Vicki Legion sums up what we learned at CCSF for our friends at Peralta facing an accreditation assault. September 19, 2020
1. We naively tend to believe what accreditation commissions say about themselves, which is that they are technical assistance bodies “of our peers,” that exist to do neutral evaluations and feedback to colleges, in order to assure and improve quality of learning. The sociologist Bourdieu, however, said that the conclusions of a commission can be accurately predicted in advance of its very first meeting, by looking at the composition of who was selected as commissioners. In the case of the ACCJC, the commissioners were selected by ACCJC president Barbara Beno, who skewed the commission heavily toward conservative administrators from the Valley, and essentially excluded faculty and concerned community members.
2. During the campaign to save City College from closure, a great deal of evidence came out that the harsh conclusions of the commission were rigged—in other words pre-determined to fit a political agenda. Our slogan was “accreditation bullies for a corporate agenda,” and we referred to “the manufactured accreditation crisis.” The evidence that the conclusion was predetermined includes:
a. An analysis that on the official yardstick of quality announced by the state Chancellor’s Office—the Chancellor’s Score Card—City College had higher scores than every college that seated a commissioner on the ACCJC. In reality, CCSF was one of the top community colleges in the state, and the PPIC presented data that City College ranked fourth highest in transfer rates of the large CCCs (2014). This news was buried in the corporate media, because it didn’t fit the dominant narrative of “bad, very bad City College.”
b. During the trial, it came out that after the commission’s visiting teams had held scores of site meetings and made its recommendations, Barbara Beno had overruled her own team’s conclusions and cranked up the harshness of the sanctions.
c. During the trial, it came out that the core accusation of “City College hovering at the point of bankruptcy” was false, and that an apparent shortfall in funds in the City College accounts when the ACCJC arrived was caused by a temporary cash flow problem caused by a late payment from the state itself. Yes, City College and the entire CCC was under financial stress—not because of “fiscal mismanagement,” but because of deep permanent budget cuts imposed 2007-13, leading to the statewide system eliminating nearly one quarter of all classes. City College’s real offense was not “dysfunctional governance” or budget profligacy, but the college’s resistance to the downsizing agenda, and its loud and unified denunciation of the 2012 “Student Success Act,” a policy clusterclearly aiming at downsizing and curriculum narrowing.
d. The VP of the commission, Stephen Kinsella, said in a public meeting that on two occasions the US DOE told ACCJC officials that they had “been going too easy on CCSF” with the implication that they could lose their authorization to serve as accreditors if they did not toughen up. We will likely never know exactly which US DOE staff member delivered this threat. However, we do know that US DOE was riddled with leadership and staff who either came from the for-profit college sector that competes with the community colleges, or who were poised to go through the “golden revolving door” to take lucrative jobs with the for-profit college industry. (To cite just one example, the DOE official in charge of “accreditation rule-making” left the federal government to take a job with the main lobby group for the for-profit colleges, making a salary of one to three million dollars a year.
3. When we say the process was rigged to fit a political agenda, we don’t mean to say that the actors were all aware of the unstated agenda. The corporate policy network has tremendous power over messaging and framing, being able to set up policy shops that generate an endless stream of reports, funding journalists to report corporate-friendly stories, etc. The messages become hegemonic, appearing as the only reasonable alternative. So many sincere people become true believers in the corporate agenda, “drinking the Kool-aid.”
4. This corporate political agenda coming from Sacramento calls for ending the free, large, open access, broad-mission California community colleges that grew up post-World War II and expanded greatly in the 1960s. That agenda grew out of an elite consensus reflected in a number of reports at the state level. This new vision calls for the community colleges to be radically downsized, and to turn away from community-facing, to instead “meet the needs of industry.” Parts of the mission that did not meet this workforce prep imperative were no longer priorities. This elite consensus was NOT arrived at through public debate, through student-faculty input, or local governance by elected boards. It is put into place by policies that are imposed from Sacramento. A good example is the policies dictated by Gov. Jerry Brown on his way out of office through his executive power of the budget: a performance funding formula, and a curricular narrowing called “Guided Pathways.” Under Guided Pathways, the colleges are to narrow their curriculum to six to ten super-majors. So locally-invented, locally responsive and social justice curriculum becomes fat to be starved out—think of the examples of City College innovations like Filipino Studies, Poetry for the People, or the first LGBTQ studies in the country. Jerry Brown made a speech to the Chamber of Commerce in which he called for the curriculum to be greatly narrowed, to be “like Chipotle”—offering a few highly standardized choices tostudents, as an efficiency measure.
The popular way to convey this corporate agenda was the mantra of the state takeover and its Special Trustees with Extraordinary Powers (you can’t make up a title like that!): “The community colleges can no longer afford to be all things to all people” (justifying cutting out lifelong learning and noncredit classes). “City College is not a social service agency” (justifying cuts in student services). “We can no longer afford that social justice stuff.” (A good example is the interview with Robert Agrella in the Wall Street Journal.)
5. During the “golden age” post World War II, California was the industrial powerhouse of the whole world, and it needed a big, technically trained working class. The US was also economically dominant in the world, and could easily afford to share the wealth. Under the Master Plan of 1960, California put in place free higher education, for decades. Finally, during the “long 1960s”, strong movements developed demanding open access and relevant education, especially for Black and people of color communities that had been largely excluded from postsecondary education (see the Third World Strike at SF State). It is the large size, low cost, open access, and the social justice orientation of the CCC that is being pulled back since the 1990s. Today, because of both outsourcing and automation, the workforce is very much smaller. The corporate policy network based in Sacramento no longer wants to pay for a big, open access, free, social-justice-inclusive and community-facing community college system. They want much smaller workforce-prep oriented institutions in which space for critical thinking or imagining has been radically reduced.Indeed many members of the bi-partisan corporate policy network make jumbo profits from the competing fraudulent for-profit colleges which cost students seven times as much as a community college education. To cite just two examples: Wells Fargo is the second biggest lender of the predatory private student loans. At the end of the Obama administration, Obama’s best friend purchased the biggest for-profit “college,” University of Phoenix (which has a graduation rate in its largest division of six percent, leaving students with no degrees or worthless degrees, and a mountain of debt).
6. The corporate agenda that we confront is part of a worldwide corporate policy agenda called neoliberalism. This is why we have seen a seemingly endless stream of privatization moves in one sector after another: health care, hospitals, elder facilities, the military, water, utilities, etc. By deeply understanding this global context, we can bring into view how many allies we have throughout the public sector and indeed the whole world.
7. An important conclusion from all of this is that we need to look higher up than the most obvious opponents who are visible to us and “in our face,” the local administration or board of trustees. We need to understand that the community college policy environment is shaped from Sacramento—“the swamp” that is heavily dominated by industry lobbyists. This understanding will lead us to address state-level actors such as the the governor and his budget, and the Chancellor’s Office whose board and leadership is directly or indirectly appointed by the governor. We need to have a clear vision of a large, free, communityfacing, broad-mission, social-justice-inclusive community college system.
Working across the state, we need to develop a program of demands. Our challenge is to organize ourselves to be able to fight for it at the state level. Yes, it is a daunting task, but necessary to get off the hamster wheel of playing defense from one cutback after the next.
