Comprehensive Community College: Initial Investigation

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Organization, Governance, and Administration

Managing the Contemporary College

The terms governance, administration, and management are notdiscrete. They overlap and are often used interchangeably, not clearly depicting either institutional functions or precise activ- ities. Peterson and Mets (1987) defined them as encompassing both structure and process: governance relates to decision making, management to executing the decisions. Corson (1960) defined governance as though the college itself were a government: “the process or art with which scholars, students, teachers, adminis- trators, and trustees associated together in a college or university establish and carry out the rules and regulations that minimize conflict, facilitate their collaboration, and preserve essential indi- vidual freedom” (pp. 12–13). However, he also noted the difficulty of separating the established policies from the practices maintained on their behalf; the act of administering a policy is as much a part of that policy as is the statement of rules or laws on which it is based.

This chapter traces some of the common forms of organiza- tion, governance, and administration, including types of governing units, state-level coordination, local governing boards, and models of district and college organization. It considers also accredita- tion, trustee functioning, administrative patterns, the effects of collective bargaining, and efforts at efficiency. These areas change continuously as new ideas for managing the institutions become

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Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278. Created from capella on 2020-04-23 08:23:16.

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popular. The one constant is that colleges are complex entities, and a description of one never quite fits the others.

Categorizing Governance

Numerous attempts to categorize governance and management have been made, most stemming from observations of university systems. Linear, adaptive, and interpretive systems constitute one set of categories. The linear are directly linked, the adaptive are responsive, and the interpretive are more culturally based (Chaffee, 1986). Other models of governance have attempted to separate the collegial from the political, viewing both as different ways of sharing authority. A management science approach views governance as rational, focused on decision making. A different model for college operations uses the term organized anarchy as a way of describing an environment in which no individual or group has much influence (Cohen and March, 1986). Weick (1976) popularized the term loosely coupled systems to describe colleges as groups of subunits that interact with one another in unpredictable ways.

In general, it seems that most of the excessively analytical models that purport to explain the workings of universities do not aptly cover the less complex community colleges. Richardson (1975) nevertheless suggested that models must be constructed if the colleges are to be understood. He offered three major models to explain why colleges appear as they do. The bureaucratic model presents the college as a formal structure with defined patterns of activity that relate to the functions spelled out in law and policy decisions. The positions are arranged in the shape of a pyramid, and each series of positions has specified responsibilities, competencies, and privileges. This organization is held together by authority delegated from the top down, with persons at the top receiving greater benefits than those at the bottom; the lowest levels of the triangle are occupied by faculty and students. The political model postulates a state of conflict among contending forces—students,

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Organization, Governance, and Administration 111

faculty, administrators, and trustees—each with different interests. In a quixotic plea for the colleges to become shared learning communities, he sketched a collegial model: “Instead of being at the bottom of a pyramid, faculty and students are part of a community of equal partners. Authority is not delegated downward as in the bureaucratic model; rather, trustees share their authority with students and faculty as well as with administrators. Students and faculty members communicate directly with the board rather than through the president” (p. ix). The model is based on group process, the concept of community, the sharing of authority, and the making of decisions within a framework of participation and consensus.

The bureaucratic and political models seem most applicable to community colleges. The institutions are organized hierarchically, and compromises among contending forces chart their directions. Colleges are social organizations with their own rules. Despite all the rhetoric about satisfying student and community needs, the procedures maintained in community colleges tend toward protecting the staff’s rights, satisfaction, and welfare. The collegial or participatory model is a delusion; the notion that students have much voice in college administration has little basis in reality. But governance shared among administrators, faculty, and college staff has become more prevalent than it was a generation ago. And faculty and staff are not the only ones to gain a foothold; national and global authorities have also expanded their influence on community college governance processes in recent years (Kisker and Kater, 2012).

In its early years, when the junior college was often an adjunct of the local secondary school, the institution was usually admin- istered by the high school principal or a designate responsible to the principal. The local school board took up junior college affairs as part of its regular responsibilities. As the colleges separated themselves from the local school districts, the newly established boards of trustees similarly concerned themselves with budgetary matters and the selection of presidents who would keep the staff

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content and the college running smoothly, or at least keep the problems from becoming apparent to the public. Yet as long ago as 1931, Eells noted in his book on the junior college that the areas of governance and administration were too varied and com- prehensive to be treated completely. Although boards of trustees and administrators may have been able to govern without apparent conflict, issues of financing, staff morale, and conformity with state laws have always been present.

Governing and Coordinating Units

Different forms of college control have been popular at one time or another. In the past three decades, the multiunit college groupings have increased, while the independent, nonprofit junior colleges have declined and nearly all colleges affiliated with local public school districts have severed that connection. The public colleges are now arrayed in single independent districts; multiunit indepen- dent districts; state university systems and branch colleges; and state systems, some with innovative patterns, such as noncampus col- leges. Individual comprehensive colleges may include specialized campuses or clusters organized around curricular themes.

Independent two-year colleges, a category that includes church- related institutions and private nonprofit colleges, have varying patterns of control. The ultimate control of church-related colleges is vested in the governing board of the church itself. Boards of control for other independents may be associated with the occupations emphasized, or they may be self-perpetuating bodies composed of concerned philanthropists. Directors of development, that is, the fundraisers, are usually prominent in the college’s organizational chart. Because many private colleges still maintain residence halls, there may be a director in charge of campus life.

Regardless of organizational form, size seems to be the most im- portant variable. In study after study—whether the topic of concern is students, curriculum, library holdings, or unit costs—

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Organization, Governance, and Administration 113

institutional size, more than any other characteristic, differenti- ates publicly supported institutions from one another. In addition, the significant differences between public institutions and private junior colleges (which are almost all quite small) appear to be related as much to size as to control.

The Local District

Most public colleges in the nation are organized within single districts. A board of trustees, either elected locally or appointed by a governmental agency, establishes policy for the institution and employs a chief executive officer. Vice presidents or deans manage business affairs, student personnel, academic instruction, and technical education. The department chairpersons report to the dean or vice president for instruction. In larger institutions, as shown in Figure 4.1, assistant superintendents and vice presidents may be added to manage detailed operations under each of the main functions. A college with over twenty thousand students may have more than fifty administrators, including a president, vice presidents, deans and associate deans, directors, and project managers, plus over forty managers of campus police, facilities, custodial operations, auxiliary services, international studies, and so on. A college with fewer than two thousand students may have considerably fewer administrators but still a president and vice presidents for administrative services, instruction, student devel- opment, and information technology, plus over twenty managers for institutional research, marketing, academic support, and so forth (Figure 4.2).

The multiunit independent district dates from the 1930s, with Chicago and Los Angeles as early examples. The multiunit districts usually arose when a college opened a branch campus that even- tually grew to a size warranting an independent administration. As shown in Figure 4.3, these multicollege districts operate with a central district organization headed by a president or chancellor and staffed with research coordinators, personnel administrators,

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Superintendent and President

Executive Assistant to the President

Executive Vice President

Campus Counsel

Vice President Academic

Affairs

Board of Trustees

External Programs

Institutional Development

Information Technology

Grants

Sustainability Coordination

Instructional Services

Vice President Student Affairs

Director Government Relations and Institutional

Communications

Vice President Enrollment

Development

Vice President Human

Resources

Vice President Business

Administration

Academic Affairs

Student Success

Initiatives

Online Services/ Support

Learning Resources

Workforce Development

Special Programs

Student Life

Counseling/ Retention

Campus Security/

Health and Safety

Community Relations

Public Information

Facilities Programming

College Foundation

Enrollment Services

International Education

Financial Aid/

Scholarships

Institutional Research

Web Content/ Digital

Marketing

Human Resources

Personnel Commission

Facilities Management

Facilities Planning

Business Services

Fiscal Services

Risk Management

Figure 4.1. Organization Chart for a Large Community College

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Governing Board

Liberal Arts

President

Purchasing

Executive Assistant to the President

Vice President Information Technology

Vice President Human Resources

Vice President Administration

Director Public Information and

College Foundation

Vice President Instruction/

Provost

Director Economic Research

and Workforce DevelopmentBusiness and

Technology

Extended Learning

Mathematics, Sciences and

Health Services

Academic Support

Student Services and Athletics

Curriculum, Learning and Assessment

College Foundation

Public Information

Creative Services/ Marketing

Facilities and Maintenance

Financial Operations

Institutional Research

Budget and Payroll Services

Human Resources

Professional Development and Learning Innovations

Occupational Safety and

Health

College Libraries

Administrative Computing

Computer Labs/ Repair

Network Management

Figure 4.2. Organization Chart for a Small Community College

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116 THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Chancellor

Governing Board

Vice Chancellor

Human Resources

Vice Chancellor Academic

Affairs

Vice Chancellor

Business Services

Vice Chancellor Information

Technologies

Vice Chancellor

Student Development, Community

Affairs Employee Services

Legal Counsel

Computer Operations

Library Technical Services

Finance/ Accounting

Financial Planning and

Budget

Strategic Business

Operations

Student Development

Services

Government Relations

Public Relations and

Marketing

Facilities and

Planning

International Education

Institutional Effectiveness

Business and Workforce

Development

Curriculum Development

College President

Assistant to Chancellor

Figure 4.3. Organization Chart for a Multicollege District

business managers, and numerous others responsible for overall academic, fiscal, and student services. Some multiunit districts, such as St. Louis, operate under a single-college, multicampus format.

Multiunit districts are far more complex, structured, and formal- ized than single-college districts. Those who advocate centralizing administration generally stress greater economy and uniformity of decisions. As long ago as 1969, Kintzer, Jensen, and Hansen con- cluded that although highly centralized colleges are characterized by maximum uniformity, impartiality, and efficiency, the risks are

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Organization, Governance, and Administration 117

depersonalization and low morale. Lander (1977) showed that, when multiunit districts in Arizona were formed, another stratum of administrators was inserted between the first-line administrators at each college and the district’s chief administrator. He concluded that increased size—the major factor contributing to structural differences—forced increases in complexity of function, formality in communication, delegation of responsibility, and centralization of ultimate authority.

Reducing duplication is the centralized structure’s main benefit. It brings together purchasing, data processing, facilities planning, personnel research, finance, physical plant, and contracting; stan- dardizes recruiting, fringe benefits, and payroll and affirmative action procedures; provides specialized personnel for collective bargaining purposes; fosters the equal treatment of support ser- vices, salaries, promotions, grievances, and resource allocation; minimizes rivalry and competition between campuses at the same time that it enhances recruitment campaigns, publicity, grantsman- ship, community service, and coordination; facilitates educational program coordination and staff development; and permits the for- mation of vocational advisory committees for each occupational field rather than one area on separate campuses.

But balancing the district’s needs to centralize functions with the campus staff members’ desires for autonomy is a continuing challenge. Ideally, participation in decision making would be shared at all levels, from the central office to the various campus departments, but power tends to gravitate toward the central district administration. As an example, in nearly all multiunit districts, budget requests may be generated on each campus, but only within the guidelines and limitations set down by the central authority. The central district offices often also maintain separate legal affairs offices to ensure that all decisions on personnel selection and assignments are made in accordance with the terms of the contracts and laws governing the institution.

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118 THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

The issue of participation is important in an era when empow- erment and involvement of all campus constituents has become a guiding principle of administration. In California, shared gov- ernance was mandated in the late 1980s as a way of ensuring that the faculty and the rest of the staff could give input on all decisions. The result has been a flurry of documents that have attempted to sort out responsibilities among faculty associations, academic senates, classified staff organizations, local boards, local and district administrations, and the state board and chancel- lor’s offices. Shared governance varies, depending on state laws and court decisions. In 2007, the faculty senate at Diablo Val- ley College (California) objected to an administrative decision to replace part-time faculty administrators with full-time professional deans, thus changing a forty-year tradition of academic adminis- tration. But a court of appeals moved that such reorganization is an administrative prerogative (Freedman and Freedman, 2007).

Investigating the extent to which shared governance changed administrative patterns and decision making in California’s com- munity colleges after the 1988 state mandate, Flanigan (1994) found that faculty involvement on committees had certainly increased but that neither the quality of committee meetings and reports nor the level of trust between faculty and administration had changed. What had changed was that the decision-making process slowed because of the need to involve groups of administra- tors, faculty, and classified staff, each with its own special interests. Schuetz (1999) concluded that implementing shared governance slows decision making and polarizes campus constituencies. On the other hand, shared governance may improve campus com- munication, increase the breadth of understanding related to issues, and promote buy-in to decisions by all parties. In addi- tion, whereas other constituencies may feel able to represent their interests through alternate means, such as collective bargaining, students may feel that shared governance is a particularly valuable procedure—perhaps the only workable avenue for their input.

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Organization, Governance, and Administration 119

The State

Publicly supported colleges are under the control of a single authority in numerous states. In 1965, Blocker, Plummer, and Richardson identified twenty states where the community colleges were under the control of a board of education and six where the colleges reported to a state department or superintendent of education. Separate junior college boards or commissions existed in only six states; in thirteen others, the colleges were under a board of higher education or the board of a four-year state university. Kintzer (1980a) found fifteen states with boards responsible for community colleges only.

The state has since become even more prominent. According to the Education Commission of the States’ (2012) Postsecondary Governance Structures Database, all fifty states exhibit some form of state-level coordination, and most fall into five primary models developed by Tollefson, Garrett, and Ingram (1999). A state board of education controlled seven states’ community college systems as in Idaho and Oregon, and a state board or commission of higher education governed eleven (New York and Texas are examples). A statewide coordinating board was in existence in sixteen states (for example, California and Washington); a state governing board for community colleges in seven including Delaware and Colorado; and in seven states (Alaska and Hawaii, for instance) community colleges were under the authority of a statewide board of regents. Some states were not typical of any of the five models. For example, there was no official statewide governing or coordinating body in Arizona or Michigan, although Michigan’s state board of education played a limited coordinating function and Arizona’s Community College Presidents’ Council voluntarily did the same for its ten districts. Several other states contained governing or coordinating bodies with overlapping authority.

Where the public community colleges are governed by a state board, decisions of funding and operation have become maximally

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120 THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

centralized. Statewide bargaining and budgeting are the norm, although some autonomy in curriculum planning has been reserved for the individual colleges. Figure 4.4 shows an organization of a state community college system. However, depending on the authority of the state board and its responsibilities, there is still much variation. Highly centralized Washington has extensive education and information technology units as well as numerous budget specialists, whereas the Oregon Board of Education’s Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development has a minimal staff. The California Community College’s Chan- cellor’s Office has ten vice chancellors (up from five in 2006) in charge of everything from legal affairs and governmental relations to student services and curriculum and instruction.

A combined state university and community college system has been established in many states. More than one hundred two-year colleges, campuses, or institutes affiliated with state universities exist in eighteen states. For example, along with the community colleges in Ohio are many university two-year branches. All public community colleges in Alaska and Hawaii are under the state university system. The university president is the chief executive officer, and the presidents of the colleges answer to the univer- sity executives rather than to their own governing boards (see Figure 4.5). The university boards of regents establish policy. The University of Wisconsin system operates more like a statewide multicampus district, with a chancellor heading the system and each campus under the direction of a dean (Wisconsin also has a separate Vocational, Technical, and Adult Education system). The community colleges, state university branches, and technical colleges in Minnesota were combined into one system in 1995 (the University of Minnesota was excluded from the merger).

A single state community college board that can exert influence on the legislature, compete with the university for funding, and coordinate a statewide college development system seems appeal- ing. If the boards responsible for community colleges were also

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Chancellor

Vice Chancellor Programs

Board of Governors

Executive Assistant to the Chancellor

Executive Vice Chancellor

Legal Affairs and Internal Operations

General Counsel

Human Resources

Business Services

Vice Chancellor Communications

Communications

Research Analysis and

Accountability

Telecommunications and Technology

Management Information

Systems

Government Relations

Technology, Research, and Information

Systems

Network Support and Operations

Facilities Planning

Finance and Facilities Planning

Fiscal Services

Basic Skills and English as a Second Language

Curriculum and

Instruction

Instructional Programs and

Services

Student Services and

Special Programs

Workforce and Economic Development

Academic Affairs

Figure 4.4. Organization of a State Community College System

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Board of Regents

Vice President Finance and

Budget

Vice President Administration

Information Technology

Services

Community College

Administrative Affairs

President University System

Vice President Community

Colleges

Vice President Academic

Planning and Policy

Vice President Research

Vice President Student Affairs

Community College

Academic Affairs

Community College

Chancellor

Community College

Chancellor

Community College

Chancellor

Community College

Chancellor

Community College

Chancellor

Community College

Chancellor

Figure 4.5. Organization Chart for a University-Controlled Commu- nity College System

responsible for all of higher education, a thoroughly coordinated, economical, and articulated pattern of higher education for the state might result. Ideal in theory, this practice has not been universally adopted, and where it has its benefits have not been uniformly realized. Institutional competition for support defies any organizational plan.

Increasingly, state agencies have assumed control over expendi- tures and program planning and have promulgated rules for nearly all aspects of college functioning, from the employment of person- nel to the space a college should allocate for different functions. Numerous authors have documented complaints about duplication, contradictory regulations, and the mass of approvals that must be

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Organization, Governance, and Administration 123

garnered from various regulatory agencies before college leaders can make a move. The problem is not merely one of decision-making authority between the colleges and the state board; it relates also to other agencies. Washington, for example, has a state board and thirty-four district boards, all appointed by the governor. In addition, executive orders from the governor, directives from the Office of Financial Management, and contractual controls, legal opinions, and audits stemming from numerous state agencies must be taken into account in the colleges’ decision-making process.

In most states, college autonomy is continually compromised. In 2006, the thirty-nine community college districts in Illinois sued the state, asking the court to declare the colleges as local agencies so that their staff would not be classified as state employees and thus have the state ethics rules supersede those of the local districts (“Illinois Colleges,” 2006). But Virginia has introduced an ambitious program designed to allow greater autonomy among its higher education institutions. As the effort develops, the public colleges within the state will be allowed to earn interest on the tuition and fees they collect, to carry over unexpended balances into successive years, and to seek increased operational authority “in areas including procurement, leases, personnel, and capital outlay” (Couturier, 2006). The initiative is set up so that as an institution demonstrates responsibility it may petition for autonomy in additional areas such as selling surplus property, using locally developed construction management contracts, and establishing policies for designating which staff are classified as administrators and which as faculty. Eventually, an institution may have such powers that it functions nearly as a charter school, establishing its own tuition and fees and finance and accounting mechanisms.

Many commentators believe that state-level coordination has made college leaders’ jobs more difficult and the colleges less responsive to local communities. However, advantages of greater state-level coordination have also been documented. Funding is more equitable than it was when community college districts

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depended on local tax revenues, and gaps between richer and poorer districts are less pronounced. Some states have devel- oped sophisticated management information systems and student information systems whereby all colleges provide data in uniform fashion; the data then can be cross-tabulated for the benefit of planners at individual institutions and can be used to generate reports for other state and federal agencies. Articulation between community colleges and public universities in the same state has also been enhanced when statewide coordination is evident. In addition, a state board is better able to speak to the legislature with a single voice.

The line between statewide coordination and state control is fine. Many educators would prefer that the resources be provided with no strings attached, contending that state mandates regarding the programs and services to be provided unduly restrict their efforts to offer the proper services for their constituents. State-level coor- dination has certainly moved decision making to broader political arenas, and it has fostered the development of administrators whose chief responsibility is to interpret the codes. But it has also yielded more stable funding, more services for certain groups of students, such as the disabled, and higher standards of operation. Further, it has helped minimize program duplication and can be effective in encouraging or mandating collaboration among community col- leges and K–12 and university systems. The question of whether it has been of general benefit or detriment cannot be answered. We can say only that it has changed the ground rules for institutional operation, the professional outlook of the staff, and the way the public perceives the college as no longer their local school but as a part of a remotely controlled state system.

It has given the top administrators a new role as well. Weisman and Vaughan’s 2006 survey of more than five hundred public com- munity college presidents reported that 93 percent of them visited the state legislature the last time it was in session to advocate for

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their institutions. Half of them said they spoke with state represen- tatives and state senators more than ten times a year, and two-thirds reported speaking with their Congressional representative or U.S. Senator two to ten times yearly. Furthermore, associations often encourage their members to write their representatives about issues or to invite them to visit their campuses. This type of activity adds to costs: “80 community colleges spent a total of about $4.3 million in 2005, with 12 of them reporting expenditures of at least $100, 000” (Lederman, 2006, p. 3). This does not include the pro- fessional associations whose governmental relations offices spend much time and resources in what is called providing information on pending legislation. The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and the statewide institutional associations are deeply involved in such activities; scan any issue of their newslet- ters. Although AACC is not an official lobbying organization, four of its staff members are registered lobbyists. Like many other associations that avoid being tagged as lobbyists under the Fed- eral Lobbying Disclosure Act or the Internal Revenue code, they operate in a gray area.

Establishing a new community college has certainly become a more complex undertaking since state-level coordination became prominent. In the 1920s, a local school may have done little more to start a college than to get the state board of education’s approval to offer some postsecondary classes. The 1907 California enabling act stipulated merely that the board of trustees might charge tuition for such classes. Gradually, the criteria expanded to include minimum enrollments, minimum district population, and tax support.

By 1960, the general guidelines for establishing community colleges included “(1) general legislative authorization of two-year colleges, (2) local action by petition, election, or action by local board of control, (3) approval by a state agency, (4) a minimum assessed valuation considered adequate for sound fiscal support of the college, (5) a state or local survey to demonstrate the need

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for the college, (6) a minimum population of school age, (7) a minimum total population of the district, (8) a minimum potential college enrollment, (9) types of educational programs (curricula) to be offered, (10) availability and adequacy of physical facilities, (11) compliance with state operating policies, (12) proximity of other institutions” (Morrison and Martorana, 1961). By the 1970s, Evans and Neagley (1973) had authored an entire book showing the various patterns of college establishment. They discussed state regulations, local needs studies, and ways of securing local support; spelled out guidelines for appointing and organizing the board of trustees; and presented sample organizational charts and recruiting and selection procedures for staff.

The growth rate ended abruptly, and few community col- leges were established during the 1980s and 1990s. One of those, Cascadia Community College (Washington), required a ten-year process involving population, participation, and feasibility studies to demonstrate need for the college; legislative processes to autho- rize the college and fund preplanning studies, which proceeded with the participation of the sixty-member Citizen’s Advisory Committee; site acquisition studies and funding; coordination with the Higher Education Coordinating Board and the University of Washington; planning of curriculum by an established college under direction of the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges; development of a master plan; and phased construction of facilities under compliance with state and local codes. Cascadia opened for regular classes in fall 2000, on a campus shared with the University of Washington, Bothell.

However, the process is not always that complicated. In 2007, voters in two Idaho counties gave a two-thirds majority to a proposal to organize a community college in Boise. They were assisted by voter-registration and advertising campaigns supported by local businesses, and Boise State University agreed to donate one of its campuses until funds for additional facilities could be collected. The College of Western Idaho opened on that site in 2009.

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Federal Role

The federal role in community college management has not differed much from its role in all of higher education. The community college sector has taken advantage of federal funding available for certain programs—for example, programs to train technicians, displaced workers, and various categories of underprivileged people. The colleges have eagerly sought these types of funds and built programs accordingly. Federally guaranteed student loans and other categories of financial aid have affected the community colleges less than they have the higher-cost universities, but they represent an important source of funds for the institutions.

Federal guidelines that minorities, women, and the disabled be provided with equal accessto highereducation,aswell asaffirmative action rulingsby the courts,have pushed the collegesto modify their employment practices. And federal money available to institutions that take prescribed steps to increase the number of certificates and degrees awarded, often in high-demand occupational fields or to underserved groups, has stimulated colleges to ramp up enrollment and completion efforts as well as to develop elaborate systems for tracking student progress and outcomes (see Chapter Fourteen, on outcomes). However, each state has had a considerably greater influence than the federal government on the policies governing the colleges within its borders.

Accreditation

Accreditation, the external review of institutions and programs, began in the early twentieth century as institutions of higher education sought to establish minimum standards for student admis- sion, faculty qualifications, and institutional resources, including finances, curriculum, and library holdings. The earliest junior col- leges were accredited by nearby universities. The University of Chicago approved the courses offered by Joliet Junior College, and by 1929 the University of Missouri had accredited eighteen

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colleges in the state. The universities in several other states per- formed similar functions, and in some states the state departments of education accredited the junior colleges.

The standards for accreditation varied greatly, and the regional accrediting associations soon attempted to adopt standards that would apply across the colleges in their area of oversight. The North Central Association and the Southern Association were early in that process. By 1930, all the regional accrediting agencies had adopted minimum standards that centered on faculty qualifi- cations and teaching schedules, student admission and graduation requirements, curriculum, college revenue, buildings, equipment, and size of library holdings. Although the universities have aban- doned the practice of accrediting community colleges, they still have an effect on college programs because of the requirements that most of them impose on the transferability of student credits.

Accreditation serves several purposes, including ensuring qual- ity, easing transfer, and sending signals to employers and the public that programs have met certain minimal standards. Accreditation is also required for access to federal funds, since the federal govern- ment relies on accreditors to determine which institutions—and, indirectly, which students—are eligible to receive federal aid. Recognition by a federally approved accreditation agency thus serves in lieu of a governmental monitoring agency. In fact, it was federal demand for accreditation that converted what was formally a voluntary process into a mandatory procedure.

The accrediting procedure rests on several characteristics. The accrediting agency sets standards, and the institution seeking accreditation conducts a self-study that considers college per- formance in the light of those standards. A team selected by the accrediting agency visits the institution and, assuming it is satisfied that the applicant has reported its practices accurately, reports back to the agency, which thereupon grants accreditation status. This process is repeated periodically.

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The regional accrediting association process often overlaps with similar reviews conducted by state-level governing boards. Four statewide indicator systems are typically used. First is one similar to that found in K–12 systems, in which inputs, processes, and outcomes are examined to measure value added. Second is resource use and efficiency, physical resources, faculty, and space. Third is the magnitude of state returns on investment, typically the preparation of a skilled workforce and the number and quality of graduates to fill jobs. And last is customer need and return on investment; this one considers rates of persistence, degree completion, and employment.

The state agencies have emphasized these types of institutional outcomes, sometimes called effectiveness measures, which often include licensure pass rates. Although the accrediting agencies also consider such measures, they have been increasingly more con- cerned with direct evidence of student learning. As an example, the Southern Association in 1986 adopted an institutional effective- ness standard that required every institution to provide evidence of its goals for student learning (Smith and Pather, 1986). All the regional accrediting organizations had similar policies in place by the mid-1990s. Industry-based skills standards have grown as well, thereby effecting a form of accreditation manifest by business and industrial companies.

Criticisms of the accreditation process take many forms. One concern is that the regional accrediting associations vary in their standards and treatment of colleges with different emphases, although the Council for Higher Education Accreditation attempts to collocate these. Obstacles to outcomes-oriented stan- dards include limited research expertise among community college staff members, the vagueness of the accreditation guidelines, and the tendency of colleges to formulate goals as statements of process rather than statements of outcomes (Palmer, 1993). Ewell summed up some of the criticism, saying that few colleges “have progressed beyond superficial engagement with ‘assessment,’

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though accrediting organizations have been asking them to do so for years” (2001, p. 4). A question still remains about the extent of overlap, similarity, or differences among the standards, often written as “indicators,” that accrediting associations and state governing boards, agencies, and commissions have proposed.

Accreditation of distance education programs is a particu- larly thorny issue. Among the seventeen recognized regional and national institutional accreditors that scrutinize distance learning, standards and guidelines vary widely, not least because tradi- tional standards of faculty contact, library access, and campus facilities do not apply. Nonetheless, the recent moves toward assess- ing institutional effectiveness, outputs, or outcomes indicate a shift away from almost total reliance on resources and processes. As with any other major paradigm shift, it is taking many years to find its way into the main currents of thought manifest by practitioners.

Nontraditional Organizations

Regardless of the form of institutional control, different organiza- tional patterns have been tried. The noncampus college became popular in the 1970s. Because such institutions typically employed few full-time instructors and offered much of their program through reproducible media—once including open-circuit television and today primarily through the Internet—their administrative patterns differed. A president would report to a district-wide chancellor, but program directors or associate deans would take responsibility for separate geographical service areas. Furthermore, because of the emphasis on rapid change in course design, instructional planners would be more prominent than department or division chairpersons. Coastline (California), Rio Salado (Arizona), and the Community College of Vermont were notable examples of colleges without walls.

At the other extreme, the continuing search for ways of bringing the decision-making process closer to faculty and students led to the

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development of cluster colleges, or small, semiautonomous units. The more freedom the smaller unit has to design its own academic program and to set its own rules of conduct for staff and students, the more it fits the ideal of a subcollege operating under the umbrella of a parent organization that provides budgets, legal authority, and general administration along with access to a central library, auditorium, and sports facilities. Traditional academic departments have been conspicuously absent in most cluster college plans, and student services are usually decentralized, each cluster having its own set of counselors. Advocates of cluster colleges have put them forth as the best system for bringing students and staff into the process of making decisions about the types of programs that should be presented.

Other special organizational forms have included colleges organized for particular purposes, for instance, technical institutes built as separate colleges in multicampus districts. Some of these have a long history; Los Angeles Trade and Technical College dates from 1925. San Francisco’s Community College Centers were formed in 1970 to coordinate all noncredit activities. Miami Dade’s Medical Center is of more recent vintage and is even more highly specialized. Santa Monica’s Emeritus College (California), designed for and operated by senior citizens, is another form of a college within a college.

Community colleges that have been approved to confer the baccalaureate in one or more fields no longer fit within the defini- tion of a community college offered in Chapter One of this book. Nonetheless, the majority of these institutions adhere to the orga- nizational, governance, and accreditation systems and standards described in the preceding pages. Indeed, many such colleges offer only one or two baccalaureate programs and function as community colleges in every other respect. Thus, while baccalaureate-granting community colleges hover in classification no-man’s land—no longer a two-year college but differing in significant ways from other four-year schools—they have not yet drifted so far from their

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origins as to display unique patterns of organization, governance, and administration.

Local Governing Boards

The idea of a lay governing board is an old concept in American education; public schools have used elected boards to reflect the collective will of the people since earliest times. Ideally, the local board is the bridge between college and community, translating community needs for education into college policies and protecting the college from untoward external demands. This places the board in the role of mediator, conveying information from college to community and back. The board agenda is that the college maintain a positive image, which translates into continued public support.

The demographics of community college governing boards are similar to those of university trustees. After reviewing several studies of trustee composition and attitude, both Piland (1994) and Vaughan and Weisman (1997) reported that, whether elected or appointed, the board members are predominantly white male, college graduate, high-income, middle-aged people with professional or managerial occupations, who tend to hold mainstream views on college admissions policies and traditional program functions. A recent survey confirmed these findings: in 2009, 82 percent of trustees were white; 66 percent were male; a majority were between the ages of 60 and 80. Over half of all trustees made more than $100, 000 annually, and 18 percent made more than $200, 000; 32 percent hailed from the business sector and 29 percent from education (Moltz, 2009). But those are national figures; board members in large, urban districts increasingly are more representative of minority populations.

Community college boards usually consist of from five to ten members elected from the district at large, typically for four-year terms.Theymaymeetonceortwiceamonth,andsometimesweekly. Their responsibilities include selecting, evaluating, and dismissing

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the president; ensuring professional management of the institution; purchasing, constructing, and maintaining facilities; defining the role and mission of the college; engaging in public relations; approving programs; determining staff salaries; and contracting for services. But these powers vary among states; the local boards in Illinois set the student fees, whereas in California they do not.

Because the boards are public corporations, they are legally responsible for all college affairs. This status involves them in legal actions regarding personnel and the purchase of materials (competitive bidding, advertising, special designs). Therefore, as Potter (1976) showed, a board must have a working knowledge of educational law and be able to recognize potential legal problems before they develop into actual litigation. He offered examples of lawsuits brought on by students, faculty members, and other parties—for example, suits by students in relation to tuition or over disruptions on campus (which, they contended, interfered with their education) and suits by faculty members, who have usually engaged in litigation because of dismissal from their jobs. Cloud (2004) traced legal issues ranging from students’ rights to risk management. Maintaining student rights is essential because “courts of law have consistently found that the relationship between students and their postsecondary institutions is a contractual one” (Mawdsley, 2004, p. 5). As consumers, students have the right to services as advertised. As citizens they have the right to due process regarding dismissal or expectations about their behavior. Students are also entitled to a safe campus environment.

Due process also comes into play in considering the dismissal of faculty members. For the most part dismissal can be successfully pursued if an instructor can be shown to be incompetent, insub- ordinate, immoral, or neglectful of job responsibilities (Fossey and Wood, 2004). Ownership of material prepared for distance edu- cation is another point of institutional concern. College policies typically divide ownership of such material depending on how it was prepared; if created by faculty members on their own time, they

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would retain ownership, but the college would own the product if it commissioned and contributed faculty time and other resources.

Governing boards are political entities, and the selection of a trustee may be viewed as a political act in which the appointing authority or the voters weigh costs and benefits. A trustee appoint- ment by a governor may be used to mend political fences, but it may also alienate members of the public who are opposed to the appointees. The elected trustee usually has more power or political independence than the appointed one, but only at the price of the financial and emotional rigors of a political campaign. In instances where the faculty union has contributed heavily to a trustee’s election campaign, its influence may be palpable—for example, when the newly elected trustee votes immediately to dismiss a chief executive officer who has fallen out of favor with the union.

State associations for community college presidents and trustees have been prominent in about two-thirds of the states. These vol- untary organizations typically coordinate statewide conferences and meetings, conduct professional development workshops for various types of administrators, arrange orientation sessions for newly appointed trustees, prepare and distribute newsletters, and monitor legislation. They provide an avenue for chief adminis- trators and trustees from the colleges within a state to meet and discuss topics of common interest. Active associations that cross state lines, such as the New England College Council, operate in similar fashion. Support for these associations most often comes from members’ dues, but some have received funds from the state or a philanthropic institution.

The Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) has also been active in apprising board members of the desirability of their taking a prominent role in college affairs. Since the ACCT was organized in 1972, its publications and conferences have been directed toward moving board members away from a rubber-stamp mentality that approves everything the college administration presents. Along with the Association of Governing

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Boards, it has stressed the importance of the board’s monitoring the college’s fiscal affairs and public relations and the necessity for open communication between the board and the college president. State offices in North Carolina and Florida, among others, have also published manuals for trustee guidance.

The way that many board members approach their work has changed during the history of the community college. Certainly, the organizations have become more complex, and board members must respond to more initiatives from personnel organizations in the college and from monitoring and controlling agents outside the institution. Furthermore, the notion of trustee liability, well docu- mented by Kaplin and Lee (2013), has become more pronounced. Less frequently seen in the literature but nonetheless prevalent are contentions that trustees sometimes go too far in their tendencies to manage the colleges. Greater control seems inevitably to follow greater responsibility.

Administration

All colleges must have administration, although the way this func- tion is organized and staffed differs from one college to another. In the medieval university, students were powerful, often fixing tuition charges and determining the curriculum; nevertheless, the faculty was the controlling wheel of the institution. During the nineteenth century, a system of centralized control devel- oped in the United States, and faculty power diminished as the administration took over the university. The professors concen- trated on their research, scholarship, and teaching, and professional managers controlled the affairs of administration, thus dividing the ranks between administrators and teachers.

The President

Community colleges, like their university counterparts, followed this general pattern, and gradually the presidents gained a fair

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amount of institutional control. Yet the role of the president changed as colleges grew larger, and as faculty and community advocate groups grew stronger it became ever more circumscribed. Still, the president was the spokesperson for the college, interpret- ing it to the public on ceremonial occasions. The president was also the scapegoat when staff morale or funds for a favored program diminished.

Community colleges with roots in the secondary schools usually were managed by former instructors who had become first part-time and then full-time administrators. Monroe (1972) described many of them as autocrats who had freed “themselves from the control of their superiors and the general public. They assumed a paternalistic, superior attitude toward the teachers. Administrative decisions of the past have often gone unquestioned by governing boards. The members of the boards rubber stamp administrative policies and decisions so that, in practice, the college’s administrators become the decision makers of the college” (p. 305). But he was speaking of a time gone by. In the 1970s, the all-powerful president had disappeared from all but the smallest colleges, and the governing boards had become ever more intrusive.

The tenure of presidents is typically shorter than that for faculty but sufficiently long to suggest that the job is not particularly precarious. The 2006 average of seven years was little changed from the means reported in surveys over the previous twenty years (Weisman and Vaughan, 2007). A full 28 percent had moved into their current position from another community college presidency, and 35 percent came from other positions in the same institution. Members of minority groups totaled 19 percent. Female presidents accounted for 11 percent in 1991, 28 percent in 2001, and 32 percent in 2010.

Primarily, the president carries out general administrative duties and has periodic meetings with the board and the heads of state agencies. To a lesser extent, the president makes decisions on

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faculty recruitment and selection, conducts public relations activ- ities, and coordinates the college program with programs of other institutions and community groups. Fundraising, always high on the list of responsibilities assumed by presidents of private colleges, has recently come to occupy more of the public college presi- dent’s time, too. Vaughan and Weisman (1998) detailed several areas of presidential focus, including mediating disputes, acting as an educational leader, and serving as an institutional symbol. Moriarty (1994) listed the president’s tasks under the major head- ings of leadership (college mission, values, resources), management (administrative staff and functions), and direct office functions (personal, social).

In their discussion “Leadership Blues,” March and Weiner (2003) asserted that the problems afflicting administrators are usually not major issues of educational policy but reflections of campus struggles. The outcomes of these contentions usually “in- volve short-term political advantage and some redistribution of power and influence on college campuses” (p. 8). Furthermore, “loss of employee morale or trustee confidence is a likely ticket out of town for an administrator, whereas institutional ineffectiveness, stale curricula, or anemic graduation or student transfer rates can often be lost in the noise of campus politics” (p. 8). The points of contention need not be very large to elicit much anger, pos- turing, and bad feelings and to result in lingering resentments. In summation, the style or intentions of leaders often founder on the rocks of personal relations. That is why relationship building is as important as fundraising and financial management.

Administrative Structure

So many administrative patterns have been advocated that it is impossible to describe an ideal form. In the line-staff organization described by Blocker, Plummer, and Richardson (1965) and cur- rently in operation in many colleges (though usually with added layers of authority), the president reports to the board of trustees.

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Under the president on the organization chart are vice presidents, usually one of whom is responsible for academic affairs, curriculum, and instruction. Under this vice president are deans of liberal arts and sciences, occupational education, and continuing or commu- nity education. Under the deans are department or division chairs and guidance personnel, and under them the faculty. According to Blocker and his coauthors, such an organization places the major emphasis on college functions.

The college deans are usually line officers in charge of planning and supervising one or a combination of college programs con- cerned with instruction, student services, or community services. The larger colleges may also have deans for college development and for admissions, but deans of men and women, prominent in the early colleges, have disappeared from the public colleges. Like the president and vice presidents, each dean becomes involved with legal issues, public relations, intrainstitutional administration and personnel matters, budgeting, and liaison with state and federal agencies.

Designating faculty and instructional managers as vice presi- dents for academic affairs instead of deans of instruction suggests some broader changes in management that have occurred grad- ually. Formerly the deans were directly responsible for assigning and evaluating faculty, planning curriculum, and introducing and evaluating instructional processes. Now those activities have been relegated to the departmental ordivisional level,much asthey are in the universities where overall instructional planning and manage- ment is virtually nonexistent. In many colleges the tension between the academic senate, a faculty organization, and the administra- tors nominally in charge of academic affairs makes broadscale management of curriculum and instruction nearly impossible.

Departmental Structure

The academic program in community colleges has usually been provided through departments or divisions organized around a

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cluster of academic disciplines or related teaching fields. The primary objective in creating academic departments, inherited from the universities, was to create manageable organizational units, not necessarily to interrelate the teaching of certain subjects or to build interdisciplinary courses. The number of departments is related to institutional size; in small colleges where not more than one or two instructors may be teaching in any subject, the combination of teaching fields within a single unit may be quite broad. In the larger institutions, the number of departments has often increased as the number of instructors teaching a single discipline has grown.

The academic department has been a basic building block in the organizational structure in nearly all community colleges. Its influ- ence has been quite marked. As an example, the administration may organize college-wide orientation sessions for new instructors, but true indoctrination takes place when the neophytes begin maintaining their offices in the suite assigned to the academic department of which they are members. And in-service faculty development workshops conducted on an institution-wide scale pale in comparison with the influence exerted by a senior depart- mental colleague’s pointed comment, “That’s not the way we do it around here!”

Departments often are responsible for constructing class sched- ules, assigning instructors, allocating funds for auxiliary employees and services—in short, for acting as miniature governmental units within the larger college structure. For this reason, many senior administrators have sought to retain control by minimizing depart- mental power—hence the move toward the larger organizational unit of the division. Other administrators have attempted to restrain the power of the department by having faculty mem- bers from different departments share office space or otherwise mixing the staff. But departments have survived in most insti- tutions, probably because the affinity among instructors teaching the same courses or courses in the same academic fields remains

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strong. Furthermore, some department chairpersons have served the administration well by maintaining certain records, supervising staff, screening applicants for positions, and reconciling conflicts among staff members and between staff members and students that might have been blown out of proportion if they had reached higher levels of arbitration.

Until the spread of collective bargaining in community colleges, the academic department remained the most popular organizational unit. However, as bargaining units were established, the chairper- sons with managerial responsibilities were often designated as administrators and thereby removed from the bargaining unit. At that point, the move toward organizing larger units or divi- sions accelerated, lest a college have thirty or forty administrators, each supervising only a few instructors. The distinction was not clear, though, and department chairpersons were considered faculty members in some contracts and administrators in others.

Lombardi (1974) reported studies showing lengthy lists of responsibilities for department chairpersons: sixty-nine discrete items in one statement; fifty-one in another. Hammons (1984), who studied department chairs extensively, reviewed a great num- ber of reports of chairperson responsibilities and activities and identified at least forty different functions categorized under five major headings: administration; student oriented; business and financial; faculty oriented; and curriculum and instruction. Finding a major problem to be that few of the chairs had received any preservice assistance in learning what their responsibilities were or how to fulfill them, he concluded that the role of the chair is among the most nebulous in the institution. Numerous responsibilities, most of them vaguely worded, are assigned, but few opportunities to learn how to manage them are provided. Finding that contempo- rary department chairs perform similar roles today, Young (2007) reported that they experienced moderate amounts of role conflict and overload, and Portolan (1992) found that many seemed to

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be experiencing a middle-management syndrome of feeling inef- fective and powerless. Faced with changing student populations, limited resources, and a range of faculty issues they had not been prepared to handle, they were developing feelings of alienation toward their work. The Academy for Leadership and Development has offered a yearlong, skills-based program since 1992, but most chairs, and indeed most chief instructional officers, have received little preparation for their specific jobs.

Leadership

When a character in Cervantes’ epic novel Don Quixote is directed to sit at the head of the table, he responds, “Wherever I sit will be the head of the table” (2003, p. 699). This aphorism, put in the mouths of various people over the past four hundred years, has become a symbol of leadership.

Why are some colleges consistently more successful than others in effecting student learning, sustaining staff morale, presenting a positive public image, managing growth, raising funds, and answering every challenge promptly and efficiently? According to many commentators, leadership is the answer. The successful colleges are blessed with the proper leaders: people who know how to guide their colleagues, stimulating each to put forth maximum effort toward attaining the proper goals.

Studies of leaders and leadership have a long history in the literature of higher education. Some analysts have sought the common traits exhibited by people in positions of leadership, usu- ally concluding that effective leaders are flexible, decisive, moral, courageous, goal-directed, scholarly individuals who are willing to take risks and have a concern for others; Vaughan (1994) covered these concepts for the administrators in community col- leges. Others—Richardson and Wolverton (1994) and Fryer and Lovas (1991), for example—consider leadership from a contex- tual perspective asking how leaders behave when confronted with

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situations in various academic cultures. Astin and Leland (1991) attempted to merge traits and contexts to describe leaders and leadership in terms of “vision, personal commitment, empower- ment, and risk” (p. xv). Together with Bensimon (1994), they related these characteristics to a feminist perspective that views the college not as a rationally managed, hierarchical organization but as a collectivity of interacting people.

Several of the broader works on leadership also articulate the necessity of viewing leadership as an interactive process. Burns’s (1978) classic, Leadership, separates the positions of power from the influence that true leaders have over those who follow them with- out coercion: “Some define leadership as leaders making followers do what followers would not otherwise do, or as leaders making followers do what the leaders want them to do; I define leadership as leaders inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspi- rations and expectations—of both leaders and followers” (p. 19). Wills (1994) agreed: “Where coercion exists, leadership becomes unnecessary or impossible to the extent of coercion’s existence … Coercion is not leadership any more than mesmerism is … The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leader and followers” (p. 70). The American Association of Community Colleges (2005) characterizes effective leaders as those who possess personal and interpersonal skills enabling them to work with staff in promoting the college’s mission. In sum, leaders are leaders only if they have others following them, and people are willing to follow only if they feel their goals are being furthered.

In an institution where the product—human learning—is infi- nite and the lines of authority not clearly demarcated, one does not issue orders and expect them to be obeyed pro forma. The astute leader knows that delivering broadsides, memoranda, newsletters, and the like has little influence on the way decisions are made or people behave. Face-to-face contact, small group meetings, and

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one-on-one explanations are the dominant influences. Adminis- trators who exercise leadership interact with the people involved. They personally negotiate among warring factions and talk with those who are instrumental in implementing new methods or pro- cedures. They do not take everyone’s advice or imply that they are going to, but they do ask questions, listen to the answers, and take them into account when it is time to make decisions.

Walker (1979) asserted that the more effective administrators are those who “accept the privileges and status of their office, but wear them lightly. They separate themselves, as individuals, from their office” (p. 4). They consider administration a process, not a series of discrete events, and they tend to be good politicians. He concludes that the personality of the administrator seems the most important ingredient; some have succeeded admirably and others have failed terribly, even while adhering to ostensibly similar administrative styles in the same type of organization. Eddy (2010) similarly asserted that there is no one way to lead, but rather than ascribing effective leadership to personality alone, she proposed a multidimensional model of community college leadership that is characterized by leader cognition, race and gender, the importance of culture and individual pathways to leadership positions, and the need for more collaborative modes of communication and decision making.

Regardless of concepts of leadership, the context of college management is being reshaped continuously. To ascertain com- pliance with state and federal regulations, the college counsel has become central to decision making. Where a bargaining unit exists, the union must be consulted on all but the most trivial decisions. The organization chart may show a staff pattern, but lines of authority do not follow boxes and arrows. State-level associations of deans, faculty members, and various college officers often take positions on legislation that may run counter to the position that a member’s home institution would prefer. Although the conferees are staff members at locally governed colleges, they exert a form

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of state-level management. A shadow government has reduced the local districts’ powers.

Leadership Training

Leadership training takes place in numerous venues. University- based programs were the earliest, and they still play a major role because they are accredited to award graduate degrees. Various consortia such as the League for Innovation in the Community College coordinate training programs, and the larger districts may join in sponsoring their own programs.

The types of training vary. Some programs center on specific aspects of administrative work, specifying in-basket exercises (“A parent has called alleging sexual harassment;” or “The faculty union has scheduled a strike for next week. What action do you take?”). Others emphasize theories of leadership, and still others place interns in the colleges to shadow administrators. But the various training exercises conducted by associations and leadership training programs in universities have been criticized for their limited effectiveness. Part of the reason is that power has shifted decidedly into the hands of funding agencies and subordinates. State boards, legislators, and faculty organizations must be consulted on all matters great and small. Theories of leadership may hold less value in the contemporary context; bottom-up control, cooperation, and collaboration have taken over. Programs need to emphasize the art of meaningful persuasion.

Collective Bargaining

Collective bargaining swept into higher education on the coattails of legislation authorizing public employees to negotiate. As these laws were passed in various states in the 1960s and 1970s, employee groups ranging from refuse collectors to prison guards gained union representation and began negotiating contracts. Within educa- tion, elementary and secondary school teachers were first to take

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advantage of the legislation, possibly because they were the furthest from professional autonomy. Community college faculties were next most likely to be represented by bargaining agents, with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers the two most prominent. By 1980, authorizing legislation had been passed in half the states. However, the spread of collective bargaining slowed notably; by 2001, a total of twenty-nine states had passed authorizing legislation (Kearney, 2001).

In 2011, 42 percent of the full-time faculty members in public community colleges were working under contracts negotiated col- lectively, as were 28 percent of the part-timers. The 415 contracts noted in Table 4.1 covered close to 119,000 faculty, or nearly one- third the total teaching staff. Due to higher numbers of part-time faculty in recent years, this percentage has decreased from nearly half of all community college instructors in 2005. (Overall, the union membership for government employees in America in 2011 was 37 percent, compared with 7 percent for private industry work- ers [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012b].) Nearly 60 percent of the community colleges where faculty were working under nego- tiated contracts are located in just five states: California, Illinois, Washington, New York, and Michigan. And almost three-quarters of all faculty (80 percent of the part-timers) covered by contracts are in those five states (National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, 2012).

The expansion of collective bargaining brought about a shift in administrative roles. In general, it marked the demise of the concept of paternalism, with the president as authority figure and opened an era of political accommodation among contending forces. These changes were difficult for many administrators whose experience had not prepared them for their different roles, but the realities of management within the confines of a negotiated contract so confronted them that they either learned to live with the restrictions or left the practice. Lombardi (1979), who traced the effects of collective bargaining on administrators, showed that

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T ab le

4 .1 .

N u m be r of

F ac u lt y C ol le ct iv e B ar ga in in g C on

tr ac ts

at T w o- Y ea r C ol le ge s by

A ge n ts , 1 9 6 6 – 2 0 1 1

Y ea r

N at io n al

A m er ic an

In de pe n de n t

O th er

T ot al

E du ca ti on

Fe de ra ti on

of A ss oc ia ti on

(i n cl ud in g a

A ss oc ia ti on

T ea ch er s

of U n iv er si ty

co m bi n at io n

P ro fe ss or s

of ag en ts )

19 66

1 1

0 0

0 2

19 70

6 3

1 10

7 27

19 75

71 52

3 23

1 15 0

19 80

14 1

72 5

16 2

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19 85

17 1

82 4

25 4

28 6

19 87

17 2

84 4

27 8

29 5

19 94

18 4

10 4

6 30

2 32 6

19 98

18 8

11 0

9 29

8 34 4

20 05

18 6

12 0

8 29

18 36 1

20 11

19 7

12 5

9 30

54 41 5

So ur ce :N

at io n al C en te r fo r th e S tu dy

of C ol le ct iv e B ar ga in in g in

H ig h er

E du ca ti on

an d th e P ro fe ss io n s, 19 74

–2 01 2.

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most accepted it reluctantly, recognizing that it reduced them to ministerial functionaries carrying out the decisions made dur- ing the negotiations. Other administrators welcomed collective bargaining—some because it enabled them to join forces with the union bureaucracy in controlling the faculty and others because it allowed them to avoid responsibility for their decisions. It has also increased administrators’ reliance on attorneys, whose role is to interpret the contracts.

The scope of contracts suggests the magnitude of their effect. Contract coverage includes management procedures; rights of bargaining agents; personnel policies and grievance procedures; academic items, such as class size and textbook selection; economic benefits; and working conditions. Under these broad headings, practically everything concerning institutional functioning is negotiable.

Collective bargaining drew a legal line between members of the bargaining unit and those outside it—between faculty on one side and administrators and trustees on the other. It also expanded the number of detailed rules of procedure. It prevented administrators from making ad hoc decisions about class size or scheduling, faculty assignments, committee structures, budget allocations, funding of special projects, and myriad other matters great and small. It forced a more formalized, impersonal pattern of interaction, denying whatever vestige of collegiality the staff in community colleges might have valued.

The effects of collective bargaining on staff salaries and morale have been examined repeatedly. Wiley’s (1993) review of several compensation studies concluded that a negotiated contract elevates salaries initially but that after a few years the difference between unionized and nonunionized campuses is minimal. Studies of staff satisfaction find only small differences but with a tilt toward greater satisfaction for the faculty on nonunionized campuses in governance, support, recognition, and workload (Finley, 1991). Still, once the faculty vote to establish a bargaining unit, they

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rarely decide to return to nonunion status. Overall, regardless of whether their campus has a bargaining unit, more than two-thirds of the faculty feel that collective bargaining by faculty members has a definite place in a community college (Outcalt, 2002b).

Collective bargaining seems to have accelerated a move to larger institutional units. In multicampus districts where the fac- ulty bargains as a district-wide unit, the district-level administration aggregates power, weakening the autonomy of the individual cam- puses. In states where the faculty bargaining unit negotiates a master contract for all the colleges, power gravitates toward the state level. At one extreme, this concentration of power may result in a federal system, in which certain powers are reserved for the individual colleges; at the other extreme, the colleges may func- tion as though they were a single statewide institution, with branch campuses in the different localities.

Overall, under collective bargaining, the faculty gained prerog- atives in establishing the conditions of the workplace, up to and including a voice in institutional governance. Administrators lost the freedom to act according to general principles and were forced to attend to the procedures specified in the contracts; both par- ties were restrained from reaching private agreements. In general, an informal relationship of faculty and administration as unequal parties became a formal compact of near equals. And governance and management patterns shifted notably as union representatives, administrators, and various committees and associations composed of people from within and outside the college district made more of the decisions affecting college operations.

Issues

Several issues swirl around the concepts of governance and admin- istration. Which elements of control should be maintained by state agencies? Which should be reserved for the local institutions? How much state coordination of secondary and postsecondary institutions is desirable?

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The college as a learning enterprise does not operate well when it is managed as a factory with inputs, process, and outputs as the model. Can anarchical elements of collegiality coexist with contracts negotiated by distant representatives? How does the flat profile of shared governance and interactive leadership change institutional functioning?

How does collective bargaining affect the faculty’s moves toward professionalization? Does it affect what occurs in the classroom? If so, how?

Will federal and state agency and accrediting association demands for accountability lead to institutional betterment? For how much longer will the colleges treat them as no more than mandated compliance activities?

Issues of productivity and accountability have been raised repeatedly. How can staff members be held responsible for their actions when most of the decisions that affect them are beyond their control? Does the larger bureaucracy protect the staff from external scrutiny? Will sizable numbers of the staff ever seriously consider performance indicators or outcome measures as meaningful reflections of their own work?

A historical view sees the colleges on firm ground. They have always faced crises of one type or another. In the 1950s their identity as prebaccalaureate or postsecondary occupational institutions was in question. In the 1960s they expanded so rapidly that finding adequate staff and facilities was an issue. In the 1970s collective bargaining and affirmative action were major concerns. In the 1980s administrators wondered how they would accommodate the rapid shift away from local and toward state financing. The 1990s saw funding limitations coupled with the threat of enrollment caps. These concerns continue in the twenty-first century and are joined by legislative demands for outcomes indicators and institutional accountability. And even though none of the crises is ever fully resolved, newer exigencies arise to shunt them aside.

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