The U.S. Department of Education has accused a regional accreditor of colleges, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, of violating federal standards by mishandling a complaint filed against a Washington State community college by an adjunct instructor there.
In a letter sent on Wednesday, the department warned Sandra E. Elman, the commission’s president, that the accrediting body faced possible limitation, suspension, or termination of its federal recognition if it could not show within a year that it had come back into compliance with the department’s standards for handling complaints such as the one an Olympic College instructor filed.
Although the commission had told the Education Department that commission staff members spent many hours investigating and deliberating over the instructor’s complaint before dismissing it, “no evidence of such review and deliberations was provided,” said the letter to Ms. Elman from Kay W. Gilcher, director of the accreditation division of the Education Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education.
More broadly, Ms. Gilcher’s letter said, the commission failed to provide the Education Department with sufficient documentary evidence of its “timely, fair, and equitable review and processing” of the complaint filed against Olympic, a community college in Bremerton, Wash., by Jack Longmate, a part-time English instructor there.
Ms. Elman declined on Wednesday to comment in response to Ms. Gilcher’s letter, saying she was away from her office and had not had a chance to read the letter or discuss it with her colleagues at the commission.
A Surprise
Mr. Longmate wrote to the Education Department in January to challenge the Northwest Commission’s actions, saying that he did not believe the accreditor had taken his complaint seriously and that he had “no evidence it conducted anything resembling a thorough investigation.” The commission’s investigators never contacted him for an interview or further information or documentation, and he was never given a chance to respond to any evidence that Olympic College had provided, he said in his letter to the department.
“I spent a lot of time and a lot of work putting together my complaint, and to have no question or no issue come up from them surprised me,” Mr. Longmate said on Wednesday in an interview. He said he had obtained the college’s response to his complaint through an open-records request, and disputes much of it. Where his statements and the college’s were in disagreement, he said, the accrediting commission “certainly did not ask me what my position was on things.”
In his letter to the department, Mr. Longmate said he had learned about the commission’s resolution of his complaint only after being contacted by The Chronicle about a November 30, 2012, letter from Ms. Elman informing David C. Mitchell, Olympic College’s president, of the commission’s finding that the college was in compliance with accreditation standards. Although the commission has produced a similar letter to Mr. Longmate dated June 28, 2012, Mr. Longmate has denied ever having received it.
The two-sentence letter that Ms. Elman sent to the college’s president did not provide any reasoning for the commission’s finding in Olympic’s favor, and said only that the decision had been based on a “a thorough review” of materials sent it by Mr. Longmate and documents subsequently submitted by the college.
‘Bereft of Detail’
Ms. Gilcher, of the Education Department, wrote to Ms. Elman in February, asking for any documentation that supports the commission’s assertions that it handled Mr. Longmate’s complaint’s properly. Ms. Gilcher described Ms. Elman’s letters announcing the commission’s decision to the college president and to the instructor as “bereft of detail” and lacking any evidence that Mr. Longmate’s complaint had been reviewed thoroughly.
The complaint that Mr. Longmate filed with the commission about a year ago stemmed from his long-running battle with Olympic College’s faculty union. The complaint argued that the college had violated the commission’s standards for academic freedom by failing to act on his allegations that union leaders had libeled him, may have conspired to reduce his teaching load, and otherwise had sought to make his life difficult.
Union officials responded to Mr. Longmate’s complaint by denying the conduct he had alleged, and Olympic College officials said they had not taken action in response to his complaints of union misconduct because his dispute was with the union, which is affiliated with the National Education Association.
The Education Department’s finding against the Northwest Commission comes at a time when some higher-education experts and prominent advocates for adjunct faculty members have mounted a campaign to urge accreditors to pay more attention to the working conditions of adjuncts in evaluating higher-education institutions. Maria Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, a group taking a lead role in the effort, on Wednesday praised the Education Department’s latest letter to the Northwest Commission.
“I think it is very important and significant that the Department of Education is taking Jack’s complaint seriously and holding the accrediting agency to account,” Ms. Maisto said. “Hopefully, it will serve notice to colleges and accrediting agencies that they can’t just treat adjuncts’ complaints informally or dismiss their complaints just because they’re adjuncts.”
