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Survey of Community Colleges Under Way
By Marcus Harvey
The AAUP’s Committee on Community Colleges is in the midst of a research project to assess administrative practices, managerial trends, and faculty participation in governance at community colleges across the country. The respect and authority afforded to faculty by community college administrations vary widely. Some colleges maintain healthy and robust systems of shared governance that are in keeping with AAUP-recommended standards, while others largely ignore faculty concerns. The committee’s goal is to better understand the range of practices, from the benign to the benighted.
The committee invited faculty at about one thousand community colleges to fill out a broad online survey on governance practices. To date, the committee has had more than 150 responses to the survey, with a roughly equal balance between unionized (51 percent) and nonunionized (49 percent) campuses. Some of the initial results are heartening: a majority of respondents indicated that they have a representative faculty senate, and a clear majority (74 percent) reported that their institutions are either “supportive” or “highly supportive” of academic freedom. On the flip side, however, few respondents reported that they and their colleagues are significantly involved in the institutional budget process, strategic and institutional planning, or the hiring and evaluation of campus administrators.
In addition to quantifiable data, the survey seeks qualitative data on faculty perceptions of their institution’s administration. The committee has been gratified by the willingness of respondents to elaborate on questions such as, “How would you characterize the current governance culture at your institution?” As anticipated, responses to this question varied widely, from “top down,” “nonexistent,” and “tyrannical,” all the way to “collegial,” “positive,” and “highly effective.” Perhaps more significant, a number of respondents suggested that governance at their institutions is in transition, for better or worse. One characterized it as “very top heavy and centralized, and getting more so,” adding that there are “more and more people and money at the top level and fewer and fewer resources at the level in which we actually impact students (in the classroom).” Another respondent wrote, “We are moving into shared governance, better communication between groups, and a recognition that we cannot continue to do everything for everyone. One goal is that the education master plan will be the guide for all other planning at the college.”
The committee hopes its study will provide faculty with a valuable resource that they can use to affirm the importance of participatory governance in higher education’s two-year sector. Knowing that healthy governance relations can be found at numerous colleges should make it easier to insist that similar standards be observed everywhere.
In an effort to expand the study’s data set as much as possible, the survey has been left open. Community college faculty members who are interested in participating in the survey should contact the AAUP’s West Coast office at (800) 431-3348. The study’s completion is anticipated in spring 2006.
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