School’s Quaker Spirit Challenged : New President, Layoffs Spur Protests at Pacific Oaks College

From its beginning in 1945, when seven Quaker families in Pasadena scraped together a down payment for a nursery school that stood for peace in the midst of war, Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School has been different from most schools.

Quaker principles of individual worth, social justice and resolving conflicts through consensus guided its founders and their successors as Pacific Oaks grew to include a college that specializes in early childhood education and into national recognition.

Now those same principles are at the core of a controversy that has shaken Pacific Oaks and that some say has become the school’s worst crisis.

Graduation ceremonies today, in which 43 of Pacific Oaks College’s 250 students will receive bachelor’s or master’s degrees, indicate to some that the college remains a viable alternative, a non-traditional school that offers innovative programs and methods of teaching. But others worry that Pacific Oaks may never be the same again.

Changes Urged

The tumult began when Pacific Oaks College received stinging criticism from the Accrediting Commission of the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges in 1985, saying it must make “profound changes in attitude and process in order to seek resolutions” to financial, personnel and academic problems. Although the college is in no danger of losing its accreditation, the commission has scheduled a review of the recommended changes for next April.

The first step by the board of trustees was to hire Katherine Gabel as president of the schools in September, 1985.

But the choice of Gabel, her salary and her firing of key teachers and administrators that began three weeks after she was hired has outraged teachers, parents and students. Several teachers have resigned in protest.

Claiming that Gabel and the board had violated the spirit of Pacific Oaks, protesters in March picketed the school and circulated petitions seeking the reinstatement of two teachers and “implementation of a fair and professional evaluation process for all employees.”

The controversy expanded as the faculty, for the first time in the school’s history, demanded higher pay.

“I was changing things,” Gabel said in a recent interview, adding that she has already raised faculty salaries and started several new programs. “You can’t run an institution forward with a consensus model, although I’m 100% in agreement with Quaker values.

“We’re refocusing,” she said. “In the last few years Pacific Oaks was broadening into women’s studies, gerontology--we’re getting back to early childhood.

“But we have not changed our philosophical goals. I think there’s a feeling of energy and excitement and challenge. I think hard times are over.”

Ralph Wolff, associate executive director of the accreditation commission, agreed, saying, “This is an institution in transition, with real problems, but we’re confident the problems are addressable and the school will be in a much stronger place.”

At a meeting in April, the board reaffirmed its commitment to Gabel.

“The board wants Katherine Gabel to get things on an even keel academically and financially, like a new broom coming in and looking at the cobwebs,” said Asenath (Kennie) Young, the only founding member to remain on Pacific Oaks’ board of trustees. She laughingly describes herself as the board’s “token Quaker.”

“She has done it in her style,” Young said. “That is not my style. She was hired to straighten things out and that’s the way she did it.”

Olin Barrett, president of the board of trustees, said Pacific Oaks’ Quaker-inspired “commitment to a humanistic approach” is a major factor in the turmoil. The school’s traditional emphasis on individual needs over those of the institution, he said, had resulted in “a loss of focus, with the result that the institution gets lost in the shuffle.”

“I think we went too far that way. Things slid to some degree,” Barrett said.

‘Lack of Academic Rigor’

The accrediting team’s report used stronger language, saying the focus on individual worth and consensus in decision-making “produces endless self-examination and self-consciousness . . . prolonging talk probably to the point of exhaustion and even paralysis.”

Of the schools’ belief in open communication, the report said, “there is in fact no real communication going on; the all-important coming together, the meeting of minds, is not now occurring.”

The commission recommended that Pacific Oaks correct “lack of academic rigor,” low teacher salaries, financial instability, absence of long-range planning and “inbreeding,” which it said was the result of more than half of the faculty receiving degrees from Pacific Oaks.

“The college’s expectations of a new president are overwhelming,” the report said, referring to Pacific Oaks’ effort to replace Libby Herrick, who retired in August, 1985, after heading the school for eight years.

The school turned to Gabel, Barrett said, because of her record as a strong administrator, something he and other board members felt was essential.

Gabel, 49, was dean of the Graduate School of Clinical Social Work at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. She holds a doctorate in sociology and a law degree, and in the early 1960s established and headed a juvenile institution for girls in Phoenix.

But her appointment, with a salary of $85,000 a year--more than double the highest amount that Pacific Oaks had ever paid--sparked an immediate uproar.

The faculty’s unanimous choice for the presidency was Carol Phillips, a long-time Pacific Oaks teacher, who has since left the school.

Breach of Faith

According to angry parents, teachers and students who rallied behind Phillips, the way Gabel was picked and the salary she received represented a breach of faith between the board of trustees and “the Pacific Oaks Community,” meaning all those with ties to the school.

Most of all, the community deplored what it called the violation of the Quaker principle of consensus when Gabel was hired without its participation. Community members protested when Gabel fired a dean and several faculty members on the staff of 22 and chose their replacements.

“That is arbitrary, hierarchal decision-making, and it is not a proper way to make decisions,” said Betty Jones, a Quaker and a Pacific Oaks teacher since 1954. “Our faculty hiring is by consensus, and you have to take as long as you need to make decisions. Violating that process will arouse all of us more than anything else.”

Protests increased with the firing of Bunny Rabiroff, who had been on the faculty for 15 years and was notified of her dismissal the day before she left on a six-month sabbatical, and the demotion of Antonia Darder, who had been hired a year earlier as the college’s first full-time Latina teacher and as a specialist in anti-bias studies.

Rabiroff has begun a grievance process to retain her job and Darder was reinstated to full-time status.

Gabel said the board had told her that she was to build her own team, and that several of the firings were made for financial reasons.

Mindful of the school’s past, Gabel said “consensus makes things more difficult, can slow things down. The rules were not as clear here. We need to be clear.”

Founding Families

Said trustee Young: “Consensus--that’s a tricky word. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be unanimous. It does mean that everyone is worth being looked at and listened to. I have felt for a long time that things at Pacific Oaks need to be tightened up. Quakerism is not sloppy. The American Friends Service Committee (a service arm of the Quaker religion) gets a lot done in a professional, businesslike manner.”

Young recalled that the founding families had to borrow money for the down payment to begin the school, which was then a nursery school in four old houses (one house was dubbed “Termite Hall”) in a residential area on California Boulevard near the Arroyo Seco.

They bought the Broadoaks School from Whittier College for $33,000, complete with a handful of teachers and 45 students, and changed its name to Pacific Oaks. Three of the founding families who couldn’t afford to pay rent lived in the school buildings.

“We were kids, and we were all conscientious objectors and we needed the support of each other,” Young said. “We wanted to make a contribution to peace and to educate people of all races.”

New Concepts

The school, a private, nonprofit facility with no formal ties to Quakerism, espoused psychological concepts of child development that were new and considered questionable at the time. The concepts were based on the beliefs of Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, famed child psychologists who theorized that children learn best through play and by figuring things out for themselves, as opposed to more formal classroom discipline.

“The head does not have to be opened up and information poured in,” Jones said. “Our children spend a lot of time outdoors and do a lot of self-initiated projects. We give no grades, no stickers, no stars.”

The children’s school has always had a full enrollment of about 200 in a variety of programs, from infant-toddler classes through third grade.

College Added

Always a learning center that gave child development classes for adults, Pacific Oaks added an accredited college in 1959, occupying two adjoining houses on Westmoreland Place next to Pasadena’s famed Gamble House.

The college has an international reputation and draws students from many countries, said Lillian Katz, director of a national information center for early childhood education at the University of Illinois.

The average age of the 250 college students is 38 and few attend full time. A small but growing minority are men. Classes are offered in the evenings and on weekends and teaching credentials and bachelor’s and master’s degrees are given in human development, child development and marriage and family counseling.

Tuition, which runs about $200 for each academic unit, makes Pacific Oaks an expensive school compared to state-supported universities. But students claim that a Pacific Oaks education is superior to other child development programs offered in Southern California, with the added advantage of flexible schedules.

Informal Classes

Like the children’s school, with its pleasant sprawl of playgrounds and wide variety of activities, adult classes are informal. Teachers and students alike sit on sofas or often on the floor.

Some critics of the accreditation report say this informality may have influenced the inspecting team’s judgment of “lack of academic rigor.”

“There was never a lack of rigor,” said Karen Fite, who was the first casualty of several firings that began last year.

Fite was dean of the college for 10 years, and also taught classes that “dealt with racism, sexism and oppression in society.” As a result of these classes, she said, “Pacific Oaks started to be believable to black and Mexican students who thought we were just another white institution.”

Fite, who has a law degree from Loyola University, said she was fired without notice. Barrett said Fite had discussed resigning many times. Gabel said the board promised she could fill the dean’s position with someone of her choice.

“Pacific Oaks was the center of my life,” said Fite, who now practices law in a Pasadena office she shares with two other teachers who resigned to protest her firing.

Improvements Noted

Gabel points to a number of improvements she has made.

She said she was instrumental in getting teachers a 20% salary increase, which she called “a beginning” that will eventually lead to early-childhood educators at Pacific Oaks being paid on par with the highest-paid teachers anywhere. As a result of the salary increase, Pacific Oaks faces a record deficit of $200,000. The schools operate on a $2.2-million annual budget.

Gabel has also started a computer research center with a $75,000 grant, applied for a Ford Foundation grant that would enable Pacific Oaks to work with the Pasadena Unified School District’s early-childhood education programs, and replaced Pacific Oaks teachers who did not have master’s degrees with those who do.

“There’s a lot that looks good to me,” Young said. “As long as there’s open communication, we’re working.”