"SHARED GOVERNANCE":
AN ELUSIVE GOAL

By William Trombley
Senior Editor

EIGHT YEARS after passage of major legislation that was intended to clarify and improve the governance of California's 106 public community colleges, many of the problems remain and some have grown worse.

That conclusion emerges from visits to 20 community college campuses and more than 100 interviews with local and statewide administrators, governing board members and faculty, staff and student leaders, as well as others who are knowledgeable about the two-year colleges.

At the statewide level, the Board of Governors seems unable to focus on major problems, instead spending much of its time and energy on pet projects and personal vendettas. Sometimes the board descends to levels of incivility not often found at local school board meetings.

On local campuses, the concept of "shared governance," mandated by 1988 legislation, has shrouded the decision-making process in confusion and has led to power struggles up and down the state between faculty organizations and college administrators. Sometimes these have turned nasty.

For example, at Merced College, President Jan Kehoe, who is embroiled in disputes with both the Academic Senate and the faculty union, reported receiving obscene phone calls and said that "dead animals have been wired under my car." In addition, Kehoe's face has been plastered on milk cartons as a "missing person"-a reference to her frequent off-campus trips.

Fed up, Kehoe applied for a job in Texas, only to find, she said, that Merced faculty members "sent damaging information about me and my vice presidents" to the Texas search committee.

Les McCabe, a veteran agriculture instructor and president of the Merced College faculty union, a California Teachers Association affiliate, said neither the union nor the faculty Academic Senate was involved in these incidents.

In Modesto, 40 miles north of Merced, trustees of the Yosemite Community College District have come under fire for appointing two college presidents without adequate faculty consultation, and for granting district Chancellor Pamila J. Fisher a 13 percent raise last year, when faculty members received only three percent.

While the dispute was raging, Fisher received threats and obscene calls and her car was deliberately damaged. "I don't think union members did it," she said, "but I think they created a climate where the crazies could come out."

Faculty members at both colleges in the Yosemite district-Modesto Junior College and Columbia College-voted "no confidence" in the chancellor but, Fisher said, "the board is supporting me and I'm not leaving."

These were among a dozen or so "no confidence" votes against either a campus president or a district chancellor in the last two years, with several more threatened. Most of these actions were occasioned by "shared governance" disputes.

At least 30 campus presidents and district chancellors have quit or have been fired in the last 18 months. "That kind of turnover is a major statement that something is wrong with the governance of the community colleges," said former statewide Chancellor David Mertes, who received a "no confidence" vote himself from the statewide Academic Senate in 1994.

Some of the problems have been caused by growing pains, as the two-year colleges have struggled to escape the public school system and become part of higher education.

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education included the community colleges (there were then 63) as part of public higher education, assigning them the task of providing quality lower-division (freshman and sophomore) instruction for students who want to transfer to four-year institutions, as well as offering a wide range of vocational and technical programs.

But the Master Plan did not disturb the governance arrangements. Locally-elected boards remained in charge, lightly supervised by the State Department of Education.

However, passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 eroded the clout of local governing boards by limiting their taxing authority. Since then, most of the money to support the colleges has flowed from Sacramento. As a result, governors and legislators have felt free to intervene in community college affairs.

"The Legislature can always run a bill to get around whatever the Board of Governors does," said Robert Rivinius, chief executive officer of the California Building Industry Association, and a member of the statewide Board of Governors from 1987 to 1993.

Local governing boards still hired and fired campus presidents and district chancellors (the 106 colleges are organized into 71 districts), but otherwise their powers were greatly diminished. They could bargain with faculty and staff over wages and benefits but, since the amount of money available was determined beforehand by the state, there was little to bargain about.

The statewide Board of Governors was created in 1968, but was granted limited powers. The board and the statewide chancellor monitor the fiscal health of the 106 campuses, set some statewide policies and carry out a variety of coordinating activities.

Because the Legislature tends to get involved so often in community college affairs, "we really have a 120-member governing board," one college president said, referring to the 80 members of the Assembly and 40 state senators.

But considerable power remained in the hands of campus presidents and district chancellors. Some of these administrators consulted widely with faculty and staff members, even with students, before making major decisions. But others, clinging to the old public school ways, ruled as virtual dictators.

"I think most institutions had an extensive consultation process, but there were many exceptions, especially in small, rural places," said David B. Wolf, executive director of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. "In those places, when a board member or the president referred to 'my college,' they meant exactly that."

The 1988 legislation-Assembly Bill 1725, authored by John Vasconcellos (then an assemblyman and now a state senator from the San Jose area) and signed into law by former Governor George Deukmejian-sought to do away with these autocratic fiefdoms and to introduce a more collegial, consultative approach to governance.

"What we tried to do was to free the community colleges from the K-12 template and replace it with a higher-education template," said Brian Murphy, who was chief consultant for the joint legislative committee that produced the bill. "We wanted to bring about a shift in authority to the Academic Senate" in such areas as curriculum, faculty hiring and assurance of academic quality.

AB 1725 dealt with many other subjects besides governance. It mandated that 75 percent of the instruction at each college be done by full-time faculty members, not by part-timers (a goal later made unattainable by budget cuts), and it appropriated $140 million over two years for new full-time faculty positions and other program improvements.

The new law also expanded somewhat the role of the Board of Governors and introduced "program-based budgeting," a little-understood concept. It set stiff affirmative action requirements, established criteria for faculty hiring and extended the pre-tenure probationary period from two to four years.

But the provisions that came to be called "shared governance" have caused the most furor.

They require the governing board of each community college district to "consult collegially with the (faculty) Academic Senate when adopting policies and procedures on academic and professional matters."

Problem: What are "academic and professional matters"? Board of Governors regulations implementing the legislation list 11 areas of prime faculty concern, including several that usually are not in dispute-such things as curriculum, degree and certificate requirements and grading policies.

But other items on the list have led to endless quarrels. Faculty members are to be consulted about "district and college governance structures," for example, and about "processes for institutional planning and budget development."

"The Legislature said one of the goals of the bill was to strengthen the role of the academic senates, and it has done that," said Janis Perry, president of the statewide Academic Senate.

"We took back the curriculum," said Ric Matthews, who has taught biology in the San Diego Community College District since 1982. "Now we are a player at the table."

But Mark Edelstein, who was president of the statewide Academic Senate at the time and is now president of Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, sees it somewhat differently.

The Academic Senate was seeking "collegial governance" of the kind that is practiced on most University of California and California State University campuses, he said, "but the CEOs (chief executive officers-the presidents and chancellors) and the unions wanted 'shared governance.' They said everyone needs to participate."

This has led to "constituency-based decision-making for everything from hiring new faculty members to repairing broken pipes," Edelstein added. "You have these 'Noah's Ark' committees for everything-two people from this group, two people from that group," and the result is often "pointless turf battles" and gridlock.

A common CEO complaint is that some faculty members are not content to be merely "players at the table"

"For some of our faculty leadership, shared governance means they get to make all the decisions," said Pam Fisher, the embattled chancellor of the Yosemite Community College District.

For example, President Stan Arterberry of Solano Community College, in Suisun, can appoint new faculty members only if they have been recommended by a faculty-dominated hiring committee.

"It's a highly unusual arrangement," said Arterberry, who has been president since July 1994. "Sometimes they send me just one name. Usually they send two to five names but it's clear they expect me to pick their number-one choice. So far, I have gone along, but if they make a recommendation that I don't think is in keeping with the goals of this institution, that's when the rubber will hit the road."

Shared governance "gives the faculty an excuse to point the finger at the president whenever the president has to make a decision," said Jan Kehoe, the Merced College president. When Kehoe turned a meeting room into an office because the fire marshal declared the room unsafe for meetings, she said, "the campus facilities committee complained because they weren't consulted."

Jim Young, who has been chancellor of the three-campus Kern Community College District for almost 20 years, said faculty opposition has delayed a much-needed administrative reorganization at Bakersfield College for l8 months. The opposition has come from the faculty union, not the Academic Senate.

Now, Young said, the Senate wants a say in how the district's annual $65 million operating budget is assembled, a request that the chancellor called "intolerable."

For some campus presidents and district chancellors, shared governance has become a convenient excuse for not making tough decisions.

"Many CEOs don't mind it at all," said Leslie Koltai, who survived for 15 years as chancellor of the huge, disputatious Los Angeles Community College District. "The ones who don't mind are the ones who were picked by the unions and had to swear on a stack of Bibles they wouldn't do anything significant."

Consultation lies at the heart of shared governance. The basic idea is that faculty members, classified workers (clerks, computer operators, the people who maintain the buildings) and students should have a say in how the institution is run.

At the statewide level, this means Chancellor Tom Nussbaum and the Board of Governors often do not make major decisions until consensus has been reached at a monthly "consultation council," involving representatives of 16 different community college constituent groups.

A review of the meeting agendas for the last two years suggests that the council seldom reaches consensus about anything.

Jan Kehoe, one of two CEO representatives on the council, said the "same issues keep coming up and never seem to get resolved...If we tape recorded the conversations, two years from now we wouldn't have to meet at all, we could just play back the same words."

Some believe the process is cumbersome and takes far too long.

"I believe strongly in shared governance, but I was taken aback when I saw how the system functions in the community colleges," said Alice Petrossian, a Glendale school administrator who has been a member of the Board of Governors since 1992 and is now its president. "To be constantly told we can't act on an issue because it has not gone through consultation-I had never experienced that before."

But Petrossian added, "I have been an administrator long enough to know that for anything to be implemented, you must get 'buy-in'" from those affected.

Marty Hittelman, senior vice president of the California Federation of Teachers (AFL-CIO), defended the process and the length of time it takes.

"Do you want a bad decision fast or do you want a good decision that's thought out more carefully?" Hittelman asked.

He said the statewide consultation conferences have resolved several significant issues in recent months, including affirmative action regulations and rules governing televised "distance learning" courses.

On individual campuses, and at the district level, consultation takes the form of "college councils," or various kinds of budget and planning committees, where administrators discuss issues with faculty and staff members and with students before important decisions are made.

Many believe the consultation process, while well-intentioned, was doomed from the start.

"You can't mandate collegiality, which is what (AB 1725) tried to do," said a college president who asked not to be identified.

One large Southern California college has 27 different shared governance committees and, not surprisingly, seldom reaches agreement on anything. The campus president, who asked to remain anonymous, called it "codified chaos."

Because so many parties must be consulted, minor decisions "take forever to make," said Robert A. Lombardi, chancellor of the Saddleback Community College District in Orange County, where the enrollment on two campuses (Saddleback and Irvine Valley) is about 35,000, and the annual operating budget is $80 million.

"You can't manage a business of this size and have everybody attuned to every possibility," Lombardi said. "It's a little bit of madness."

Some CEOs say the extensive consultation requirements make it impossible for them to do their jobs.

"We are ultimately responsible but we don't have enough authority," said Grace Mitchell, president of Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, and president of the statewide CEO organization. "But if something goes wrong, it's the CEO and probably the fiscal officer who get fired, not the faculty."

"I believe in collegial administration but there has to be an authority figure," declared L.H. Horton, Jr., president of San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. Horton was at loggerheads with faculty members over wage and benefit increases for 18 months before the dispute was settled late last year.

For their part, faculty leaders say it is bull-headed administrators, not power-grabbing instructors, who have caused many of the shared governance problems around the state.

Roger Waller, a business management instructor and president of the Academic Senate at San Joaquin Delta, said, "President Horton's idea of shared governance is, 'you can say anything you like, but I'm going to make the final decision.'"

Marty Hittelman rejected the notion that shared governance has caused more problems than it has solved. "It's not a mess if you compare it with what took place before (AB 1725), when administrators acted like monarchs dealing with serfs," he said.

If anything, faculty members have been too passive on too many campuses, according to Janis Perry, the statewide Academic Senate president.

"There have been cadres of faculty leadership who haven't really seen governance as a major issue until a problem arises on their campus," Perry said. "Then they get very interested in exercising their role."

Angry and frustrated by shared governance and other community college management problems, a group of eight to ten CEOs met last September at the Camp Nelson summer home of Jim Young, the longtime Kern Community College District chancellor.

They discussed a series of sweeping changes that would grant more authority to local governing boards and administrators, reduce the power of the local and statewide academic senates, and curtail the regulatory role of the statewide chancellor's office.

These changes would require repeal or substantial amendment of the 1988 legislation. Before last November's elections, Young said he saw a chance for success if Republicans retained control of the State Assembly. The chancellor thought a handful of conservative Senate Democrats could be persuaded to join the Assembly Republicans to return some power to the local districts.

But when Democrats regained a majority in the Assembly, Young put the plan in the bottom drawer. Instead, he and his allies among the CEOs will try to persuade the Board of Governors to change some of the governance regulations that they find onerous.

Governance is not the only problem facing California's public two-year colleges. Despite a $450 million increase in state support for the current academic year, the colleges remain chronically underfunded. The governor's budget for 1997-98 proposes to spend a per-student average of $14,362 on the eight UC general campuses, $9,665 at the 22 Cal State campuses, and only $3,759 at the community colleges.

Because local community college board elections usually draw little attention and receive scant news coverage, they are often subject to control by one faction or another. In some large urban areas, especially in Los Angeles, it is difficult to be elected without support from the faculty union.

According to Marty Hittelman, the Los Angeles faculty union typically contributes about $100,000 to a favored candidate in a board race. "That's more money than anyone else has and that's why our candidates usually win," he said.

But Hittelman insisted, "You don't buy them; you don't even rent them for very long. They often vote against us, but at least we don't get anti-evolution people. We don't get anti-affirmative action people, and we do get people who are concerned about workers' rights."

However, Leslie Koltai, the former Los Angeles chancellor, said Hittelman's union virtually runs the Los Angeles district because of its control over board members. He noted that the trustees once voted a six percent salary increase that the faculty union wanted, even though the district faced a deficit of several million dollars.

President Constance Carroll of San Diego Mesa College called union support for board candidates a "fundamental flaw" in community college governance.

Board members elected with union support often "bargain with the very unions that helped to elect them," Carroll said. "That's a built-in conflict of interest that needs to be fixed." She urged new legislation that would prohibit contributions from employees or employee groups to candidates in community college or school board elections.

In some parts of the state, candidates from the Christian Right have won seats on community college governing boards recently. In at least one district-Grossmont-Cuyamaca, east of San Diego-they hold three out of five board seats as a result of last fall's elections.

A member of the "unorganized militia of Siskiyou County" was elected a trustee of the College of the Siskiyous, a small community college in the northern California community of Weed, last August. But three other militia-backed candidates failed to win election in November, leaving moderates in control of the board.

Micromanagement is another common problem. Governing board members sometimes cross the line between setting broad policy and interfering in the day-to-day administration of the colleges.

When a new board majority in the 19,000-student San Jose-Evergreen Community College District established its own budget subcommittee in 1995, bypassing the district chancellor and the two college presidents, both district Chancellor Ron Kong and President Del M. Anderson of San Jose City College resigned.

At Rancho Santiago College, which serves a predominantly low-income population in Santa Ana, some trustees "visit the campus, talk to staff and try to solve problems, circumventing the president," said John Peterson, former executive director of the community college accrediting commission.

Peterson conducted a workshop for the college trustees last fall. "Around campus there is a general belief that how well they (staff members) do depends on how well they're connected to board members," he said.

Rancho Santiago Chancellor Vivian B. Blevins said one or two board members "even try to tell us which students should be taking what level of ESL (English as a Second Language)" classes.

"Clearly there is a micromanagement problem" in some districts, said William Corey, a trustee of the Contra Costa Community College District and past president of the statewide trustees organization. Many new board members "are ill-prepared to meet the demands" of the job, he said.

The Community College League of California, which represents both trustees and CEOs, tries to help with workshops and publications that seek to teach the "do's and don't's" of boardsmanship. But the lessons don't sink in with some of the hundreds of people who serve on local governing boards around the state.

So the two-year public colleges face many problems-inadequate funding; trustee micromanagement; legislative interference; attempts by unions and other groups to control local boards; and many more. But "shared governance" seems to be a source of more disputes than all the others combined.

There is general agreement among the interested parties that changes are needed, but there is little consensus about what these changes should be.

"I think there needs to be a review of (AB) 1725," said Patrick McCallum, executive director of the 7,500-member Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. "I think it needs some tinkering and some clarification."

But "tinkering" would not satisfy Jim Young and the other campus presidents and district chancellors who met at Camp Nelson last September. They want to repeal or substantially amend the 1988 legislation, returning more power to local administrators and governing boards.

Such an effort would infuriate faculty leaders of the Academic Senate and the faculty organizations.

"That's an inflammatory move that faculty members will never accept," said Jack Ullom, president of the instructors association at Santa Barbara City College, an independent union.

Some CEOs agree. "Any attempt to undo (AB) 1725 would lead to a pointless political battle, and it would not do us any good as a system," said Diablo Valley College President Mark Edelstein.

Tom Van Groningen, who was chancellor of the Yosemite Community College District for 18 years and now acts as a consultant to troubled districts, thinks both sides are to blame for the current tension over shared governance.

"Some CEOs are not comfortable with it, and some faculty have gotten pretty heady and think nothing can be done without their approval," he said. "But I think if reasonable people have access to enough accurate information, they'll come to the same conclusion 95 percent of the time."

Van Groningen believes governance disputes often have more to do with the personalities and temperaments of those involved than with real differences. An inflexible campus or district administrator is not likely to succeed in a shared governance environment, no matter what other talents he or she might possess.

The CEO's job now requires a "peculiar kind of personality, with good people skills," he said. "The robust, aggressive leader who forges ahead and hopes others will follow is a thing of the past. What's needed now is a person who will listen, who can analyze the situation and the people they're dealing with and make something positive happen. Those are very different skills and you don't learn them in most educational leadership programs."

The squabbling about governance presents Tom Nussbaum, the new statewide chancellor, with one of his first challenges.

The policies "definitely should be reviewed," Nussbaum said in an interview. "They have shown a tendency to create a very legislative, and sometimes politicized, process. Instead of becoming more collegial, many colleges are becoming more contractual."

It should be pointed out that Nussbaum, as general counsel for the statewide office, played a major role in writing the regulations that have produced these "contractual" results.

Concerning the prospect of a review, the chancellor said, "The question is how to do it. If there is a call for dramatic action, everybody will takes sides and it will totally embroil the entire system at a time when we have many other important problems to solve.

"We ought to try to solve it through discussion, but if that doesn't work, we might want to take it on in some other way later this year, perhaps by changing some of the regulations."