Free City! Reclaiming City College of San Francisco and Free Education for All

Abstract

Public education is a main target of the assault on the public sector; recently corporate education reformers have expanded their agenda to include the open-access community colleges, which enroll 40 percent of U.S. college students. City College of San Francisco was threatened with closure for resisting this policy agenda. The faculty union, students, and community groups led by people of color waged and won a five-year battle to save it. Although not unscathed, today the college is open, accredited, and free. In the continuing war on working-class community institutions, this struggle offers valuable lessons for coalitions of labor and social movements.

Keywords

education justice faculty unions community college labor-community coallition

Overview

In 2012, the Accrediting Commission for Junior and Community Colleges threatened to disaccredit City College of San Francisco (CCSF), one of the biggest and most-respected community colleges in the United States (Frerking 2007), for continuing to uphold its community-serving mission in the face of attacks on public higher education in general and community colleges in particular (Fabricant and Brier 2016). A five-year-long campaign that began as an uphill fight to save the school culminated in a victory for the most inclusive free college measure in the United States. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 2121, the CCSF faculty union, anchored the organizing, evolving a multipronged approach that included public protests; legal, legislative, and regulatory challenges to the accreditor; electoral and lobbying initiatives; and the first faculty strike in the school’s eighty-year history. It collaborated with a campus coalition and community organizations and mobilized San Franciscans’ love and support for City College.

When the threat to close the college hit, many AFT 2121 members were scared and disengaged. The local met them where they were and launched an internal organizing effort that shifted the collective culture toward a more participatory social justice unionism. This enabled it to push back an array of hostile forces: the accreditor and statewide community college leadership; some faculty and community groups that supported the accreditation agency’s sanctions; local politicians and media. In 2016, San Francisco voters approved a luxury real estate tax to fund free tuition at City College for San Francisco residents. In 2017, CCSF won full reaccreditation.

Community colleges open the door to higher education for working-class students, especially students of color. Their broad mission—lifelong learning and community service as well as university transfer and vocational programs—situates them as community institutions and essential public goods. Since its founding in 1935, CCSF has trained the city’s chefs, firefighters, nurses, and medical technicians; taught English to some twenty thousand immigrants each year; has transferred tens of thousands of students to four-year institutions; and been a home for lifelong learners needing new careers and exploring new passions.

The five-year battle saved City College, toppled the leadership of the accrediting agency, and won reforms to the accrediting process. But the education reform project that animated the attack on CCSF is still rolling out. AFT 2121 continues to defend a vision of education that serves the broad community rather than narrow corporate interests. Its challenges include the bipartisan political support for corporate education reform and the hailstorm of policies that flow from it, and the need to also keep resisting layoffs, class cuts, and precaritization. To meet these challenges, the local can draw on lessons from its recent victory—lessons learned by other education and health workers as well: the power of identifying worker and community interests and organizing together for the common good. “Fighting for the schools our students deserve” has been a mantra for education justice fights from Chicago in 2012, to “#RedForEd” in 2018, to Los Angeles in 2019. In each of these cases, teachers went on strike and organized with the community in defense of public education, which “remains one of the few democratically distributed public goods in the United States” (Blanc 2019). Although this story centers on a community college and not K-12 schools, and a strike played just one small part, we offer it as a case study of a union that organized successfully with a whole cast of actors to defend a beloved community institution. Each of the authors has direct experience of the story, Vicki Legion as a faculty member at the college, Mickey Ellinger and Marcy Rein as community allies. This article will establish the context for the attack on CCSF; outline the attack; look at the fight back and its lessons; and make a note for going forward.

Context

Community colleges are bedrock institutions for working-class and poor students and students of color: open to all, low-cost, easy to access. They enroll almost 40 percent of U.S. college students. California has by far the largest community college system in the United States. Nearly three-fourths of Black and Latinx college students in California attend community colleges (Campaign for College Opportunity 2018, 2019). At its peak in 2008, CCSF enrolled more than one hundred thousand students at its eleven campuses and dozens of neighborhood sites, making it California’s largest community college. More than three-fourths of its students were students of color (California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Data Mart 2016).

The California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 opened the community colleges to “anyone who can benefit from further instruction.” Ever since, these workhorse colleges have been consistently underfunded (Fabricant and Brier 2016). Per-student funding for community colleges was less than one-third the allocation for students in the elite University of California system in the 2018-2019 state budget (Taylor 2018).

In the 1960s and 1970s, social justice activists led by students of color fought to make the promise of open access real, and to make community college education promote equality and justice (Fabricant and Brier 2016).

David Labaree (1997) describes the progressive agenda that powered the post–World War II expansion of postsecondary education: equal access, education for participation in civic life, and the possibility of upward social mobility. CCSF embodied the open access mission, with courses for transfer and career preparation, English as a Second Language (ESL) to serve San Francisco’s large immigrant population, courses for older adults, and a range of labor, women’s, queer, and ethnic studies classes. The school wove a strong net of student support services: childcare centers and parenting classes; programs for older students returning to college; disabled students programs and services; and Second Chance, for formerly incarcerated students. It also boasted an award-winning student newspaper, The Guardsman, and a vibrant arts and music program.

But City’s rich mission ran into the buzz saw of austerity that had been razing U.S. public education for decades. Ever since California voters opted to freeze property taxes when they passed Proposition 13 in 1978, schools had been starved for resources. State and local jurisdictions raised sales taxes and colleges raised tuition. In 1984, California community colleges began charging modest tuition for the first time. But by the 2000s, these fixes were not enough to stave off deep budget cuts.

In the years before the accreditation fight, City College administrators, faculty, and students were vocal and visible in the statewide anti-austerity movement, mobilizing students and faculty to march on the capitol and lobby the legislature for more funding. At the same time, corporate education reformers were unveiling new policies to manage a system shrunken by disinvestment.

Slamming the Open Door—“Education Reform”

Public education is a main target of the neoliberal attack on the public sector and its workers. Sociologist William Robinson roots this attack in the deep structural crisis of globalized capitalism. With much of the world already colonized, global capitalism has turned its attention to penetrating internal sectors, privatizing one public institution after another and imposing austerity budgets on the public sector (Robinson 2014).

So-called reform of K-12 education has been on the corporate agenda since the 1980s, accepting shrunken public resources and accommodating to them by implementing standardized tests, attacking teachers and teachers unions, and closing neighborhood schools, often to make way for publicly funded but privately controlled charter schools. There is an extensive literature on the attack on K-12 public education and the resistance to it (Hursh 2015; Lipman 2011).

More recently, the reformers have targeted public higher education. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) released “A Test of Leadership,” widely referred to as the Spellings Report, which outlined higher education reform objectives, explicitly comparing higher education to “industries”:

History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond to—or even to notice—changes in the world around them, from railroads to steel manufacturers. Without serious self-examination and reform, institutions of higher education risk falling into the same trap, seeing their market share substantially reduced and their services increasingly characterized by obsolescence. (Spellings 2006) (U.S. Department of Education, 2006)

The report focuses on “cost-cutting and productivity improvements” and encourages students to tap financial aid; a year after its publication, 70 percent of that aid was actually student loans (Soederberg 2014).

The Spellings Report recommendations comparing higher education to other industries is echoed in California by the California Business Roundtable, “Keeping California’s Edge: the Growing Demand for Highly Educated Workers” (Fountain 2006). The Roundtable stresses the need for more credentials, associate, bachelor, and graduate degrees. This agenda is often called “student success” and explicitly contrasted with “access.” It prioritizes the goals of transfer/degree/certificate and forecloses other goals and agendas.

Community colleges, which enroll more than 40 percent of U.S. college students, rapidly became a focus of austerity strategies. Columbia University’s Community College Research Center (CCRC) has published dozens of studies on what it calls “community college redesign” and is a major arena of discussion of speeding up and streamlining community college programs (CCRC, various).

The “Guided Pathways to Success” curriculum model developed by CCRC moves students through on a fast and narrow track. It slots students into a short list of highly standardized meta-majors, discouraging them from taking courses that do not lead to the degree or certificate they are required to declare quickly (Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins 2015).

The Lumina Foundation, seeded with funds and personnel from the student loan industry, funds many of the think tanks and advocacy groups that promote these community college reforms. In 2009, Lumina teamed with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to start Complete College America as a state-level advocacy organization. Lumina also sought to amplify its policy efforts by working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), becoming a lead sponsor of ALEC’s 2011 convention (Jilani 2011). In 2010, 58.8 percent of Lumina’s grants (more than $25 million) supported so-called “student success” projects. In 2011, it funded the Student Success Task Force created by the California legislature, as well as the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit that coordinated advocacy for the Student Success Act of 2012, which enacted many of the Task Force recommendations. (The Task Force director later became the state strategy director for the Lumina Foundation.)

The program set out by the Task Force prioritized first-time, full-time students pursuing transfers, degrees, or credentials, and discouraged other goals and agendas. It assigned registration priority to students who have an educational plan and required students to declare a course of study; it centralized more power to impose regulations in the state chancellor’s office; and developed a so-called “scorecard” that ranks colleges on graduation and transfer rates.

Community college faculty, students, and administrators—with CCSF in the lead—objected vociferously to the Task Force agenda, contending that it excluded a majority of community college students. More than 70 percent of all California community college students attend part-time (California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Data Mart 2019). Being able to work while attending school helps make school affordable; forcing full-time attendance increases the chances that they will need loans. And noncredit, nondegree offerings like citizenship classes and ESL have been a core component of community college offerings; ESL is the largest program at CCSF. Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) President Barbara Beno supported the Student Success Act, as did the state chancellor’s office. The fight to reclaim City College turned on the conflict between the opposing views of public community college education.

The Attack

In July 2012, the ACCJC slapped CCSF with a “show cause” sanction, one step short of yanking its accreditation, which would have effectively shut down the school by making its students ineligible for federal financial aid. The commission, a private body authorized by the federal government to “ensure that institutions of higher education meet acceptable levels of quality” (DOE 2019), sanctioned CCSF despite the fact that academically it ranked close to the top of California’s 113 community colleges (Johnson 2014).

The ACCJC sanctioned CCSF for fourteen aspects of the school’s administration and finances, mission statement and democratic governance, and faculty wages and benefits. The sanctions required CCSF to align with the reform agenda, directing it to change its mission statement “to successfully adapt to the changing resource environment” (ACCJC 2012).

Pamila Fisher, who stepped in as the college’s interim chancellor in 2012, hewed closely to the reform agenda. She brandished the disaccreditation threat to force the Trustees to shrink the mission statement. This narrowed mission only included (1) career and technical education certificates; (2) transfer and associate degree completion; and, after a fight, (3) basic skills (centering on lower level ESL—representing roughly half of the college’s students; and high school equivalency [General Educational Development], roughly synonymous with adult education). Cut out of the primary mission were “lifelong learning (non-credit classes), life skills and cultural enrichment,” as well as “active engagement in the civic and social fabric of the community, citizenship preparation.” The statement’s last sentence made its purpose clear: “The mission statement drives institutional planning, decision making and resource allocation” (CCSF Board of Trustees 2012). The Board also canceled support services like childcare and transportation, and obeyed Fisher’s directive to call in the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT). (Established by the state legislature to analyze the finances of K-12 and community college districts, FCMAT resembles entities all over the United States that have justified school district takeovers [Morel 2018].) FCMAT’s “appropriate steps to fiscal recovery” often presume compliance with austerity, making it harder to question the political basis of starving the schools. Its recommendations for City College doubled down on the ACCJC’s charges, explicitly objecting to the faculty’s salaries, benefits, and decision-making power.

Fisher tried to abolish CCSF’s elected, unionized department chairs by collapsing sixty-two departments into seven schools headed by deans serving at the chancellor’s will. She was candid in her intention to downsize or eliminate the Diversity Collaborative departments: black and Latinx studies, women’s and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) studies, Asian American studies, Labor and Community studies, Disabled Students Programs and Services, and Interdisciplinary Studies. “I understand about social justice, but we can’t afford it any more,” she said on many occasions, “City College can no longer be all things to all people.”

In July 2013, the ACCJC announced that it would terminate City’s accreditation in a year. The California Community Colleges Board of Governors (BOG), appointed by the state governor, put the school under emergency management, sidelining its elected trustees in favor of a “Special Trustee with Extraordinary Powers” (STWEP). The Special Trustee (like emergency managers in cities and school districts elsewhere) held the power formerly vested in the elected Board: budgeting, hiring, and firing administrators, and enacting campus regulations.

A series of interim administrators continued the downsizing agenda; a vice chancellor told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We are in a serious transition to right-size the college” (Asimov 2013). The administration laid off 14 percent of the classified staff, 33 percent of the full-time faculty, and 12 percent of the part-timers, tilting the workforce toward precariously employed instructors. They cut one-third of the classes, with non-college-credit taking the biggest hit. They put CCSF property on the market, and closed campuses and neighborhood sites (Research Committee Serving the Struggle to Save City College 2018). A 2014 payment policy automatically dropped students if they owed any fees even before financial aid arrived, pushing out nearly five thousand students in two years (Santos 2015). Meanwhile, spending on consultants and contributions to the school’s reserve funds mushroomed.

In the fear and disorientation created by the ACCJC’s sanctions, few were willing to question the agency. But former California Federation of Teachers (CFT) president Martin Hittelman (n.d.) had been documenting the ACCJC’s actions for years and considered it a rogue agency that respected neither state and federal laws nor its own rules. One of six regional accreditors, the ACCJC issued 89 percent of the sanctions on community colleges nationwide between 2003 and 2008. Hittelman kept updating and publishing his research as “ACCJC Gone Wild” (accreditationwatch.com). His meticulous investigation laid the foundation for formal actions against the commission and for educating the public about this secretive body. As word spread, it fed outrage and indignation. But the motivating power of the campaign to reclaim CCSF came from the unions skillfully harnessing the vision of the community-serving college, education as a public good.

The Fightback

AFT Local 2121 anchored the organizing to save City College, working with a flexible and shifting union/faculty/student/community network. Students organized themselves in forms that changed over the years. The Save CCSF coalition drew faculty members, students, and community activists. The coalition sometimes worked independently and sometimes collaborated with the union; a few faculty members worked with both groups. Community organizations joined the fight as well, notably the San Francisco branch of Jobs with Justice, the national labor/community coalition. The San Francisco Labor Council, the AFT, and especially the CFT brought solidarity and resources. For almost five years, people took the fight to the streets and the courts, to the CCSF Board of Trustees and the state BOG. They worked on the campus, in the city, at the state capitol, and in Washington, D.C.

AFT 2121 had around 1,600 members when the crisis hit. More than three decades of organizing and bargaining for “equal pay for equal work” had brought part-time faculty close to the full-time pay scale and earned them some of the best benefits of any part-time teachers in the country. Much of this was achieved through an interest-based bargaining framework, which presumes that workers and employers have common interests. With a sympathetic employer, it can produce contract gains, as it did at City College—but “the line between that and business unionism, where you hire us to take care of you, becomes very fuzzy,” said labor educator and AFT 2121 Executive Board member Joe Berry (2017). To deal with the sudden chill in the bargaining climate and the complexity of the accreditation crisis, AFT 2121 moved decisively toward what Kim Scipes identifies as a “social justice union” practice about nine months into the crisis. As Scipes (2014) describes a social justice union,

its scope is broad, seeing the necessity of addressing the needs and concerns of all its members, in the union, in the workplace and in the community. In short, these self-defined interests are integrated with those of working people as a whole.

Citing Stephanie Ross (2008), Scipes notes that social justice unions do not necessarily have a higher degree of union democracy than business unions. But, he says, “support for any form of unionism based on inclusion and collective decision-making is much more likely to survive difficult times than those with exclusive decision-making,” and AFT 2121 would put this to the test.

When the crisis first hit, “Our members were all over the place,” said Alisa Messer, who was AFT 2121 president in 2012. “People were very scared, people were very mad, people wanted to fight back and people wanted to be quiet. Lots of people were in different places and some people were in all those places at once” (Messer 2017).

Within a week of the sanctions, Local 2121 pulled together a community meeting. More than 350 people packed the room; dozens queued up at the mic to testify about what CCSF meant to them and their families, how it changed their lives. The meeting ended with a determination to pull together to pass a parcel tax earmarked for City College on the November ballot.

The union had been considering the parcel tax for a couple of years, but it became even more strategic as a response to the financial issues the ACCJC raised, something that would allow the school to fend off austerity measures. “It was a good organizing tool because it was a positive thing and it pulled the whole city into it,” said Kathe Burick (2017), a core rank-and-file organizer in Local 2121. She spent most of that first meeting in the hallway, taking pictures of people holding newsprint sheets with their stories and the hashtag “#IamCityCollege,” à la Occupy’s “#Iamthe99%.” Her task was easy: one in seven San Franciscans had taken classes at City or had ties to someone who did.

From that July 2012 meeting on, AFT 2121 rallied San Franciscans’ love for the college to counter the narrative of dysfunction and failure projected by the accreditors and taken up by the mainstream media, the San Francisco Chronicle in particular. The emblem of the fightback became a red heart on a yellow background overprinted with “We Are All City College”; versions appeared in several languages.

The parcel tax won handily and was expected to bring in some $15 million each year to the college—in addition to the millions raised by the statewide “Millionaires Tax” initiative championed by CFT. The interim chancellor responded by saying the vote changed nothing and imposing a unilateral pay cut, which touched off a new wave of organizing on several fronts.

Going through Channels, Digging New Ones: Using the Regulatory Process

Early on AFT 2121, President Messer realized the importance of understanding how accreditation worked. “It became really complicated really quickly,” she said. The bodies who had the actual power over the ACCJC were the U.S. DOE, which recognizes accrediting agencies, and the California Community Colleges BOG, which makes policy for the statewide system and could replace the accreditor. Both bodies are appointed not directly accountable to the people affected by their decisions.

A lot of people were unhappy because a lot of the framework we used to challenge them [the ACCJC] was bureaucratic rules and stuff like that, but it was clear that legally those were the places we were going to have some success. (Messer 2017)

The union learned to use these rules, though that part of the work was largely invisible to members. CFT and AFT 2121 filed a complaint with the DOE against the ACCJC. The 280-page filing crafted by the CFT’s lawyer, Robert Bezemek, spelled out the key issues that would inform the public critique of the agency over the next four years: conflicts of interest and violation of due process including its own rules and procedures. Notably, the complaint was the first place it was noted that the commission redefined recommendations it made in an earlier evaluation as “deficiencies,” and used those as the rationale to sanction the school.

A little over a year into the struggle, the DOE affirmed the union’s charges that the ACCJC appeared to have a conflict of interest; Commission President Beno had put her husband on the CCSF evaluation team. It also agreed that the commission violated its own regulations and procedures, depriving City College of a fair process. They gave the ACCJC a year to come into compliance. The critical ruling gave heart and a first bit of traction to defenders of the school, even while leaving its power over CCSF undiminished.

Shifting the Union Culture

When the crisis hit, Local 2121 had a good activist base but not a wide reach. “They had a core of about 50-75 people whose commitment to the union and the progressive values of the union was a mile deep, and they would show up for anything,” said Alyssa Picard (2018), an AFT organizer loaned to the local in 2013. Along with 2121 leadership, organizers from CFT, and local members working on release time, Picard helped change the culture of the local. They began with basic outreach, using an informational leaflet on the ACCJC to address early fears and concerns and trying to talk to as many members as possible. Contract negotiations also afforded a natural opportunity for engagement. Talks between AFT 2121 and the City College administration had bumped and stalled since they started in March 2012. By August 2013, the local was bargaining with the representative of the state takeover, the STWEP. The STWEP replaced the elected trustees and, like the accreditor and the FCMAT team, aimed to cut worker pay and benefits to improve the school’s finances. To strengthen its position, AFT 2121 expanded the negotiating team and invited members to observe bargaining. A militant faction argued for a strike, but a careful assessment showed that was not viable. The local leadership called members to a mass meeting, where they made the hard call to take a contract that fell short in some significant ways in order to buy time to fight the accreditation sanctions and build strength. Organizers mobilized the largest turnout for a contract vote in over a decade, seeing that as the first action in the campaign for the next contract.

Revising their structure also helped the union contact members more effectively and develop a new layer of leadership. Local 2121’s “precinct reps” functioned like shop stewards. The size and spread of the college made their job difficult. Changes voted by the local’s Delegate Assembly in 2014 added reps and redrew some precincts to make them more natural groupings.

As the end of the contract ratified in 2013 drew closer, the local prepared for a possible strike. “We had teams in place, and maps of each location, and leaders, and people signed up who had committed to being out on strike, and we had count after count and assessment after assessment,” said Local 2121 Secretary Jessica Buchsbaum. “We had even instituted a strike fund that people were contributing to out of their paychecks” (Buchsbaum 2018).

Coordinating with the Statewide Union

The CFT backstopped Local 2121 from day 1 with legal and communications support. After the accreditor announced it would terminate CCSF’s accreditation, the local organized a “road show,” sending City College students, faculty, and even a couple of trustees to talk to locals around the state. The contact helped build toward a statewide CFT demonstration at the June 2014 ACCJC meeting in Sacramento. CFT staff also helped organize support among state legislators.

Organizing Elected Officials

At first the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was wary of treading on the turf of the Board of Trustees (or once the Trustees had been pushed aside, the STWEP). And until the consequences of the takeover for students of color became clearer as the downsizing continued, Coleman Advocates—an important Black-led community group which had led the fight for equity in the San Francisco high schools—stood aloof from the campaign to save the college, increasing some supervisors’ reluctance to get involved. That plus the steady stream of hostile press paralyzed many supporters.

AFT 2121 leaders, Save CCSF members, and allies from the San Francisco Labor Council and community groups lobbied the supervisors. Early on, Supervisor Eric Mar’s office asked for a report from the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office which showed the cost to the city and the students if CCSF were to close. The report helped quantify the college’s value—and showed that closure would drive students to fraud-ridden for profit schools that cost more than eight times per semester unit than City (Budget and Legislative Analyst, City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors 2013). Over time, almost the entire board would swing behind the campaign to save the school.

The top ranks of the Democratic Party had been mute as City College was being downsized and re-engineered. U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) finally broke her silence at a January 2014 press conference in support of CCSF. Ultimately, she played a positive role, writing to the U.S. DOE on behalf of the college.

But perhaps the pivotal involvement of an elected official was that of Dennis Herrera, San Francisco’s elected City Attorney. Herrera believed deeply in the advocacy role of his office, and defenders of City College pressed him to get involved. After the ACCJC said it would terminate accreditation, his office sued the agency, charging it with bias and flouting due process. The case exposed the corporate roots of the “student success” agenda and the ACCJC’s aggressive advocacy for it, in direct conflict with City College’s commitment to open access. The city asked for and won an injunction in January 2014 to keep the school open until the suit was heard, giving CCSF breathing room.

AFT 2121, Save CCSF, and community allies filled the courtroom and people lined the halls waiting to get into the October 2014 trial. In the most dramatic testimony, ACCJC President Beno had to admit that she changed the recommendations of the evaluation team to assert grounds for closing the college (Asimov 2014). The trial educated the public and bolstered the legitimacy of the fightback. The judge’s final ruling in February upheld essential parts of the city’s case but stopped short of overruling the ACCJC.

With a Lot of Help from Our Friends

AFT 2121 worked with, or alongside, a range of allies who brought distinct contributions. Everyone played their position, which strengthened the struggle overall. Students formed a visible, militant, and essential wing of the fightback. They organized or joined teach-ins, rallies, campus demonstrations, building occupations, and vociferous lobbying at the Board of Trustees. Their actions were colorful and bold, and attracted attention from the media and the public—like the first overnight sit-in in City College history, which drew four TV trucks that reported throughout the night. With two years of persistent organizing, students forced the school to drop its “pay up front” policy in 2016. The core student organizers came from organizations of people of color on campus and left groupings. They were quick to link the attack on CCSF with gentrification and police violence in their neighborhoods. They connected issues and called for actions in ways that AFT 2121, constrained by its historic alliances with the mainstream Democratic Party and its need to work with a broad membership base, could not. On the other hand, student organizations are by nature fluid: community college students come and go. Early on, one group of students of color that was affiliated with Coleman Advocates opposed student resistance. They sought to use the sanctions as leverage to win changes they advocated in the name of more equitable treatment for students of color, especially shorter remedial sequences and employment of multiple measures used to assign entering students to classes. Their impact waned as dialogues proceeded and Save CCSF diffused its analysis.

The Save CCSF coalition included students, faculty (many of them veterans of Left organizing), and members of the community. Save CCSF did not have the resources of AFT 2121, but neither was it hampered by its legal, organizing, and political constraints. Its members and activities ebbed and flowed, but it could take more confrontational stances. Through newsletters, leaflets, speeches, and actions, it pointed beyond the ACCJC as a “rogue accreditor,” to the bigger picture of the corporate agenda driving education reform and its impact on education justice. The Research Committee of Save CCSF developed many of the documents uncovering the relation of the accreditation crisis to the national agenda of community college reform. The committee was inspired by the Chicago Teachers Union’s historic nine-day strike in September 2012, linking school closures to gentrification and keeping the impact on Chicago’s Black and Latinx communities front and center. In coalition with Teachers 4 Social Justice and other progressive groups, they sponsored a 2013 talk by activist scholar and CTU ally Pauline Lipman, who analyzed the relation of education policy to gentrification. They continued to highlight that connection throughout the crisis, calling attention to the “asset stripping” of City College property under the takeover.

At first, only a minority of the campus community embraced Save CCSF’s linkage of the crisis to education reform and its willingness to criticize the ACCJC. As events unfolded, their perspective moved to the mainstream. Trustee Rafael Mandelman acknowledged this increased support for this broader perspective at the BOG hearing on the state takeover: CCSF’s elected board did everything suggested by the state chancellor’s team, he said,

even when under attack by those who claimed the team was following a secret agenda to destroy or radically downsize the college. . . . Now, after the ACCJC’s irresponsible and punitive announcement . . . the hotheads looked prescient. (BOG 2013)

Save CCSF organized three delegations of students, faculty, and AFT 2121 and CFT representatives to the National Council on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) in Washington, D.C., calling for the deauthorization of the ACCJC as an accreditor. (The Council formally advises the DOE on accreditation.) Save CCSF also offered a space where radical faculty and students could have deep and consistent working relationships—a rarity in campus organizing. AFT 2121, Save CCSF, and the student organizers built dozens of lively and visible demonstrations that kept activists’ spirits up and kept issues in front of the public. The movement brought four thousand people into the streets of San Francisco after the ACCJC issued its termination decision and the state took over the college. People protested in front of the ACCJC’s meeting places, at City Hall, at the City College Board of Trustees, and the state BOG, often using satirical songs and skits to bring their points home. They impersonated widely disliked ACCJC President Barbara Beno on the steps of the State Capitol, and repurposed lyrics to familiar songs. (“This school is my school, this school is your school/From music theory to U.S. history/Reentry students and lifelong learners/This school belongs to you and me.”) The raucous Brass Liberation Orchestra with its pink-haired drummers encouraged rallies and marches and broke into Board of Trustees meetings.

Community Coalition in Action: Preventing a Campus Closure

Cooperation between Local 2121 and community organizations deepened after CCSF administrators abruptly shut the Civic Center Campus in January 2015. Located in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s poorest and most diverse neighborhoods, the campus housed a vibrant segment of the college’s highly regarded ESL program. Tens of thousands of immigrants to San Francisco learned English there for generations. The sudden closure dispersed Civic Center classes to other sites around the city, and enrollment dropped like a rock, from around two thousand to barely three hundred students.

AFT 2121 leaders backed the Civic Center teachers in meetings with the college administration and reached out to the Tenderloin’s strong network of community organizations. Within a few weeks, the Central City Coalition for Public Education (3CPE) took shape, with Community Housing Partnership, the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, Young Workers United, and the Chinatown Community Development Center joining La Voz Latina and Glide Memorial Church. 3CPE collected more than two thousand signatures on a petition demanding (in six languages) that their campus be reopened. After a protest that drew close to six hundred people to City Hall, they delivered the petition to San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who represented the district where the campus was located. Six days later, Kim introduced a resolution urging the City College administration to immediately find a new campus in the central city area. In May, the administration announced that they had secured an interim site to serve the Tenderloin community. The site was not perfect, but the neighborhood organizations and the union had won a round—and the relationships the union built in the community and with Sup. Kim fed directly into what would become the Free City campaign.

Free City Flips the Script

By 2016, the BOG had voted to seek a new accreditor, but the ACCJC still had the power to shut down City College by terminating its accreditation. Enrollment had plummeted, and the administration had announced plans to cut course offerings by 26 percent by 2020. AFT 2121 did two things: it launched a ballot initiative to make City College tuition free, and it called the first faculty strike in the school’s eighty-year history.

As the parcel tax did in 2012, “Free City” offered a practical way to address a pressing problem—in this case, the deepening inequality in San Francisco. And like the “We Are All City College” meme, Free City called out the importance of CCSF (in particular) and education (in general) as a public good.

“We’re looking at competing visions,” said J. J. Vivek Naryan, a member of the CCSF students’ Solidarity Committee.

One vision is what we call CCSF Inc., a downsized corporate model in which marginalized students are pushed out . . . Our vision is of community values being restored, enrollment being restored, community college being free again like it was before 1984, a college that supports the community and life-long learning. (Naryan 2016)

Six supervisors joined Jane Kim in introducing the Free City initiative, which would pay tuition for all San Franciscans (except some undocumented immigrants) with a “mansion tax,” a 0.25 percent tax on real estate transactions worth more than $5 million. Low-income students who already qualified for tuition assistance would get stipends for books and school costs, including transportation.

Just days later, CCSF faculty walked out to “strike for the college San Francisco deserves.” Nearly three years of systematic organizing built to the April 27 action; the administration’s announcement of deep class cuts was the last straw for many members. AFT 2121’s unfair labor practice charge alleged that the college administration failed to bargain in good faith because it was bound by “the ACCJC’s hidden or ‘underground’ criteria.” Students as well as labor and community allies joined faculty on picket lines at ten sites around the city. Early morning rain gave way to blue sky, and one thousand people converged on Civic Center for a noontime rally. The one-day strike changed the chemistry within the union. “It showed us that our students and community supported us,” said Malaika Finkelstein, a teacher in the Disabled Students Programs and Services and one of the members newly activated by the local’s internal organizing. “It changed the feeling about what we are doing, about what a union is . . . . It was a powerful experience” (Finkelstein 2019). Three more months of bargaining won a new contract that restored lost wages, got raises for full-time and part-time faculty, and secured a provision making class cuts harder to implement.

Accredited!

The ACCJC granted City College full reaccreditation in January 2017. Five years of organizing by students, faculty, unions, and community groups scored a victory not just for City, but also for other community colleges and the people who rely on them. Organizing forced changes in the commission’s procedures and top leadership that made the agency more transparent and accountable, and blocked its right to use “standards” to trump faculty’s bargaining rights. Notably, Compton College in south central Los Angeles was reopened after over a decade of disaccreditation.

A core of committed activists had a deeper and broader understanding of the issues involved. AFT 2121 grew stronger internally and built broader and tighter relationships in the community, as evidenced by its active participation in the Budget Justice Coalition, which brought together around forty community organizations in San Francisco’s 2018-2019 budget cycle.

Yet winning the battle to keep City College open, essential as it was, was only one campaign in what people increasingly realized was going to be a long war. “What we won was the chance to rebuild,” said Wynd Kauymyn, a leading Save CCSF activist who went on to win the vice-presidency of AFT 2121 (Kaufmyn 2018).

Reclaiming Community College

At the same time as the rebuilding began, the reform agenda was also picking up speed. AFT 2121 confronted new proposals for deep cuts in course offerings and attempts to undermine Free City. Former Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, implemented a handful of reform measures in his budgets without legislative or public discussion and debate. Brown tied a quarter of community college funding to “performance,” disregarding educators’ longstanding opposition to such schemes. (Outcry against a performance funding measure in the state legislature had led to the formation of the Student Success Task Force in 2011.) Brown’s funding formula proposed to pay colleges according to their numbers of AA degrees, certificates, transfers, Career and Technical Education credits, and transfer-level math and English courses. He allocated $150 million to pilot Guided Pathways programs, and $40 million to underwrite a second year of free tuition for full-time community college students. Moves like that—making tuition free but only for first-time, full-time students—co-opt “Free College” programs into the reform agenda.

Advocates for reform deploy the language of civil rights and equity, while leaving structural racism and inequality undisturbed. Challenging them effectively calls on us to define and organize around a vision of education justice at a community college level, built on a broad understanding of student success and what supports it. The democratic open access vision embodied in Free City! can be a model. In doing so we can link to #RedForEd movements around the country, where K-12 teachers, parents and students are pushing back—and winning—against the reform project that has impoverished schools, teachers, staff, students, and communities alike. And we can look at ways to upscale some of the lessons learned by AFT 2121 and its allies. They met people where they were, developed a multipronged fight, and recognized and respected the distinct contributions of the different groups involved. And they brought people together around a message of inclusion, a vision of education for life and not just for work, for the whole person, for everyone. “We are all City College.”

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

Marcy Rein, Mickey Ellinger, and Vicki Legion are co-authors of Free City: the Fight to Save San Francisco’s City College and Education for All, forthcoming from PM Press, Fall 2020.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Marcy Rein is a long-time writer on labor and social movements, retired member of OPEIU Local 29, and former communications specialist for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Organizing Department. With Clifton Ross, she co-edited Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).

Mickey Ellinger, as a print journalist, writes regularly for News from Native California and other California-based publications. She worked with Allensworth elder Alice Royal to write Allensworth the Freedom Colony: A California African American Township (Heyday Books, 2007). She has served as treasurer of the Bay Area chapter of the National Writers Union and is a member of the board of the Making Contact social justice radio project.

Vicki Legion was on faculty at City College of San Francisco from 1994 to 2019. She belongs to AFT 2121 and was a core activist of the Save City College Coalition and convener of its Research Committee. In her faculty role, she was the co-executive director of the nationally recognized Metro College Success Program, a program for graduation and transfer of students who are low-income, first-generation, or historically underrepresented in higher education.

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