Truth and Reconciliation: A Call to Keep New College Alive

We write to express our shock and disbelief at the decision of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges to terminate the accreditation of New College of California. In its thirty-seven years of existence and its thirty years as an accredited institution, New College has made a unique and important contribution to American higher education, providing high-quality educational programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional level for thousands of graduates, many from underserved and under-respected communities who otherwise would never have had the opportunity to get a college degree, or to become teachers, psychologists, or lawyers. In addition, New College has played a central role in shaping and sustaining the progressive culture of San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, through the use of its theater and cultural center on Valencia Street for nightly political and cultural events and intellectual discussions, through its provision of free or low-cost legal services and psychotherapy for poor and working-class communities who would otherwise not have access to them, and through the participation of its students in community internships and apprenticeships that have linked student learning with positive social action and social change. The abrupt termination of this school’s accreditation after more than three decades of nationally recognized educational excellence and public service is morally wrong.

The allegations made by the WASC Accrediting Commission to justify their actions should seem puzzling and even implausible to any reasonable observer familiar with New College’s recent history. In the letter announcing its drastic and unprecedented action suddenly terminating the College’s accreditation, the Commission paints an unmitigated, negative picture of a long history of difficulties with the accreditation body, finding the College so irremediably in violation of every one of its four standards that no further time can be granted to correct its alleged deficiencies. But how is this possible when the College was judged by this same Commission to be in satisfactory compliance with all of these same standards as recently as 2006, when its accreditation was affirmed without conditions following a nine-person comprehensive visit to the College that lasted almost a week? And if the College’s administrative and financial management have been as inadequate as the commission’s letter alleges, how is it that the College achieved surpluses in each of the previous five fiscal years, and in 2006 received a clean institutional audit by an independent, outside auditing firm? Does it seem plausible that in a few short months, a College that has been accredited for thirty years and has been routinely recognized in a succession of WASC accreditation reports for its academic excellence and important social contributions has suddenly plummeted so far and so irrevocably beneath all of the accreditation standards as to merit the drastic action of termination of its accreditation?

The true story behind the WASC Commission’s action is far more subjective, irrational, and arbitrary than the supposed objective narrative presented in the WASC action letter. What actually took place began with a factional struggle all too common on the Left that persisted unresolved for several years inside New College. To state the core of this struggle in a few words, some of us passionately believed in a communal conception of the College based on informal bonds of affection and lifelong friendship, while others saw this communal model as exclusionary and a cover for a desire for power, seeking instead a more traditional organizational model of formal, shared governance based institutional roles and interest groups. Our inability to resolve these differences internally led a subgroup of one of these factions to secretly go to WASC with allegations of accreditation violations. This is the oft-repeated story of the Left eating the Left, and the tragic consequences for our students, staff, and faculty are an object lesson in the need for progressives to find new ways of creating internal cultures in which empathy, compassion and resolution of differences and misunderstandings are stronger than the tendency toward fear, mistrust, and the distortions they generate.

What happened next is what we find so unjustified and unfair considering the power that WASC holds to determine the fate of a college and the real lives of those who create it. Although we have never been allowed to see the testimony of those who complained to WASC or even to know their identity, it is clear from subsequent communications between WASC and the College that some of the charges against us were untrue, and we could demonstrate this if we were ever given the chance to do so. Some reflected valid concerns pertaining to inadequacies in the college’s record-keeping and in structures of oversight of academic quality (though no criticisms were made of academic quality as such). In addition, in significant part as a result of the internal conflicts outlined above, some faculty felt improperly excluded from decision-making because the work-group structures that had been approved at the time of the previous WASC visit in 2006 were not functioning as planned.

Whatever the merit of these allegations, and even supposing them to be serious in nature, they could have been effectively addressed by a firm telephone call from the WASC staff to the College leadership with whom WASC had been on good personal terms for many, many years. During the 1980s and 1990s, New College leaders were among the most active of the small colleges in the Western Region in advancing the goals and purposes of accreditation, including serving on the region-wide task force to develop the basic elements that would shape the new standards, and working side-by-side WASC leadership to win support for the new emphasis on accreditation as a pathway to institutional improvement rather than merely being concerned with the enforcement of minimum standards. In light of this personal and collegial work history, it would have made perfect sense for the WASC staff to contact the New College leadership, express serious concerns about what had been told to them, and arrange a meeting in which New College could have a chance to provide context and explain its side of things, followed by an indication by WASC of what corrective action was required.

New College certainly would have immediately taken whatever actions were needed to maintain the accreditation for which it had worked so hard with resources much more limited than most other educational institutions. Had WASC proceeded in this respectful, collegial manner consistent with its long and essentially positive relationship with the College, New College would be thriving today; its staff and faculty (some of whom have worked at the college for twenty or thirty years) would continue to have secure meaningful work and health care; and New College’s unique and socially committed students would be working toward their degrees and preparing to use them to create a more humane and just world.

However, for reasons that remain obscure and call for further investigation, WASC chose to utilize an extraordinary provision in the WASC regulations allowing it to take summary action against an institution for serious unethical conduct requiring immediate intervention (a provision that would appear to be directed at addressing evidence of fraud, embezzlement or some other serious offense). Under the authority of this state of emergency, the WASC staff sent in a kind of investigative swat team on only one week’s notice to New College, while refusing to inform the New College leadership of the charges against it or allowing the College any opportunity to prepare explanation or defense for whatever allegations had been made. This three-person team appeared on campus, conducted a two-hour review of specified student files, and then spent five hours at an off-campus location interrogating administrators and faculty who had not been told why they were to be present or what they were to testify to. The team then produced a condemnatory report containing some legitimate criticisms of College administrative and academic practices but many sweeping judgments and conclusions that were either exaggerated or false. To give but one example, the report accuses the then president of showing favoritism toward a student and even authorizing a change in the student’s transcript to give him higher grades in exchange for the student’s promise to donate one million dollars to the College. This attempt at grade change never took place, but the then president was never given an opportunity to prove his innocence of these charges, and the report’s conclusions were later widely published in the media as if they were objective findings based upon fact and arrived at by an outside regulatory body.

Within a few weeks, the results of this shocking and distorted investigation were brought before the WASC Commission for disciplinary action. Ignoring the College’s pleas of innocence and requests for a mediation process that could lead to greater mutual understanding and collaboration between WASC and the College, the Commission proceeded to suddenly find—a little more than a year after having praised the College for being in compliance with all its accreditation standards—that the College was in violation of every one of these standards and it placed the College on probation. In addition, the action letter announcing these findings gave the College only a few months to prepare for a nine-person comprehensive visit to determine whether the College’s accreditation should be terminated, and the letter implied that the president and perhaps some members of the Board of Trustees would have to resign.

In a period of little more than a month, a College that had over more than thirty years built an excellent reputation for linking education and social justice was stigmatized for supposedly grave mismanagement and wrongdoing. The letter did cite legitimate criticisms of a new program directed at San Francisco’s underserved African-American community that offered too much course credit in too short a time, of errors in record-keeping in the registrar’s office, and of flaws in the College’s governance structure. But these shortcomings, even assuming them to be serious mistakes, certainly could have been corrected in a short period of time by a stern private meeting between WASC staff and New College’s Board of Trustees. Had that kind of intervention taken place, an improved New College would be thriving today.

Instead, WASC took a highly public, punitive action that had disastrous consequences. On July 5, the Commission issued an exaggerated, highly negative action letter, putting the College on probation. This letter was immediately leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, which proceeded to run a front-page lead article with the headline “Progressive New College Found to Be in Academic, Financial Mess.” As a result of this article appearing shortly before the start of the academic year, New College enrollment plummeted 41%, actually creating a major financial crisis that previously did not exist. Because of the WASC action, the Department of Education immediately restricted the college’s access to its federal financial aid funds, requiring a complex procedure of file-preparation and approval prior to releasing student aid monies. Since WASC had forced the then president to resign and had stigmatized all those with significant past involvement in the administration, a new administration with little or no experience in running a college was expected to cope with the new financial and political crisis, and following some understandable difficulties mastering the financial aid process, the Department of Education blocked the release of all federal monies, meaning that students could not pay living expenses or tuition and the staff and faculty of the college could not get paid. This led the newly hired professionals who had been retained to respond to the WASC criticisms to quit, and the College had to postpone completing other reforms demanded by WASC. With no one having been paid since November and the College in chaos caused by this six-month sequence of events, the WASC Commission abruptly terminated New College’s accreditation.

The effect of the combined actions of WASC and the Department of Education has been to force some law students to sleep in shelters, to cause undergraduate students who had come here across the country to frantically look for other colleges, to cause our entire graduate psychology program to stop functioning in mid-year disrupting students’ pursuit of a new and positive career, and to cause faculty and staff, some of whom have devoted their entire lives to New College, to face eviction and loss of health care, with some having serious chronic illnesses for which they must have treatment or face death. The effect has also been to dissolve into thin air a forty-year progressive college that has made a tremendous, positive contribution to the creation of a better world. For what?

Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo famously stated, “The Law will not assume an intention to punish venial faults with oppressive retribution.” Yet that is exactly what has occurred in the case of New College, and it is a completely unnecessary tragedy that this is so. Since we cannot assume that the WASC Commission or the Department of Education are run by cruel people indifferent to the fate of educators and their students, we must assume that this is a situation that has simply gotten out of everyone’s control, that compassion, problem-solving, and common sense have taken a back seat to blame, recrimination and self-righteousness, and that a whole community of human beings and their families—as well as a worthy institution with a fine mission and tradition of service—are being sacrificed.

We call upon the WASC Commission to reconsider all of the circumstances leading up to its decision to terminate New College’s accreditation and to work compassionately and creatively with us to help us develop a plan to recover from the present crisis, instead of continuing on a course that is likely to destroy us. We also call upon the U.S. Department of Education to release the federal financial aid owed to our students, less any amount needed to reconcile our accounts, and to relieve the suffering of our students and staff in a way consistent with the Department’s own high ideals of creating educational opportunity for students in need of financial assistance. What has taken place here are no more than good faith mistakes made by well-intentioned people, followed by a cascade of misunderstandings and distorted dynamics that have produced a situation no one intended or wanted. Together, WASC, the Department of Education, and the New College community still have the power to reconcile, to cooperatively re-imagine a positive future for New College, and to do so in a way that satisfies what each body needs to go forward in a hopeful, life-affirming manner. For the sake of ourselves and the communities we serve, please join with us to help us do so.

Signed: