Trustees Defer College's Plan to Rename Courses for Paid Sponsors

The City College of San Francisco’s Board of Trustees has temporarily repealed a plan to allow donors to sponsor classes that would otherwise be canceled, and to rename them in honor of their benefactors. The trustees said they had not been informed of the plan and needed to discuss it at a meeting on Thursday.

The college’s chancellor, Don Griffin, announced the plan on Monday but failed to notify the seven-member board beforehand. Board members told the San Francisco Chronicle they were irritated after they learned of the plan in Monday’s newspaper.

“Public education is not for sale,” Milton Marks, the board’s president, told the paper. “If someone wants to give money, that’s great. But getting publicity or feel-good points shouldn’t be necessary. It smacks of some sort of paternalism.”

Mr. Marks said there was no guarantee the proposal would ever be approved, but with the college facing cuts of $8-million to $12-million over the next few years, the board wasn’t ruling it out, either.

Since the plan was announced, no donors have offered the minimum $6,000 gift to save a course, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, though several potential sponsors have asked if they could make partial donations. —Erica R. Hendry