Stronger State Rule Over Community Colleges Urged

For the second time in six months, a prominent education research group has revived a long-standing question surrounding community colleges: Who should run them?

In the newest report, the California Postsecondary Education Commission recommends that the state authority over the colleges be strengthened. The change would lend the system more unity, the panel said--although it would also tend to shift power from faculty and local officials.

“The system is pretty diffuse,” said Warren Fox, executive director of the 16-member commission, the state’s planning agency for higher education.

The governance system now attempts “to bring all the stakeholders to the table,” he said. “But it has been cumbersome and allows veto power by small groups.”

In other quarters, though, the commission’s conclusions were questioned--on their merits and their relevance.

Why worry about governance at all? wondered Carl Friedlander, president of the American Federation of Teachers College Guild in the Los Angeles Community College District.

“I don’t think this governance issue is that central to the education of students,” he said. “A lot of it is an obsession with governance for the sake of governance.”

Friedlander was skeptical of the notion that placing more power in the hands of a single, centralized authority would improve life for students, and urged more focus on issues like improving campus buildings.

Also critical was Patrick McCallum, lobbyist for the Los Angeles Community College District, who chided the panel for floating a plan that is “politically unfeasible” because it requires various constituencies to give up some powers.

But Fox said reforms would improve accountability and help the system wrest more funds from the state Legislature.

Disagreement over governance of California’s vast system of 106 community colleges is almost as old as the system itself.

The system’s complex bureaucracy borrows elements from both the public schools and public universities, so its regulations are more extensive than those governing four-year universities.

Its consensus-style form of leadership requires consultation with faculty, administrators and state officials. The process can be slow, and views on its effectiveness differ.

Recent interest in reforming the process has been stoked by frustration among community college leaders over their inability to grab a greater share of state funds. An oft-sounded complaint is that the system is treated like a stepchild to the University of California and Cal State when it comes to handing out scarce resources.

Predictions that the community colleges will soon be hit by a wave of students, boosting enrollments, have intensified these concerns, Fox said. Changing the governance system would unify the system, he said, and strengthen its voice in Sacramento.

California Community College Chancellor Thomas J. Nussbaum agreed. The colleges need to present a united front, he said. “What we tend to get from the Legislature is a sense that no one is in control.”

Although the report will raise some hackles, its recommendations are more moderate than those put forth by a controversial commission last year.

Among the sweeping changes proposed by the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education in July was a suggestion to scrap local boards of elected college district trustees.

By contrast, the new report, titled “Toward a Unified State System,” calls for local boards to remain in place, in part to shoulder responsibilities delegated from the state. The chancellor and Board of Governors would set priorities, norms and standards for the entire system, and create guidelines for spending.

Stronger state-level leadership is needed because the system acts more like “a federation of semi-autonomous districts” than a unified system, the report said. Yet the panel also said “there needs to be local input and local leadership,” Fox said.