Tom Fuentes and the accreditation crisis at the South Orange County Community College District

Today, at Red County/OC Blog, contributor tylerh will be posting about the accreditation of our two colleges. He has graciously offered to include a link to this post, which offers the "faculty perspective" on this matter.

No doubt tylerh has opined that the South Orange County Community College District’s colleges will likely be reaccredited (early in 2009).

He is probably right.

But why has the question arisen in the first place? It has arisen because, back in January, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) sent letters to the two colleges of the district—Saddleback and Irvine Valley)—advising them that if they did not finally resolve long-standing difficulties, they would lose their accreditation.

Back in 2004, the accreditors dinged the colleges essentially for trustee micromanagement and a “plague of despair”—the latter largely engendered by the authoritarian, repellent, and incompetent “leadership” of the conservative Board Majority’s man, Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur.

Back in 2004, instead of canning Mathur and ceasing their micromanagement, the board gave Mathur a new contract and a generous salary (he makes about $300,000), and it continued to throw its weight around inappropriately—for instance, imposing incompetent and irregular elements in follow-up reports to the ACCJC.

During all of these years of accreditation difficulty, the most consistently defiant trustee has been Tom Fuentes, the former chair of the OC GOP, who is now up for reelection in November. He has displayed open contempt for the accreditors, even declaring, during board meetings, that, contrary to the ACCJC, it is not trustee micromanagement but rather the “macromanagement” of “others” that burdens our colleges. The others, of course, are the faculty, whom he routinely demonizes.

Unfortunately for Mr. Fuentes and the district, circumstances have changed on the accreditation front, for, not long ago, the Department of Education, in the course of pursuing its peculiar reforms, took ACCJC/WASC to task for its failure to enforce standards.

Thus it was that, in January, the colleges were informed that “institutions out of compliance with standards…are expected to correct deficiencies within a two-year period or the Commission must take action to terminate accreditation. …[T]he college has lapsed significantly beyond the … two-year rule and needs to ensure that these recommendations are completed resolved at the time of the October 2008 report.”

This has placed the colleges in a difficult situation, for how, after these many years of “hostility, cynicism, despair, and fear,” are the colleges supposed to emerge with the requisite chirpiness, idealism, and hope? Mathur is still the Chancellor, depressing morale and causing an alarming administrative turnover. The board remains defiantly behind their man, despite his manifest incompetence and unpopularity. (In December, it was revealed that, for many years, Mathur had allowed the district to drift toward noncompliance with the 50% law, a situation that recently forced the district to engage in a hasty and disruptive faculty hiring initiative.)

The conservative readership of OC Blog will no doubt be receptive to Fuentes’ efforts to blame the situation on a recalcitrant and "overpaid" faculty that refuses to be led by Mathur and that pursues only power. But I do hope that they will listen to Board President (and Fuentes ally) Don Wagner, who, for five months now, has been working with faculty (and others) to address our accreditation difficulties and draft the accreditation report on behalf of Irvine Valley College. Since he’s begun to work closely with faculty, he has expressed only praise and admiration for their excellence and hard work. I do hope that you will ask him whether the problem with the district is its faculty.

In the end, owing to the hard work and dedication of such groups, the colleges will likely avoid accreditation disaster. But if they do so, it will be despite Mr. Tom Fuentes.

In the Area 6 trustee race, Fuentes is running against Bob Bliss, a retired Saddleback College professor. Like Fuentes, Bliss is a conservative. But, unlike Fuentes, he will not place our beloved colleges in jeopardy.

For a more detailed account of our accreditation predicament and how we came to it, please see Tom Fuentes and SOCCCD's accreditation crisis.