Continuity needed at Peralta campuses

Why we need a new position to align the goals of the four Peralta campuses

The Peralta Colleges are more than “junior colleges,” as they were once known — they’re pipelines for the community. They’re conduits of information to illuminate student curiosity, transportation portals that deliver students to their wildest dreams, crystal balls for students to visualize their futures.

But as much as the Peralta Colleges help students, much of their well-meaning mission is hamstrung by its own ham-fisted bureaucracy. The Peralta College student community needs a sanctioned advocate in the Peralta College offices to coalesce the disparate colleges into one, cohesive student community.

How can the Peralta Colleges promise to maximize student potential when the colleges’ own potential is self-sabotaged by its administrative policies?
To be fair, the Peralta College mission is unique: four local, self-managed campuses competing for common resources. Combined, the four campuses (Laney College and Merritt College in Oakland, College of Alameda, and Berkeley City College) serve 24,000 students annually.

We need someone to coalesce the disparate colleges into one cohesive community.

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While each campus offers much of the same general education classes, each campus also specializes in particular vocational training and has its own student community to serve. Complicating matters is the constant turnover in the upper-management ranks at each campus that stifles continuity of purpose.

Interim administrators aren’t enough — their contributions are too limited.
The permanent student advocate position should be held by someone who can combine the macrovision of creating a grand Peralta College student community with the microvision detail that maintains the unique flavor of each campus.

This brave soul should be prepared to navigate through the morass of administrative red tape and limited bureaucratic vision to create the needed connections between students and the spirit of Peralta’s stated mission.

A beneficiary of the status quo would say that change is unnecessary. I would ask that person to step down from their ivory tower and put themselves in a student’s shoes. Learn from their experiences how frustrating it can be to try to navigate the messy maze of Peralta’s bureaucracy.

Kyiakhalid Ruiz is a Tower Staff Writer. Email him at: kyiakhalid(at)yahoo.com