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Audio engineering teachers with gold records on their walls. Former Olympians who give athletics classes. A master blacksmith who teaches the only college-credit blacksmithing course in the country.
These are just a few of the 215 instructors at ACC who learned this summer that they must update their educational credentials or be barred from teaching classes in the fall. The news has sent many teachers back to the classroom to get associate's, bachelor's or master's degrees in subjects in which they have been teaching and working for years.
"We have a bass teacher who has a degree in geology," said Russell Scanlon, a professor in the commercial music department. "He's a great bass player and a great teacher, but [he] had to be let go. In a business like ours, where your professional credit counts for so much, I think the academic thing is being way overemphasized."
The new requirements came after ACC was placed on warning status by its accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. In January, SACS issued a new set of stricter guidelines on faculty hiring, under which many ACC instructors no longer had proper credentials to teach courses for college credit, said Donetta Goodall, a spokeswoman for the college.
If ACC does not address the issues raised by SACS before September, the school could be put on probation and potentially lose its accreditation, Goodall said.
But some faculty members say ACC has known about the credential issue for years, and failed to act on it.
"There's a little bit of suddenness to this," Scanlon said. "The problem is that it wasn't taken care of five or 10 years ago when it could have been done in a more equitable way."
Faculty were notified in December that the credential issue was on the horizon, Goodall said. However, many instructors said the implications of the warning from SACS were not made clear to them until the last minute.
"I found out between the end of the spring semester and the start of the summer semester, which gave me time to register for the 15 hours that I need," said Steven Bradley, who teaches a real estate class.
Bradley, who has a master's degree in management and has been a licensed real estate broker since the 1970s, needs an associate's degree in real estate in order to keep teaching his course.
Including Bradley, 75 of the 215 instructors with credential problems have agreed with the administration on "action plans" that will get their papers in order and put them back in the teaching rotation, Goodall said.
Another 140 teachers have not yet filed action plans, meaning that they will probably not be coming back in the fall.
"Our goal is to not decrease the number of courses that we offer," she said.
But Tom Gingras, chair of the welding technology program, said that some instructors can't be replaced.
"We're going to have to cancel some classes," Gingras said. "It's not easy to find people in these disciplines who have five years of work experience and a degree in the discipline."
Some ACC students say the credentials crisis has affected their degree plans.
"It has caused me to re-think how quickly I take classes before I don't have the opportunity to take a class from a master," said David Williams, a student in the metal arts program.
Williams cited the example of Stanley Young, a jeweler who spent decades setting stones for Tiffany's.
"People in his class are people who want to learn from a master jeweler," Williams said. "People like him are a treasure. But his class in the future might not count for a degree program because he doesn't have a jewelry degree."
Faculty and administrators agree that keeping ACC's accreditation is a top priority. But some accuse the college of overreacting to the SACS warning.
"Our administration definitely took a doomsday approach to this," said Mark Goodrich, a spokesman for the ACC teachers' union. "They were very leery of fighting for people who they thought deserved an exception."
Some instructors have discussed a class-action lawsuit on the basis of age discrimination, Goodrich said. The credentials issue disproportionately affects older teachers because the appropriate degree programs weren't available when they started their careers, he said.
Many of the teachers directly affected by the issue declined to comment. Some, however, expressed a sense of optimism and a desire to do their best to meet the requirements.
"We all love this place. We're all really into our school," said Geoffrey Schulman, the chair of the commercial music program. "I think SACS will hopefully get more realistic in the way they look at this. One size does not fit all."
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