A city in crisis: Board says yes to special trustee

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By Sara Bloomberg

The Guardsman

The City College community was shocked in July when the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges threatened the school with potential closure but how to move forward is proving just as controversial.

At a special meeting on Sept. 11, the Board voted 6-1 to invite a so-called special trustee to help get them through the accreditation process but a group of around three dozen students and Occupy supporters vehemently disagreed with the decision.

They demanded the board reject any special trustee and, after the board voted, called for their resignations.

If the board had voted no that night, the state chancellor’s office would have imposed a special trustee who would be given far greater powers to override the board’s decisions—a fate experienced by Compton Community College before their accreditation was revoked in 2006.

Trustee Chris Jackson was the sole dissenting vote on the board that night.Although he isn’t opposed to a special trustee on principle, he expressed uncertainties about the process, including the cost to the school, the time frame of the contract and the role that the trustee would play.

“I have some serious concerns,” Jackson said as the audience cheered. “I would like to know what the procedure is to remove the special trustee.”

Another way

Protesters insisted that there is a third option and denounced the presence of any special trustee as fundamentally undemocratic.

“The responsibility of the Board of Trustees if they really want to respond to saving our school is to say, wait a second everything going on here is illegitimate,” City College student Eric Blanc told The Guardsman before the meeting began.

“We need to slow down and reassess how (…) we’re actually going to be able to save our school and what we need to do to fix the problems, including the funding problems, which are coming from the state,” Blanc said.

After nearly half an hour of emotionally charged public comments, demonstrators initiated an occupy-style “mic-check.”

Police officers began shoving the demonstrators, many of whom were students, out of the room, while the majority of the board and the chancellor simultaneously fled out of the room for a recess.

Protesters took over the remaining vacant chairs and slammed down the president’s gavel and voted to commence a “People’s Board of Trustees.”

Jackson and his fellow trustees Anita Grier and William Walker stayed in their seats and watched and listened as the protesters voted to appoint themselves as the special trustee.

They also called for solidarity with the teachers’ strike in Chicago.

“This is a very difficult decision I have to make. While I can’t do what I really want to do, I certainly felt that I could stay and listen to what students were saying,” Grier told The Guardsman as the rest of the board and the chancellor filtered back into the room and reclaimed their seats.

Even after the board reclaimed their seats to resume the meeting, protesters formed a semi-circle around them.

They chanted “shame on you” after the board cast their votes and called for all of them, except those who they said had sided with students and workers that evening, to immediately resign.

But not everyone agreed with their tactics that night.