Attack on City College SF
Historical Essay
by Molly Hankwitz, September 24, 2013
A beautiful mosaic of the Aztec calendar greets those entering the City College Mission Campus
Photo: Molly Hankwitz
This Attack Goes Against Our History and Any Meaningful Sustainable Solution for San Francisco
Maneuverings of The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, (ACCJC) around City College's accreditation and possible closure in July 2014 came as an unwarranted attack on the community. To many here, CCSF exemplifies the best of this part of the world: its inclusive, diverse, intellectual and progressive populations. How is it possible, then, that CCSF had gotten behind on standards when the education is widely valued? What could closure do to the exceptional cultural diversity and educated workforce of the city? How has CCSF sprung back? Moreover, what is the responsibility of Californian cities to their lower income and minority residents with respect to higher education?
The 2008 State budget cuts affected California's community and state colleges through reduced enrollment and loss of services. The cuts took a toll upon the UC system as well. The pressure on CCSF to change its ways or lose accreditation is yet another set back to our State's higher educational system.
This small, notoriously democratic institution, a College of approximately 85,000 currently enrolled, has worked for years to deliver quality education and certification to students. Many in the student body are under-served, newcomer, transitional, or older adult residents of the city including veterans, seniors, women, undocumented workers and newly arrived immigrants.
CCSF has also been a robust employer, paying its faculty some of the highest salaries and benefits for public workers anywhere in the nation. State budget cuts from 2008 have affected CCSF's capacity to do its job on some levels despite how the administration managed to preserve faculty salaries and many student services. Yet, even with difficulties experienced at the hands of the State, CCSF is now being made to scramble to fulfill the requirements set by the privately-run organization, the ACCJC, or risk closure.
More Context
The ACCJC's judgments may first have appeared rigorous due to the many news reports. It may also have seemed an assertive official effort to "clean up" a faltering and unworthy urban institution in times of economic uncertainty. But, it's easy these days to send morality plays through the news when "quality education" is being debated as hotly as it is. "Crisis" makes for good reading. More astute thinking, however, cannot separate one act of large-scale political indifference from another. These are divisive times in the US. From the Federal government shutdown to the plethora of evictions and foreclosures plaguing citizens' housing, one must read the swashbuckling neo-liberal moves to destabilize land, cities, economies, communities as having politically divisive and conservative similarities.
Because of its scale and history, the attack on CCSF comes along as one more in a spate of moves targeting minority and lower-income citizens (and their history) including the recent Supreme Court's decision on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Trayvon Martin verdict, the Tea Party's blockade of Obamacare, Republican adherance to "states' rights", and the secret, nighttime addition (by Republicans) of limitations to birth control, a clear attack on womens' reproductive freedom.
Indeed, globally speaking, entire governments of poorer countries have been strangled by destabilization. Economies have fallen and state "austerity" measures have been enforced, frequently through violent and heavily militarized police action. Privatization of public assets, the pervasive argument that there is no money without corporate management, has proved extremely successful when in league with media that convinces the public that assets must be handed over. We see this in arguments for undermining K-12 public education, parks and recreation facilities, and public transportation. It started with Bush's "bail out" utilizing the US Treasury.
Laying Blame and Taking Action
Interests behind frequently clandestine initiatives, like those used to discredit and restructure CCSF, must be resisted. Their work undermines the foundations of progress in our democratic, civil society; our capacity for free thought and the right to self-representation of populations.
In a singularly well-worded lawsuit, City Attorney Dennis J. Herrera's office has proceeded against the ACCJC for “using the accreditation process to squelch debate with respect to education reform in Sacramento”.(LA Times,2013) Their move sheds light upon the agency's agenda for including CCSF in its already overly-punitive track record of punishing California's community colleges. This commendable insight into the political practices of the ACCJC across the state comes as some welcome relief to an else-wise silent or "on side" City Hall.
Resistance, Protest, Student Speak Outs: The Community Rallies Back
Efforts to sustain CCSF in resistance to the attack are, of course, taking place. (See links below.) The community has been working to keep CCSF open despite the imposition of the ACCJC “deadline." Decline in enrollments means continued loss of funding from the State. Loss of accreditation will only make that situation worse. This is why the trajectory of the ACCJC's attack is punitive. Their approach is counter-productive to a school already beleagured by State budget cuts! The State's entire budget and its challenges have little to do with CCSF's ongoing successes, except that CCSF needs money to continue to run. The school is being pushed further down, instead of being supported to succeed, by the ACCJC. The San Francisco Chronicle has continuously published on the official story, highlighting the one Trustee now appointed, not elected, to dictate all decision-making at the school. Thus, CCSF has been held unduly responsible for the State's messy budget, and the linear, punitive methodologies and "interests" of the ACCJC.
Questions and Motivations
Why destroy the city's largest provider of workforce education? Why shutdown the US government through tactics of defunding so as to avoid giving Obama his due in implementing federally subsidized and affordable health insurance? Herrera's law suit alleges that “the panel is biased against the college and its advocates because of differing agendas.” The openness to political difference and the diversity of the city's culture lies in specific contrast may be in direct conflict with the ideas of those wanting to close it down. Thus the attack on CCSF reads as one more act of sabotage in a long history of "fall out" from State and national greed and corruption. The effects of years of racist, classcist response, the passing over of voters and tax-payers for CEOs, and a minority of powerful "aristocratic" interests actively out to destroy civil society in the last decades, are hitting home.
Keeping the doors open!
Photo: Molly Hankwitz
Efforts to Kill Morale
Let's name the ways in which the attack on CCSF has played out across the community. In the mainstream press steeped in neo-liberal capitalist "speak", CCSF has been assailed as fiscally irresponsible, failing to maintain appropriate standards, with the strong implication that CCSF is behind the times in its aims. This argument is transparent. This is an "old and new" argument, preparing for a future of "real" change, as it were, which will be managed and created to be up to date, as if there were no mitigating circumstance or community voice to be heard. The San Francisco Bay Guardian, reliably left wing, published an editorial, however, on how elements of Obama administration rhetoric are to blame for much of this pushing and maneuvering around education at state and national levels. (Bay Guardian editorial, 2013)
Measures from the faceless regime-enforcing new management to disrupt CCSF have been extensive. Faculty have received eleven percent pay cuts, a measure supposedly to have been prevented by Prop. A, which voters wholeheartedly supported. Long term teachers have received reduced course loads, their clases renamed and syllabi handed over to younger teachers with the excuse that any attrition rates were their fault. These are contract-breaking tactics which hold faculty responsible for management's foibles and whims. In truth, enrollment has been declining since the 2008 budget cuts and since the ACCJC pronouncements. It is surely not the fault of the extremeely high quality faculty or a school under pressure to prevent its own closure!
More Confusion and Undermining
The threat of closure has felt like a gangster heist; a robbery. Ultimately, it's an issue of self-representation and community v. "top down" distanced management with an undisclosed, yet painful and harmful agenda. When locks were suddenly changed in classroom buildings without notifying those using them, the message was clear. New keys had to be requested by a workforce which had come and gone freely for years. In one case a native plant garden, carefully tended by a Native American gardener, was ordered removed and replaced with new landscaping. The disappearance of departmental chairs, faculty pay cuts, “downsizing“ of student services, and commercialization of the bookstore all happened so quickly, that there has been little time to respond. It was as if the school had become slated for demolition by an outside force. Visions of the newer campuses falling silent have continued to haunt a public familiar with San Francisco land grabs and the current rapid gentrification in many neighborhoods squeezing out local families and shops. The CCSF attack is a "takeover" of San Francisco's organic, counter-cultural, lower income and minority milieu. It is a deliberate effort to undermine the community. CCSF campuses, with their huge building footprints, expanses of lawn, playing fields, parking lots, and the brand new multi million dollar architecture must seem tasty morsels. The matter of history doesn't seem to matter.
Where is any official assessment that would make the effort to sustain CCSF on the grounds that all residents deserve affordable educational opportunities and that CCSF has been remarkable well organzed and beneficial to the city?
The social and political history of CCSF and its influence on our city is important to the Bay Area. Radio talk shows about CCSF's accreditation have had callers expressing anger over the effects upon community. One angry ESL teacher from the East Bay ended her rant about the war on minority students with, ”Oakland has no more adult public higher education.”
Civil Rights Backlash and Educational Inequity are a National Issue
Recently, national events in Washington, Florida and elsewhere have targeted the public sector, particularly, people of color and the poor. The New York Times reports that 1 in 5 children live in poverty in the United States. (NY Times, 10/1/2013) Income discrepencies show people of color significantly poorer and more unemployed overall than similarly aged white people; approximately 60% of people of color to a mere nine percent of whites. These numbers lend background texture to the climate of deprivation surrounding dis-accreditation and threat of closure at CCSF, a school which has been notorious for helping thousands of low-income people and minority students gain significant ground in academia, job placement and career certification. Where will these students go and what will their future prospects be in a system which is currently oppressing them further? This smells like the conservative attack on affirmative action, only this time the tactic is to bleed our important institutions dry or out rule us altogether.
Starting from the top is the Supreme Court decision to take down important parts of the 1965 Voters' Rights Act on the thinly laid argument that the racial discrimination originally leading to this seminal legislation no longer exists. To be clear, the Voter's Rights Act is a piece of Law, put into place to protect minorities from discrimination, and the Civil Rights movement was not some passing delusion. Just as Roe v. Wade is a piece of Law that enables women to gain the right of privacy over their own bodies, these laws are cornerstones for the protection of civil liberties for people of color and women, yet within hours of the Court's decision, notoriously racist Southern states set about re-zoning voting districts, drawing boundaries which would affect voter turnout in future elections. It is an historic fact that President Obama won states where voter turn out for minority and low-income populations was especially high.
A not-guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin shooting has also sent a disturbing message. Fatal wounding of young people of color by those armed and sanctioned to use weapons is being legally protected by the judicial system. In my humble opinion, this constitutes another link in a chain of highly-conservative backlash towards people of color which is being glossed over by the “Martinizing” of the Obama presidency with highly publicized marches on Washington in honor of King. As Smiley and West have pointed out, sentimentality towards Martin Luther King does little but put frosting on a situation which King himself would have regarded as abhorrent and which cannot be condoned ---that is the trading of civil rights laws for ineffectual "feel good" histories as easily forgotten as they are enjoyed.
What is real, however, is the shape-shifting of top courts and justices, legal maneuveurs tantamount to legislating inequality, new laws around activism, the closing of borders, and the de-waging and under valuation of low-income citizens. Where does growing inequality best take root? In attacks on the cultural ideal of accessible, affordable education for all citizens. It is here that populations stand to lose the most ground in terms of their own self-betterment, growth, and prosperity.
The Toll
Beleagurement of the other, the poor, the ethnic minority is a pernicious outcome of white, chauvanistic ruling power. It is observed in the widespread modeling and adoption of “Stop and Frisk” police methods in New York and Oakland, in the problem of Oscar Grant's shooting death going all but excused, and of “inner city” hatred emerging as far back as the Nixon and Reagan administrations when many urban policing laws were put in place and more people started living in the streets.
If you are a person of color and poor, today — even with a half Black president — you can be screwed out of your vote, stopped and frisked without a warrant, and are as likely in 2013 to be the target of police brutality or "acceptable levels" of violence from someone wearing a badge, who will then be pardoned for shooting you than you may ever have been before.
Unfortunately, to my mind, the destruction of CCSF due to a financial explanation showing little faith in its sustained purpose or public good, is a heartless account fitting right into the current, reactionary cycle of governmental shutdown/control and domination. Most importantly, the attack is a disavowal of the importance of political difference, as Herrera's lawsuit amplifies, of multiple cultures and expressions of culture which make San Francisco and the US great. It is nearly tantamount, instead, to an act of blind, cultural war supported through justifications of power in a way similar to that described by Hardt and Negri as the growth of "just wars" under empire.
DOE
In 2009, the Department of Education swept the country with educational imperatives in hand. They held multiple public meetings on minority education in public and charter schools in numerous states including our own at the Main Library in Civic Center. In the Bay Area, attendees, including myself, heard from young Oakland activists of color about the state of Oakland's schools, which when moved from being public to Charter status under the DOE's plans for educational reform, frequently became more whitened and were no longer seen as serving or belonging to minority populations. The activists cited in particular the American Indian Middle School, which “went charter” and lost its community character. Actions such as the people's sit-in at Lakeview Elementary in Oakland 2012, underscore further, the degree of struggle being undertaken to protect public schools from outside "takeover". This is in the context, too, of neighborhoods being gentrified and of the extensive publicity of crime rates and levels of involvement from Oakland's black youth. At the same time, it is very important to respond to the fact that if it had not been for the African American press, the Oscar Grant story would probably have disappeared altogether.
Sustainable Urbanism not Gentrification
In the modern history of the United States, the quality of life, and open, free-wheeling civic participation of community in politics have been progressive values embodied in the city of San Francisco. Residents here helped to build a radical movement against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, against the invasion of Iraq, and have been the first to implement many critical chapters in the history of womens' rights, gay rights, and AIDS research. Occupy SF was a vibrant and challenging chapter in recent history. Part of this progressive tradition has been the building of CCSF as a deeply engaged institution providing quality low-cost higher education to the lumpen mass without student loan debt.
Copernicus and the Aztecs as inspiration.
Photo: Molly Hankwitz
Regardless of faults with City College SF, the point here is to lay bare the consistency of neo-liberal attack strategies, the connection between depriving populations of public assets and other forms of oppression now emerging in the national political landscape, and, above all, to point out the pointlessness of destroying something which has proved to be an effective resource and beneficial to the city, when, with a little forethought and governance, this could be prevented.
All citizens deserve the right to affordable higher education. What the responsibility of California's cities will be to their populations regarding this issue in the future, remains to be seen, but CCSF should be preserved as the amazing institution it is. It needs to be saved. It needs our support. It is our College. We built it.
The author wishes to thank Richard Baum for his camaraderie and factual assistance, and Walter Alter for his correspondence and research. She is the initiator of The City College of San Francisco Community History Project (continually being added to Found SF) and seeks to collect stories, photographs, and details about CCSF from the community of San Francisco. She is working on a video installation about City College and urban education for the masses for ATA's window gallery on Valencia Street.
For more information, please contact: 'mollyhankwitz@gmail.com
Notes / City Attorney Files Suit
San Francisco sues Panel over City College Accreditation
Here's Real History in the Making: Fighting to Save City College