Last week, as expected, a California superior court judge ruled on whether to allow the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to end accreditation for City College of San Francisco (CCSF) as of July 31, 2014. As reported in multiple news outlets, the judge granted an injunction preventing ACCJC from stripping CCSF’s accreditation at least until a court trial based on the city of San Francisco lawsuit, which would occur in the summer 2014 at the earliest. This means that CCSF will stay open for at least another academic term (fall 2014), and it is possible that ACCJC would have to redo their accreditation review.
What was the actual decision and what are the implications for other schools?
Law Suits
The original issues found by ACCJC were raised in the 2006 review, leading to multiple follow-up reports and actions. By summer 2012 ACCJC issued a Show Cause ruling based on a new review – the one that is the crux of the lawsuits and injunction. The full 2012 report documented the new evaluation that in order to “fully meet each ACCJC Accreditation Standard and Eligibility Requirements [sic]”, the college must follow 14 recommendations by March 2013 to keep its accreditation. CCSF did not meet this timeline and ACCJC in July 2013 sent a letter stating that CCSF accreditation would be revoked as of July 31, 2014. For full background, read this post.
Despite the seven-year buildup, CCSF finally got serious about changes in summer 2013, and they replaced their Board of Trustees with a “special trustee” (Robert Agrella) “with unilateral powers to try and save the school from losing accreditation in one year”.
As CCSF is the largest college in California (85,000 students before 2012) and potentially the largest college ever to lose accreditation, the issue quickly became political. Three groups filed law suits seeking for force ACCJC to maintain CCSF accreditation – the City of San Francisco’s attorney Dennis Herrera, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 2121 and the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), and the Save City College Coalition (which was not part of last week’s ruling). Much of these three lawsuits’ arguments were based on a Department of Education notification from August 2013 that ACCJC was “out of compliance in several areas related to its sanctioning of City College”.
Both CCSF administration as well as California Community College system officials accepted the ACCJC ruling and decided to work within the system, even arguing against the three lawsuits. As described in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“The ruling doesn’t affect me at all,” said Robert Agrella, the special trustee appointed by the state to replace the elected Board of Trustees last summer. “I was brought in to meet the accreditation standards, and that is exactly what we’re doing.”
Brice Harris, chancellor of the statewide community college system, agreed. In a letter to Herrera on Thursday, Harris expressed dismay that the courts had gotten involved at all.
“Court intervention is not necessary to keep City College open,” Harris wrote. “Characterizations that the cases before the court are a ‘last-ditch’ effort to ‘save’ City College are inaccurate and will do additional damage to the college’s enrollment.”
He then listed nine areas in which the college had made significant progress, including hiring a permanent chancellor, hiring a collection agency to recoup millions of dollars in student fees it never collected, and mapping out progress on each of the 357 steps needed to fully comply with accreditation standards.
In fact, CCSF has maintained a public spreadsheet detailing its efforts:
Nevertheless the city kept up the pressure through its lawsuit, as described by the San Francisco Chronicle:
The city’s suit says the commission allowed political bias and conflicts of interest to influence not only its decision to revoke the college’s accreditation next summer, but also its entire evaluation of the college that began in March 2012.
The suit alleges that the commission unfairly stacked its evaluation team with supporters of a statewide initiative called the Student Success Task Force that sought to limit college access for thousands of students whose academic goals did not include a degree or transfer to a four-year college. The commission’s president, Barbara Beno, also wrote letters to the state in support of the initiative, which became law. At the same time, City College students and faculty members were among the most outspoken critics of the idea.
The suit also claims the evaluation team had too few faculty members and should not have included Beno’s husband, Peter Crabtree.
Ruling
What the judge ruled:
- To prevent ACCJC from finalizing its revocation of accreditation for CCSF until a trial can be held based on the city’s lawsuit;
- To deny the city’s request to prevent ACCJC from blocking any accreditation rulings for all colleges it reviews (mostly California Community Colleges);
- To deny the CFT request for injunction based on alternate legal theories; and
- To deny two ACCJC requests to throw out the city and CFT lawsuits.
By reading the ruling itself it becomes apparent that the basis of the ruling was California’s Unfair Competition Law (UCL) governing “unfair”, “unlawful” and “fraudulent” practices. The City Attorney’s claimed in a press releasethat:
the court recognized that Herrera’s office is likely to prevail on the merits of his case when it proceeds to trial,
yet the actual language of the ruling was that (p. 41):
In short, I conclude there is some possibility that the City Attorney will ultimately prevail on the merits, because there is some possibility that he will establish some Commission practices (i) have zero utility and so demonstrating their unfairness, or others (ii) are illegal.
The injunction really is based on the harm done to CCSF by allowing revocation to proceed before the lawsuit goes to trial, but it does not give significant insight into whether the lawsuit might prevail.
Why did the judge grant an injunction based on the city lawsuit but not the faculty union? He explained that this was mostly a matter of the attorney’s role, as shown in the Plain English Summary (p. 54):
Back to this case. Some of the plaintiffs (the union, teachers and students) have a problem with their case. They have probably shown enough to conclude that the Commission imposed unfair procedures, but they have not shown that those procedures led to the Commission’s adverse decision. As far as the evidence presented to the court shows, the Commission might have issued exactly the same decisions with fair procedures. The plaintiffs have argued that they can win by just showing unfair procedures, and it doesn’t matter if the Commission would have done the same thing or not. But under the UCL, it does matter, at least as far as the union, teachers, and students are concerned. They have at least to show they were harmed by the specific acts they say were unfair or illegal under the UCL. They didn’t do that. It’s not good enough to argue that the Commission’s ultimate decisions (for example, threatening to terminate accreditation) causes harm.
The situation is different with respect to the case brought by the City Attorney. As a law enforcement officer he is empowered, along with other City Attorneys and the state’s Attorney General, to enforce the UCL without showing that any particular person was harmed.
As I mentioned last week:
What is remarkable for such a significant decision is that the CCSF deficiencies are not related to academic quality, and no one (CCSF, City of San Francisco, faculty union) has argued that the actual accreditation findings are in error. We’re facing the biggest accreditation shut down in history, and the issue is whether procedures were followed in evaluating non-academic management. Go figure.
Significance Inside and Outside California
The reason I am covering this case in so much detail is that it gives insight into the external pressures on higher education institutions. The real significance of the CCSF injunction is that it opens the door to direct political action to change the accreditation processes. Yes, there have been other cases where a court granted an injunction to delay revocation of accreditation, but to my knowledge all previous cases have involved motions coming from the affected institution itself (e.g. St Paul). With CCSF we have state and city politicians who went to court and prevailed (at least in their motion) despite the school and the system accepting the decision.
Accreditation is a hot political issue, and there is now blood in the water. Politicians can prevail with direct action on accreditation and not just by indirect pressure and not even through arcane accreditation procedures (CCSF ruling based on California law). As the San Francisco Bay Guardian described the political stakes in California:
The ACCJC has come under increasing fire from state education advocates, a bipartisan coalition of state legislators and U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier for its controversial advocacy to dramatically restrict the mission of California’s community colleges by focusing on degree completion to the detriment of vocational, remedial and non-credit education. The accrediting body’s political agenda — shared by conservative advocacy organizations, for-profit colleges and student lender interests — represents a significant departure from the abiding “open access” mission repeatedly affirmed by the California legislature and pursued by San Francisco’s Community College District since it was first established.
And there is a great interest in changing accreditation processes even at the federal level. Just last month the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology made a specific recommendation on the subject:
2. Encourage accrediting bodies to be flexible in response to educational innovation. College degrees in the United States are accredited primarily by regional nonprofit organizations whose members collaborate in accrediting one another.19 These organizations, on the whole, do a reasonably good job of quality assurance, but they have many standards (concerning the adequacy of physical facilities, library collections, etc.) that are irrelevant to providers of online courses and degrees. The Federal Government (and in particular, the U.S. Department of Education) should continue to encourage the regional accrediting bodies to be flexible in recognizing that many standards normally required for an accredited degree should be modified in the online arena; it should also encourage such flexibility in state oversight of education.20 If the bar for accreditation is set too high, the infant industry developing MOOC and related technology platforms may struggle to realize its full potential.
How would the Tiffin University / Ivy Bridge College case have turned out if Ohio politicians had taken a similar approach to San Francisco politicians? CCSF has had seven years warning to deal with its issues, yet Ivy Bridge College was shut down, and Altius Education broken apart and sold off, based on a notice of several months from its accrediting agency HLC. From the press release [emphasis added]:
Today, Tiffin University announced to students a directive from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) that the school must discontinue offering associate degree programs through Ivy Bridge College as of October 20, 2013. Ivy Bridge College, a college within Tiffin University, has offered online associate degree programs to students across the U.S. since its creation in 2008. The HLC directive, which was issued on July 25, was unexpected by Tiffin University, and Ivy Bridge College is now intensely focused on ensuring that its students’ progress towards a degree won’t be interrupted by the decision despite the very short timeline.
I agree with Audrey Watters’ take last week:
As I noted in one of my year-end review posts, I predict this and other accreditation battles will dominate the headlines in 2014.
