The Faculty Association of California Community Colleges gave a vote of no confidence in Eloy Oakley during his ongoing tenure as chancellor of California Community Colleges which is the governing body of California’s community college system.
Oakley, the former superintendent-president of LBCC from 2007 to 2016 was appointed as chancellor to the CCC in 2016.
The vote took place during the FACCC board of governors meeting on May 10 in Burbank and is based primarily around the idea that the office of the chancellor doesn’t consult faculty organizations enough when proposing and implementing new policies and procedures for the community colleges in California.
One of the most often cited examples of the lapse in communication between faculty groups and Oakley’s office is the proposal and budget allocation for the new community college funding formula, which will now allocate state funds to community colleges based on student completion, as opposed to the old formula that granted funds based on student enrollment.
According to the executive director of FACCC, Evan Hawkins, the funding formula will hurt the success rates of some students, endanger the jobs of many state community college faculty members, and incentive colleges to push students on educational paths that they may not need.
“It creates a system of winners and losers,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins also mentioned that the process to get the funding formula passed went through with little consultation from FACCC.
“These are major changes to our system and from our perspective, we only were made aware of it during the state budgeting process,” Hawkins said.
“It was completely inappropriate … If we had been apart of the process from earlier on, we could have avoided many of the problems that we are having with the new funding formula.”
David Morse, an LBCC English professor and former Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) president, says that the ASCCC has always been against a funding formula that is based on performance, partially because it can encourage bad behavior in terms of lowering standards to meet funding requirements.
Morse also says that there is no evidence that shows that the performance based funding formulas improve a college’s overall performance.
“In 2011, I spent a year as a member of a student success task force, that was created by the legislature to look at performance based funding, and then broadened out to look at student success in general, so we spent a year meeting with various constituent groups from all over the state,” Morse said.
“We heard from people from states that had performance based funding, in Ohio and Washington, and a couple of others, and they told us that they could give us no evidence that it had improved their outcomes, by connecting funding to performance.”
“And so that group, in 2011, came to the conclusion that we were not going to recommend going to performance based funding because there was no evidence that it would provide any benefit,” Morse said.
The other example of the breakdown of the shared governance system in this scenario is the newly implemented statewide online college system, which is set to go begin teaching students this fall.
FACCC and other faculty advocacy groups say that the statewide online system is redundant because all the community colleges in California have online classes in place, and that the online system would put part-time faculty at risk of losing their jobs.
Morse also says that another issue that advocacy groups have with the chancellor’s office pushing through the statewide online college is that the administration for the college isn’t being hired based in compliance with the California Department of Education Code of Regulations.
Morse refers to the hiring of Heather Hiles as the CEO for the new online college.
“They start planning and hiring for this before they even have any faculty in place. Title V of the education code says that decisions made about educational programs must involve consultation with the academic senate,” Morse said.
“The online college has no academic senate to consult with, and they’re still making decisions.”
“They’ve gone ahead and hired a chief executive officer, who is getting paid an ungodly amount for that position, with again, who was the input for hiring that person,” said Morse, “That person then gave out some of the positions of her upper administrators, kind of giving out contracts to people she knew, with no competitive or real interview process.”
Morse also points out that without faculty in place the deadline to have classes in place by this fall might be a problem.
“They want to start offering classes this fall. They don’t have a faculty, they don’t have a curriculum, and they’re doing it without the experts,” Morse said.
Another issue raised by Morse about Oakley’s office pushing through the online college system is that he believes that to Oakley it’s less about having a statewide online system, and more about having a college system that falls outside of the regulatory constraints that are in place for the actual community colleges.
“I remember him (Oakley) saying several years ago, ‘We need to worry about serving the students right in front of us, instead of worrying about serving students all over the world.’”
Morse said, “I don’t think it was ever about online education for Eloy.”
“California community colleges are about the most regulated system that you can find. We have a lot of laws telling us how we can do this, how we can do that … How we can spend our money, like the 50% law. It’s a hugely regulated system.”
“I think what Eloy wanted was a sandbox to play in that maybe was a whole new thing that he could argue could operate outside all of those rules, that we could experiment… in ways he wanted to, but never could. He was a chief business officer and most chief business officers hate the ways the state tells them they have to spend their categorical funds,” Morse said.
Morse then pointed out that he and Oakley have worked together for a long time, and that he was very supportive of Oakley and his policies when he was leading LBCC, but he also acknowledges that he doesn’t feel that Oakley consults with faculty groups at the state level in the same capacity that he did when he was head of LBCC.
“I felt that he did include faculty voices in the decision making, with a few exceptions, but by and large I did think he was respectful of the consultation process with the faculty and the college as a whole,” Morse said.
“He was cooperating, he was talking, but since he has gotten to the Chancellor’s office, it has been a disappointment for me. I’ve seen him operate. He knows the right ways to do things, but that’s not what we’re getting now.”
When the Viking News reached out to the chancellor’s office for comment, Paul Feist, the vice chancellor for communications and marketing said in a statement that the chancellor’s office is committed to working with faculty groups on the new policies and initiatives.
“We recognize that the pace and scale of change we are pursuing to enhance student success is sometimes challenging to college faculty, but it is vital to the future of the more than 2 million students who attend our institutions. The Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges calls upon faculty groups to continue to share their views with the Chancellor’s Office through the extensive and longstanding statewide participatory governance process,” Fiest said in the statement.
At the time of writing this article, LBCC administration officials were not available for comment.