2020

Academic freedom allows for “invention, scholarship, and creative enterprises that support and enrich humanity. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition” (Franke, n.d.). The connection between academic freedom and equity is fundamental. Without the rights of faculty to speak, research, and pursue diverse ideas, equity is not possible. Academic freedom allows faculty to academically challenge racist ideology and structures in the context of their expertise.

WHAT IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM?

This article is a summary of the results of an Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) statewide survey on collegial consultation during guided pathways implementation and provides important information on where professional development may be needed to ensure broad based faculty participation.

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) Guided Pathways Task Force paper Optimizing Student Success: A Report on Placement in English and Mathematics Pathways was approved by the ASCCC Executive Committee during the September 2020 Executive Committee meeting. The following is the executive summary from this report:

Note: The following article is not an official statement of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. The article is intended to engender discussion and consideration by local colleges.

Throughout the California community colleges, from the Chancellor’s Office and Board of Governors to local colleges, determination has been renewed to dismantle institutional racism in recent months. At virtual town halls in the new online world, student voices have called for the community college system to identify and eliminate the bureaucratic inertia that perpetuates barriers disproportionately for students of color. Now more than ever, colleges must accept the reality that systemic racism, among other things, prevents student success.

Times of crisis often bring out the best in people. The California Community Colleges system clearly demonstrated this fact with the responses from its colleges to the outbreak and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic; the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; and the increasing uncertainty around the world in the current moment. No one can doubt that when the crises began to impact students, faculty, staff, and communities, the California community colleges rose to the occasion.

Guided pathways increases attention to individual student journeys through California’s community colleges, intentionally addressing innovations to optimize student success in completing the students’ educational goals. This report primarily concerns placement and success in English pathways, including reading, and mathematics1 pathways, including all quantitative reasoning, as it directly relates to implementation of AB 705 (Irwin, 2017, codified in California Education Code section 78213) and evaluation of that implementation.

Health disparities, like racism, are difficult to discuss.  As a health care professional and nursing faculty, I like to spend more time on how my students, the future nurses of America, can help. Health disparities were recently brought to light with the COVID-19 pandemic. The death rates of persons of color, particularly African Americans, were alarming. In Chicago, nearly 70% of COVID-19 deaths were Black people, although they only make up 30% of the population. In Louisiana, 70.5% of deaths have occurred amongst Black people who represent only 32.2% of the population (Yancy, 2020).

One can argue that policy making does not always lead to sustainable progress for African American students. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to reconcile the egregious, abhorrent enslavement of African Americans. Oppositely, it made racism less visible, fertilized discrimination, and stagnated African American students even more. The number of African American students entering four-year colleges and universities have mostly remained the same since 1976 (Harper, 2012).

Education is a revolutionary act of consciousness and is presumed to be the great equalizer in a civilized world. Unfortunately, most California community colleges are in a state of paralysis when it comes to confronting the issue of systemic racism. Most historically and predominately white institutions are not truly committed to the efforts of combating institutionalized racism, structural racism, anti-blackness, or establishing culturally relevant pedagogy and a student-ready college.