It’s Education Wednesday here at LAist, and today, we look into who exactly is in charge when it comes to our universities. And it’s a little more complicated than you might think.
Conflicts this year at CSU Fullerton and Cal Poly Pomona over the proper handling of “shared governance” prompted my colleague Adolfo Guzman-Lopez to go deeper.
What is “shared governance”? Three main constituent groups run university campuses: the university president, a board of trustees, and faculty, who are organized into academic senates and, on many campuses, into labor unions. In the United States, this arrangement goes back more than a century.
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(Also: Notice that “students” are not one of those three groups.)
Professors say the presidents of CSU Fullerton and Cal Poly Pomona both violated this doctrine when they respectively fired their university’s top academic officers this year without consulting faculty. In one case, that led to a vote of “no confidence” by the faculty senate.
How does this tension affect how a college is run? What does it mean for students? And is there a solution? Read the story here.
And for more education-related content, you can click here to read all the stories.
Have a great Wednesday, friends. There’s more news below - just keep reading.
(After you stop hitting snooze)
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In the last few weeks, the How To LA team has been taking a look at SoCal’s mutual aid groups – volunteers who help fill the gaps in government services for the unhoused, in a four-part series.
In part three, the team checks in with “Nono,” a woman in the encampment they visited who was given housing through Inside Safe.
Nono received a voucher for a motel, a key element of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. She was optimistic about its promise but, so far, Nono has not felt safe.
Read the story here and listen to the How To LA episode here. You can also listen to part 1 and part 2 of the mutual aid series.
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