Difficult Lessons : New Chancellor Confronts Tough Task

SACRAMENTO — Some educators say they don’t envy David Mertes for his recent appointment as chancellor of the California community colleges system. After all, they explain, his predecessor, Joshua Smith, angrily quit last August after only two years in the job and little success in reforming the 106 community colleges.

The post, skeptics say, has little real power because the Legislature controls the budgets and the 70 local districts try to control everything else. The system is fractious, under-funded and confused about its future, they complain.

But other officials at the two-year schools expect Mertes to have better luck when he takes over the post in July. They point to his respected career as an administrator, currently as chancellor of the Los Rios district, a Sacramento-area system of three community colleges with a reputation for innovation. Moreover, they explain, Mertes is an insider while Smith, hired from New York, never overcame suspicion as an outsider.

Also, the optimists maintain, there is a decent chance that much-debated reform proposals will pass the Legislature later this year. That complicated omnibus bill, AB 1725, seeks to strengthen the roles of the statewide chancellor and the Board of Governors and to improve academics for the system’s 1.2 million students.

A gray-haired, soft-spoken man who earned a doctorate in zoology and biochemical embryology from UC Berkeley, Mertes, 58, was interviewed recently by Times education writer Larry Gordon. In the library of his new office, he talked about the challenges of leading the nation’s largest system of public higher education.

Q:

Your predecessor did not have a very happy career in this position. Why do you think you will be any different?

A:

I believe that knowledge of the California system, having worked with many of the people who are trustees, CEOs and faculty and having been here in Sacramento, interacting with the Legislature, should make it possible to smooth out the operation of this office and its relationships with the other offices. I don’t think the problems we face are any less but I think that an individual within the system will be more likely to be able to work with it than someone coming in with no knowledge of it at all. However, time will tell.

Q:

Can you explain what your role is supposed to be and what the role of the local district chancellors should be?

A:

I think the local boards and local chancellors are responsible for the day-to-day operations of their institutions and the role of this office and the (statewide) Board of Governors is to set the long-term agenda for where we all should be going. It is a unique organizational structure, but I think it is also the system’s strength to have the locally elected trustees highly responsive to local communities. If you tried to centralize it, I think you’d lose some of that real strength.

Q:

But doesn’t that produce inherent tensions?

A:

Sure, there will always be some inherent tensions. But one of the primary goals the Board of Governors and I have is to dramatically improve the whole relationship between this office and the local districts.

Q:

Some people complain that community colleges are basically run by an alliance between the teachers’ unions and the local trustees because nobody else pays any attention to the trustee elections. Do you think that’s true?

A:

It is certainly true that some elections for trustees are run by faculty unions. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish the choice was determined by a large number of voters informed about the issues. But vested interests are involved in any election, and I support the concept of locally elected lay boards. I think that all of us just have to work to make that system better.

Q:

Why have you spent your professional life at community colleges rather than going to four-year schools?

A: Everything seems to be telling us that we will have an increasingly diverse cultural and ethnic mix in the state. At the same time, we will have a state with the kind of economic base that is dependent on a very well educated citizenry and work force. It is quite clear that for the majority of people in this state, the entry level to higher education and vocational education will be community colleges. And for me, that is an awesome responsibility.

Q: I think there is confusion about the many missions the community colleges are supposed to perform. Can you describe them and how you would rank them?

A: There are two primary missions: One is to prepare people in their freshman and sophomore levels to transfer to four-year institutions to earn a BA degree. The other is for employment preparation, along with (mid-career) upgrade training. Remedial education and English-as-a-second-language programs are not ends in themselves. But the goal is to move people through them into a primary area.

Q: How would you improve transferring?

A: I think state policy should be that when a student enters a community college, the college can guarantee that if he takes the appropriate courses and perform at an appropriate level, there is a place for him at the university. In our district, we have written contracts for transfer into UC Davis or Sacramento State and we check the student’s progress each semester. The student can’t say no one told him about the requirements because he signs it, we sign it and the university signs it. And I think that kind of model can be looked at for many other districts.

Q: And vocational education?

A: I believe that community colleges need to network their vocational education programs more directly with business and industry.

Q: What about what’s been called enrichment education? Haven’t community colleges been criticized for offering too many cooking classes?

A: And macrame. . . . I can’t speak for the whole system yet. But I can tell you in my district, all the direct and indirect costs of any course of that type are supported fully by the fees paid by their students. And if all those courses were all lopped off, it would not affect our primary missions. I think there was a time, particularly in the ‘70s, when some of that kind of stuff got into the general curriculum and was offered for credit. In my view, it shouldn’t have been there. I think there is a much tighter attitude now.

Q: Funding now is based on the average daily attendance, and schools benefit if a student drags out his courses for 10 years. Should that change?

A: I support a proposal that is being worked out for what is called program-based funding. Under the present system all the incentives are for growth, and there are virtually no incentives for doing a good job. Program-based funding gives incentives for quality and performance even if a district’s enrollment is small or stable.

Q: What about having some course requirements for admission?

A: State policy is not to have any entry requirements, and AB 1725 reaffirms that. The issue now is finding better ways of dealing with the student when he comes in. The bill calls for testing for placement, with the idea that you should first go into courses where you will be successful. I don’t want to be Pollyannaish about it. It’s not going to be easy to work that out. Some students simply will not be able to go into courses they want to go into.

Q: Should we be building more community colleges?

A: My priority is to get money into the existing facilities. There is a tremendous amount of repair needed on the infrastructure. When there is talk about laying off faculty as there was in Los Angeles two years ago, you’d better believe that they’d taken everything they can out of the budget for long-range maintenance first. And that has happened all over the state, not just in Los Angeles. Cut long-range maintenance and no one screams. Buildings don’t scream.