For information go here.
