Uniting Community Colleges No Easy Job

Every Friday, the leader of the world’s largest system of higher education fires up his computer and taps out an e-mail message to campus leaders across the state.

Sometimes he’s whimsical, reporting on his 9-mile bike commute or concocting imaginary adventures about the bureaucracy he would battle if he requisitioned a bicycle.

But more often, Thomas J. Nussbaum is serious, updating more than 100 district chancellors and college presidents--the chief executive officers--on such pressing issues as state funding and the question of how ready the California Community College system is to take in thousands of new enrollees sent for job preparation by welfare reform. (His conclusion: not very ready.)

“This is a direct line of communication,” Nussbaum said, taking a break from the system’s Board of Governors’ recent meeting in Garden Grove. “It’s been unifying for the system.”

Unification is no small task for Nussbaum, the system’s chancellor, who is somewhat like a king answering to an array of sometimes raucously independent fiefdoms.

The system he leads educates more than 1.4 million people a year--more than the University of California and California State University systems combined--at 106 colleges.

But for Nussbaum, being chancellor of the entire state system poses a curious challenge. Each of the 71 districts is run by locally elected boards with wide latitude in setting curriculum and policies tailored to regional needs. That allows them to offer everything from English literature to Internet surfing, depending on what their community wants.

Nussbaum’s office’s chief duties include distributing guaranteed state funding--up $350 million this year to $4 billion--and stepping in when a district approaches financial insolvency. The chancellor and 16-member Board of Governors also advise local districts on policy questions.

But, as evidenced at the recent Board of Governors meeting, Nussbaum is willing to assert authority.

He proposed tying $100 million worth of state funding systemwide to “academic excellence”--meaning how well colleges do in graduating students or transferring them to four-year schools. Colleges would be rewarded with a certain amount of money for each student who gets an associate’s degree or certificate or goes on to a four-year college for a bachelor’s degree.

The board approved the concept but not the money, sending the proposal back to the chancellor for fine-tuning in consultation with faculty, students and administrators.

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In rare unison, those groups complained that Nussbaum failed to solicit their opinions adequately before presenting the proposal, which they panned, to the board.

Critics said the idea would primarily benefit suburban districts, where students get through community college faster because they come from academically superior high schools, and would encourage professors to inflate grades for higher funding.

But Nussbaum said the measure is needed to prove to the Legislature and governor that community college money is well-spent.

That is an important argument: Next year, Nussbaum will ask for a $500-million budget increase for the system, which over the years has had to turn away students because funding has not kept up with rising enrollment demands.

Enrollment statewide stands at about the same level as in the mid-1970s, even though the adult population has grown by more than 8 million. Consultants predict a 4% increase in enrollment demand annually through the beginning of the next century.

Moreover, colleges have come to rely on lower-paid, part-time faculty to such a degree that they now constitute two-thirds of the teaching force--a key bone of contention with union and faculty groups. Spending per full-time student, $3,308, pales in comparison with Cal State’s $8,425 and UC’s $16,218.

“There is a lost level of ability to provide access,” said Nussbaum, 48, a career administrator who is halfway through a two-year contract paying him $135,000 annually. “The Legislature and governor have allowed that to happen. They have not funded the enrollment demand.”

Part of the funding problem, he said, is the lack of a cohesive lobbying voice in Sacramento, where some larger districts employ their own lobbyists, often out of sync with the system’s demands.

That raises the issue of the power of the chancellor, who has the least authority of the three heads of public higher education systems in the state.

Nussbaum carefully dances around the suggestion that he should have more say over local boards and their actions, but he admits to some frustration when crises arise.

Earlier this month, faculty members from the South Orange County Community College District in Mission Viejo complained to him and the board about their trustees’ appointment of a college president behind closed doors and the approval--later rescinded--of a seminar with a guest speaker who questions the severity of the Holocaust and contends that Israeli agents were implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

But the best Nussbaum could do was explain that nothing in the California Education Code allows him to intervene or overrule a local board’s decisions.

Later, in an interview, he suggested that in some cases “there ought to be a time when the system comes in. We don’t have that authority now.”

Independent observers recommend a change in the system’s structure, but just how to make it, how to balance state and local power more effectively, is a thorny problem.

“It is a set of institutions enormously consumed by internal issues and conflicts and turf battles that are barren of an educational result,” said William H. Pickens, executive director of the nonprofit California Citizens Commission on Higher Education. “I like contentiousness and argument and discussion. But when one’s entire energy is devoted to that and there is no benefit to the students, you have to say, ‘We need to change the structure.’ ”

In the coming months, a community college system task force and independent bodies such as Pickens’ commission plan to release recommendations to improve how the system works and is governed.

Meanwhile, Nussbaum, an El Centro native and lawyer by training who never attended community college, presses on.

He is watching how well the system moves welfare recipients through education and job-training programs before their two-year limits on public aid expire. The system this year received $65 million to rework curriculum and job training and provide day care for welfare recipients.

Already, 10% of the system’s enrolled students receive some form of public assistance, but Nussbaum said colleges will not meet the challenge of moving them through quickly for another few years.

And he said he will continue steps to bring some semblance of unity to the fractious system. But carefully. “We’re looking at a minor adjustment in the system’s role.”