Lane Community College - A Chance to Think Things Through

In its editorial on the LCC budget crisis several weeks ago, the editors of the Register-Guard began with "LCC hits budget wall," and sub-capped that with "There's no place left to squeeze." This is nonsense. The LCC budget is rife with places to spend money more intelligently. For instance, compared with complexity, simplicity is cheaper and others things equal, works better. Here are three examples where LCC could spend less and do better.

Simplify Advising: Lane has a large number of people giving advice on transfer-to-university programs. Their job is to steer incoming students, based on their intended majors, through the shoals of what seems like 100 different courses. It could be more, I haven't counted, but it's an intimidating array.

It's a waste of time and money on two counts. Incoming students don't really know where they're going. Ask them and they'll say they do, but they usually don't. Check university students on graduation day and see how many of them finished in the discipline they expected when they walked on campus in September, four years earlier. Not many.

The best advice that incoming students can be given is to start taking survey courses and preserve their options. Rather than, "Here's what you can do for two years," they should hear, "So you're somewhere in liberal arts? Take writing. Take the most advance math you can handle. Take one of these two literature sequences. Take Western Civ, US History, or Sociology. Throw in speech if you have a slow term. Come back in a year when you have a better idea what you're going to do."

I exaggerate, but not much. Students should be steered firmly and quickly into courses that will be interchangeable if they change their minds. Give them one survey course in their supposed major and predicate everything else on the likelihood that they'll switch. They'll be grateful later.

Simplify the course offerings: This follows closely on the previous point. To see what not to do, check the Spring class schedule. Look at Literature. Seventeen separate courses in order to deliver just twenty sections weekdays on the main campus. The needs of students could be entirely met with two sequences, e.g. US Lit and British Lit, plus a single term of World Lit to meet certain diversity requirements. "Horror films" seems to be popular, but it's not clear why this can't be handled with some Friday night flicks at the student union.

But why not, you ask? If students want a class, why not give it to them? Many reasons:

• It doesn't serve the students well. When a dozen boutique classes are offered, students can't get the survey courses they want and need at the times that fit their schedules.
  
• It isn't appreciated by the universities, who want Lane do foundation work and specifically do not want incoming students to have taken specialized classes.
  
• Class hours are a zero sum game, so it's a bad strategy to put students who spend very little time in literature classes into 3 credits of Latino/a Literature. What they will learn about this will be subtracted from what they might have learned about general American literature.
  
• It's expensive. The catalog is cluttered, advisors must be trained to explain extra choices, books are needed in the library, the workload for scheduling and curriculum rises, ...

Simplify governance: Lane has adopted "shared governance" as a strategy. It's a utopian belief that if everyone has a say, the results will be better and fairer. In actuality, it's either just expensive window dressing or it will bring decision making on campus to a halt.

There are about ten different councils now. Among others, councils for faculty, learning, facilities, and finance. The faculty council is just faculty, but the others are drawn from throughout the college community. Membership seems to be about ten each.

It's a little hard to see what the faculty is engaged in if not learning, and someone has already noticed that the purpose of facilities is to advance learning so those two councils need to be coordinated. What they will recommend depends on the availability of money, so everyone will need to talk to the finance committee. Except that the college budget is reviewed by the official Budget Committee and approved by the Board, both of which are irrelevant steps since in practice the budget is produced by the administration and not modified.

At the end of the day, somebody makes a decision and everyone up to that point just gives advice. There are vastly simpler ways to give advice. "Shared governance" borders on oxymoron. The cost of this charade is spread throughout the budget, but it must be considerable.