What a tragedy it would be if City College were to close

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On Thursday nights I play music with some friends while my wife, Norma, takes a singing class at City College. Norma has taken classes there for years. She has studied painting, Russian, Italian and other things. City College has been a great life-enriching place for her. She is smart. She knows the value of a community college in a city as rich and varied as San Francisco. She has taken full advantage of it. Our lives have been better because of it.

So on Thursday, March 13, I picked Norma up about 9:30 p.m. at the Ocean Avenue campus and she told me that her singing class had gotten a late start because the police had broken the bones of some singing students earlier. Her instructor was talking with another instructor before class about the beatings and that delayed the class. Students had occupied a building and police had come in and bones had been broken and students had gone to the hospital. These were voice students. It’s oddly poetic, isn’t it, that in a fight for free speech and access to low-cost education it should be the voice students whose bones are broken by police?

Since July 2013 I had watched this controversy out of the corner of my eye. I now endeavored to learn what I could. I began to look into it. It didn’t take long to form a clear and passionate impression. It boils down to this: The ACCJC sucks. That is, in quickly reading the available information about its requirements and the current legal process and the correspondence sent to schools that have been sanctioned, and its own account of its purpose and its methods, and some legislative testimony and the various lawsuits pending, I came to see that the ACCJC is a troubled institution granted wide powers to act in secret and capable therefor of wreaking great harm. Their approach appears philistine and heavy-handed and inappropriate to an educational institution.

In other words, the ACCJC sucks.

More could be said and no doubt will be. More reporting must be done to expose the true long-term strategy of the people behind this move. The true story will no doubt involve power and money. It will involve ideology and infighting. It will involve public vs. private education. It will involve capitalism vs. democracy. It will be seen that some ACCJC’s rulings seem to favor private for-profit colleges at the expense of publicly run ones. A full, detailed picture will no doubt reveal our current cultural battle at its most venal and ugly.

Lest we forget: No fight about money and power and politics in San Francisco can be without real estate money. Wherever there is land, someone stands to make a fortune. There must be real estate money somewhere in this tale. And there must be clueless zealots and venal operators and ideological nitwits and the settling of old scores and backbiting and striving and all the great human passions that make life in California so interesting and so maddening.

Such is the ongoing carnival of human folly. If it were not dangerous, one would like to just let such folly play out. One would just like to watch with a mixture of horror and glee. I was content to do so until it appeared that the ACCJC’s actions may not be harmless at all. Now it appears urgent that the public become informed and take action. The loss of City College would be a tragedy for the city of San Francisco.

See These Links:

ACCJC: A Troubled Institution. An illuminating piece by independent journalist Rick Sterling (rsterling1@gmail.com) about deficiencies in the accrediting organization itself.

For a chilling look at the mindset of the people doing the accrediting, there is no better example than their own prose. I don’t know about you, but I am quite sensitive to how the quality of a person’s mind shows in the style of  prose he or she uses. ‘Nuf said. Just take a look at the PDF.  If you aren’t howling in laughter you will be howling in pain.

Accreditation Watch. Again: ‘Nuf said. This comprehensive site will give you a quick sense of the magnitude of the ACCJC’s shortcomings, and there is enough depth here for days of reading.

Hashtags on Twitter are #ACCJC and #CCSF.

Thought you’d like to know. Trying to remain civil about it, the breaking of voice students’ bones notwithstanding.

 

 

 

1 comment

  • Cary, You’ve just said in a few paragraphs what the news can’t get out in several days.

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