Cantonese Certificate Program Stalled at City College of San Francisco

City College of San Francisco was expected to start two new Cantonese certificate programs this fall, a first for a community college and a presumed win for the city’s robust Cantonese-speaking population. But one of the programs was recently delayed by the college’s curriculum committee after faculty members in the world languages and cultures department raised concerns that the institution doesn’t have the resources to run a high-quality program.

The delay infuriated and frustrated longtime advocates of the planned Cantonese programs.

Alan Wong, the president of the Board of Trustees who authored the initial resolution last January that proposed the programs, issued a press release Tuesday calling the decision “tone deaf” and a “disappointment to the Chinese community.” He told Inside Higher Ed Wednesday that he publicly aired his concerns to put pressure on the committee to launch the program as soon as possible.

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Committee members say they felt pushed to rush out a program before it was ready.

Sheri Miraglia, president of the college’s Academic Senate, said delaying the start of a program to ensure it’s up to snuff is a “standard, routine process.”

“We do it all the time,” she said. “Our goal is to serve the Cantonese community by making sure this certificate happens and make sure it’s the high-quality type of curriculum that City College puts out.”

Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong, Macau and China’s Guangdong Province and is the most commonly spoken language among Chinese residents in San Francisco. Some speakers worry the language is at risk of dying out as the Chinese government pushes for the widespread use of Mandarin, the country’s national language.

When City College announced last November that it would launch two Cantonese certificate programs, Wong and student activists celebrated. The news came after administrators threatened to eliminate fully enrolled Cantonese courses in 2021 amid budget cuts, partly because courses that aren’t part of a certificate or degree program are not eligible for state funding, Wong said.

A nine-credit conversational Cantonese certificate program will move forward as planned. But plans for a 16-credit Cantonese certificate of achievement program are stalled for now. Departments wanting to start a new program are required to submit plans for approval to the college’s curriculum committee, which are then processed by the Office of Instruction and ratified by the Board of Trustees, said Craig Kleinman, chair of the curriculum committee. Final approval must then be granted by the California Community College system chancellor’s office.

The curriculum committee approved the nine-credit program last fall but requested some changes to the curriculum for the second program from the department, Kleinman said. When he followed up on the revisions, department members told him they felt “pressured” to develop the curriculum quickly and felt uneasy about the quality of what they submitted. The department members also voiced concerns about getting calls from students pushing for the programs and about media reports describing the programs as done deals.

Meanwhile, both certificate programs ended up on the board’s agenda for approval in November, due to a clerical error in the Office of Instruction, even though the committee had yet to formally approve one of them, Kleinman explained. The board ratified both programs during that meeting. The committee then reverted the program to draft status.

Wong said, as far as he knows, the committee approved the program with some stipulations and then it was formally approved by the board. He noted that minutes from a November curriculum committee meeting specifically described both of the certificate programs as "recently approved with stipulations." He said he hadn’t heard anything about a clerical error in previous conversations with faculty members

“When I’ve spoken to them before, it seemed like they indicated that they can move forward, but they were regretful over it,” he said.

Diana Garcia-Denson, chair of the world languages and cultures department, explained at a Board of Trustees meeting in March that her department wasn’t satisfied with the proposed program because the college employs only one part-time Cantonese instructor to teach the four conversational Cantonese courses the department currently offers.

“There is no 16-unit Cantonese certificate of achievement, and it will not be in the 2023 catalog,” Garcia-Denson said. “This certificate has not been finalized for our department and remains in the draft stage in curriculum. The current draft does not meet department standards because we don’t have the courses nor the resources to support a 16-unit certificate in Cantonese … We cannot build this certificate around such limited resources. The board passed a resolution that was not backed by any commitment to funds.

“It is not the board’s purview to dictate curriculum,” she added. “The board needs to trust faculty and the department chair to work with the administration to develop a quality program that meets our standards. Give us the space, the resources and the staff we need to make this a reality.”

The number of Cantonese instructors at the college has dwindled over the years. Grace Yu, the college’s last Cantonese lecturer, previously told The San Francisco Standard that the college had at least 10 Cantonese courses taught by a handful of instructors in the 1990s, but now she’s the only one left. Meanwhile, the college has an associate degree program in Mandarin with multiple instructors.

Wong doesn’t buy the argument that the new certificate program needs more resources to launch. His hope was to string together the courses that already exist at the college and package them as the Cantonese certificate programs, which wouldn’t require additional instructors or courses, he said. He added that if the department had these concerns, they should have raised them earlier in the process.

“For a change of mind to happen after it’s gone through correct processes, it’s very unfair because the community celebrated and expected this certificate,” he said. “It’s very tone-deaf to do that to a community that has seen this program developed and now suddenly yanked away.”

Kleinman believes the program needs a reading and a writing course to be up to standard, and those courses don’t yet exist. He also noted that the college is trying to hire a second part-time Cantonese instructor.

He believes Wong is pushing for the program to come out quickly partly to boost his reputation.

“I’m not saying that there isn’t real concern for the Cantonese community,” he said. “There is real concern that we offer more at City College because it’s not offered really anywhere else. But I think there are also a lot of political ambitions that are mixed in with this and that it’s spiraled out of control.”

“We care about this community,” he added. “We care about the students, but we really have to care very much about the curriculum process.”

Wong said he’s applying pressure because his community was eagerly awaiting the programs.

“My parents speak Cantonese,” he said. “My community speaks Cantonese. This is one of my top priorities, and I will do whatever it takes to fight for it … Because I have been working with the community, I think there may be a different sense of urgency.”

Multiple students, alumni and community members spoke up at the March board meeting to stress the importance of the programs.

Lauren Chinn told the board she’s taken four Cantonese courses at City College. She said the language was useful to her as a worker at a local COVID-19 vaccination clinic, as a student employee at the campus library in Chinatown and as an English as a second language tutor.

“I’m a fifth-generation Cantonese San Franciscan, so my ancestors came from Cantonese-speaking regions of China, but I never learned it growing up,” she said at the meeting. “So, most of my ability to speak Cantonese has come from the Cantonese classes I’ve taken at CCSF. I’m appreciative both for the way it’s allowed me to reconnect with my roots and also for how I’ve been able to connect with and support members of my community.”

It’s too late for the college to offer the program this fall, but Wong planned to propose a resolution to the board in a meeting Thursday to include a note in the 2023–24 course catalog that the certificate program is forthcoming.

City College of San Francisco isn’t the only higher ed institution that’s struggled to preserve and expand Cantonese programs. Stanford University notably faced backlash from students and alumni after it announced plans to end the contract of its only Cantonese lecturer in 2021. A grassroots campaign to preserve the Cantonese program resulted in a $1 million gift a year later from S. J. Distributors, a food company founded by Cantonese speakers, for an endowment supporting Cantonese classes at Stanford. Only about 20 higher education institutions in North America offer Cantonese courses, according to the Brigham Young University Cantonese Language Association.

Dana Bourgerie, professor of Chinese and linguistics at Brigham Young and chair of the Cantonese Language Association, said universities deciding whether to offer Mandarin or Cantonese courses often choose Mandarin because it’s more widely spoken and closer to standard written Chinese.

But he noted that there are an estimated 73 million Cantonese speakers worldwide. He also emphasized that Cantonese has a rich history in the United States—almost all early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. were Cantonese speakers.

“In places like San Francisco, you’re much more likely to have a practical need for Cantonese than German or French even, for that matter,” yet those programs are common university offerings, he said.

Wong emphasized that in a city with so many Cantonese speakers, it’s critical to train workers who can speak it. He recalled encountering an elderly woman with a bruised eye at a hospital he was visiting while working as a union representative. She told him in Cantonese that she’d been punched without warning by a stranger on public transit but police officers and hospital workers couldn’t understand her.

“It’s not just about preservation of the language or culture, but it’s also about the practical help that this provides to our communities that allows for our social workers or health-care workers or public safety officers or our police officers and firefighters to be able to learn Cantonese and be able to communicate with that large segment of the San Francisco population,” he said. “San Francisco is the Cantonese capital of America. If we don’t teach Cantonese here to support our community, who will?”