May

For a friend, it was the best of times, yet it was the worst of times. He had bought a beautiful new carpet for the living room, but rather than enjoy his new floor covering, the result was that he became uncomfortably aware of the dinginess of the paint on the walls and the shoddy condition of the baseboards.

In a similar way, when we in the community colleges work to address one issue, we often end up becoming uncomfortably aware of others. Such is the case with our work on the proper coding of our courses for MIS reporting.

With the introduction of the 2002 Accreditation Standards, California community college faculty tentatively waded into the waters of Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) and assessment. At a Spring 2009 plenary breakout session, some preliminary results were presented from a recent survey of SLO coordinators conducted by the Academic Senate's Accreditation and SLO Committee. In the survey, which will be more fully reported in a forthcoming Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) paper, most of the respondents stated that their colleges had waded into the SLO waters by 2008.

On a warm and sultry summer morning in the predawn hours, a breakfast flock of pelicans gently wings its way across the bogs and southwestern shore of the San Francisco bay. They glide in the still air on a convoluted wandering path among the towering concrete slabs of Redwood City's high tech companies painting a scene of majestic serenity. At the same time a non-descript white van departs the suburbs of Sacramento loaded with heavy and mysterious boxes, seemingly on a mission of unknown, but potentially nefarious deeds.

Without a doubt, one of most controversial words in education today is "accountability." While the term still retains some of the positive connotations of its origins, it cannot be argued that the term has not been tainted by its misappropriation by outside agencies for their own purposes.

Dear Julie,

After the accreditation team visited our college, one of the team's recommendations to our board of trustees was to perform a self-evaluation. We think that's a good idea for our board, but our senate executive committee wants to know if academic senates should also perform self-evaluations. What do you think?
Evaluating Evaluations

Dear E.E.,

"Eminence"-the word of terror to the chair of the Standards and Practices Committee. Well, maybe not "terror," but it sure brings up a lot of questions in any discussion of equivalencies to disciplines in the Disciplines List. The equivalency process in section 87359 of the Education Code states that "no one shall be hired to serve as a community college faculty.unless the governing board determines that he or she possesses qualifications that are at least equivalent to the minimum qualifications."

What do the following community college students have in common?

If you are reading this article, then you are already too far gone into the oblivion known as "board policies" to ever return to normal. The tornado of whirling policies, procedures, and drafts attempts to suck you up to new levels of frustration and arduous efforts. Fear not, however; the updraft takes you just where you and your senate need to be. The tornado will drop you in a new location, and after the rebuilding, every indicator will point to the new location as being safer and better.

Athletic directors who recruit student athletes often remind the rest of the college that when the athletes enroll, they do not only enroll in their sport; they also take courses across the campus, such as general education, fulfilling requirements for degrees and for transfer. So any athletic recruitment effort actually benefits the whole college.

Alas, the soap opera continues as colleges submit their shiny new-and hopefully compliant-degrees to the Chancellor's Office. While we know those bold and beautiful new degrees, submitted by the young and restless faculty, have been designed with all my children in mind, we wait, on the edge of night, as their fate is determined. Stephanie Low, their fearless recipient in the Chancellor's Office, in the interest of avoiding General Hospital, has resorted to providing an automatic response to requests for reviews of draft degrees.