Walter Russell Mead on City College of San Francisco

At Via Meadia, "Blue Blight Update: Largest CA College to Close?":

The collapse of blue California is picking up speed. California’s largest college, which enrolls 90,000 students, faces closure within a year unless the school can essentially reinvent itself. Bad administration, wasteful personnel spending, poor organization, a lack of strategic vision and a series of budget cuts as the state of California frantically hacks at its own budget deficit have brought City College of San Francisco to the brink.

As the Mercury News reports, the college has been ordered to prepare for closure by next March even as administrators and politicians search for ways to keep the school open. Threatening to pull the plug is the state’s accrediting commission that supervises junior and community colleges. Without major reform, the commission says, the College will lose its accreditation in March of 2013 and without accreditation it would lose access to the state funding that keeps it alive....

How exactly the school got itself into so much trouble is hard to figure out. It appears that both the administration and the board were incompetent and out of their depth; there are reports that board members (who get paid) were often no-shows at meetings. 92 percent of the total income was spent on personnel expenses; programs don’t seem to be well thought out and no overall strategy or shaping vision guided a school in which, apparently, the inmates took over the asylum and ran it into the ground....

But CCSF’s problems point to an important local failure: deep blue San Francisco is not doing a good job at helping low income people. The noble rhetoric about justice and compassion that liberal politicians so eloquently express doesn’t seem matched by particularly inspiring results. To let the community college that offers low income people their most hopeful route of escape from the poverty trap fall into ruin is not the mark of a compassionate or justice seeking political movement.

Ain't it a shame?

Mead reminds us that the community colleges are sinkholes of patronage. And with all the diversity programs, the college was probably being run by a bunch of hacks. See my report, "City College of San Francisco, Nation's Largest Two-Year College, On Brink of Closure."

And FWIW, here's this from the far-left San Francisco Bay Guardian, "City College fights back."