Unsnarl Faculty Hiring

Just before he quit as Los Angeles Community College District chancellor last year, Bill Segura summed up the situation: “No one’s happy, the issues aren’t solved and everyone becomes angry at everyone else.” At that point, the district was mired in feuding and faced a $13-million deficit. Some of its nine campuses were in jeopardy of going out of business.

Now, however, after years of sliding enrollment (from 134,622 in 1980 to 98,728 earlier this year), the district is clearly on the mend. A recent audit confirmed a projected $8.3-million surplus in the district’s operating budget and a 2% rise in student enrollment in the last year.

Credit goes to district officials for deciding to reward high-performing college presidents and threatening to replace low-performing ones. That accountability has prompted presidents to find innovative ways of generating revenues. The ingenuity prize might go to Los Angeles City College President Mary Spangler’s scheme to generate a half-million dollars in annual revenues by building a pay-to-park garage on college property, topped with a state-of-the-art driving range.

Community college officials are also drawing more students by offering courses at early morning hours that students, if not always the faculty, prefer.

But the district’s growth will be sustainable over the long term only if its board president, Elizabeth Garfield, prevails in streamlining the district’s needlessly bureaucratic faculty hiring process. That decision is due at the district’s board meeting today. College presidents need the freedom to hire the teachers they find most qualified, rather than bowing to bureaucrats with rigid hiring criteria cooked up decades ago in the central office.

Hiring qualified faculty is key to giving colleges the ability to develop regionally tailored courses of study: It could help Pierce College in the west San Fernando Valley to expand its agribusiness courses and enable West Los Angeles College to continue its partnership with the DreamWorks studio to develop multimedia classes.

Yes, the community college district is on the mend. But to keep it that way, district officials will have to demonstrate continuing commitment to flexibility and to accountability by college presidents, administrators, faculty and the board itself.