By Fran Chandler, Faculty Association President

Summer 1998 proved to be public relations tough for the California community colleges with a number of punches aimed at the most unlikely sources: academic senates and boards of trustees. Of course, we unions have been mentioned as well, but we're used to it and have learned to roll with the punches.

First came a series of editorials and one-sided articles condemning the Los Angeles Community Colleges. In the midst of these shallow, vituperative pieces came the report of the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education entitled A State of Learning: California Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century.

The Los Angeles Times portrayed the Los Angeles colleges as nearly bankrupt, the result of "irresponsible" raises granted by the boards to teachers and classified staff. Board members were accused of being mere puppets manipulated by the campaign contributions of powerful special interests.

Additional editorials cited the inability of the LA colleges to act or to make even the simplest of decisions due to the bureaucracy imposed upon it by, of all things, shared governance (specifically the AB1725-imposed requirement that the Board rely upon the advice of the district-wide Academic Senate when changing or establishing policy related to academic and professional matters).

No mention was made of what has always made LA an object of derision and which is the true cause of its financial problems, its incredibly slow decision making and seeming inability to act by its own top heavy, expensive organizational structure. Among Santa Monica College faculty (and even some administrators), one of the most condemning indictments of administrative policies, particularly the inexorable growth in recent years of administrative salaries as a percentage of the overall budget, is this comment: "It has finally happened; we've become another LA."

Undoubtedly, the Los Angeles colleges are top heavy and would benefit from many of the reforms they themselves have recommended, particularly, giving each college more autonomy, freeing them to operate more like single campus districts such as Santa Monica. The AFT, LA's collective bargaining agent, agrees that this is the best way to correct the major inefficiencies within the system. The District is now in the process of consulting with its local academic senates and the district-wide senate on this restructuring plan. Ironically, it is exactly that need to consult with the senates, the unions, and the students our hard-fought-for and precious shared governance that the Times finds so horrifying!

These sparring punches were followed by the powerful KO punch, the report of the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education (CCCHE), a report headlined across the state as urging overhaul of the "dysfunctional community colleges" which are ill prepared to handle the 500,000 new students enrolling in California colleges by 2006.

Put together by a 25-member group of primarily business people and professionals, only one of which is connected with higher education, John Brooks Slaughter, outgoing president of Occidental College, the report calls for "a fundamental change in the structure and governance of the California Community Colleges to reduce the layers of decision making and state regulation, and to ensure they are governed as collegiate institutions."

The CCCHE advocates replacing locally elected boards of trustees with political appointees, specifically 17-member advisory councils that would not have the power to budget or even to select college presidents. Thirteen members of each advisory council would be appointed by assembly members, senators, and county commissioners. Although four of the seats on these councils would be appointed respectively by faculty, staff, students, and administrators, no current employee of a district would be allowed to serve on that district's advisory council.

All decision-making power would rest in a much-strengthened statewide chancellor's office that would have the kind of power granted to the chancellors of the CSU and UC systems. The unwieldy, meaningless local councils would make recommendations to the Chancellor's Board of Governors, which would be responsible for establishing and maintaining uniform standards.

Taking another hit at shared governance under the guise of ridding the community colleges of the more than 2,000 regulations by which they are constrained, the CCCHE recommends that all provisions of the Education Code be sunsetted, including such vital protections as tenure and collective bargaining.

One only has to imagine where such thinking leads a faculty unprotected by tenure and no longer given the right to participate in the governance of their institutions as hasty top-down decisions are made to take maximum advantage of performance-based funding, incentives to "make extraordinary efforts to use existing facilities more extensively through sharing and through extended hours," the program changes necessary to accommodate "regional cooperation among educational institutions to remove barriers to lessen efficiency," etc.

Not only would faculty be unprotected, but student bodies would be unprotected as well as they see their fees rise yearly in compliance with the commission's recommendation that students shoulder a larger share of the burden ostensibly this would somehow magically increase "access."

One can only speculate that the pride with which the CCCHE points to its complete independence from the higher education institutions it studied is at the root of some of the report's outrageous recommendations, almost all of which are unsupported by statistical or anecdotal data in the 40-page report (available at www.ccche.org).

However, as the CCCHE holds hearings around the state to generate action, how will the general public know that the commission members had no experience with and were not fully knowledgeable about the institutions they want so desperately to change?

Given the Los Angeles Times' combative and one-sided view of community colleges, we can't expect them to inform the public on this issue. To preserve the very fabric of California's community college system, faculty members themselves must speak up at these hearings.

In addition to the public, we must remind legislators that there was a reason California does not refer to its colleges as junior colleges; the word community was meant to emphasize the responsibility each college has to reflect not only the standards set forth by the state but also to meet the unique needs of the community of which it is a part.

Ironically, the behemoth LA Community Colleges are criticized by the Times for their bureaucracy-mired centralized administrative structure while, at the same time, the CCCHE wants to create an even larger bureaucracy made up of 107 colleges! Inconsistent though the public's calls for reform may be, change of some kind is clearly in the works for California's community colleges. Faculty must work to ensure such change makes sound educational sense and is in the best interests of students.

To do so, faculty and organizations that represent faculty will have to make sure the public and legislators do not form their perceptions of what is right for community colleges by reading the Los Angeles Times or the report of the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education.