Merger of community colleges moves ahead

Still three years from reality, the newly named Connecticut State Community College is set to have 100 or more student advisers whose job is to keep students on track to graduate.

It will be headquartered in New Britain.

And it will increase both student enrollment and financial stability.

Those are the promises made in an 83-page progress report on a planned merger of 12 community

colleges into one set to be reviewed by the New England Commission on Higher Education in a virtual meeting June 23.

The commission — which will ultimately decide whether to grant accreditation to the new college — may or may not release a statement afterward, said Barbara Brittingham, the outgoing NECHE president.

For Mark Ojakian, president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, the presentation is another step in the process — a chance to answer questions that had been posed by the accreditation body more than a year ago and get formal feedback.

“I would anticipate a robust discussion based on the progress report,” Ojakian said.

He expects questions and suggestions for areas of focus.

His office has been consulting regularly with Brittingham’s staff since the accrediting body sent the state’s initial plan back to the drawing board in 2018.

The system has a hired consultant — the National Center For Higher Education Management Systems — for $90,000 to help with the planning. Last month, Former Norwalk Community College president David Levinson was named the interim president of the proposed college.

Levinson was a member of the accrediting body for seven years. He not only knows NECHE standards, he was on the commission (then called NEASC) when they were written.

“He knows them inside out,” Ojakian said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media last week.

The progress report was a team effort, primarily written by Ojakian’s chief of staff, Alice Pritchard, Levinson and Ken Klucznik, an associate vice president for academic affairs for the system.

“We are giving them our road map to the future,” Ojakian said of the report. “We expect them to say we are making progress . ... It is no official action that we are asking for.”

That won’t come until sometime in early 2021 when the state applies for the substantive change that will lead to accreditation of one community college instead of a dozen.

If the green light is signaled, site visits will follow and a transition that will allow students to start being admitted into Connecticut State Community College rather than Norwalk, Housatonic, Gateway or nine others, as soon as October 2022 in anticipation of the college starting the following fall.

Even for students who enter the colleges in the midst of the transition, their assimilation will be seamless, Levinson said.

The plan

Last month, the table was set for the NECHE visit when the Board of Regents for Higher Education hired a cabinet for the new college and gave it a name.

Ojakian, who first proposed the merger plan in 2017, admits the road to creating what he calls the only clear path to more student success and a more financially sustainable system took longer than expected.

The extra time, feedback and participation will make for a better college, he now says.

“I am very optimistic for the future of the Connecticut

state community college, especially for the students that we serve,” Ojakian said.

The plan calls for a central office for the community college to be established, perhaps in New Britain, where the system owns property. The idea is to create independence from Board of Regents offices in Hartford. All 12 colleges will keep their locations but become branches of a single college.

The process of replacing college presidents with chief executive officers has begun. Last month, Terry Brown was named CEO of Gateway in New Haven and Dwyane Smith, the CEO at Housatonic in Bridgeport.

Under the plan, faculty report not to the campus CEO but one of five centrally located deans in charge of particular academic disciplines.

The new college calls for 141 administrative positions. It is less than other similar sized institutions, system officials said.

By the time the college becomes fully functional in fall 2023, there will be 100 advisers assigned to help students reach their academic goals. The current completion rate for firsttime, full-time students in the state’s community colleges between 2011 and 2015 was 15 percent.

Levinson said that will improve with consistent and coordinated advising.

“We can’t have different approaches on different campuses,” Levinson said.

As many as 41 advisers could be hired this year pending a budget review in October.

The plan says the system will save $23 million annually, which Ojakian said is still a realistic target. It also promises to boost enrollment by as much as 25 percent.

The opposition

This summer, Ojakian said some 200 faculty will be working on aspects of the curriculum merger. That, despite a resolution by the system’s Faculty Advisory Committee to the Board of Regents which late last month condemned the plan on a 5-0 vote with 5 abstentions. The committee sent their own lengthy submission to NECHE.

Ojakian said he is disappointed by the strong opposition from faculty and union leaders.

He maintains the opposition is based on a false narrative and that those opposed have not suggested an alternative that would address issues of student outcomes or fiscal stability.

“We have serious issues around student success rates and we have serious issues around the equity gap,” Ojakian said. Students, he said, need to be served better and have the same opportunity for success.

Colena Sesanker, a Gateway professor and vice chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee to the Board of Regents, said a merger is not the way to do it.

“It is a terrible plan that betrays little understanding of academia and no love for the institutions the system office is entrusted with preserving,” Sesanker said. “While plans are being made for this imaginary college of the future, our current colleges’ and students’ needs go unmet.”

If NECHE approves the plan, she said it will be an embarrassment. Others see it differently. Del Cummings, who retired last week as a chemistry professor at Naugatuck Community College, said a lot of the planning is being done the right way.

“The overall goal is trying to make the student experience a little easier,” Cummings said. Now, he added, students run into too much red tape if they want to take courses at multiple community colleges.

He said what some faculty may lose is complete freedom over what they teach. If there is consistency between the campuses, some professors may not be able to teach in a way that ignores what happens on other campuses, he said.

Ojakian said some faculty who won’t speak up on the plan at campus forums email him later to say they support the efforts and offer suggestions on how to make it better.

“At some point, we need to continue to move the initiative forward,” Ojakian said. He called it a Board of Governor’s policy directive that he intends to carry out.