Yesterday, I wrote about a vote of no confidence by the faculty of Eastern Gateway Community College. It’s not uncommon for a faculty union to issue such a vote when there are problems between themselves and the administration. It is less common for the faculty to hold a vote of no confidence in the institution’s trustees.
Clearly, the Eastern Gateway Community College Education Association (EGCCEA) is sending a message to the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits EGCC. EGCC has been on probation since 2021 for a range of deficiencies, including the number of students per teacher, the quality of the online educational experience, and questions regarding the school’s financial arrangement with its online program manager.
The EGCCEA wants the HLC to know that the problems the HLC noted in November 2021 are still present in November 2023. EGCC has a new interim president, but the problems have remained. HLC issued a report in 2022 saying that while EGCC had corrected some deficiencies, it had acquired others in the meantime. At that time (in mid-2022), HLC was not willing to remove the school’s probationary status.
According to its statement, issued Friday, the EGCCEA believes its membership has done what it can to support the students and the school as it works through its problems. It claims that neither the school’s administration nor its Trustees have done their part to move the school forward and out of its current perils.
The vote of no confidence in the school’s administration should come as no surprise. EGCC’s current and most recent presidents previously served as the school’s Chief Financial Officers. That’s a clear sign to anyone who’s listening that the focus of the school administration is on making money, not on providing the highest quality academic experience for the students.
Community may be left to pick up the pieces of EGCC
However, the vote of no confidence in the Board of Trustees is slightly different. In theory, when a school’s administration does not act in the best interests of its students and its community, the Trustees are there to direct the administration. If necessary, they have the power to remove the Administration.
In this case, the Trustees are clearly more interested in turning a profit than they are in looking out for the best interests of the 5% of in-district students that EGCC serves. There’s nothing legally or technically wrong with turning a profit in higher education. For-profit schools exist as part of the higher education landscape. The enormous costs associated with this approach to higher education often leave students heavily mired in debt with few job prospects and no way to transfer their credits to a lower-cost, higher-quality institution.
I am interested to know how the HLC will react to the vote of no confidence in the EGCC Trustees, and whether they share the faculty’s concerns that the elected officials at EGCC are not providing the oversight their positions require.
Should EGCC lose its accreditation, its elected Trustees and the school administration will simply disappear, proclaiming to anyone who will listen that they did what they could to save the school. The Steubenville/Youngstown communities will have lost the community college which they have invested millions in over the past five-and-a-half decades for the benefit of its few thousand in-district students.
For what it’s worth, AFSCME already has other institutions lined up to take EGCC’s place.
Photo Credit: Alpha Photo , via Flickr
