CCCFE Faculty News Notes July 2013

July 8, 2013

San Francisco City College Loses Accreditation: Some Reflections

​Most of you are by now aware that San Francisco City College, which serves approximately 85,000 students, was notified last week that it will no longer be accredited and will be scheduled to close its doors by the end of June 2014. That means that San Francisco CC has one year in which to make its appeal to the ACCJC not to revoke its accreditation but to keep the doors open for the many students that the college serves.

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Community College Chancellor Brice Harris has announced that he will put a Special Trustee in place to guide the San Francisco district away from the abyss. Our current Special Trustee, Tom Henry, was the master architect of our partnership which allowed Compton to keep the doors open, but the ACCJC has already declared that there will be no “Compton Solution” available to SFCC, that is, no partnership agreement possible. The partnership itself required special legislation which took us right up to the abyss of closure, while we were sweating every vote in the Assembly and Senate. The special legislation, AB 318 was crafted by Mervyn Dymally, a long-time supporter of the college; Compton was in his assembly district. His legislation allowed the Compton College District to continue to exist while the Center provided our students access to El Camino’s curriculum. The legislation also provided a 30 million dollar line of credit, since our FTES had dropped so precipitously as to not provide us operating expenses for the subsequent year.

The Acting President at the time, Jamillah Moore, having worked in the Chancellor’s Office and with the legislature, lobbied tirelessly in both the Assembly and the Senate. And she was not alone: faculty leadership spent many week-ends in Sacramento or in Oakland and Burbank, addressing the legislators, the statewide Academic Senate and the California Federation of Teachers (CFT). Dean Rodney Murray was President of the CCCFE at the time, and Saul Panski President of the Academic Senate. Faculty members attended weekly meetings of citizens groups in the communities served by the District. In short, the partnership was the result of collaborative efforts of the Chancellor’s Office, through the Special Trustee, the administration, and the faculty.

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And at the same time that these political activities were going on, we wrote SLO’s for our curriculum which was subsequently abolished when we lost the appeal. However, we’d been trained by a committee from the statewide Academic Senate, so we learned some valuable lessons about writing SLO’s. The point about the SLO’s is important: the ACCJC is ruthless with districts that fail to comply with SLO’s and Assessments, with Program Planning and Reviews. If the ACCJC finds financial problems or governance problems in a district, the commission looks directly to these areas on the academic side.

From a union perspective, protecting and maintaining jobs are as important as negotiating wages, hours of employment and working conditions; thus, there is nothing more devastating than the wholesale layoff of all full and part-time faculty, a layoff that is the necessary part of any closure plan required to be produced during the appeals year. We were all laid off, and then, if we were teaching during the summer, hired by Santa Monica College, and eventually all were hired by our District—at least for one year to teach El Camino courses. As a result of the difference in the curriculum at El Camino, we did lose a few faculty positions in 2007, though we saved far more than the district intended to abolish at that time. Our FTES, from its high point in the first decade of the new century was reduced by over 56% by 2007.

So we have survived financially on borrowed money and bonds, and on a systematic—not dramatic--increase in our enrollment and course offerings. Fortunately, we are a small district—yet it is still difficult to recover fully from the loss of accreditation, particularly given the state’s fiscal crisis of the past few years. What our experience reveals is that belligerence and denial will not help in saving San Francisco’s accreditation. Rallies only serve to help morale, which is important in preventing a blind and inexorable slide into perdition, but they won’t save accreditation.

Community groups, the College administration, the local union (CCCFE), and the state union (CFT), even the Chancellor’s Office, tried to bring suit against the ACCJC; none had the legal standing to bring suit except possibly the Chancellor’s Office. The former CFT president, Marty Hittleman, has produced a brief entitled “ACCJC Gone Wild” which he has been working on for the past several years, once the CFT realized that Compton’s sanctions and loss of accreditation were not an anomaly, as other small districts were put on “show cause” sanction. Now the ACCJC has gone for one of the largest districts in the state. Just how do you think it will fare? The faculty at San Francisco CC has already endured layoffs resulting from cuts to programs, and direct cuts of salary, while other employees have taken furlough days, and these sacrifices aren’t enough.You will have received an email with an attachment of” ACCJC Gone Wild, ” illustrating—over its 95 pages—the development of events and ACCJC sanctions. There are a few corrections for the section on Compton—namely that the issue of qualification of faculty resulted from the governance issue: cronyism existed, and board members demanded the hiring of their friends in adjunct positions. Some of these lacked qualifications for the positions into which they had been placed.

Negotiations up-Date:

Despite the prospect of a 1.57% COLA from the state, the District has offered nothing to faculty—nor for that matter to any other group. The pressing need, particularly given the increase in the cost of health benefits this year, is to have an increase in our fringe benefits. So far the district has been unwilling to make any move in that direction. Further discussion of this matter, and how the membership, as well as the leadership, will address it will occur at a union meeting next week.

Union Meeting

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

1:30 in the E Wing

Please plan to attend.

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