San Francisco City College, where Heisman Trophy winner (and former Hunter’s Point resident) O. J. Simpson played football from 1965-67, and with 85,000 students the largest public school in California, is in big trouble. Last week it lost its accreditation of its degree programs, to go into effect at the end of July, 2014. It will lose all public funding at that time unless the situation can be reversed. This week state bureaucrats also stripped the elected Board of Trustees of all governing powers at the College, appointing a “special trustee” to run the place and try to fix it, to gain back accreditation for future students.
We know that much. What we don’t know much about are the facts that lead to San Francisco City College losing its accreditation! And that is because the media isn’t digging into the story to try to find out for California taxpayers exactly what the heck happened at SF City College!
The San Francisco Chronicle has a webpage that collects all their stories on the scandal, which they claim to have been covering for the last two years. But other than revealing information about the on-going accreditation problem, and quoting labor representatives about their negotiations and contract disputes with the campus, and telling us there is a problem at SF City College, in very general terms, there are surprisingly very few actual facts that have been publicly revealed that support the extreme sanction of de-certification. Somebody is pretty clearly hiding meaningful facts of wrongdoing at the school from the public view. And the main stream news media seems to be going along with the blackout on specific facts, as a careful review of the articles reveals they are printing only very sketchy stories about problematic facts, and never associating any facts offered with a named individual. I think the lack of information is being engineered by state officials and the nonprofit accrediting commission, plus a sympathetic liberal San Francisco media, who are shielding from public view the teachers’ union members that pilfered taxpayer money and engaged in the incompetent teaching and administration. Their actions have made a degree from the publicly supported College now pretty much worthless, and they ought to be outed. Taxpayers have a right to know and understand all the facts involving their public institutions, whether they be the IRS or San Francisco City College.
Here is what we know beyond the above that has been reported: The Chronicle reported on 7/9/13, and the accrediting commission had already posted on its website, that the College lost its accreditation because of “ineffective leadership,” but the Chronicle has not effectively challenged the accrediting commission to disclose facts that tell us exactly what constitutes “ineffective leadership” and the commission is mum about the specifics in its documents that have been made public. More information needs to be disclosed to taxpayers here.
We know from a 7/3/13 story in the Chronicle that the College is “beset by mismanagement” but no facts are offered in the article to tell us exactly what conduct supports the mismanagement, and what mismanagement means. We also learn in this article that the accrediting commission identified 14 areas for improvement about a year ago and determined recently that the College only responded with action on two of the recommendations, but we are not offered any facts supporting just how the College failed in the 12 areas of improvement the accrediting commission said needed corrective action. No names, no details and no narrative about the facts have been made public by officials, nor has the SF media dug up and reported any such hard facts. Only summary information has been made public, and the media isn’t trying very hard to pierce the veil. And readers should keep in mind this is information that has been used to usurp the elected representatives from their authority on the Board of Trustees.
We learn just snipets of what the real scandal at City College is from prior stories in the Chronicle. One story obliquely reports that there were “problems in the payroll system” because “too many people” had access to the system, and that employees were likely paid for work they didn’t do over a long period of time. (Taypayer money mind you!) But no names or witnesses are quoted on exactly who was overpaid and by how much. And even then a sympathetic Chronicle reporter offsets the payroll fraud allegation by quoting a union representative who said “sometimes we were underpaid too!” What we do not know are the specifics of the payroll scandal, who the responsible parties were, whether teachers came forward to return overpayments, how much taxpayers were ripped-off, if at all, and what plans the College has to get taxpayers’ money back.
We know from a 6/7/13 story in the Chronicle that the accrediting commission that met to strip City College of its accreditation, did so in private and would not allow either the public or the media to sit in on the meeting where the commission considered the facts.
We know the Chronicle has published extensively about the closed nature of the accrediting commission and its work, from a 3/5/13 story. But we do not see corresponding efforts and stories from the Chronicle focused on who exactly did the alleged wrongdoing on the City College campus in the first place, and what they got away with, and for how long.
The Los Angeles Times did a terrific job of covering the financial scandal in the City of Bell, where a small group of greedy civil servants stole millions from taxpayers over many years, and a city manager paid off councilmembers and paid himself a gross salary of over $800,000 a year. The Bell employees were forced to stand trial for their misdeeds. But it took time for the Times to jump on the story. The Times’ work nevertheless, helped get regulators to jump on the story and start the process in law to fix things. The San Francisco Chronicle ought to take a page out of the LA Times’ notebook. There has probably been civil or criminal wrongdoing at City College involving taxpayer funds. This is a very reasonable conclusion, and it deserves more focus by the Chronicle and San Francisco law enforcement officials, and San Francisco’s otherwise silent elected officials, instead of shadowy protection of unionized wrongdoers by the liberal establishment.
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