General Concerns

Whereas, Community colleges are commonly referred to as “two-year colleges,” and students are often expected by external observers and even themselves to complete their studies within time frames and unit limitations that stress greater speed to completion and economy of course scheduling rather than the quality of their experience;

Whereas, Many students remain at community colleges beyond two years and take more than the minimum units needed to complete their educational goals for legitimate reasons, including the following:

Whereas, In January 2014, the Board of Governors (BOG) of the California Community Colleges approved new minimum academic and progress standards that a student qualifying for a BOG fee waiver must meet in order to retain eligibility, but allowed an exemption to those standards for foster youth;

Whereas, The California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office recently released a report from the California Community Colleges Baccalaureate Degree Study Group[1] on the topic of expanding the mission of community colleges in the state to include the awarding of bachelor's degrees, and the report concludes with a recommendation that the topic "merits serious review and study;"

Whereas, Recent events in Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and California have served to remind us of the fragile nature of our sense of peace and security as well as creating safer environments for our faculty, staff and students;

Whereas, All members of the college faculty and staff are considered "Disaster Service workers" in the face of any emergency and will be held accountable for maintaining a level of training and expertise regarding safety and appropriate response to emergency situations;

Whereas, The Southwestern Community College faculty and students have received reprimands and disciplinary action for expressing their views regarding budgetary cuts made by the State of California and the Board of Trustees at Southwestern Community College; and

Whereas, Freedom of speech is a fundamental right guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution;

Resolved, That the Academic Senate for the California Community Colleges support Southwestern Community College faculty and students and stand in solidarity with those faculty and students; and

Whereas, The central work of the California Leadership Alliance for Student Success (CLASS) Initiative is to establish and facilitate a leadership alliance consisting of “a select group of community college chief executive officers and trustees who will focus attention on key leadership strategies and policies that must be central in California's effort to increase successful outcomes for community college students”;

Whereas, Cooperative Work Experience Education (CWEE) is a program of education consisting of either supervised employment which is intended to assist students in acquiring desirable work habits, attitudes and career awareness (General Work Experience), or supervised employment extending classroom based occupational learning at an on-the-job learning station relating to the students' educational or occupational goals (Occupational Work Experience);

Whereas, Newspapers like the Washington Post, which owns Kaplan University and Kaplan Prep, large and successful private education conglomerates, have mounted concerted campaigns to discredit community colleges for being inefficient and harmful to their students and their faculty for being lazy and overpaid, and organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have mounted concerted conservative legislative campaigns to advantage corporate goals to privatize education at the expense of our public educational institutions;

Whereas, Academic Senate Resolution 14.02 F05 (Student Cheating) sought clarification on Chancellor’s Office legal opinion L 95-31 “limit[ing] the ability of local faculty to fail a student for a single incident of academic dishonesty, and pending the result of clarification, to seek an appropriate Title 5 change,” and Academic Senate Resolution 14.01 S08 called for the Senate to “convene a group to review and where appropriate draft language to revise Title 5 grading regulations to allow for the failure of students for egregious acts of academic dishonesty”;

Whereas, There is significant attention to the potential for online and distance education to improve access to California community colleges from both the Governor and the Legislature;

Whereas, Title 5 §58003.1(f)(1) requires that the weekly student contact hours (WSCH) for credit distance education (DE) courses be determined by the credit units awarded for the course, not the actual student contact hours used for attendance accounting for the equivalent on-site credit courses;