LAVC Media Arts Department - Full-Time Phantom Professor

Multiple articles have been published about the scandal at Los Angeles Valley College’s Media Arts Department in the past year, particularly with a specific focus on the education being provided or rather not provided.

In 2016, Dr. Erika Endrijonas persuaded the LACCD Board of Trustees to approve the construction of the Valley Academic and Cultural Center as a new home for LAVC’s Media Arts Department. The building was lobbied for by multiple faculty members including Department Chair Eric Swelstad.

In 2022, The Los Angeles Times published an expose that the building was a massive racketeering scheme designed to bilk Pinner Construction in late fees for disrupting the education of many students by failure to complete the building on the 2018 deadline. (The VACC is currently still not finished).

For full coverage see ‘Breaking: LA Valley College Building Delayed Till 2025’

In the past year, multiple articles have been published to IndyBay, NewsBreak App, GoogleNews and been amplified on @X (Titter) by the account @LACCDW – a community newsfeed started in 2019 that published shocking information about Los Angeles Valley College and the Media Arts Department in particular.

What these articles and the original documents in them show is that the Los Angeles Valley College Media Arts Department did not and has not provided the education it advertised and that faculty received tax-payer funded salaries to provide. Further students paid for courses either out of their own funds, the Board of Governor’s Fee Waiver, Pell Grants and even Stafford Student Loans for education they did not receive. They further show that over the course of a decade students brought lawsuits, complaints to the LACCD Board of Trustees, and complaints to the Accreditation Commission for Junior and Community Colleges to no avail.

’Erika Endrijonas faces new questions in LACCD fraud’ | May 2, 2023

‘Dozen LAVC Cinema Student Narratives challenges Erika Endrijonas’s LACCD Success Story’ | May 5, 2023


‘Two Los Angeles Film Professors Bilked Taxpayers Over $3.5 Million Dollars’ | May 21, 2023

‘Corrupt North Hollywood Council Rep Turned Blind Eye To College Fraud’

Additional articles further show that various students may have received fraudulent degrees from LAVC’s Media Arts Department, including at least one member of the LAVC Citizen’s Building Oversight Committee.

‘Did L.A. Valley College award Fake Degrees?’ | May 11, 2023

‘Controversial NoHo Neighborhood Rep Named In Racketeering Scheme at Los Angeles College’ | May 13, 2023

They also proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Eric Swelstad, Department Chair of the LAVC Media Arts Department and various professional experts, lecturers and Media Arts Advisory Meeting members may have falsified their professional experience as well.

‘Van Nuys/Los Angeles College Screenwriting Professor Faked Writer’s Guild Membership’ | May 17, 2023

‘LAVC Grant Director Falsified Resumes/Employment Histories’ | February 8, 2024

Most recently, the latest article shows that while Department Chair Eric Swelstad ran off students by first refusing to offer classes at Los Angeles Valley College, full-time Broadcasting Professor Jason Beaton was allowed to refuse to award course credit for classes taken at other colleges. As previously documented credit was awarded in an extremely arbitrary and highly questionable manner.

‘LAVC Full-Time Faculty Running Off Students – Preventing Graduation’ | February 5, 2024

A review of payroll records, student news publications and college faculty directories raise additional questions about the education that is being not only offered at Los Angeles Valley College. Jason Beaton is a full-time professor of Broadcasting at LAVC and according to the Spring 2024 schedule, he is slated to teach no less than 11 courses and 12 class sections at LAVC. This is alone is highly unusual. Most Full-Time Faculty teach between 5 – 7 courses per semester. The Spring 2024 schedule shows Eric Swelstad teaching 4 Classes and a total of 5 class sections.

But a review of payroll records show that Jason Beaton is also listed as faculty in several other community college districts as well. Currently and through-out the Spring 2024 Semester Jason Beaton is teaching no less than three classes at Moorpark Community College FTMA M140, FTMA M145A, FTMA M145B. Additionally he is scheduled to teach Public Speaking at Lake Tahoe Community College for Spring 2024 as well. This brings the total of currently known classes Jason Beaton will be teaching to 15 courses and 16 class sections at three different colleges for the Spring 2024 semester.

This is not an anomaly either, for the past decade Jason Beaton has been listed as regularly teaching multiple courses at Santa Monica College, Pasadena College, Lake Tahoe Community College, Ventura Community College, Moorpark Community College and more all at the same time.

As mentioned before, Beaton’s course load at LAVC alone was highly unusual for a full-time faculty member, especially one also listed as the faculty advisor of the LAVC Broadcasting Club, and at various times on the LAVC Curriculum Committee.

It also raises the question of how it is possible for a single instructor to provide college level instruction in that many subjects at that many schools during a single semester. Even more bizarre is Jason Beaton’s email refusing credit for Broadcasting classes claiming “We [LAVC] are the only campus in the state that offers training in remote broadcasting with a lab.”

Apart from the fact that this wasn’t true (terming something ‘remote broadcasting’ when it comes to radio and television is itself an oxymoron), the classes Beaton refused to award credit for were from Santa Monica College, where Beaton was a member of the faculty. Further, it raises the question of if Jason Beaton has been faculty in no less than four community college districts at the same time why the curriculum didn’t match up, why vanity classes are being created that can’t be transferred in or out, and whether the classes offered are in fact actual college-level coursework.

Even more bizarre, as previously mentioned in links above, Radio Broadcaster Summer James was awarded academic credit for multiple film classes she hadn’t taken including Directing, Editing, Advanced Film Production, etc . . . however in another email with Student 1, she was denied awarded credit at LAVC for Broadcast 10 Radio Production – despite being a SAG-AFTRA Radio Broadcaster with an established career of working in radio for twenty years at this point. Yet, Beaton was allowed to deny her academic credit for radio broadcasting forcing her to take his class.

Stranger still, all Beaton’s classes are listed as ‘INTERNET’ raising additional questions about the integrity of them. In 2017, Beaton as documented above led the Broadcasting Faculty in an argument with the Media Arts Faculty about creating new Broadcasting Courses that would be provided for students once the Valley Academic and Cultural Center was opened. This was pushed back against by Department Chair Eric Swelstad, then Full-Time Professor of Media Arts Arantxa Rodriguez, and then Assistant Professor Chad Sustin due to an agreement they had to strangle classes at Los Angeles Valley College and in exchange for Pierce College and Mission College to strangle Cinema/Film/Media Arts classes on those campuses, to force students to drive from the West and North parts of the San Fernando Valley to take classes at LAVC instead of their nearest campus.

But considering all Beaton’s classes for Spring 2024 (and apparently for a number of years) are listed as ‘Internet’ then what was the reason for creating new Broadcasting Courses to be housed in the still uncompleted VACC?

What we do know is that this is an unusual amount of courses for any faculty member to be offering regardless of discipline.

We also know that in 2021, a Criminal Justice Professor Kim Rich at Los Angeles Pierce College spent months documenting and exposing how bots and scammers were enrolling in online class sections to steal financial aid.

According to
The Daily Mail, “The California Student Aid Commission discovered 105 of 116 colleges in the state's community college system had been targeted by the suspect applications.

Those included were Cerritos, Pasadena, Chaffey and eight of the nine campuses in the Los Angeles Community College District, the Los Angeles Times reported."

In an interview with the
Washington Examiner, Kim Rich cautioned that the education officials and state legislators blew off her research for personal enrichment;

“They do not want to fix this because the amount of funding they are going to lose is astronomical,” Rich said. “The lower their enrollment, the less they get funded by the state. If [school] districts are going to take out or prevent students from being enrolled, they are going to lose funding.

Alot of questions have been asked and given the amount of money flowing, alot more need to be asked. Especially about what appears to be a Phantom Professor handling the courseload of three full-time faculty in multiple community college districts.