Civic Engagement, Shared Governance, and Community Colleges

To reinforce their democratic mission, community colleges need to cultivate faculty engagement in academic decision making.

By Carol A. Lucey

Those of us who have spent our professional lives in community colleges tend to think of our institutions as occupying a unique place in the American higher education landscape. These colleges are sometimes labeled "democracy’s colleges," and a strong argument can be made that, at their best, they embody the best values of American prag-matism. Many of our faculty members tend to be pragmatists, un-fettered by dogma or tradition and concerned mainly about providing their students with the practical knowledge and material expertise that make for better lives and livelihoods. Much community college teaching is shaped by techniques that AAUP founder John Dewey, a philosopher of education, would recognize, such as active and collaborative learning and clinical and in-tern experiences that are immediately useful in a life or in a career.

Coming of age at a time when the country’s great external threats were communism and national socialism, belief systems that champion the goals of the state at the expense of those of the individual, the American community college promotes the ascendancy of the individual. Programs are often strongly workplace oriented and supportive of upward socioeconomic mobility. Community college faculties include many adjuncts whose main employment is not with the college, but in a profession, business, or industry to which students aspire. Many of the students are older than traditional-age college students and live busy lives. Often, they are raising families or working full time and take only a class or two each semester. For all these reasons, community colleges are not noted for their strong campus life, for either students or faculty.

Yet because of the low cost and convenience of these institutions, growing numbers of traditional-age students today elect to begin their education at a community college. Many are first-generation college students, women, or minority-group members who want to complete their general education requirements before transferring to a four-year college or university. For occupational students, however, the two years at a community college may account for their entire post-secondary educational experience. Increasingly, therefore, the challenge to democracy’s colleges will be to create a climate that nurtures in these students a strong ethic of civic engagement. To do this, a college must have an engaged faculty. How can a community college, in its curriculum and through the interactions among its students, faculty, and staff, model the best of engaged community life?

Citizenship Education

Certainly, these little microcosms of society that are our colleges should model, as closely as possible, what is best about our diverse, democratic, and pragmatic society. Our college’s honors program and societies (Phi Theta Kappa chapters) have had a strong service focus over the years. More recently, different groups have encouraged a spirit of voluntarism and giving among staff, faculty, and students. Our student government, our outreach division, and our college foundation have been particularly supportive of these efforts. In addition, some faculty members have experimented with service learning courses. In the arts and sciences, faculty designed a public speakers’ series around an important science policy question for Nevada regarding storage of national nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

Along with encouraging such specific activities, colleges should create an atmosphere in which campus decision making mirrors the best qualities of engagement in a democratic society. Specifically,

• The various college constituencies should have an opportunity to provide reasonable input into major college decisions.
• There should be a predisposition toward mutual respect and trust among all parties, even when they seriously disagree.
• The community should support successful compromise as the highest end and be willing to negotiate differences.
• College discussions should reflect a healthy respect for reasoned argument and for the importance of maintaining a questioning mind. That is, all parties to an argument need to demonstrate a sensitivity that, to paraphrase the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, certainty begets violence.
• Generally accepted and codified rules for settling disagreements among constituencies should exist.

Within the context of such an atmosphere, college dialogue should provide for the broadest shared governance that is consistent with institutional accountability. Below I discuss how, in practice, community colleges can use a tradition of strong shared governance to promote engagement. I also point out some features of community college culture that can work against shared governance and community engagement.

Shared Governance

Between them, the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities and the 1998 statement on the same topic by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges define those matters that are the responsibility of the voting faculty and those reserved to the governing body and its delegates. The faculty should maintain primary authority over matters related to curriculum, methods of student instruction, standards of faculty competence and conduct, and faculty appointments and status. Matters related to institutional mission, strategic planning, program review, and resource allocation are generally recognized as matters for the governing board and its administrative delegates.

All of the community colleges I have been part of have had climates in which these divisions, at least for the purposes of campus discussion, have been somewhat blurred. The respective authority of governing board, administration, and faculty has generally been as described, but valuable, regular exchanges of opinions have occurred between faculty and administration about all these matters. As president, I am not shy about telling faculty when I hear from the community that a particular program curriculum is believed to be stale and in need of updating, and faculty have been quite willing to let me know when they feel I am not allocating resources effectively. That is part of the give and take of a healthy college community.

As a new president in Nevada, I asked the entire college community—students, classified staff, management, faculty, and community advisers—to participate in a mission and goals review and to deliberate on a new college strategic plan and reorganization. The college’s governing board later approved the mission and goals statement and the strategic plan that we developed.

This spring, my college will pilot a new budget allocation process developed by a broadly representative budget committee. It will permit the various constituents within the college who might reasonably be affected by budget decisions to advise the president about budgetary expenditures. When the process is fully implemented, it will make use of information from the strategic plan as well as data from institutional research. Our goal is to produce a process in which decisions and the reasons for them, while made by the president as the delegate of the governing board, are guided by objective input from, and are transparent to, the rest of the community.

I think the blurring of these areas of faculty and administrative responsibility is natural at many small community colleges. As long as faculty-administrative relationships are good and the trust level is strong, such a blurring will usually be accepted when the best interests of the college and the students are clearly the objective. An administration inclined to consult and to consider a range of opinions before taking action makes its college stronger and increases the likelihood that its decisions will be acted upon energetically.

Ultimately, however, with regard to matters of mission, strategic planning, program review, and resource allocation, the governing board holds the president and her administration accountable. Final decisions in these areas therefore rest with the president. Similarly, with regard to curriculum, methods of instruction, standards of student performance, faculty competence and conduct, and faculty appointments and status, the faculty traditionally has primary responsibility. That is the only appropriate arrangement for achieving the highest quality of teaching and learning.

Faculty Passivity

Sometimes, a whole college community can get the shared governance idea backward. I have seen that happen in community colleges where certain features of the institutional mission seem to promote it. It is somewhat disconcerting when faculty and administrators disagree about resource allocation and similar decisions. (In the end, the president has to win those arguments or find another job, because the governing board cannot hold the collective accountable for fiduciary matters.) Of greater concern, however, is when faculty effectively delegate authority on academic matters to administrators and others.

I am aware of colleges at which responsibility for academic advising; curricular matters, including general education outcomes; standards for and determination of faculty performance; and academic standards for students have been removed from faculty control and placed under the purview of deans or other administrators. This transfer of power is most likely to occur in colleges that do not have a strong tradition of faculty oversight of academic decisions. The intrinsic nature of the community college itself can also contribute to the problem, as I will explain.

At many community colleges, advisory boards whose members come from the businesses and industries that hire occupational students have had a strong voice in guiding the technical content of occupational curricula. Specialized accreditation agencies for technical programs often require such committees. But they are usually under the management of faculty members, who may elect not to take all of the committee’s advice. Conflicts sometimes break out when a major industry in a community makes a donation to a technical lab and then suggests what the curriculum in the lab ought to look like.

Certain community college organizational models give rise to other tensions. Consider the new organizational models sometimes seen in two-year colleges, where strong discipline-based divisions or departments with faculty chairs give way to larger academic entities headed by administrators. The ostensible model for these units is the university "college" or "school," headed by a dean. In the university model, however, the dean does not replace strong department chairs. I have seen division and department chairs (teaching faculty on reassigned time for administrative duties, not unlike department chairs at universities and four-year colleges) replaced at community colleges by assistant deans, sometimes with the tacit acceptance of the faculty.

Such organizational revisions occur for many reasons, often simply for the sake of convenience. Academic programs change and new programs emerge fairly rapidly at community colleges, and not always according to the academic calendar. Divisional faculty members, and even chairs, are sometimes not available throughout the calendar year. And even during the academic year, those divisional or departmental faculty members who might ordinarily take responsibility for program development are teaching course loads that are often heavier than those of their colleagues in universities. It is tempting in such an environment for faculty simply to yield responsibility for program oversight to full-time administrators.

Yet the quality and the depth of the curriculum inevitably suffer as a result of such yielding of power, and a culture can develop that distances faculty from their own programs. I know of one faculty whose members hesitated to do academic advising because they did not feel sufficiently familiar with their own degree program. In the long term, such disengagement can affect a college’s bottom line by cutting into full-time degree-seeking student enrollment.

Continuing education, or outreach, is a strong part of every community college’s mission. The deans of such programs often have an entrepreneurial outlook toward the curriculum, viewing it as a product that can be modified and packaged to meet the needs of individual "customers," who are likely to be local businesses or industries. Traditional faculty may resist modification of curriculum offerings requested by the outreach office, often for sound academic reasons. Where communication is weak, however, some administrators may believe that faculty members are resisting change for less than pure reasons. Such disagreements put additional pressure on the ability of community college faculty to control academic matters. I think it must have been an outreach dean who invented the notion of the "faculty ivory tower"!

My own favorite tale from the continuing education barricades concerns the semester the continuing education office ran an astrology class in "my" physics and astronomy laboratory. Granted, it was not a credit-bearing course, but despite the passage of twenty years and my having arguably gone over to the dark side, I can still call up the sense of outrage I felt about the use of a science lab to support what I considered a debasement of science.

The best resolution of such conflicts that I have seen occurred at a college with an outreach dean who frequently contracted with academic departments to offer the continuing education curriculum. He then contributed a proportionate charge-back fee to the originating department’s equipment budget from the course’s revenue. The issue of outreach revenue versus academic standards was always explicitly on the table for debate, and communication between the outreach office and the faculty at this college was excellent.

Weakening of Standards

Many colleges have multiple campuses that compete with one another, usually over academics or resource allocation. Most frequently, individual campus communities want to control their own curriculum, while regional accreditation commissions want evidence of a cohesive faculty across the college, engaged in oversight of a single, well-thought-out curriculum. The accreditation commission’s standards must, however, trump other points of view.

At the two-year colleges where I have witnessed intercampus politics at close quarters, one college that separated out curriculum by campus (one campus for occupational programs, one for transfer and technical programs) successfully managed to avoid intercampus conflict. The gravest risk of intercampus rivalries is the weakening of program oversight by both the academic departments and the faculty senate curriculum committee. That occurs because departments and senate committees depend for their effectiveness on the qualities of successful college engagement discussed earlier: strong communication channels, high trust levels, and a predisposition to negotiate differences. Geographic distance between campuses can produce communication "silos" that deprive the larger community of these qualities.

Membership on the faculty senate committee that provides oversight for new programs and academic policy (such as curricular or academic standards) is often seen as a thankless service job at community colleges. In some states, faculty members at community colleges do not enjoy academic rank, and merit systems have been replaced by longevity-based salary schedules. I recognize that legitimate reasons having to do with state politics and higher education funding often exist for these schedules. Still, the net effect can be unfortunate. If institutional reward structures do not properly support service, as well as scholarship and teaching, the senate committees charged with academic oversight eventually become ghettoes of untenured faculty members who complete their service requirement solely for tenure eligibility. Untenured faculty members do not often challenge powerful administrators about matters of academic standards and curriculum. Their hesitancy to do so further deprives faculty of power over their own curricula and academic standards.

Sometimes, a similar passivity affects faculty evaluation processes. Because so many community college faculty members are adjuncts, placing responsibility for all faculty evaluation and mentoring on the shoulders of full-time faculty, who already have heavy teaching loads, can create a severe burden. Providing an honest peer evaluation is often an unwelcome responsibility anyway. The presence of large numbers of adjuncts coupled with a remuneration system for full-time faculty that does not reward college service only increases the likelihood that evaluation processes will either fail to ensure instructional quality or be shifted to administrative oversight.

These risks to faculty engagement and shared governance do not affect all community colleges. Many maintain strong faculty commitment to college service and academic oversight, despite the problems I have described. They do so because the college community is vigilant about supporting cultures of quality engagement and voluntarism, as described earlier. It is no accident that such colleges often also offer the strongest educational experiences to their students. Colleges at which faculty lose interest in academic service will eventually see the experiences they offer their students undercut by a weakened climate of campus engagement.

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam quantitatively and vividly describes the importance of community engagement to different indicators of social health. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both recognized that a constitution is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a successful democracy. Democracy also requires well-educated, engaged citizens. Public education in this country is founded on that premise; it is why taxpayers are asked to fund public colleges.

By this measure, the primary "customers" of community colleges are neither the students nor their future employers, although in the world of community college administration, one often hears discussions about which of these might be primary. But if we think about why any state or community would fund us, we realize that our true customers must be the larger civic community, whose members have a right to expect delivery of an education that prepares students for an engaged life in a democracy—as well as one that offers them the opportunity to achieve a better life. To satisfy these customers, we should be willing to take the steps necessary to preserve such engagement within our own college communities. While continuing to support the goals of individuals, democracy’s colleges also need to support democracy.

Carol Lucey is president of Western Nevada Community College. She served formerly as an academic administrator at Alfred State College of Technology of the State University of New York and at Jamestown Community College. She has a Ph.D. in theoretical high-energy physics. This article is based on an address delivered at the AAUP’s 2001 conference on shared governance.

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