College District Should Consider Breaking Up

* On Sept. 22, the Valley Edition ran a front-page article (“Accreditation Panel Defers Pierce Renewal”) outlining severe problems at Los Angeles Pierce College, ranging from lack of leadership to neglect of programs that would attract and retain students. The situation at Pierce is endemic to the nine-college Los Angeles Community College District as a whole. The district is hamstrung by a wasteful hierarchy that siphons off money and talent while isolating itself in an ivory tower in Downtown Los Angeles.

This Downtown hierarchy is a disaster which should be tolerated no longer. While the Los Angeles Unified School District is being broken up slowly but surely because it is unwieldy and ineffective, no such outcry is being made against the Los Angeles Community College District. Meanwhile, all nine campuses under Downtown control are languishing on the brink of desperation and collapse.

College presidents and other administrators, appointed Downtown, are sent to the campuses with little knowledge of local needs. And since these appointments are temporary, at best, appointees put no real effort into strengthening the infrastructure of the individual colleges. Thus, presidents are little more than figureheads.

The main argument against breaking up the Los Angeles Community College District is that there would be expensive and needless duplication of administrative services and costs. This argument holds little weight. Each campus already has personnel devoted to all of the administrative services required. Of course, each new district would need a chancellor as well as an elected board of trustees. But it is typical for a good college president to serve as chancellor, and trustees would be much more accountable if they were elected by local city districts. Thus, trustees would not be able to squander millions of dollars on an unusable building, as the current board has done. Waste and corruption will be cut way back if the district is broken up, and services will greatly improve.

The time has come to look at an alternative to the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District. Individual college districts, made up of a single campus, can provide local communities with the types of college programs they desperately need and deserve. And if the administrators, faculty and staff who run these individual college districts are made accountable for the success of the college, local communities will gain.

JOE RYAN

Los Angeles

Ryan is a professor of English and ESL at Los Angeles City College in Los Angeles.