Who Does This College Serve? 

The Strike That Nearly Was 

On March 26, just hours before faculty and staff were set to walk off the job at 7:00 a.m., the Community College of Philadelphia administration caved.

After months of organizing, the Faculty and Staff Federation of CCP (FSFCCP) announced it had reached a tentative agreement with the administration. According to the union’s statement, the agreement included higher wages, increased staffing, smaller class sizes, and an invitation to the table with SEPTA for free transpasses for students. The union called the win a sign that “when faculty, staff and students stand in solidarity with each other, we can all win more.”

“These contracts set a new standard for workers and students across the city, state, and country,” the union wrote. “Through the collective power of CCP workers, the support of CCP students, family, friends, and local and state politicians, union allies and community organizations, we secured tentative agreements with significant gains compared to other institutions of higher learning.”

It was the most student-centered contract the college had ever seen. And within days, President Dr. Donald Generals was gone.

The Board of Trustees, CCP’s unelected body of fifteen mayorally-appointed business leaders, voted 13–0 to not renew Generals’ contract months ahead of schedule with no public explanation. He was placed on administrative leave immediately. There was no open discussion, no hearing, no student voice just a sterile statement insisting the move had been made “with a high degree of transparency and consideration.”

The timing is not subtle. The message from the Board is anyone in power who tolerates solidarity will pay its price. The union won. The president vanished. Whoever bends to the will of labor may not be welcome at the top.

CPP’s Oligarchic Governance

CCP students don’t vote for the college president. They don’t elect the Board of Trustees. But those two forces control almost everything from tuition hikes to class sizes to who gets fired for doing their job too well. 

The Board of Trustees is a 15-member body appointed entirely by the mayor. They answer to no students, no workers, and no campus vote. Yet this group wields the power to hire and fire the college president, control multimillion-dollar budgets, and shape the direction of a public institution that claims to serve the working class of Philadelphia.

The Board’s recent actions show what it really values. In the wake of the tentative union agreement that dared to treat students and workers like people instead of costs, the Board ousted President Generals, who signed off on the deal.

Earlier this year, Jason Hand, our affable former Director of Enrollment, left on quiet terms. At every Trustees meeting, the enrollment numbers are presented and ogled at the consistent growth in enrollment. Pivoting away from hard-sell tactics that pressure vulnerable students to enroll at any cost may have been too much integrity for the Board’s taste. Hand has not responded to comment.

Then, Richard Kopp, Assistant Dean of Students, was let go in January after privately advocating for a student-led Financial Advisory Board to oversee the college’s $1.6 million General College Fee. That plan would have given students some say over how their own money was spent. Kopp is now at Camden County College.

Anyone who proposes giving students more power, transparency, or dignity gets removed. In this system, students are customers. Faculty and staff are liabilities. And the real stakeholders are the people sitting quietly behind the curtain whose names students never hear.

The SGA Shuffle

When students at CCP talk about their own governance, the Student Government Association (SGA), they tend to do so with a mix of confusion and exhaustion. For years under Faculty Advisor Jeffrey Markovitz, the SGA has been mired in interpersonal squabbles, unchecked dysfunction, and a persistent sense that it answers more to administration than to students. 

That dynamic snapped into focus with the fall of Frank Scales, the last SGA President who dared to challenge the system. 

Scales fought for a student seat on the Board of Trustees and won it. He called for stronger student representation in campus decisions. But he is a conservative and endorsed Donald Trump for President in November. And, when he threw a Winter Formal that was approved for the day of his girlfriend’s birthday, the political turned dramatical.  

Impeachment, removal, and a retroactive rewrite of the rules to make sure he could never return. 

After his ousting, Scales attempted to run for SGA President again only to be barred under a newly enforced one-year term limit. The rule had never been applied to past presidents, including his predecessor Khaneef Martin who spent part of his second term as president enrolled at Drexel University, and was nowhere to be found in the SGA Constitution at the time. The change was introduced at a General Assembly meeting on February 24, under the watchful eyes of Faculty Advisor Jeffrey Markovitz, Administrative Advisor Jenavia Weaver, and Dean of Students Brad Kovaleski. With their backing, the rule became de facto law that SGA was no longer a platform for independent student leadership. SGA is and will continue to be an arm of administrative gatekeeping. 

The new front-runner and sole candidate for SGA President, Maria Baez, previously served as Treasurer and was a vocal critic of Scales. She and her allies, including 1st Vice President Angie Orozco and 2nd Vice President Jaritsa Hernandez-Orsini, have consistently aligned themselves with Markovitz’s hands-off approach to student empowerment. The SGA’s energy has turned inward, consumed by procedural squabbles and petty allegiances instead of tangible action for students. 

The more power SGA gains on paper, the less it seems to do. And that is likely by design. If students in and around SGA are busy bickering, sidelining ambitious members, and orbiting the whims of administrators, it won’t be organizing students to demand SEPTA transpasses, set up our own on-campus events, or have a say over the General College Fee. 

If the administration wants a student government that looks professional, they’ll need to let it do something. Division and distraction are a feature, not a bug. We are watching student leaders pretend to govern while the real decisions are made behind closed doors. 

A Play for Real Representation

The past year has shown us exactly how power operates at the Community College of Philadelphia. Those who push for dignity get punished. Those who demand oversight have unanswered complaints disappear. And when we call for shared governance, they call security. The lesson is not subtle, but it is exhausting. 

Students do not choose the Board of Trustees, approve the college president, nor have a say in how our budgets are spent. Even the Student Government, the one place where students should have responsibility, has been gutted, sanitized, and refashioned as another PR wing for administrators. 

A democratic student union, open to all students, not just the well-connected or administrator-approved, may be the only path left to real accountability. This cannot be another power trip, run like a clique or personality cult. 

We have already made an attempt at a student union on campus. It is now steered by 2nd Vice President Jaritsa Hernandez-Orsini, the same SGA officer who’s aligned herself with the administration’s quiet campaign against student autonomy. What students do not need is a closed-door, shadow SGA with a new hierarchy dressed in radical branding. 

Horizontal power is the only feasible structure to build the power to stand up to the governance of the college. A collective, student-led body that anyone can join to make decisions together in assemblies regardless of major or identity. A place where students are treated as people with power, not pawns in a bureaucratic game. 

There’s still no public process to select the next college president and no public vision for what kind of leadership this college deserves. But whoever that next president is, they will answer to the Board unless we give them someone else to answer to. If students want smaller classes, free SEPTA transpasses, safer campuses, and actual say over how our tuition and fees are spent, we will not get it by asking individually and politely. 

Organize without bosses, without idols, and without permission. And when in doubt, humbly ask: who does this college serve?