Shared Governance in the California Community Colleges

Despite recent legislation that promises them a bigger role in the state’s two-year colleges, California faculty continue to face obstacles to shared governance.

By Linda Collins

Most of our students are older than those in traditional four-year institutions of higher education, attend part time (73 percent), work (80 percent), have significant family responsibilities, and are men or women of color (over 55 percent). As A New Look at the California Community Colleges: Keeping the Promise, a 2002 report, pointed out, 75 percent of the students of color who are pursuing higher education in California are enrolled in the community college system. We are, quite simply, a gateway institution—to higher education, employment, the opportunity for a living wage, and a richer, more satisfying life.

We face daunting obstacles, the lack of adequate resources being the most devastating. Funding for California’s community colleges is among the lowest nationwide; we hover about $2,500 below the national average in per-student spending and significantly below the rates at the two university systems in California—the University of California and the California State University—as well as the rates in the K–12 sector. Our average class size is some ten students above the national average, and community college faculty teach the equivalent of fifteen units every semester.

Yet the community colleges educate most of those who provide essential public services—fire, police, emergency medical, and nursing-care personnel—as well as those who maintain the state’s basic infrastructure—electrical workers, plumbers, and providers of information-technology services.

And community college students who transfer to the state’s four-year universities do as well as or better than students who begin their college education at the universities, as measured by grade point averages. In recent years, 60 percent of the students who have graduated from the California State University system and 30 percent of those who have earned bachelor’s degrees from the University of California have been community college transfer students.

Moreover, we are well thought of—polling data consistently show high levels of public support for the community colleges. But we have not succeeded in translating that esteem into sufficient fiscal support for our colleges. We continue to absorb growing numbers of students, while funding falls further behind; projected enrollments are off the charts. That we do what we do is actually quite miraculous.

The California community colleges underwent a massive and comprehensive reform with the passage of legislation in the late 1980s. A remarkable achievement, the legislation defined the multiple missions of the colleges, their place within the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education, and the centrality of these institutions to the overall quality of life in California.

The reform (often referred to by its legislative designation, "AB1725") was wide-ranging, affecting everything from funding formulas to system governance. It moved the colleges away from their K–12 roots, raised minimum qualifications for faculty, extended probation for new faculty members from two to four years, strengthened faculty evaluation through mandated peer review, and established expectations and funding streams for faculty professional development and curricular innovation. The results of the reform include increased confidence among businesses, the public, and transfer institutions in the integrity of our educational offerings, certificates, and degrees.

Faculty Voice

The legislation gave the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (which represents the senates from all 108 colleges) a formal role in supporting the local senates and in providing academic recommendations at the system level. It also called for enhanced cooperation among the state’s three public systems of higher education—the community colleges, the University of California, and the California State University.

The advent of AB1725 sparked a decade of experimentation and reform and loosed enormous creative energy among faculty and administrators. New personnel policies gave faculty responsibility for hiring, evaluation, tenure review, and professional development and established an orderly system for layoffs. And policies that gave local academic senates primary responsibility in academic and professional matters—including oversight of degree and certificate requirements, grading policies, curricula, and educational programs—replaced the old "meet-and-confer" model.

This legislation came none too soon. Over the past decade, California’s demographics and economy have changed enormously, requiring constant responses from the colleges. In the last five years, curricular changes have been especially dramatic, partly because of the influence of computers and information technology, but also because of increasingly varied levels of student preparation. Faculty have risen to this challenge by tailoring curricula, teaching styles, and support services in novel ways, such as experimenting with programs that can bridge traditional disciplines, create learning communities, and respond to rapidly changing community circumstances. The incredible diversity of our students requires ongoing attention to the makeup of the faculty, the content of the curriculum, the climate on campus, and the success rates of all the students admitted to our historically open-access institutions.

Tools for Citizenship

Faculty have always felt the duty to advocate for the best interests of students—to insist that attention to the broad span of their lives inform every interaction, every college offering, every college policy. Students must be prepared for careers, not just jobs. In community colleges, raising students’ aspirations is critical to helping them secure viable futures. Growing commercial pressures on the community colleges make this task more urgent than ever.

Recently, the state added economic development to the mission of the community colleges. This new mandate raised both ethical and educational dilemmas—and provided new opportunities. Increasingly, businesses want employees who can work in multicultural teams, solve novel problems, and adapt to changing circumstances. Of course, these abilities are the very ones we seek to impart in a full, general education. Yet the workforce-development system, in California and elsewhere, still rewards short-term, skills-based training and undermines or militates against investment in longer-term educational preparation.

Many people now recognize that the old training models are inadequate and that a decade of welfare reform has led not to self-sufficiency but to an increase in the working poor. California’s governor, Gray Davis, and the state’s Community College Board of Governors have recently supported policies that would center the workforce-preparation system on a "career-ladders" approach that encourages movement up occupational and educational ladders. As the governor has recognized, community colleges must be key to any real solution to workforce preparation. And for that to happen, faculty must be engaged in curriculum development and program redesign, something that can occur only when they are given the support—and the time—to do so.

The ideas that flow from collegial governance structures make available to students and the community one of the most precious traditions of a free society: the practice of fearless inquiry—without which students cannot experience the freedom to think, question, and make their own choices. Academic freedom for both faculty and students is essential if we are to nurture independence of thought and provide the tools for active citizenship.

Obstacles to Progress

AB1725 called for increased investment in the community colleges, but such investment did not materialize. Little money has been available for professional development for faculty or administrators. Little or no reassigned time has been on offer for faculty to do curriculum development or governance work. Administrators have been stretched thin, and many are increasingly preoccupied with efficiency and productivity, often at the expense of educational discourse and classroom concerns.

Like other systems and institutions of higher education, we have come to rely increasingly on part-time faculty, in spite of the AB1725 mandate that 75 percent of all credit instruction be delivered by full-time faculty. Few part-time faculty members are paid for office hours, and fewer still receive compensation for governance activities or extracurricular work with students. Increasingly, part-time students are taught by part-time faculty, decreasing both groups’ sense of institutional connection.

Moreover, part-time faculty without the benefits of due process or tenure are vulnerable to institutional pressures and retaliation when they participate in governance work. Overreliance on part-time faculty has placed increased burdens on full-time faculty, adding to already heavy workloads and straining the ability of full-time faculty to carry out governance responsibilities.1

While some administrators welcomed the opportunities afforded by AB1725 and joined with faculty to make the new approach work, many were unprepared for this shift in governance. Faculty and administrators alike had to learn from the bottom up—and are still learning. The skills needed to engage in collegial governance have not been systematically developed in either group. Underprepared administrators often turn to gimmicks, controlling behaviors, simplistic techniques, or even fits of pique. These actions cover a deep, and sometimes shocking, ignorance of the values and traditions of higher education, which is particularly marked in general education and the liberal arts. Such actions also reflect a dwindling commitment to the core values of the academy on the part of certain administrative leaders.

Many community colleges have successfully negotiated the transition. But in many others, local senates have found themselves ignored or—worse—targeted for asserting their governance rights and academic primacy. Autocratic administrative cultures that insist on conformity, loyalty, and safety above all else place progressive administrators in untenable positions and have driven some from the profession.

As I mentioned earlier, the state chancellor’s office has provided little enforcement of relevant statutes, and no coherent response to ongoing conflicts over governance and threats to academic freedom at the local colleges. In some districts, these conflicts have caught the attention of the media or spilled over into the courts. In the South Orange Community College district, for example, district officials stripped the local senates of reassigned time, then attempted to install an administrator as chair of the curriculum committee. In response to vocal opposition, the district proposed restrictions on student and faculty speech. Parts of the proposed speech policy were eventually ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. district court, while other provisions were withdrawn by the district prior to the court ruling. In another case, a faculty member won his suit after the college district reprimanded him for publishing a newsletter critical of the administration. This district continues to be embroiled in controversy.

These issues prompted the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges to enter into a formal partnership with the AAUP, which was designed partly to bring the AAUP’s expertise to bear in protecting academic freedom and faculty governance rights in the community colleges, particularly in the most egregious cases.

Market Model

It is not an accident that these corporate-style reforms have taken square aim at faculty governance—a form of power sharing that is not available to faculty at most private proprietary institutions. Many people agree that the reformers intend to dismantle faculty governance. As Terry O’Banion, one of the chief gurus of the "change" movement puts it, we need to overthrow the "traditional architecture of higher education." After all, once we replace concern for "process" with a focus on "product," the means to achieving the desired product no longer really matter. If it can be made without investing in the deliberative processes of governance, so much the better.

Even more objectionable than the movement’s disregard for faculty governance is its devaluation of the educational experience. If the aim is to produce "student learning outcomes," the process of inquiry, the joys of discovery, and the relationships between faculty members and stu-dents are not of much consequence in their own right. In the end, O’Banion and his supporters offer an instrumentalist (and reductionist) approach to knowledge.

Other like-minded reformers clamor for "accountability" and insist that we educators shift our attention from "inputs" to "outputs." Looking at the actual achievements of our students is vital to measuring educational success, but inattention to so-called inputs is simply bad policy. The reformers’ disregard for the baseline resources required for education is a thinly veiled attempt to change the subject. They do not want to talk about the increasingly inadequate investment in public education in California, nor do they want to address the fact that our students today are the most diverse in the history of the state.

Certainly, these students deserve the same level of investment in their education as previous generations enjoyed.

Across the nation, accrediting commissions, bowing to pressure from the federal government and from private proprietary institutions seeking accreditation, have moved to refocus standards on "measurable learning outcomes." In the western region, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which is under the authority of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, recently proposed a radical restructuring of the basis of accreditation.

The ACCJC would like to move away from multiple measures of institutional excellence, dropping assessment of the quality of faculty, the soundness of policy and governance structures, the functionality of academic senates, the sufficiency of fiscal and physical resources, and the level of community involvement. Instead, the commission proposes to base institutional accreditation primarily upon whether an institution has a "systematic cycle of evaluation, integrated planning, [and] implementation and re-evaluation to verify effectiveness." This "standard" would be applied as an evaluative tool across an institution—to instruction, student services, and governance itself. The ACCJC further proposes that faculty be evaluated for their "effectiveness in producing student learning outcomes." The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges strongly opposes this move, and has been joined by representatives of the AAUP, the Community College Council of the California Federation of Teachers, and other faculty and administrative groups.

While the commission has backed off on some of the more egregious changes—such as replacing the current standard on governance with one entitled "Leadership and Vested Authority"—the basic character of the proposal remains unaltered. The new standards would weaken the academic senates and the faculty role in governance and underscore the authority of the CEO to an extent not seen in previous accrediting standards.

Exacerbating these attacks on governance is the growing affinity of governing boards with what AAUP general secretary Mary Burgan has called the "cult of the CEO." The Association of Governing Boards and the Community College League of California (which represents CEOs and trustees) have asserted that the CEO is the only employee of a governing board—undercutting faculty participation in the selection of the college president or chancellor and underscoring board loyalty to the CEO rather than to the broad institution, the community, the faculty, and the students.

Organizational structures featuring exaggerated hierarchies and an unprecedented number of management positions have become increasingly common in California’s community colleges. Management reorganizations have undermined shared governance in the name of efficiency. In college after college, faculty-elected division and department chairs have been replaced by full-time managers, who claim, remarkably, that this new structure will make colleges more "student centered."

Faculty have opposed these measures, often futilely. In a more successful recent battle, 91 percent of the faculty at Diablo Valley College registered a no-confidence vote in a college president who, amid an institutional restructuring, proceeded on academic and professional issues without formal consultation with the local senate.

A decade after passage of AB1725, we have yet to create structures and cultures that support and nurture the practice of shared governance throughout the state’s community colleges. We have made heady progress in some areas, and we have witnessed heartbreaking conflicts in others. But because we have learned that it is possible to do the job right, we have hope for tomorrow.

Note

Linda Collins is professor of sociology at Los Medanos College and past president of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. This article is based on an address delivered at the AAUP’s 2001 conference on shared governance.

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