By Nanette Asimov Jan 23, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
Days after a commission sanctioned City College of San Francisco for violating accreditation standards, a supervisor is demanding an explanation from the trustees in light of the millions of dollars the city and taxpayers spend to support the school.
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges determined this month that the trustees are neglecting the long-term fiscal health of CCSF, failing to follow their own policies and ignoring the chancellor’s authority. The three violations center on actions by the elected trustees, not on the quality of the college.
On Tuesday, Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro, Noe Valley and other mid-city neighborhoods, sent a formal letter of inquiry to Alan Wong, president of the Board of Trustees, asking why the trustees have allowed the college to run afoul of critical accreditation rules for the second time in a decade and how they will fix it. Accreditation is required for colleges to stay in business.
The letter also asked why the trustees appear to be bickering with Chancellor David Martin, who has set the college on a fiscally stable path for the first time in years. Martin, who arrived in 2021, has said he will leave at the end of this academic year but has not said why.
“This Board of Supervisors and the communities we represent have a strong interest in ensuring that City College is being governed in a manner that promotes its long-term financial stability and success,” Mandelman wrote in his three-page letter, noting that San Francisco spent nearly $20 million in the last year not only to clear student debt at City College, but mainly so that city residents could attend for free.
Mandelman, who served as a City College trustee before being elected supervisor, noted in his letter that he had been deeply involved in helping the school emerge from its previous accreditation crisis, which it did in 2017 after a five-year ordeal.
He told Wong that he was concerned about “troubling evidence that some of the very same governance failures that drove City College into a ditch a decade ago are now re-emerging.”
Wong did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Jan. 16, the accrediting commission informed Martin that it was sanctioning City College and placing it on “warning” status — the mildest of the commission’s three sanctions.
To achieve compliance, the commission said the board must consider the “long-range fiscal implications” of its decisions and allow the chancellor to implement policies “without Board interference.”
City College has until March 1, 2025, to produce a report showing how it will fix the violations before the final deadline of January 2027.
In his letter, Mandelman credited City College with making great progress since its last accreditation crisis, when it received the most serious of sanctions and nearly shut down. He noted that “after a prolonged period of declining enrollment and financial uncertainty,” the college’s $314 million budget is balanced for the first time since 2017 and it’s increasing enrollment.
The college reports that it added nearly 2,000 students between fall 2022 and fall 2023 — an 8% increase to 25,834 full- and part-time students. While that is far less than the more than 95,000 City College boasted 15 years ago, the school has been desperate to increase enrollment for years, so the uptick is good news.
Mandelman also credited Martin with bringing other areas of stability to City College, saying that its five unions are under multiyear contracts and that construction projects for building a new administration building and a science and math building, both on Frida Kahlo Way, are on time and on budget.
A petition, begun last week to try and retain Martin, has 244 signatures.
But the board that hired Martin is largely gone, and city voters have elected a majority of trustees who disagree with the chancellor’s fiscally conservative approach.
Now, Martin has said he will leave at the end of this academic year, “apparently in the wake of public conflicts among board members and between board members and the chancellor,” Mandelman wrote.
He is asking the trustees to explain how they will address their new accreditation problems and what they will do if they aren’t about to find a “suitable replacement” for Martin before he leaves on June 30. When he arrived, Martin was the school’s ninth chancellor in eight years.
The supervisor asked the trustees to provide answers by Feb. 5.
Reach Nanette Asimov: nasimov@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
Jan 23, 2024
Nanette covers California’s public universities – the University of California and California State University – as well as community colleges and private universities. She’s written about sexual misconduct at UC and Stanford, the precarious state of accreditation at City College of San Francisco, and what happens when the UC Berkeley student government discovers a gay rights opponent in its midst. She has exposed a private art college where students rack up massive levels of debt (one student’s topped $400k), and covered audits peering into UC finances, education lawsuits and countless student protests.
But writing about higher education also means getting a look at the brainy creations of students and faculty: Robotic suits that help paralyzed people walk. Online collections of folk songs going back hundreds of years. And innovations touching on everything from virtual reality to baseball.
Nanette is also covering the COVID-19 pandemic and served as health editor during the first six months of the crisis, which quickly ended her brief tenure as interim investigations editor.
Previously, Nanette covered K-12 education. Her stories led to changes in charter school laws, prompted a ban on Scientology in California public schools, and exposed cheating and censorship in testing.
A past president of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, Nanette has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in sociology from Queens College. She speaks English and Spanish.
She can be reached at nasimov@sfchronicle.com.
