Faculty representatives have filed two new complaints with Pima Community College’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, over the past few days.
The complaints include allegations of “a serious policy violation impacting faculty and staff classification and compensation,” as well as “harassment, intimidation, and retaliation against employees who have expressed criticism of the college.”
These new complaints from a portion of the faculty come more than a year after William Ward, an ex-senior facilities administrator, filed a complaint alleging that the PCC Governing Board is not “autonomous to make decisions in the best interest of the institution in compliance with board policies and to ensure the institution’s integrity.”
In March, an accreditation team made a focused visit to campus to investigate that claim. The college is expected to make that report public Tuesday.
In a statement to the Arizona Daily Star on Monday about these two new faculty-driven complaints, a spokesman for PCC said “it is the college’s practice not to comment on complaints sent to the Higher Learning Commission until the HLC issues a final determination, as many facts contained in an initial letter can be inaccurate or unsupported by evidence.”
For now, it is up to the Higher Learning Commission to determine the merits of these new allegations, which are briefly outlined in the two complaints obtained by the Star.
Faculty input?
In June of this year, the board approved a new employee classification and pay structure, which includes paying adjunct instructors more money the more years they’ve taught at PCC and setting the college’s minimum wage at $16.50 an hour.
But, according to a complaint the All Employee Representative Council — that’s a group made up of employee representatives from all job classifications at the college, which is charged with advising employee policy — filed with the HLC Friday, the group’s input was not properly considered, as required by the college’s administrative procedure, before the board voted to update the employee pay structure.
The PCC Faculty Senate endorsed the complaint in a 30-0 vote (with one abstention) Friday afternoon.
In response to those allegations, a PCC spokesperson said administration met with various faculty and employee groups, which include the AERC, about the employee pay structure more than 100 times before the board passed the new policy.
But according to the faculty members who filed the complaint, at the June 8 board meeting in which the new policy passed, “public comment was moved to the end, and voting occurred before the board could hear from employees.” In so doing, the complaint further argues, the college violated its accreditor’s requirement that shared governance “engages its internal constituencies — including its governing board, administration, faculty, staff and students — through planning, policies and procedures.”
Makyla Hays, a faculty member in the mathematics department and co-chair of the AERC, personally endorsed the complaint.
“We were assured for two years straight that nothing would become final without our say,” Hays said. And while there are some things about the final policy she and other faculty members would have done differently, the issue, she said, “isn’t necessarily the result, it is the process by which the policy was implemented.”
‘Harassment, intimidation, retaliation’
Additionally, Hays is also president of Pima Community College Education Association, which is an affiliate of the Arizona Education Association that represents some full-time faculty at the college. Over the weekend, the group’s 13-member executive board voted to endorse a second complaint and subsequently sent it to the HLC.
This second complaint stems from the group’s allegations that the college violated HLC bylaws by creating “fear and hopelessness, including harassment, intimidation, and retaliation against employees who have expressed criticism of the college,” according to a news release issued by PCEA Monday.
In addition to allegations that faculty faced backlash for speaking up about the perceived problems with implementing the new employee classification and compensation structure, the complaint also says some faculty faced backlash after voicing concerns about “significant efforts on behalf of PCC to stall and conceal information about the content and even receipt of the draft report from the HLC visit in March 2022 regarding board governance.”
The complaint explains that faculty filed formal grievances with the college’s Office of Dispute Resolution in both instances, but that nothing was resolved through that process.
When KOLD ran a story detailing the draft of the HLC report from the March site visit, it quoted Hays as saying: “There have been a lot more rushed decisions and a lot more policies put in place that had the appearance of stakeholder input that have had trickle down effects and not always in a positive way.”
According to the complaint Hays and her colleagues endorsed and sent to the HLC over the weekend, “PCC’s response to these public criticisms was swift, engaging in both stonewalling and intimidation.”
As Hays recounted to the Arizona Daily Star, after the draft report was leaked to KOLD, the college’s outside legal counsel called her and two others (all of whom had asked the college for the draft) in for a meeting to discuss how they knew about the leaked draft report.
“We were like, ‘Why are we being faced with college legal asking us questions that we felt like if we don’t answer we could face discipline?’” Hays said. “If people feel like we can get called in for asking questions and then have to give up our source about where we got this information, people are going to be very nervous about coming to faculty leadership to represent them.”
In a joint news release sent by both groups, the end goal of the complaints is to “hold the College accountable, without risk to accreditation, for following its policies,” and to “ensure an effective and independent Office of Dispute Resolution through which students, employees, and community members can report and address policy violations without fear of retaliation.”
Now that the HLC has received both complaints, it will take up to 30 days to review them, as well as supporting evidence that has not been made public. If the HLC determines it should further investigate the complaint after that time period, it will send PCC a copy of the complaint and its supporting documents. The college will have 30 days to respond after that, at which point the HLC will decide if it will review the complaint further.
