For the second semester in a row, DVC instructors have been told to cut sections for the upcoming spring schedule, despite overflowing classes and district Chancellor Helen Benjamin’s admission that the district’s formula for allocating money to the college is “seriously flawed.”
At the center of the controversy is the “C” contract formula, which is used to allocate money to the college for part-time faculty, said Jeffrey Michaels, president of the teachers’ union, United Faculty.
Michaels said the formula does not provide money to adequately fund the college, which leads to DVC exceeding its budget for part-time faculty.
In the past, the district chose not to actively enforce the budget cap, but began to do so this year. DVC is currently $2 million over budget.
“If you have to tighten your budget, the easiest – and when I say ‘easiest’ I mean ‘if you’re lazy’ – way to manipulate the money is to adjust the student-teacher ratio, raise class sizes or offer fewer classes,” Michaels said.
This policy has proven very unpopular with DVC faculty.
“We’ve got what some of us have labeled as a ‘formula for failure,'” said music instructor Glenn Appell. “Right now we have something like 92 percent enrollment, and if that’s not adequate to say we’re in good shape then … I don’t know what is.”
At a tumultuous Faculty Senate meeting Oct. 9, DVC instructors blasted the chancellor for coming unprepared to answer their questions about why the college was being forced to cut classes, despite overwhelming student demand, potential revenue loss and increased enrollment.
Benjamin returned to the Faculty Senate this week along with Roy Stutzman, the districts interim chief financial officer, who gave a brief presentation about the formula. Abruptly ending the meeting, Benjamin refused to answer questions promising a more in depth meeting in November.
At the earlier meeting, the chancellor responded to faculty complaints by saying, “My regret today … is that I didn’t know what you were going to ask me. And had I known that, I certainly would have been better prepared.”
Her statement did little to alleviate several faculty member’s growing apprehension that she is out of touch.
“I’m concerned to the point of being a little bit frightened that you only come and say, ‘Well, I wasn’t prepared to deal with this question or I wasn’t prepared to deal with that question’ because these are the issues we talk about every day,” math instructor Cheryl Wilcox told Benjamin.
In the meantime, students face an increasingly slimmer schedule.
“We are cutting the same number of classes in the spring schedule as we did for this past fall,” said Wilcox. That means a loss of 30 hours of classes a week, she said. This translates to an additional loss of six sections, as well as two hours a day of the math lab.
“Initially we were told, yes, we would have to cut again,” said biology instructor Catherine Machalinski. “However, we discovered huge mistakes in the numbers they had used for my department.
“Once we redid [them] … it turned out we didn’t need to cut – and actually didn’t need to [have] cut last semester, believe it or not.”
At the Oct. 7 meeting, instructors voiced their frustration over having to turn away large numbers of students and the potential revenue that they represented.
“Aren’t we here to offer classes to students?,” asked Machalinski. “…You gave up $15,000 for every single large lecture class you didn’t offer this semester, [money] we could have used to offer more classes next semester.”
Biology instructor Rick Gelinas likened it to a popular math game.
“What you’ve done with your formula is like coming to a Sudoku puzzle right at the beginning and just arbitrarily filling in one of the spaces,” he told Benjamin. “Nothing else is going to make sense”
Benjamin admitted the formula has not been revised in 17 years. “We know that it is seriously flawed,” she told senate members. “Seventeen years, nobody looked at it.”
She said there are plans to “tweak” the formula to better reflect the realities of the college.
But in a later interview, Machalinski said “tweak” falls far short of what must be done.
“They need to come up with a completely new way to distribute money to the colleges,” she said, “because what they are doing is restricting growth and enrollment at all of the colleges.”
At the Oct. 7 meeting, Dr. Joe Krivicich of physical science and engineering asked whether faculty input would be solicited. Benjamin replied, “Not at this point. It’s just upper management.”
In an interview, Krivicich said he doesn’t have a problem with that, as long as constructive criticism from the faculty is taken and used to make changes.
“My concern is about the speed of this,” Krivicich said. “This should have been done a while back, years ago.”