This city’s community college has much that instructors elsewhere complain about missing.
Its administration is lean, and its shared-governance system gives its faculty a lot of say. Full-timers account for about 45 percent of its faculty, a proportion about half again as large as at most other California community colleges. Its part-time instructors have good access to health benefits and earn nearly as much per hour as full-timers.
The college gives its academic departments substantial leeway to tailor programs to the needs of its 85,000 students, who include large numbers of immigrants needing English-language instruction, older adults seeking training for emerging local industries, and low-income, first-generation college students who see the institution as their best hope for upward mobility. It operates at more than 100 sites.
Now, however, the City College of San Francisco might pay a heavy price for its faculty-oriented ethos: being shut down.
The college has been warned that it faces imminent loss of accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Many of the college’s strengths in the eyes of its faculty are viewed by its accreditor as flaws. The commission’s evaluation of the college concluded, for example, that it had long devoted too large a share of its annual budget—more than 92 percent—to salaries and benefits, causing it to spend well beyond its means. And the commission called the college’s governance structure, under which 43 separate committees with employee representation advised the Board of Trustees, far too complex to allow for timely decision-making.
In its scramble to satisfy the commission, the college has met resistance from its employee unions, its Academic Senate, and many of its students. The tensions have exposed a fault line between faculty members’ vision of how a community college should operate and an accreditor’s standards for judging such institutions in a time of limited resources and increased demands for accountability.
Top officials here characterize many of the steps they have taken to retain accreditation as concessions to reality. Thelma Scott-Skillman, who took over as interim chancellor last fall, says the college simply can no longer be “all things to all people at all times.”
But the Save CCSF coalition—a group of faculty, staff, and students—argues that the college exemplifies how such institutions should operate. It is the accreditation process, the group has said, and not the college, that needs to be overhauled.
Pointing Fingers
The accreditor’s critique of the college focused on its financial troubles, which last fiscal year put the institution in the red by about $2-million out a budget of $191-million, and have left it with just $4.5-million in reserve funds. Similar conclusions were reached last year in a state financial review, which concluded that the college was in “a perilous financial position.”
The state review said the college employed twice as many full-time faculty per 1,000 full-time-equivalent students as comparable community colleges did. One reason is that the more than 60 faculty members who chair the college’s academic departments have more administrative responsibilities than department heads elsewhere. Those faculty leaders also have their own collective-bargaining unit, the Department Chair Council, which negotiates their contracts to perform such work.
The accreditor’s evaluation characterized many of the college’s problems as the product of an elaborate governance model, which, it said, poorly defined responsibilities and bred both distrust among key players and resistance to the board and administration’s authority. The college received the commission’s toughest sanction partly for its failure to fully respond to recommendations made by the accreditor in a previous evaluation, in 2006.
Steve Ngo, a member of the college’s Board of Trustees, argues that the institution’s governance system was “upside down,” with faculty members’ needs dictating institutional priorities and academic concerns trumping financial considerations. Classes with low enrollments went uncanceled, he says, so that the part-timers who taught them could keep their health benefits. Administrators’ performance evaluations gave less weight to the chancellor’s opinion than to the results of anonymous surveys of the faculty as a whole.
“People here don’t think they have a boss,” Mr. Ngo says.
The institution’s troubles have led it to factor prominently in a broader debate over the governance of California’s 112 community colleges, 27 of which have been given sanctions or warnings by their regional accreditor. California Competes, a nonprofit group of business and civic leaders, has blamed the community colleges’ accreditation troubles largely on state regulations that, it says, must be changed because they give excessive power to the institutions’ academic senates.
Brice W. Harris, chancellor of the state’s community-college system, argues that California Compete’s analysis exaggerates the power of academic senates. He says the sanctioned colleges have deeper problems, such as fiscal woes resulting from cuts in their state appropriations.
In the case of City College, a similar assessment is offered by Robert Agrella a special trustee appointed by the college’s board, under state pressure, to guide the institution back into its accreditor’s good graces. He says it is “a stretch” to blame City College’s many problems on its Academic Senate, especially considering how many of the college’s councils and committees have asserted powers that the senate never gave them.
Tough Spot, Tough Talk
The breakdown in communication at City College was evident on its main campus in February, during a rally of about 300 students, faculty members, and community activists staged by the Save CCSF coalition. “This is a school for the community, right?” Shanell Williams, president of the college’s student council, exclaimed in rousing the crowd.
The organizers’ plan was to march on the administration’s headquarters and present the interim chancellor with a list of demands that included calls for her to speak out against the accreditor and tell the board “to reverse all cuts to classes, services, staff, and faculty.” They also planned to demand that the college, which has experienced sharp reductions in its state support in response to shrinking enrollment and California’s economic woes, spend revenue from a special local property tax passed in November on preserving educational offerings rather than on financing pensions and shoring up the college’s reserves.
Upon arriving at the administration building, however, the protesters were told that Ms. Scott-Skillman was out of town at a state conference, away on the very day that marked the college’s deadline for public input on its plans for retaining accreditation.
A banner at the rally said, “Save City College of SF from the 1%.” The coalition and some faculty leaders have promoted the idea that the accreditor has ulterior motives, like a desire to bust unions or downsize public colleges to benefit private education providers or wealthy people who want low taxes. Such theories, offered without solid evidence, have helped generate much more opposition to the accreditor here than in other California cities with sanctioned colleges.
Barbara A. Beno, the commission’s president, says “there is no agenda other than to provide quality education.”
The changes the college plans to make to retain accreditation are especially threatening to its Department Chair Council, the unusual collective-bargaining unit that represents the more than 60 faculty members who head its academic departments. Mr. Agrella wants the college to cut the chairs’ pay and eliminate more than half of their positions, partly to free up money to replace administrators whose positions went unfilled after recent retirements. The college’s representatives have declared an impasse in negotiations because the chairs’ union has refused to go along.
“This does not feel like collective bargaining to me,” says Madeline Mueller, head of the college’s music department and a member of the chairs’ bargaining team. “It feels like union busting.”
American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, which represents both full- and part-time faculty members at the college, similarly opposes plans to cut full-timers’ pay by 5 percent more than it has already been cut and to cut part-timers’ pay by 10 percent. It has filed an unfair-labor-practices complaint accusing the college administration of imposing pay cuts unilaterally.
“I don’t think anyone disagrees that folks are in a tough spot,” says Alisa Messer, the union local’s president. “But we have been disappointed not to see more willingness to work together.”
Unfinished Business
The “show cause” sanction that the accreditor gave the college last July provided it until March 15 to shore up its finances, overhaul its governance and operations, and make plans for its own closure in the event its efforts are deemed insufficient.
The college responded just before the deadline with a report describing how it had made many of the demanded changes but had managed only to plan others. It blamed some of the lack of progress on “substantial opposition” from employee groups.
The steps the college has taken include revising its mission statement to get out of the business of providing citizenship education and lifelong learning; establishing a comprehensive, centralized system to track how well its students are learning; and overhauling how it maintains facilities and technology.
To make its decision-making processes more efficient, the college has consolidated or scrapped many committees that had advised its board and has put the board through training to discourage infighting and micromanagement of the administration. It has also established 12 new dean positions to handle some responsibilities now held by department chairs, many of whom could see their administrative positions eliminated.
As part of its efforts to reduce spending and build up its reserves, the college has laid off 34 of about 690 classified staff members and stopped offering classes at a few small sites. It cut employee wages by about 3 to 5 percent, depending on job category, this fiscal year.
“We have done a lot of work—good work,” says Mr. Agrella, the special trustee. He describes himself as cautiously optimistic that the commission will vote in June to spare the college, which, he says, could not possibly have met all of the accreditor’s demands in the nine months given.
As special trustee, Mr. Agrella has the power to veto decisions by the college’s board. He says he has had a good relationship with top college officials in pushing for change, But faculty leaders say the result has been a top-down power dynamic that has destroyed shared governance and left only its facade.
“We have a very small voice in what is happening,” says Karen Saginor, the Academic Senate’s president. It is the administration, she says, that is “calling the shots.”
