New College of California — A Radical College That Lost Its Accreditation and Then Itself

Summary

New College of California, a small progressive college in San Francisco's Mission District founded in 1971, ceased operating in early 2008 after its regional accreditor moved to strip its accreditation and the U.S. Department of Education cut off its access to federal student aid. It was, for most of its life, exactly the institution it set out to be: an activist, humanities-centered alternative college with a law school dedicated to public-interest practice, programs in poetics and women's spirituality, and a faculty that at various times included figures of the American left. It trained progressive lawyers and writers and organizers for nearly four decades. Then governance and money failed it, and the bodies that certify a college as a college withdrew their certification.

The decline was long and, by the end, fully documented. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) had warned New College repeatedly across decades — over curriculum, governance, and finances — and in the summer of 2007 launched an investigation that found serious, long-standing deficiencies across every area it reviewed and placed the college on probation. By late 2007 the college was losing tens of thousands of dollars a month, had stopped paying faculty, and let health benefits lapse. After discovering record-keeping and financial-aid improprieties, the Department of Education placed New College on heightened cash monitoring and then, in early 2008, revoked its eligibility for federal aid — the financial oxygen a tuition-dependent college cannot live without.

The end was not a clean closing date but a quiet asphyxiation. Spring classes that were supposed to begin in mid-January 2008 were postponed and then never really started; with federal aid frozen, there was no money to run a semester. WASC revoked the accreditation in February 2008, and the college simply stopped functioning. The most viable parts were transplanted: the law school's students moved to John F. Kennedy University in April 2008, and the women's spirituality master's program migrated to a graduate institute in Palo Alto. What remained was debt, unpaid staff, and a building on Valencia Street that had been, for a generation, one of San Francisco's training grounds for the activist left.

New College's story is not the demographic enrollment cliff that would claim so many small colleges a decade later. It is an older, plainer failure: a mission-driven institution whose internal governance and financial controls decayed until the external authorities that vouch for a college could no longer do so. When accreditation goes, federal aid follows, and for a college that lives on tuition, that is the end.

Timeline

A College Built as a Counter-Institution

New College of California was founded in 1971, in the right city at the right moment, as a deliberate alternative to the university as it then existed. John Leary, who had run Gonzaga University, started it with a handful of students; it grew into a small, intensely ideological institution in the Mission District devoted to the humanities, to social change, and to the idea that education should serve movements. Over the decades it assembled an unusual catalog — poetics, writing and consciousness, media studies, graduate psychology, women's spirituality, activism and social change — and a law school whose explicit purpose was to train public-interest and movement lawyers rather than corporate ones. Its classrooms drew, at various points, well-known figures of the American left, and its graduates fanned out into San Francisco's progressive bar and activist organizations. At its height it enrolled on the order of 1,100 students.

A college defined this completely by mission tends to be governed by conviction, and New College was. That gave it energy and identity; it also left it institutionally thin in the unglamorous areas — financial controls, record-keeping, board oversight, the separation between a founder-leader's vision and a corporation's books — that accreditors exist to police. For years the mission carried the institution past its administrative weaknesses. WASC, the regional accreditor, kept noticing the weaknesses anyway. As early as the 1980s it was issuing warnings; by 2002 it was reporting "extremely serious management problems" and unstable revenue. The college kept its accreditation through these episodes, but the file was lengthening, and an accreditor's patience is not infinite.

When the Vouching Stops

What an accreditor ultimately certifies is trust: that a college keeps real records, controls its money, governs itself with some separation of powers, and delivers what it promises. By the mid-2000s, WASC had decided that New College could no longer be trusted on those terms. In 2005 it warned about long-term financial stability. In June 2007 it launched a formal investigation, finding poor record-keeping and flawed financial controls, and that summer the faculty voted no confidence in president Martin Hamilton, who had arrived in 2002 and around whom allegations of conflicts of interest and mismanagement had gathered. He resigned in August 2007. By the fall, WASC had placed the college on probation, its visiting team reporting serious and long-standing deficiencies in all seven areas it reviewed — an unusually total indictment.

The governance failure became a cash failure with brutal speed. By November 2007 the college was bleeding roughly $80,000 a month; it stopped paying faculty, and health benefits quietly lapsed. Then the federal government applied the decisive pressure. The Department of Education, after finding improprieties in the financial-aid office and a history of shoddy record-keeping, placed New College on heightened cash monitoring in December 2007 — and when the college could not bring its files into compliance, moved to revoke its eligibility for federal student aid. For an institution that lived on tuition, much of it financed by federal loans and grants, that was not a penalty but a terminal diagnosis. The money that paid for a semester would not flow.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students fared according to which program they were in. Law students and the women's-spirituality cohort were transplanted to other institutions and could finish; humanities and other students in less portable programs were left to transfer where they could, on their own, mid-degree, with a transcript from a college that had just lost its accreditation — a difficult document to carry into an admissions office. Faculty and staff were owed back pay, and the wind-down ran partly through California's labor authorities and a string of creditor claims; an institution that had championed workers' causes ended by owing its own workers money it did not have.

New College left a more diffuse mark than the small colleges that would close in the following decade. It was not a casualty of the demographic enrollment cliff or a celebrated abrupt-closure scandal; it was a slower, more ordinary institutional death — governance rot, financial collapse, lost accreditation, frozen aid — of a kind accreditors are built to catch and, in the end, did. Its alumni diaspora persisted in the Bay Area's progressive legal and activist worlds; its name surfaces in San Francisco histories of the radical Mission. The lesson it leaves is unsentimental: an institution can be principled, beloved, and necessary, and still fail the basic test of keeping its books straight — and when it fails that test, the authorities that vouch for colleges will, eventually, stop.

Lessons

References

• New College of California Is on Deathbed Inside Higher Ed
• New College of California Closes Metro Silicon Valley / Bohemian
• New College's Tragic Demise BeyondChron
• New College of California Wikipedia