2020

Whereas, The primary function of The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges is to make recommendations with respect to academic and professional matters as defined in Title 5 §53200, which includes standards or policies regarding student preparation and success, in order to help students meet their educational goals such as earning a certificate, degree, or transfer to a baccalaureate institution;

Whereas, Faculty have both the freedom to select the course materials they deem most appropriate and the responsibility to consider the cost burden as they do so;

Whereas, The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges has promoted the goal of faculty diversity for decades [1];

Whereas, The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges’ paper A Re- examination of Faculty Hiring Processes and Procedures (2018) [2] promoted faculty diversity and included “the creation of ‘grow your own’ programs seeking to hire students who attended California Community Colleges” as a district measure for promoting equal employment opportunity;

Whereas, Resolution 01.03 F18 directed the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges “to provide guidance to local academic senates and faculty on safeguarding academic freedom rights and responsibilities in the current political environment, update the 1998 paper Academic Freedom and Tenure: A Faculty Perspective by spring of 2020”;

Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges adopt and broadly disseminate the paper Protecting the Future of Academic Freedom in a Time of Great Change. [1]

MSC

Whereas, Substantial shifts in placement, enrollment, and successful completion have been experienced as a result of both full AB 705 (Irwin, 2017) implementation and COVID-19 pandemic challenges; and

Whereas, The funding to support institutional transformation as codified by the California Community Colleges Guided Pathways [Award] Program is coming to an end, with the final allocation of the remaining 10% in July 2021;

Whereas, The work of establishing and improving a college’s guided pathways framework is integral with all institution-wide work;

Whereas, During the current emergency conditions, the Alternative Attendance Accounting Procedure, Title 5 § 58003.1(f), is employed for noncredit distance education courses that do not use the Positive Attendance Procedures, Title 5 § 58003.1 (e), requiring a calculation of student contact hours that includes

(a)  The total number of hours of instruction in the class
(b)  The number of hours expected for any outside-of-class work
(c)  Instructor contact as defined by Title 5 § 55204;

Whereas, Education Code section 87454 allows tenured faculty within a given district the right to retain their faculty tenure when assigned to an educational administrator position, while Education Code section 87458 states that educational administrators without faculty tenure have the right to become first-year probationary faculty provided all of the requirements of section 87458, commonly known as “retreat rights,” including the existence of a process reached by joint agreement between the representatives of the governing board and the academic senate and approved by the governing board

Whereas, Many faculty are required to complete a minimum number of professional development or Flex hours each term or year, and art of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges’ (ASCCC) mission is to foster “the effective participation by community college faculty in all statewide and local academic and professional matters,” a mission it achieves through an infrastructure that includes various committees and a wide-array of events intended to inform, engage, and listen;