Colleges Get Mixed Grades

Irvine Valley College has made great strides in overcoming campus strife, an accreditation commission reported, but at Saddleback College, deep divisions continue among faculty groups and between instructors and the district’s board of trustees.

An evaluation team that visited the Saddleback campus in April found that “negativism and hostility are still prevalent on campus,” to the point that some faculty “spoke openly of . . . their desire to work elsewhere.”

Last week, the South Orange County Community College District announced that the commission had kept intact the accreditation of both its campuses but would not divulge details. On Monday, the district released the full report of the commission of the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges.

The commission notified the presidents of both schools, however, that the colleges will remain on warning status for the foreseeable future, as they have been since the beginning of the year. They will be subjected to further evaluations and scrutiny in the months to come. Each must file a new report to the commission Nov. 1.

The district’s trustees were praised in the report for undertaking “a remarkable change of direction” at Irvine Valley College.

In a February report, the commission found that Irvine Valley’s governance process had been stymied by inappropriate involvement by trustees in the school’s leadership.

“The board has made what appears to the team to be a genuine commitment to limiting its role to policy,” according to the latest report.

South Orange County Community College District Chancellor Cedric Sampson did not return phone calls seeking comment on the reports Monday. Irvine Valley College President Raghu P. Mathur was on vacation and could not be reached for comment. Saddleback College President Dixie Bullock also could not be reached for comment.

The schools’ continued warning status comes after a six-month period in which they were closely monitored by the accreditation commission. District officials and college administrators had hoped to shake the warning status stigma in this latest round of reports but failed to convince the commission that they had adequately addressed its concerns.

The commission issued a scathing report early this year, in which it criticized the district’s board of trustees for trying to micromanage the two schools and noted “the paralysis of college governance processes” at Irvine Valley College.

Those governance issues are still a source of considerable bad feeling on campus, the latest report said, but the commission noted the faculty’s efforts to “address the divisiveness and vitriol” that have previously characterized the faculty’s relationship with the administration.

The commission also noted that Irvine Valley College still has “a long ways to go” in fixing its planning process to increase research and plot out new curricula.

The accrediting panel painted a far more troubling portrait of Saddleback College. A rift between the school’s Faculty Senate and its union, the faculty association, has not subsided at all, the commission found.

Although it credited Saddleback President Bullock with doing her best to bring the constituencies together, the commission reports that the conflict has been exacerbated because the current union leadership is contesting the validity of a recent election.

“The level of personal attacks in written publications is disturbing,” the report states. “The sometimes painful stories of faculty who felt attacked were indicative of a campus that is still plagued with hurtful and unprofessional behavior.”

Saddleback also was cited by the commission for having failed to advertise seven open administrative positions that badly needed to be filled.

“With so much at stake, it is surprising that the process was not monitored closely by both college and district leadership,” the commission scolded.

The lack of a permanent human resources director at Saddleback was blamed for the oversight, according to the commission’s report.