The accreditation report lists “shared governance” as a paramount problem of San Jose City College; the failure to cooperate between administration and the Academic Senate is a known issue. This month’s accreditation visit will address if this issue has improved.

Both the administration and the Senate are made up of incredibly intelligent and dedicated individuals, making it difficult to quantify how best to improve shared governance.

There are some issues that the administration and the Senate just don’t agree on.

However, considering the gravity of the accreditation visit, it is time they find common ground.  One thing everyone can agree on is that it would be a terrible shame if the accreditation visit proves that the school has not improved in the area of shared governance, or if that failure is a factor in the school losing its accreditation. That would make hard work, degrees and, by extension, the school, virtually worthless, all because the faculty couldn’t exercise a reasonable balance of power.

It is obvious that the admin works diligently in accordance with its best judgment, taking into account their collective years of experience with each decision, while also keeping in mind the mission of the college. The admin as a whole makes up a sizable contingency, fractioning out into lower and upper admin, with lower admin experts of their respective departments reporting upward for final decisions.

The Senate is an advisory body, typically made up of tenured faculty, that independently drafts proposals for executive consideration and approval. It is a multilateral entity compartmentalized into a number of smaller committees, with each committee highly focused on a limited scope of the school. In these committees, areas of improvement are identified, and a plan is proposed as how to best move forward.  The individual committees report back to the senate that then discusses the matter further, with the intent to pass on the best recommendations to the admin.

The Senate has no actual authority or executive vote; it is merely an advisory chamber. Put simply, the Senate does not actually govern anything.  It recommends proposals to the administration on how to govern.

If you could juxtapose this model of government on the national level, it would be similar to congress initiating bills, passing them through its chambers, then forwarding them to the president, at which point the president would have full, unadulterated dominion to do whatever he wanted.

If the only governing body is the executive branch, that isn’t shared governance at all; that’s a dictatorship with a face-lift. If the Senate has no tangible influence on executive decisions outside of its advisory, then it is nothing more than a respected consulting firm.

Not only does the Senate have no participatory vote, but large-scale decisions are made in stark contrast to the counsel of the Senate.

Campus Works, a Florida-based technology consultant company, was allotted more than a million dollar contract without the consent of the Senate. The interim dean of counseling was outsourced without the approval of the Senate. Classes are continually cut without the approval of the Senate. The list goes on.

There are undoubtedly reasonable explanations to all of these decisions, but those reasons do not negate, detract from or compensate for the nonexistence of shared governance.

The government structure at SJCC is a classic top-down power model.

The list of decisions that has been made without the consent or consideration of the Senate is not only numerous but incredibly costly. Not just costly in terms of dollars, but costly in the sense that it could cost the school its accreditation.

If the problem threatening the school’s accreditation is shared governance, then the solution is simple: The role of governing needs to be shared.