I was a Professor of Interior Design here for almost 4 years. I taught there because I loved to teach, not for money or acclaim or recognition. Most of my years there I had very happy students and glowing reviews.
Dallas College - El Centro, since the beginning, has had absolutely no concern for students or their instructors, despite their continual words to the contrary in the public eye. The place is so bad that I even told my students in my last semester there before I resigned, my classes to RUN - go to a real school, a real college, not this one that has no idea what it's doing nor any desire to do what's best for the students, only what serves the school. The students in EVERY semester I taught told me how awful they were treated by the administration and some by their instructors and how they never know what to expect .
The administration there would not tell me what I was teaching until a week or two before the semester giving me NO time to prepare, they allowed students to take courses out of order and without any concern for pre-requisites or how that would slow down and possibly hinder the learning by the students whom had completed them already as required by the curriculum. They NEVER had books ready, often times students wouldn't get their actual hardback books until the MIDDLE of the semester IF at ALL, despite being promised to be part of their tuition, whether they were requested or not. They literally NEVER gave me a copy of my contract that I signed with them as a full time professor,
The "Dean" of the Arts and Humanities departments, is a JOKE and should NOT be a Dean of anything other than how NOT to talk to people - he literally yelled and screamed at me in a meeting and refused to let me speak or even listen to my grievances or any explanations for teaching choices, not to mention using a condescending and combative tone via Teams even before we started talking. I actually have a video that I recorded of him and his asinine behavior that I will be posting all over Google and many other outlets on the internet so they can see what I, teachers, and students are dealing with at Dallas College.
Beyond all of this, the interior design program lost its CIDA accreditation and the credits only transfer to one other university in Texas for the most part. I told my students if they wanted a real career, to go to a real school not this hell hole of "higher learning". The fact that it's cheap doesn't make up for everything else that's wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with community college per se, however, THIS community college is filled with and ran by a completely inept staff - from HR to the Deans to the general administration, it truly is a terrible place to work, to learn, or to even BE. It's as if the crazy people are running the asylum, and it might as well be one. TRUST someone who KNOWS, whom has been there and heard the students complaints and experienced the ineptitude of the administration first hand. Go to one of many online full Bachelor programs in interior design that all ARE accredited by CIDA and actually have their stuff together. If you don't, you'll regret it.
