Emotional testimony from faculty members, students, and union officials from City College of San Francisco was not enough to convince a federal panel on Friday that the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges was not worthy of federal recognition.
The commission was seeking to renew its recognition this week at a meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, an 18-member panel that advises the U.S. secretary of education on accreditation matters.
With only one dissent, the committee voted to recommend that the accreditor continue to be recognized and report to the panel in a year on its efforts to fix more than a dozen deficiencies in its procedures, including ensuring widespread acceptance of its policies and standards by its member colleges and their employees and students.
The vote followed testimony from more than a dozen City College staff members and students, who asked the committee to recommend that the accreditor lose its recognition because of actions the commission had taken in deciding to remove the college’s accreditation.
In July, a year after putting the college on “show cause” status, the commission, part of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, announced that it would strip City College of accreditation in 2014. Because unaccredited colleges cannot receive federal student aid, an institution’s loss of accreditation typically leads to its closure.
‘A Tough Call’
After the vote, Lalo Gonzalez, a student at City College and member of its student council, said the accreditor had been unfairly forcing the college to focus too much on degree completion at the expense of its open-access mission. “The standards are completely disconnected from the reality of students,” he said.
Vincent Tarikhu Farrar, chairman of the department of African-American studies at City College, said the accreditor had overstated financial difficulties at the college and was now forcing it to make austerity cuts that would harm students and faculty members.
Programs and courses at City College should be expanded, not cut, to meet the educational demands of the region, Mr. Farrar said.
While committee members voiced their empathy for the plight of students, who will be forced to find another college if the institution closes, some also credited the accreditor for holding the college accountable for its shortfalls.
Jill Derby, a member of the advisory panel and a governance consultant at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, said the group could not ignore the outcry from students who had traveled all the way from California to register their complaints.
But Arthur J. Rothkopf, president emeritus of Lafayette College, said the accreditor should be commended for taking action at a time when accreditors, in general, are being criticized by policy makers for going easy on poorly performing institutions. “The agency made a tough call,” he said. “We need to support the agency.”
