Student voice silenced at Academic Senate meeting

By Greg ZemanThe Guardsman

When City College Student Trustee  Josh Nielsen tried to ask a question at a March 23 special meeting of  the Academic Senate, he was told to “sit down” and “shut up” by members  of the faculty.

“I asked just a point of process, just for  clarification,” Nielsen said at a March 25 Board of Trustees meeting. “I  was appalled as a student to see faculty and a lot of people that I’ve  seen within the institution provide me the education, and now I’m seeing  they really don’t value what students really want out of an education.”

Many  faculty members, including City College music instructor Bob Davis,  don’t see it that way.

“He was asked to leave the microphone and  sit down more than once and would not relinquish the microphone. That’s  not appropriate behavior,” Davis said. “I feel that there were some  students who were inappropriate and rude, and that when you’re dealing  with people who are out of order they should be treated as out of  order.”

Academic Senate President Hal Huntsman, addressing the  board on March 25, said he was deeply disturbed by the events at the  special meeting and apologized to Nielsen and the student body for the  behavior of his colleagues.

“You were literally shouted down and  told to go away, and that was a low point in my personal career here,”  he said.

When Nielsen refused to sit down at the March 23 special  meeting, Fred Teti, the parliamentarian for the meeting called a  security officer to enter the room.

Political science instructor  Sue Homer, shocked by Teti’s request, advocated for Nielsen’s right to  address the senate.

“I actually shouted out, ‘are you going to  arrest our students? Are you calling for them to arrest our students  simply for trying to speak?’ We heard, ‘go away, shut up, sit down, get  out!’,” Homer said. “What kind of institution is it where educators are  afraid of their own students sharing their point of view?”

Librarian  Karen Saginor, who served as facilitator of the Academic Senate special  meeting, said Nielsen is a member of the board which authored the  resolution being considered.

“Josh himself has kind of a conflict  of interest because he’s a member of the Board of Trustees,” Saginor  said. “Was he speaking as a student or as a member of the board? There  was some confusion there.”

Saginor said she wished she would have  suggested that faculty concerned about allowing students to speak could  have yielded their time to a student. In hindsight, she said a block of  time could also have been allotted for students to speak at the  beginning of the meeting.

Fears of disruption
“Up until  the moment that the meeting began, the organizers’ intent was to  completely deny student’s access to the meeting,” Homer said.

But  meeting organizers and City College Police Department Chief Andre  Barnes denied that allegation.

“We had heard rumors that some  students were planning a disruption of the meeting, which made people  nervous,” Saginor said, adding that there were seats provided for  students and no effort was made to exclude them.

Barnes said his  office provided only one uniformed officer for the event.

“We  didn’t give any specific instructions for this meeting but to do what we  normally do as a matter of course of our business,” he said. “It went  uneventful, at least from our standpoint. We didn’t take any police  action.”

All for equity
Darlene Alioto, chair of the  social sciences department, addressed the Board of Trustees after  Nielsen to “set the record straight” about the Academic Senate special  meeting.

“The meeting of the Academic Senate was not a meeting to  discuss the Achievement Gap and Equity Resolution, we have yet to get  there, and we need to. That meeting was a governance meeting,” Alioto  said.

The special meeting was called by petition to address the  concerns of faculty who felt that the board recommendation authored by  Trustees Chris Jackson, Milton Marks III and Steve Ngo was too  prescriptive and overreaching regarding math and English sequence  changes. Some senate members are concerned that the certain changes to  curriculum proposed in the recommendation could negatively affect the  college to the point of jeopardizing its accreditation.

All  faculty interviewed said they are committed to complete equity in  education and that their opposition to the nature of the board’s  resolution does not in any way oppose equity.

“It wasn’t an area  where we were discussing an equity resolution, where of course students  would have had primacy in that discussion,” Alioto said.

Nielsen  found that explanation inadequate.

“That’s ridiculous, that  students don’t even have an opportunity to voice their concerns when it  affects them primarily,” he said.

Francine Podenski, chair of  the broadcast department, said all faculty are dedicated to equity.

“The  average teacher at City College cares completely about this and will do  anything they can think of to narrow the gap,” she said. “That’s why  people work at City College and not Berkeley.”

Davis said the  issues of governance discussed at that meeting do not concern students.

“The  meeting had nothing to do with whether people support equity or not;  we’re all working very hard for equality. We have been for a long time  now,” Davis said, adding that the board’s resolution did not present a  new approach to the achievement gap.

“We’ve been trying to solve  these problems with race-only and ethnicity-only solutions since the 70s  and it doesn’t work,” he said.

Davis added that the equity  report the board relied on in part to write the resolution did not  address the academic performance of the LGBT community, women, veterans,  non-native English speakers and other groups that “cut across racial  and ethnic lines.”

Trustee Chris Jackson said he wants to see  real progress on closing the equity gap.

“I understand their  concerns about it being too narrow and specific. We can go back and  forth, but that doesn’t really help the students,” Jackson said. “We’re  not going to dictate. We’re going to ask the English and math  departments to come up with specific requirements to attack the  achievement gap specifically relating to issues of sequencing and  Pass-No/Pass.”

Accreditation concerns
Some faculty  members, including Davis, feel that City College’s accreditation could  be jeopardized by an over-extension of the board’s authority.

“By  state regulation and by the education code there are certain  responsibilities for the administration, the board and the faculty, and  this administration inadvertently entered into areas that are the  purview of the faculty without consulting with the faculty,” Davis said.  “Their enthusiasm to do the right thing clouded their judgement.”

California  Education Code Sec. 53200 outlines 10 specific responsibilities that  are reserved for the Academic Senate. This list of faculty  responsibilities is called “ten plus one” because there are ten  responsibilities plus an eleventh item reserving the right to take  responsibility for other matters “mutually agreed upon” by shared  governance.

Homer said that while there are some legitimate  concerns being voiced, others are overblown.

“The irrational  fears of loss of accreditation and the board taking over are just hype  and fear-mongering by people with a political agenda,” Homer said. “I  would classify it as a mob mentality that was completely irrational and  not in the best interest of students.”

Huntsman said he was  approached by organizers of the Academic Senate special meeting and  asked how a petition containing at least 100 senate member signatures  could be validated in order to call the meeting, and he told them he  and  other senate officers should verify the signatures. But he was told  the signatures would not be shown to him or be made public.

“I  expressed to them that I thought that called the validity of their  meeting into question,” Huntsman said. “However, I in no way wanted to  stand in the way of that dialogue because I thought it was important.”

Jackson  said the resolution does not violate any union contracts or education  codes and wants to reassure teachers that the board is not trying to  tell them how to teach, but he wants to see real action.

“I’m  tired of arguing about the process, and I think the students in  underserved communities are tired of arguing about the process,” Jackson  said. “The status quo is not good enough for San Francisco. The status  quo is not good enough for City College.”