April

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) has a well-established position opposing performance-based funding based on the lack of evidence for its effectiveness, the potential impact on academic rigor, and concerns regarding the incentives it creates.[1] Indeed, the California Community College System as a whole rejected the concept of performance-based funding through the legislatively-established Student Success Task Force in 2011, with a majority of the task force concluding that “the lack of national evidence demonstrating that outcomes-based fundi

For seasoned academic senate presidents, chances are that the following scenario is a familiar one: you are approached by a vice president, director, or other administrator, handed a document, and told that it needs to be signed or the college will face sanctions, lose money, or be out of compliance and that the document needs to be signed today, this hour, or this minute. If you have not yet had this experience, the question of whether or not to sign a document as the college or district academic senate president will very probably arise during your tenure as a faculty leader.

Newly elected academic senate presidents often have important documents handed to them at the last minute before they are due or are not appropriately included in approving the documents at all. This situation occurred not long ago at one of the colleges in a multi-college community college district. At the time, this particular college had been operating at a financial deficit for at least three consecutive years.

Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) is now 50 years old—younger than some but older than many faculty that are currently involved with the organization. The success that the Academic Senate has had as a resource for faculty and as a state-level voice on academic and professional matters during its first fifty years is solely due to the contributions of faculty throughout the state. When individuals consider service with the ASCCC, many questions, as well as hypotheses, arise regarding how one becomes involved.

California community colleges comprise the largest system of higher education in the United States, educating approximately 2.4 million students.[1] As the largest system of higher education teaching one of the most diverse groups of students, the California Community Colleges must ensure that the student population sees itself represented by the community college faculty.

At its Fall 2016 Plenary Session, the ASCCC approved Resolution 10.01 F16 which changed the process to revise the Disciplines List from a biennial to an annual process.  This important process begins again and faculty can propose new disciplines or make revisions to those that exist. Proposed revisions to the Disciplines List can now be submitted to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) office for possible consideration by the delegates at the Spring 2019 Plenary Session.

Our former Chancellor, Dr. Brice Harris, used to open some of his addresses with the line, “California—the Land of Unintended Consequences.” He would follow that with a litany of the latest measures that were designed to empower our colleges or our students but that did the opposite, placing students or our mission in jeopardy.

The value of learning support and tutoring services to student success cannot be overestimated given the various levels of preparation our students bring to the classroom. In-person tutoring, online tutoring, embedded tutoring and other academic supports for students have grown in popularity in the California community college system, and colleges are looking at current and prospective learning support models as they build their guided pathways frameworks or look for strategies to address the mandates of AB 705.

Part-time faculty not only make up the majority of all faculty in the California community college system, but provide nearly half of all instruction[1].  The success of our students, and ultimately our institutions themselves, depend on supporting the needs of part-time faculty just as we must for full time faculty.  While ASCCC along with partners like 3CSN provide some support statewide, including hosting this year’s Part Time Faculty Institute on August 2-4, 2018, many of the needs of part-time faculty also require local support.

In the face of broad and unprecedented change represented by the guided pathways movement and legislation such as Assembly Bill (AB) 705 (Irwin, 2017) that supports many of the principles of guided pathways, faculty are looking for opportunities to be creative and student-focused in their responses to that change.