By Helena Getahun-Hawkins. Bay City News.
The CCity College of San Francisco ?CCSF? issued a public apology this month for the damage, frustration and confusion it may have caused to its community by not being able to offer a 16-unit Cantonese certificate program for the upcoming academic year.
The public apology was issued on July 10.
While the university began development of the program in early 2022, according to the district's legal counsel, it was improperly backed off during the final stages of its approval. Community leaders have advocated for the protection of Cantonese classes and the creation of the certification program, arguing that increased access to Cantonese allows students to connect with their heritage and culture and better serve the needs of San Francisco's seniors.
The university affirmed its commitment to developing the certification program for the 2024-2025 school year.
Alan Wong, Chairman of the City College Board of Trustees, first proposed the 16-unit Cantonese certificate program in 2022 after administrators planned to remove Cantonese classes from the school's curriculum.
At the time, Cantonese was the only language program that lacked both a certificate program and transferable credits from the University of California, two metrics the state uses to allocate funds, Wong noted. However, the Cantonese classes have been popular and have reached full enrollment since 2019, he said.
The university passed Wong's resolution to create the certificate program in the fall of 2022, allowing the proposal to advance to the curriculum community, which would have to recommend the program to the board of trustees. After receiving the recommendation of the curriculum committee, the proposal was ratified by the board of directors. His final step was to be submitted to the state chancellor's office for approval.
However, several months after university administrators ratified the proposal, Wong was informed that the curriculum committee had decided to retract the certificate and remove its records from the curriculum management software, he said.
I felt in my gut that what happened was wrong. We had approved this certificate and it was supposed to go ahead," Wong explained.
In November, shortly after university administrators approved the certificate, the curriculum committee withdrew its support for the program during a meeting, reverting the certificate proposal to draft status.
The committee argued that the department of world languages and cultures did not have the resources to develop further Cantonese offerings, including a grammar course. The chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures, Diana Garcia-Denson, confirmed this decision at a board meeting in March.
According to Wong, when he spoke to the administrators, they said that the curriculum committee could not withdraw its support for the certificate after the board of trustees had already approved it; this fact was later confirmed by the district's legal counsel in June.
As for the reasoning behind the curriculum committee's decision, Wong feels that they could have voiced their concerns and proposed changes when they were first discussing the proposal, before recommending it. He also noted that the certificate proposal ties together existing classes and does not require additional resources.
"The community celebrated this certificate and removing it at the last minute because some people changed their minds is very unfair and undemocratic and, as the legal counsel mentioned, it was an inappropriate action that violated our policies," Wong said.
Chester Leung, a CCSF student who volunteers with the Save Cantonese organization at CCSF, was delighted when he first heard that the university would offer the 16-unit certificate program.
“The Bay Area is one of the few places where people can have easy access to learn Cantonese and this certificate shows people, our community, that learning Cantonese is worth it,” Leung stressed.
In his experience, Cantonese is a language that has been stigmatized. Even within his own family, his parents discouraged him from learning it saying it wouldn't be useful and instead encouraged him to learn Mandarin.
“Unfortunately, where I live, there are no community colleges that offer Cantonese, so CCSF was the only lifeline for me if I wanted to reconnect with my heritage and learn my language,” Leung explained.
Taking Cantonese classes at CCSF has allowed her to connect with her roots. Of his family's grandchildren, he is the only one who can communicate with his grandfather, a monolingual speaker of Cantonese.
Leung worries that without this year's program and with their ever-changing future, students will be less motivated to continue learning Cantonese. Instead, they would only take a few classes to fulfill their general education requirements. With less demand, the school might be less inclined to offer its latest installment of Cantonese, which Leung said took the school nearly two decades to recover.
The 16-unit certificate program, which would appear on students' transcripts, would provide the motivation for students to continue studying Cantonese, Leung suggested.
For Wong, establishing the certification program meant establishing equity between the different language programs at City College. It meant meeting state metrics for continued funding, protecting classes from cuts in the future.
Wong's dedication to protecting Cantonese classes stems from an understanding of the importance of the language to the San Francisco community.
He recalled a time when he was walking into a San Francisco hospital and an elderly Chinese woman approached him. She told him she was on the bus when someone punched her in the eye for no particular reason and pushed her. When the police arrived, they could not help her because they did not speak Cantonese. When she got to the hospital, the staff couldn't help her because they didn't speak Cantonese either.
When you think of the Cantonese program, you think of this experience.
“San Francisco is the Cantonese capital of the United States and if we don't teach Cantonese here, who will? We need to be able to teach it so that we have our next generation of public servants, our next generation of health care workers, public safety workers, social workers who can serve," Wong said.
“There is damage in the community from this inappropriate action to withdraw the program and we as a university must rebuild trust with our community and repair the damage that was done. This apology is really the first step in acknowledging that."
Wong said he is committed to ensuring the university has a Cantonese certificate program in the 2024-25 school year. In the meantime, she encourages students to enroll in the university's Cantonese language classes this fall.
This publication was supported in whole or part by funding provided by the State of California, ayou administeredred by the CaliFornia State Library.
You may be interested in: Woman accused of defrauding an organization that helps SF students
