Welcome | Program | Registration | Hotel&Travel | Materials | Area Meetings

Welcome to Spring Session 2006

2006 greetings from the Executive Committee of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. Our hard-working team of Executive Committee members hopes you have had a successful term and a pleasant holiday season since we last spent time together at Fall Session in Pasadena. We look forward to joining you again this spring.

More specifically we invite you to meet us at the San Francisco Airport Westin Hotel on April 27–29, for the Spring 2006 Plenary Session. We will feature our usual rich mixture of activities and topics: breakout sessions that range from nuts-and-bolts training for relatively new local senate officers to explorations and updates for the expert on arcane, recent developments at the state level that will impact your daily life in the classroom. You will have the opportunity to talk with colleagues from around the state as you craft resolutions in preparation for Saturday’s voting session, where we debate and adopt policy and newly crafted position papers. And as delegates you will get to elect officer and Executive Committee members to represent you for the coming year.

Our session theme is “Are We There Yet?” Before you immediately respond with a resounding “no, of course not!” let me explain that, in selecting the theme, we did have more in mind than just the catchy title. We were struck by the seemingly large number of fundamental changes that are currently under way but far from completed. We have the system strategic plan that has been adopted by the Board of Governors and is moving toward fast-track implementation of certain recommendations. We have the Academic Senate’s own recommendations on changes to Math/English requirements for graduation; while support will never be unanimous, it’s time to devote our considerable faculty energy and expertise to ensuring the best possible implementation and development of creative courses and support strategies to ensure that our students succeed in modern, high-skill California. There are several competing proposals that would affect our finances and the level of financial contribution expected from our students and their families: the Academic Senate continues to call for the elimination of mandatory enrollment fees; the Campaign for College Opportunity suggest a 25% student contribution; the Community College Ballot Initiative specifies $20/unit fees and a change in Proposition 98; and the system funding formula proposals are slowly making their way through the legislature in SB361. Any one of these proposals could create a profoundly altered landscape. And speaking of altered landscape, we whimsically suggest that you join a colleague in the bar at session and attempt to interpret the signs and reflections in the session graphic—from the point of view of an artist, or perhaps a physicist.

We’re planning general session speakers who can reflect on our theme from different viewpoints. Some of you will recall a previous plenary session where Brian Murphy eloquently and passionately described the history and politics of the Master Plan and AB1725 that deliberately led to our current discriminatory funding system; Brian will give us an update in light of some of the current initiatives. We hope to feature a husband and wife team with an interesting perspective on our system—long-time supporter in the legislature, Senator Alan Lowenthal and relatively new Board of Governors member Debbi Malumed. And, as usual, we will have breakout sessions where both the title and the content reflect this theme of exploration—past, present and future.

Once again, I encourage you to participate personally and to recruit several colleagues from your campus. You can widely share the pre-session materials that will be sent out to you and that are also available electronically on the Academic Senate’s comprehensive website (www.asccc.org). You can discuss issues at your local senate meetings. You can meet with regional friends and colleagues at the Area Meetings, scheduled for the weekend of April 7th or 8th. And you can attend the Spring Session itself—preferably in the company of others from your campus. Remember that scholarships are available to ensure that every local senate is represented by a voting delegate (contact the Senate Office for details). And to honor the fact that our students are close to implementing a new statewide representation mechanism, we also encourage you to invite a student leader from your campus to join us at a specially reduced registration rate.

On behalf of the Executive Committee I can say that we are all eagerly looking forward to joining you in San Francisco.
Cordially,

Ian Walton
President,
Academic Senate for California Community Colleges