Green River faculty opt out of program prioritization process

Green River College’s Instructional Council and faculty union have decided not to participate in the college’s program prioritization process.

“We have deep, deep concerns about this process,” Jaeney Hoene, president of the United Faculty union, told the college’s Board of Trustees at its Oct. 30 meeting. “We have deep concerns about whether or not it is justified. Deep concerns about whether or not the outcome from it will be reliable … and for that reason, the faculty have opted not to participate in this process.”

College officials announced earlier this year that Green River would implement the process to help improve programs and save money as it faces a potential $4 million to $5 million budget deficit.

Hoene said the union on Sept. 23 presented the college with a demand to bargain concerning the process.

“What they want to do is outside the contract,” she said of the process.

Hoene said the faculty contract includes two processes — program assessment and improvement, and program review — to be used to evaluate programs.

Hoene and Leslie Kessler, Instructional Council president, have suggested the college conduct program assessment and improvement reviews, which haven’t been done for the past two years, even though the contract stipulates programs be reviewed on a five-year cycle.

“Program assessments should be ongoing,” Kessler said. “There are always things to do to be more efficient, ways to restructure. We are always looking at ways to improve.”

Derek Brandes, Green River’s vice president of instruction, said the prioritization process will continue as planned even without faculty involvement. Instructional deans representing the academic areas of the college will serve in place of faculty on the instructional pillar committee, which will evaluate programs on a rubric system.

“The challenge for faculty is really other people are going to choose what the elements are going to be rather than them having a voice,” Brandes said.

Kessler said faculty members are concerned the prioritization model pits programs against each other.

“Here at Green River, programs have always worked together to support each other,” Kessler said.

Programs will be placed in one of five quintiles, with 20 percent of the programs falling into each quintile. Quintile one will have the highest ranking programs and quintile five the lowest ranking.

Brandes said just because a program ends up in the bottom quintile does not mean it would be cut.

“To me this (process) gives us glasses to see what we need to look at in greater detail,” he said.

Faculty are also concerned the process is not transparent.

“What goes into that report is going to be limited,” Hoene said. “They are going to tell us what questions to answer. I think it is actually anything but a transparent process. It looks very transparent.”

College administration and the Board of Trustees have stood behind the process.

“I felt this was a much cleaner process and much fairer process than across the board cuts,” Green River President Eileen Ely said during the board meeting. “You want a fair way of identifying how programs are doing.”

Board president Pete Lewis said the board understands that jobs are on the line.

“It is a horrible process that we never want to see again,” Lewis said, noting that board members have been involved in budget cuts resulting in job loss in other industries. “So to have the idea that we don’t care is simply not the case. We have been there and we do not like this. We are not excited about this, but we keep getting the message from the state, which we must all hear, that we are going to see less and less revenue. That is a fact.”

The college hopes to have the process completed by June and has launched a website, grprioritization.org, to keep the campus and community updated.