Saving CCSF: What's At Stake
by Diane Putnam
[Click here to see the 14 recommendations by the ACCJC to CCSF March, 2012]
In March of last year, a visiting team from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) issued fourteen recommendations to City College of San Francisco. A few months later at its bi-annual June meeting, the ACCJC issued a “show cause” letter, giving the college one year from the team’s visit to prove that its accreditation shouldn’t be terminated. The ACCJC gave this reason for the harsh verdict: “the College has failed to demonstrate that it meets the requirements outline in a significant number of Eligibility Requirements and Accreditation Standards. It has also failed to implement the eight recommendations of the 2006 evaluation team; five of these eight were only partially addressed, and three were completely unaddressed. The College is reminded that an institution is expected to fully address all of the recommendations of a comprehensive evaluation team before the next comprehensive evaluation visit occurs.”
Flash-forward to the present day—a month from the deadline—and the outcome is far from clear. What many people hoped was a system too big to fail may end up failing more than 85,000 students. How did it get this far? Has ACCJC been too hasty in issuing “show cause,” the most serious sanction short of terminating accreditation, or has CCSF ignored systemic problems far too long?
The Blame Game
In the mainstream press, the dominant narrative has portrayed abysmally low administrator-to-student ratios, overreach of faculty power, and gratuitous staff salaries and benefits as the culprits. But the actual causes of CCSF’s crisis are many, and they are shared by all of the college’s constituencies. Several of ACJCC’s recommendations are in areas where faculty wield very little direct control, such as system-wide and long-term financial, technology, and facilities planning, and “effective board organization.”
On October 23rd, the SF Gate laid a fair amount of blame at the feet of City College president Philip Day, who helmed the college from 1998 (height of the dot com boom) until 2008. Although he enjoyed broad support from the board during his tenure, Day left in disgrace, facing charges from then-District Attorney Kamala Harris for money laundering. In 2011, Day pleaded guilty to diverting $100,000 of college funds to a bond campaign. As Day was departing, the boom turned bust, and the college turned to cutting salaries for three years in a row. Crisis mode set in around the state, and CCSF was no different. Except in 2006, City College had already been warned by ACJCC about unsustainable finances at the college—a warning that President Day, and apparently the majority of the trustees, ignored.
In fact, it appears that the board was asleep at the wheel for more than a decade. Natalie Berg, a trustee since 1996, remarks in the October SF Gate article that "Our problems started when we started overpaying, which was not sustainable," Berg said. "We should have been forewarned. It was the staff's responsibility to tell the board. People did say, 'This is the budget,' but not in a way that made the board understand that this was a problem." OK. So when people said, “This is the budget,” how many of the trustees actually read it? Or the 2006 Accreditation reports?
Earlier that month, on Oct. 4th, the Gate reported that “John Rizzo, president of the City College Board of Trustees, offered one candid explanation: ‘We were clueless.’ Even as Rizzo said he tried to steer the board toward fiscal responsibility, he and other trustees acknowledged that there was much they didn't know about overseeing the college's finances until they were required to take training as part of the effort to retain accreditation.”
Also, why did the board approve an interim president (Pamila Fisher) last year from just May to October, and then another interim (Thelma Scott-Skillman), when they knew college leadership was under scrutiny by ACJCC?
One category of faculty at CCSF was scrutinized in all the reports: the department chair. At CCSF, department chairs have reassigned time for their administrative duties and they also earn stipends. They have control over reassigned time, schedules and course offerings.
At least, that was the arrangement up until, their board voted last October, in a panic at the mid-year point, to replace department chairs entirely with twelve deans and three associate vice chancellors rather than scaling back their responsibilities and compensation to better resemble their counterparts around the state.
Financial Outlook Uncertain
CCSF still faces potential financial hurdles. With the threat of closure by ACJCC, enrollments are sinking, offsetting new Prop. 30 revenues. Prop. A, which passed with 73% of the vote, is a local bond benefitting the college $79 per parcel per year for eight years. However, the college administration has not even included Prop. A revenues in current budget planning. The district intends to use that money to bolster CCSF’s anemic reserves even though the bond was sold as a way to avoid layoffs and, subsequently, course closures.
In what appears to be another panic move, the college administration says it will pay to keep classes open by instituting a unilateral 9% pay cut for the rest of this year beyond the 4% that was already negotiated and implemented, plus another 5% pay cut for next year. Layoff notices are going out to everyone in the district come March 15th (more than 30 staffers and many part-time instructors were already laid off in January). While the college defends itself to ACJCC, it has also been directed to prepare for closure.
| The college administration has not even included Prop. A revenues in current budget planning. The district intends to use that money to bolster CCSF’s anemic reserves even though the bond was sold as a way to avoid layoffs and, subsequently, course closures. |
So as we start our semester and look ahead to our fall visit from ACJCC, it’s worth pausing to notice what’s happening up north and standing up in solidarity. CCSF has been at the forefront of adjunct parity and meeting the state’s 75/25 goal for full-time versus part-time instruction; these and other gains are being exploited and scapegoated as the only causes of a much bigger problem.
Robert Shireman and California Competes have filed a legal challenge to Title V with the CCC Board of Governors to amend the law to diminish the role of academic senates and solidify the power of boards of trustees. Their challenge is flawed and probably won’t get far in the current political climate, but it’s just the beginning. Props. 30 and 32 may be behind us, but the fight to retain our place at the table continues, even in the Golden State.
Learn more at CCSF’s Accreditation homepage, which houses all the official reports. AFT Local 2121 has published news updates and communications on their website, and you can follow their side of the discussion in their newsletters. Finally, you can catch up on local coverage at SF Gate’s page for CCSF Accreditation stories.
When it comes to faculty responsibilities at CCSF, the 2012 ACJCC visiting team was especially affronted by CCSF’s inattention to implementing Student Learning Outcomes at any level. SLOs appear in four recommendations, guiding everything from classroom learning to student services to faculty evaluations. Whether out of neglect or political will, CCSF’s resistance to SLOs is now undoing them in several different areas of the college, in a sort of quadruple-jeopardy.
| Has ACCJC been too hasty in issuing “show cause,” the most serious sanction short of terminating accreditation, or has CCSF ignored systemic problems far too long? |
ACJCC also urges CCSF in three recommendations to teach constituencies to learn their places in the system. Whether this is in response to the college’s custom of decision-making by committee or a perception of faculty overreach, it is somewhat curious that ACJCC recommends (in #12) that a college bleeding money should “engage the services of an external organization to provide a series of workshops for all college constituencies, including the members of the governing board, the chancellor, faculty, staff, students and every administrator, in order to clarify and understand their defined roles of responsibility and delineated authority in institutional governance and decision making.”
The Public Debate
So why has the public narrative focused primarily on faculty rights and compensation? One of the most vocal critics of the faculty at CCSF has been Robert Shireman, the director of California Competes: Higher Education for a Strong Economy, an organization currently dedicated to undermining the role of CCC faculty in decision-making. In an Op-Ed in the SF Gate in September 2012 he argues that “While the original motivation for the shared-governance requirement was understandable, even laudable, in hindsight we can see that empowering everyone leaves no one in charge. California's community colleges are capsizing as a result.”
Shireman goes on to claim that community college faculty command more power on their campuses than their CSU and UC counterparts, and he cites the accreditation report and a subsequent investigation by the Chancellor’s office as examples of faculty run amok: “Two independent reviews have offered stinging critiques of CCSF's processes. The accreditor found ‘a veil of distrust among the governance groups’ instead of clear decision-making roles. A fiscal review found the college paralyzed by a culture that undermines good management, preventing it from making the decisions that would stave off bankruptcy. Decision-making ‘appears to have been driven more by power, influence and political whim, than reason, logic and fairness.’"
But neither report cited by Shireman claims that’s because faculty were driving all the decisions. The ACJCC did find that too many administrators were temporary and not enough had authority to make decisions. The Chancellor’s report concludes that “CCSF initially suggested that it had too few academic managers, but the data does not support this assertion.”
Independent of the ACJCC and the college district, the Chancellor’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) visited the college, conducted interviews, and investigated various planning processes. While their report also mentions the relatively high number of tenured faculty (double the number at comparison colleges) and lifetime health benefits for retirees at CCSF as expenditures worth reviewing, it identifies several other major contributing factors.
The FCMAT team also blames the high number of classified staff and their salary scale and benefits; ad-hoc enrollment management,especially at satellite campuses; continuing grant-funded programs out of general funds after their expiration; and maintaining expensive leases for outlying, low-FTES-earning programs.