A Report Card You Wouldn’t Want Your Kid to Bring Home

By Phil Hendricks and Carl Gettleman

In the Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights July 2004 newsletter, Margaret Quinones, Chair of the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees and the sole incumbent Trustee running for reelection, characterized Santa Monica College's recent Accreditation Evaluation Report thusly:

“And just to brag a bit, we've just completed accreditation, and have been commended as
‘outstanding’ due to a great faculty and a strong institution.”

But the Accreditation Team responsible for issuing the evaluation report produced a document quite at odds with Quinones’ facile assessment. While agreeing that SMC is a strong institution with a great faculty and staff and student body, the Accreditation Team, a peer review group composed of administrators and academics, did not see the college's present situation as "outstanding."

The Accreditation Evaluation Report pointed to an organization in a highly precarious state due to substantial loss of student enrollment, dysfunctional governance, deficiencies in its structural organization, diminished student services, multi-year operating deficits and inaccurate and untimely financial data.

It also found understaffing in critical student service areas, an inadequate decision-making process, low morale, a lack of tracking data in regard to student use of service centers, a rising number of disciplinary cases and little or no coordination between human resources, physical resources, student learning, and institutional planning.

In addition it found inadequate assessment of student learning outcomes, disregard for the principles of shared governance, a propensity for making capital acquisitions without factoring in total cost of ownership and a general lack of interdepartmental functional integration, among other problems.

The Accreditation Evaluation Report in its entirety can be found on the College's website,
www.smc.edu/policies/MasterPlans/Accreditation_2004.htm.

All California Community Colleges must be reaccredited through the Western Association for Schools and Colleges every six years. The 12-member Accreditation
Team has the College prepare a comprehensive self-study according to a prescribed format.

After the self-study is submitted to them, the team visits the College and meets with the Board, the Administration/Management, faculty, support staff, and students; attends regularly scheduled committee meetings, and walks around the campus. The Team also examines documents related to the college's finances, policies, planning procedures, technology, academic and vocational educational achievement, curriculum, student services and shared governance.

While no community college in California has ever failed to be accredited, in an unprecedented occurrence for SMC, the Accreditation Team directed the College to submit a progress report on a list of critical recommendations listed in the Accreditation Evaluation Report by March 2005.

How does a College that retains a veteran Superintendent and employs a relatively high number of well-paid administrator/managers find itself in the position of having such a plethora of problems, many of which have developed and been exacerbated since the
last Accreditation Report in 1998?

Much of what was exposed in the Accreditation Evaluation Report was already known to the Administration and Board of Trustees through surveys, formal group dialogues, and formal reports from classified support staff, faculty, and more recently, students. So ignorance is not the explanation.

Put simply, the college suffers from a well known and well documented phenomenon of social psychology termed diffusion of responsibility. It is an observable fact that when more managers are involved in getting things done, each manager assumes that the
others are taking action and so each manager tends to be less proactive.

By consciously growing the managerial /administrative segment of the college's employment base to twice the State average ratio per employee, the Board of Trustees effectively ensured that each administrator/manager's personal responsibility was diluted.

Compounding the problem of diffusion of responsibility is the lack of accountability for administrators and managers. The Accreditation Evaluation Report states that "classified managers are evaluated on inconsistent basis" and provides no specifics on the President's process of evaluating administrators or the Board's process for evaluating the President.

If the managers at SMC are not being held accountable by Administration and Administration is not being held accountable by the Board, then it is up to the Santa
Monica/Malibu Community to hold the Board accountable for the deteriorated condition the College finds itself in.

In November, the voters of Santa Monica/Malibu have the opportunity to place three new members on the Board of Trustees of Santa Monica College. The future viability of the College as a community asset is at stake.

Roseanne Barr once defined her notion of competent motherhood: "The way I look at it, if the kids are still alive at the end of the day, I've done my job."

The hierarchy at SMC seems to have adopted this minimalist approach to defining organizational success. True, the place hasn't burned to the ground and no one has been led away in handcuffs. Still, that's a not very high bar for gauging the effectiveness of the College's ruling elite.

Phil Hendricks is president of CSEA at Santa Monica College and a member of SMRR for 21 years. Carl Gettleman is president of the Classified Senate at the college and a member of SMRR for 15 years.