By Nanette Asimov and Melody Gutierrez

   The only group authorized to accredit California’s 113 community colleges is far too punitive and should be replaced, a task force convened by the state’s Community College Chancellor’s Office concluded Friday.    The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges is best known for its vigorous but so far unsuccessful efforts to revoke accreditation from City College of San Francisco, a huge school that served almost 70,000 students last year. Without accreditation, City College could receive no public funding and would have to close, as happened in 2006 to Compton College near Los Angeles.    But the startling recommendation from the task force of 10 college leaders and faculty members — which was asked to evaluate the state of accreditation in light of concerns from college faculty and employees across the state, as well as politicians and the chancellor’s office itself — is based on more than just the outrage that has sizzled around City College for three years.    The task force said the commission has for years resisted calls for it to change from focusing on the minutiae of compliance to doing a better job helping troubled colleges improve. In addition, the task force noted that community colleges and four-year universities are increasingly intertwined — the transfer system has improved, and some colleges are even offering bachelor’s degrees.

   Reviewing the report
   As a result, the panel is recommending that the state chancellor’s office replace the commission, perhaps by bringing community colleges under the wing of the WASC Senior College and University Commission, which accredits California’s four-year schools. The nation’s five other accrediting regions all have just one commission evaluating both levels of higher education.    Until a new system is identified — which could then take years to receive the required recognition from the U.S. Department of Education    — the task force is recommending that colleges continue to work with the commission. At the same time, a delay in repairing the problem “will have adverse effects” on students and the state’s economy, the task force warned.    Commission President Barbara Beno said the group is reviewing the task force report.    “The commission’s mission has remained the same for more than 50 years: assess member colleges’ academics, finances, facilities, technology and governance to point out deficiencies and provide recommendation and guidance to help colleges excel,” Beno said. “The ACCJC is committed to supporting the best higher education in the Western region.”

   High level of sanctions
   In its most damning criticism of the commission, the task force said that since 2005, the accreditor has placed two-thirds of California’s community colleges — all but 37 — on some level of sanction. Sanctions are imposed when colleges fall below accrediting standards of academic, governance or financial quality.    In California, sanction levels include “warning,” “probation,” and the most severe, “show cause,” which requires the college to prove it should remain accredited or be shut down. City College of San Francisco was on “show cause” but has been placed on a special “restoration” status and has until fall 2016 to satisfy all accrediting standards. If the college fails, the commission could decide in January 2017 to revoke its accreditation. City College’s failures center on governance and financial standards, not on academic quality.    “Although many of these institutions were removed from sanction relatively quickly, the numbers are inordinately high compared to the frequency of sanctions under other accreditors,” the task force said in its 270-page report. The commission is one of the nation’s six regional agencies recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.    From 2009 to 2013, the commission’s sanction rate was about 53 percent (it issued 143 sanctions within 269 accreditation actions it took) compared with a sanction rate of about 12 percent by other accrediting agencies, according to the task force, which got the figures from a 2014 state audit of the commission.    “Yes, our colleges have challenges, but that many sanctions? I must admit that does not make sense to me,” said California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris, a former commissioner who left in 2007.

   Makeup of commission
   Harris said he generally agrees with the report’s conclusion that the commission must go. He said he’s a strong believer in accreditation, which is a peer-review process. The commission is made up of 19 volunteers, including college chancellors, faculty members and education experts from California, Hawaii and Palau, where the commission also accredits colleges, plus representatives from some private colleges.    But he said the primary point of accreditation should be on helping colleges improve and grow, rather than focusing entirely on compliance. The report spends several pages talking about what a good system would look like, including improving communication and respect between colleges and the ac-creditor.    “I’m certain it won’t be a quick process,” Harris said, adding that the Board of Governors for the state’s community college system is likely to take action on the recommendation and direct his office to consider possible alternatives.    “This will be a multiyear process,” he said. Any changeover “would probably take place as each college comes up for review.”

   Panel ‘has lost its way’  
  Colleges are evaluated for accreditation every six years.    News of the recommendation brought hope to the commission’s critics.    “The ACCJC has lost its way,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which represents instructors at 112 community colleges. “We need a commission with the best interests of students, faculty and public higher education at the center of its work. The ACCJC has other priorities. It forces colleges to waste faculty and staff time and taxpayer money on bureaucratic minutiae irrelevant to the classroom. It makes reckless and ill-informed decisions behind closed doors that harm the lives of thousands of Californians.”    Accreditation commission member Frank Gornick said he’s not surprised by the recommendation. Gornick said it shows the undue influence of one commission critic — the California Federation of Teachers — which he said pushed state officials toward an agenda of finding fault with the accreditation process instead of the college.    “It’s a political process, so people lose sight of the real focus, and that’s that there were significant problems with San Francisco City College,” said Gornick, who is chancellor at the West Hills Community College District in the San Joaquin Valley. “All we did as volunteers was point out the obvious six years ago, and no one wanted to make those changes. … We can’t walk away from financial abuses we see. We have to point them out. You know, kill the messenger.”  

  Nanette Asimov and Melody Gutierrez are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: nasimov@sfchronicle.com  , mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com   Twitter: @NanetteAsimov, @MelodyGutierrez Gabrielle Lurie / Special to The Chronicle    

http://psychologybenefits.org/2015/08/24/adjunct-faculty-highly-educated-working-hard-for-society-and-struggling-to-survive/

By Gretchen M. Reevy, PhD (Lecturer, Psychology Department, California State University, East Bay)

When we think of people who live below the poverty line in the U.S., we often picture individuals who lack adequate medical care, who are homeless, who are unable to provide nutritious food for themselves and their families, and if young, people who are unable to prepare for their old age. Would you put college teachers in this category? A fact that may surprise you is that many college teachers earn very low incomes and some are even among the poverty-stricken in the United States.

These individuals possess Master’s degrees and PhD’s and are doing professional work. I am referring to non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. These include adjunct professors, lecturers, post-docs, and others. The impoverishment of NTT faculty is an unknown and unexplored issue.

In the United States today, 76% of faculty in higher education are hired off the tenure track (AAUP, 2014). However, if you are an NTT faculty member, that nearly always means you are hired on a contingent basis. This means that each class you were hired for may be cancelled at the very last minute, due to insufficient enrollment, budgetary issues with the university, or other reasons.

According to Adjunct Action (2014), adjunct professors in the United States make $3,000 per 3-unit course, on average. Let’s say that as an adjunct faculty member you teach four courses per semester for two semesters. You supplement this income by teaching three additional courses during summer session. This translates to $33,000 per year.

In order to survive, NTT faculty take on workloads that make it nearly impossible for them to develop their careers. It is difficult to spend less than 10 hours per week teaching a class (including face time, preparation, grading, emails with students, etc.). An NTT faculty member may spend 15 or more hours per class per week if they are an experienced instructor (and even more if they are inexperienced). Therefore, I estimate that teaching four courses means working 40 to 60 or more hours per week for NTT faculty. This leaves little or no time to supplement what is, for most, an already inadequate income.

The shaky financial situation NTT faculty face is even worse when you take into account that they are typically saddled with student loan debt, often from both their undergraduate and graduate educations. NTT positions also rarely include the possibility for promotion or for enhanced job security over time. While adjunct positions are often the only professional work available to many qualified candidates emerging from graduate school, many can tell you that experience as an adjunct effectively labels you as “sub-par” and severely reduces your odds of obtaining a full time or tenure-track position.

The NTT faculty member making $33,000 per year would actually be among the relatively lucky. Many NTT faculty teach only one to two classes a semester because their institution limits the number of classes that part-time faculty may teach. They have to work their way up to a full-time load, which can take over two years or more. I just heard from an adjunct who has been teaching four courses a semester at $2,000 per course, and he is rarely allowed to teach in summer. He makes $16,000 a year.

The NTT faculty problem is too large for us to ignore. In the United States there are now at least 1.4 million NTT faculty (Curtis, 2014). It is certainly not the case that all of these faculty are impoverished or nearly impoverished; some are fortunate enough to work for universities that pay them relatively well and some have spouses or partners who make more money than NTT faculty do. However, the number of people affected by the impoverishment of NTT faculty also extends to their families (many NTT faculty are single parents).

If we work to help these faculty, we will aid a large number of Americans and we will be “doing the right thing.” My position is that most of the NTT faculty positions should not exist in their current form. Many aspects of the positions are simply immoral (in my view), in particular:

• the exceptionally low pay,
• lack of access to health insurance,
• contingent nature of the employment, and
• lack of opportunity for advancement.

The administrations of many universities argue that they can no longer afford to hire most faculty into secure positions and pay professional salaries. However, the AAUP (2014) counters that the decline in secure positions and salaries for NTT faculty is not economically necessary. In the last few decades universities have prioritized investing in facilities, technology, and other segments of the university over investing in faculty.

 

What can we do to help NTT faculty?

1. Educate ourselves about NTT faculty and their working conditions. The best places to start are the New Faculty Majority, the American Association of University Professors, and the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, which has produced an excellent report on working conditions of part-time faculty.
2. Researchers can study psychological effects of the working conditions of NTT faculty. My colleague, Grace Deason and I recently published an article on correlates of contingency. We found that several demographic and psychological factors were associated with elevated rates of depression, stress, and anxiety. Appropriate to the current discussion, one of these factors is low family income. Another is the NTT faculty member’s emotional commitment to his or her university. The more committed faculty suffer higher rates of depression, stress, and anxiety. Grace and I found that, at the time of publication of our article, no one else had studied the psychological effects of contingent appointments on faculty (to our knowledge).
3. Encourage our professional organizations to join the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW). The CAW is a group of disciplinary associations and faculty associations whose mission is to improve faculty working conditions (particularly for part-time faculty) and thereby improve higher education for our students. The leading professional associations for many academic professions are members (e.g., history, philosophy, modern languages); many other professional associations are glaringly absent from the list of members.
4. Speak out publicly and put pressure on universities to alter their practices.

To conclude, I ask you--

• What does it tell us about our society that many of the faculty educating our future professionals are themselves barred, perhaps for the duration of their careers, from the security provided by a normal academic salary?
• And what does it say about the future of research when so many adjuncts receive neither the resources nor the time to do research, instead teaching full time just to survive?

NTT faculty make enormous contributions to our society. They deserve reasonable working conditions and pay that is commensurate with their education, experience, and other qualifications.

References

Adjunct Action. (2014). The high cost of adjunct living: St. Louis. Available online at: http://adjunctaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/18851-White-paper-st-louis-FINAL_E.pdf (Retrieved September 2, 2014).

American Association of University Professors (AAUP). (2014). Background Facts on Contingent Faculty. Available online at: http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts (Retrieved September 3, 2014).

Curtis, J. (2014). The Employment Status of Instructional Staff Members in Higher Education, Fall 2011. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

Acknowledgments:

Thank you to Kent Goshorn, who provided extensive feedback on this essay.

Biography:

Gretchen M. Reevy received her BA in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1994 she has taught in the Department of Psychology at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) as a lecturer, specializing in personality, stress and coping, psychological assessment, and history of psychology courses. With Alan Monat and Richard S. Lazarus, she co-edited the Praeger Handbook on Stress and Coping (Praeger, 2007). She is also author of the Encyclopedia of Emotion (ABC-CLIO, 2010), with co-authors (and CSUEB alumnae) Yvette Malamud Ozer and Yuri Ito. With Erica Frydenberg, she co-edited Personality, Stress, and Coping: Implications for Education (IAP, 2011). Her research areas are in personality, stress and coping, psychological experiences of contingent faculty, emotion, college achievement, and the human-animal bond. Dr. Reevy publishes with CSUEB students, CSUEB alumni, and faculty colleagues in these research areas.