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Twice a year, the Academic Senate
of the California Community Colleges holds its plenary sessions,
where representatives from the senates from around the state meet
and discuss current issues in community college policy. The session
culminates in a round of voting on resolutions, some of which may be
incorporated into Title 5 regulations passed by the California
Community College Board of Governors and thus apply to all of the
California community colleges. In November, several members of the
Glendale Senate Executive committee attended the plenary, and I
represented the college as its voting delegate. Below you will find
a summary of what I took to be the most interesting debates at the
voting session.
Transfer degrees
There were several competing motions about transfer degrees
triggered by legislation pending in the state Assembly. (You may
recall that Glendale, like numerous other colleges, granted transfer
degrees to students who completed an approved transfer general
education program [i.e. IGETC or CSU GE]. At the urging of the state
Academic Senate, these degrees were prohibited since they did not
have a major—they weren’t a degree in a specific
discipline or area of study.) AB 440 is proposing that the colleges
may again confer a transfer degree for students who complete 60
units of an approved transfer general education program as well as a
major or area of emphasis, as long as the colleges do not add
additional local requirements.
The debate here was twofold. First, there was
opposition to the state legislature imposing what degrees are
instead of faculty. Second, there was opposition to the prohibition
on local requirements as an abridgement of the local autonomy of
college senates. There were
a total of three resolutions on this matter, all hostile to state
imposition of a degree, but split over the ban on local
requirements. The only one that passed is as follows:
Resolved, The Academic Senate
for California Community Colleges oppose any legislation that
seeks to alter its curriculum, degree, and certificate
requirements and reaffirm its support of local autonomy and
faculty primacy over the same.
Minimum Qualifications and
Equivalency
Another area of interest is the procedure for establishing
equivalence to the minimum qualifications. As you may recall, when
you applied for a job here at Glendale College, you indicated
whether you possessed the minimum qualifications for the position.
If you didn’t, then you indicated that you possessed the equivalence
to the minimum qualifications. In the event that a candidate asserts
equivalence, it must be reviewed by both the Division and the GCC
Academic Senate. Such decisions are based on our “Minimum
Qualifications, Equivalency Policy, Hiring Procedure” policy (coming
soon to
http://www.glendale.edu/index.aspx?page=3652). For most
disciplines, the minimum qualification is a Master’s degree in the
discipline, but for other disciplines (primarily in the career
technical education area) a Bachelor’s or an Associate’s degree
along with work experience in the field fulfills the qualifications.
Last spring, a resolution proposed that there could in fact be no
equivalence to an Associate’s degree. The argument was, among other
things, that if we did not require at least a minimum of an
associate’s degree from our instructors, it undercuts our belief in
our own mission. On the other hand, this could be taken to mean that
a student who completes all but three units of his or her degree at
UCLA did not possess the equivalent of an AA degree. Practically
speaking, it means that recruitment of faculty in these disciplines
will be more difficult, since relatively few of the candidates
possess the Associate’s degree, let alone the BA. (How many
appliance repair workers do you think have an Associate’s degree?)
Added to these difficulties is the actual process of deciding what
amounts to equivalence. Many people think it is equivalent work
experience, but in fact the ASCCC (and our) policy is equivalent
coursework. Nonetheless, practice varies widely around the state
about the interpretation of equivalency, and the resulting
resolution (which passed) was as follows:
Whereas, There are
significant problems with equivalency across the state;
Whereas, Single course equivalency, eminence, equivalence to
coursework and other issues continue to be serious issues;
Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community
Colleges produce a process of consultation with local senate and
discipline organizations leading to guidelines for establishing
standards and suitable criteria for equivalencies; and
Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community
Colleges present proposed guidelines for establishing standards
and suitable criteria for equivalencies including model
practices, at a breakout at the Fall 2010 Plenary Session.
Speaking of minimum
qualifications, if your discipline is dropped from the college’s
disciplines list, does this mean you’ve lost your job? The state
senate also took up this issue and came to the following conclusion:
Resolved, That the Academic
Senate for California Community Colleges recommends that local
senates work with their bargaining representatives to ensure
that faculty not be released from employment solely on the basis
of a change to the minimum qualifications.
By the way, to the best of my
knowledge there is no provision in our bargaining agreement that
covers this issue, but I am told that “grandfathering” faculty based
on the minimum qualifications when they were hired is our past
practice.
50% Law
For the uninitiated, the 50% law is a requirement that community
colleges (and K-12) spend 50% of their expenditures on instruction.
(The actual formula is quite arcane. For a better understanding, see
appendix F at:
http://www.asccc.org/Events/sessions/fall2009/materials.html)
Not included in the numerator (instruction side) of the ratio are
classified staff and administrator costs (among other things), but
also the salaries of counseling and library faculty (when they are
not offering “instruction”). Of course, as any of these faculty
members will tell you, much of what they do is in fact instruction.
And this is the nub of the problem: expenditures on counseling and
library faculty can be severely pinched by the 50% limit.
Thus the resolutions (which were all authored by the same person to
encourage a freewheeling debate on the issue) offered a variety of
contradictory options: abolish the law; remove the counseling and
library faculty from the denominator of the ratio; move the
counseling and library faculty into the numerator and change the
ratio to 54%; provide counseling and library faculty with their own
apportionment separate from the 50% for instructional faculty; and
conduct further study to gather more accurate data about the costs
of administration. Only the latter proposal for further study
passed, with the rest referred back to the ASCCC Executive for
re-presentation in spring, 2010.
Accreditation
Whereas in the spring there were several resolutions about
accreditation (e.g., enhancing faculty representation on site teams)
and considerable frustration expressed with the Accreditation
Commission by the ASCCC president, there was only one resolution
that indirectly touched on accreditation but is still noteworthy:
Resolved, That the Academic
Senate for California Community Colleges communicate to all
California community colleges that a lack of Telecommunications
and Technology Infrastructure Program (TTIP) funding should not
be considered an acceptable reason for failure to adequately
fund periodical databases and/or other electronic information
resources in our college libraries.
This resolution was approved by
the plenary. These were just a few of the resolutions debated. Overall there were
45 different motions and some 25 amendments to those motions. As you
can see, some of them deal with fundamentally important issues that
we struggle with here at Glendale as well. So when you see me send
along the link to the proposed resolutions before a plenary, take a
look at resolutions of interest and let your Senator or members of
the Senate Executive know of your concerns.
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