from VCCA Journal, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring/Summer 1989, 4-10
© Copyright 1989 VCCA Journal
The ideology of the community college has never been clear, but its conflicting elements have usually maintained an uneasy balance. That balance, however uneasy, is no longer present. We see ideology as the values and beliefs behind mission statements and expressions of institutional goals. The ideology of the community college has always been in conflict because it has contained within itself the contrasting claims of Jeffersonian democracy with its call to prepare an educated citizenry and the claims of the technical and bureaucratic corporate state with its call to prepare a trained work force. This conflict is not just theoretical, but real. On one hand, a focus on individuals and their human, academic, and social development is the appropriate concern of higher education; on the other hand, a focus on corporate development needs is the appropriate focus of higher education. In the community college, this conflict is particularly salient because the institution lacks a history and a tradition of its own, is unsure of its connection to higher education, and is embedded in a commitment to responsiveness and to community. The focus has shifted from responsiveness to community expressed as student and community development, toward responsiveness to community expressed as economic development. In the process, the previously uneasy balance has been lost.
In the past, the ideology of the community college has kept the conflict contained and the goals in balance. The burgeoning of the community college during the 1960s and early 1970s was accompanied by an ideological fervor unparalleled in postsecondary education. Here was an institution whose time had come and whose mission was clear. It was the peace corps of the collegiate world. The evangelical period of the community college (mid 1950s through early 1970s) was a period in which the Jeffersonian component of the ideology drove the mission. The society supported the empowerment of minorities, disenfranchised groups, and citizens and workers outside the mainstream. The community college embraced the non-traditional students as its particular responsibility and attempted to educate them, along with its more traditional students, to become Jefferson's educated citizens. The leaders and the faculties of the community college participated in this ideology and this evangelical thrust. And perhaps, in retrospect, we overstepped our point of balance. Certainly, the shifts toward unlimited access to the courses and programs of the institution exceeded our balance point. Certainly, the calls for community development as the central activity of the community college exceeded our balance point. Then the center of ideological mass began to shift in the society at large. The ideology changed, and with it the balance among our many goals changed.
The ravages of time and events displaced the evangelical with a more mundane ideology; the bureaucratic corporate model gradually gained sway. That shift of ideology resulted in a fragmentation of mission as well as a shift in overall effort. The shift was from emphasis on human/student/community development to emphasis on economic development. Instead of being led by social activists both external and internal to education, the college found itself led by external economic and political powers and operating internally as a bureaucratic organization in a management-oriented society. The dominant theme of this current ideology became efficiency which emphasized management and control, assessment and accountability. It engendered an environment hostile to education and overtly anti-intellectual.
Like most other institutions, the community college itself matured and became less flexible, more bureaucratic, and discovered more need to justify its existence. In turn, this made it more vulnerable to external pressures. In a tactical move that would later prove quite costly, the colleges attempted to defend against these external pressures by bureaucratizing their missionary instinct. This defense meant that internal forces became less able to induce change, became frustrated; and the common view that the community college was an effective tool for social change broke down.
We believe the ideology of the community college has shifted too far and again has produced an imbalance. The four functions of the institution remain collegiate, career, community, and remedial education; but the balance is off. Ideology has led mission and goals to an extreme position that is both unstable and untenable. Commissions call for a return to community, but do not resolve the conflicting ideologies which view community as individual development or as economic development. Cohen calls for a return to collegiate education; others call for a focus on career education as the core function of the institution. These are all signs of the imbalance now existing and of the unresolved conflicts within our ideology.
A Shift in the Goals of the Community College
The founding model of the community college, which we elect to name the Jeffersonian Model of Community, has two goals. Those goals are as follows.
1. Educating for active citizenship. A disenfranchised or incompetent citizenry could not be tolerated by a participatory democracy, lest freedom itself be forfeit. This is achieved by focusing on three educational goals. (a) Development of social consciousness where concern for the welfare and development of others is a responsibility of the citizen. (b) Concern for quality of life. Mere survival is not acceptable. Instead we must teach the value of quality of life and also how to improve that of others as well as of ourselves. (c) Work as a component of the human condition. Work is seen as a worthy goal and a vital part of both the life of the citizen and the life of the community college. Work is, however, clearly subordinate to the preceding goals.
2. Using institutions to empower individuals. The Bureaucratic Corporate Model of Community, which has succeeded the Jeffersonian Model, also has a set of goals, which clearly differ from the Jeffersonian Model in the values they espouse. The goals of the Bureaucratic Corporate Model are as follows.
(a) Contributing to economic development. Economic development at the local level is reflective of the spirit of the times. It is a corollary of the trickle-down theory of economics. The associated educational goals are the following. (i) Training to meet industry's needs. The need to create a work force directed toward articulated needs of industry is seen as the key means by which economic development can be accomplished. (ii) Producing passive citizens. Implicitly, leadership within this model is the role of economic and political powers; rather than empowering the individual citizens, they (under this model) should be responsive to direction from above. (iii) Modeling docile workers. By further subordinating the faculty influence over curriculum (and probably college governance as a whole) this model generates a docile, disenfranchised faculty which then serves as a role model for its students. Since economic and political powers are seen as the most efficient leaders, the role of worker becomes responsiveness to the demands of the employers.
(b) Using individuals to empower institutions. Implementation of the preceding goal strengthens the power of societal, economic, and political leaders since their needs become the focal point, with the needs of the student/employee becoming subordinated.
Consequences of the Shift
This shift in ideology and goals is effectively a shift from a focus on the individual to a focus on collective or corporate entities within society. It is also a shift from the guiding vision of the student as active citizen and reformer to a view of the student as passive citizen and corporate member. As evangelical enthusiasm waned, the ideology shifted from an emphasis on human outcomes and the broad goals of social improvement and advancement. The underlying resistance to social change merged with the societal commitments to work and to the work place as ennobling. Career education and training activities flourished, and collegiate education moved to a secondary or tertiary position.
The perspective on the kind of knowledge that should be taught in the community college shifted. The liberal arts--taught to stimulate critical thinking, personal improvement, and responsible citizenship--were no longer considered high status knowledge. Instead, high status knowledge became the technical information and special skills appropriate to the work place. Even critical thinking was represented as an agglomeration of skills. Conformity and subordination of self to the organization were the values transmitted. All of higher education was affected by this shift, but the community college was affected the most. As institutions midway between secondary and higher education, as institutions balanced between training for work and education for responsible middle-class citizenship, the community college has been tenuously linked to the system of graded education running from kindergarten through the senior year of college. The connecting link has been the collegiate function, but with the shift away from collegiate education and the related decline in transfer students, the linkage has become very weak.
We rejoice when full-time student enrollment shows upswings and collegiate education/liberal arts enrollments expand. But these swings are local and short-term and, most importantly, driven by forces outside the community colleges. They are not of our doing. The overall direction of the community college in the 1980s is away from student development and toward economic development, away from collegiate education and student empowerment and toward industrial training and the reinforcement of passive behavior. We move from providing a vehicle for social mobility to becoming another cog in the apparatus of social reproduction. Within our institutions we have moved from a culture of hope, optimism, and enthusiasm epitomized by the "people's college" and "opportunity college" appellations of the '60s and '70s to a culture shaped by bureaucratic form, bounded by "outcomes measures," "productivity guidelines," and conditions of employment. These are the signs of organizational pathology, signs that ideology, goals, mission, and their expression in curriculum are out of balance.
The Shift Explained
The external pressures representing the ideology of the society have been undergoing rapid change. During the community college population explosion of the 1960s, its culture was a reflection of the "Great Society's ideology" and thus reflective of expectations that the community colleges would provide both a gateway of opportunity to the individual and a vehicle of general societal change. Now we have quite a different ideology. Community colleges are expected to serve society as it is, to be responsive to community by meeting economic needs over individual and social needs, to emphasize career education rather than a collegiate education and to train rather than to enable.
As a nation, we are experiencing a constriction of the middle class, both in terms of economics and in terms of empowerment. The decline of the middle class has the potential for destabilizing any democracy. Thus, it is not shocking that community colleges have been pressed into the breach. Where before we represented access (both via upward mobility and status maintenance) to the middle class and prepared students for that transition, today we provide functional literacy and instrumental training appropriate to membership in the working class. We are developing a work force that is trained rather than educated, that has minimal ability to conceptualize and communicate, and that expects to be led rather than to lead. This use of society's formal organizations, especially schools and colleges, to limit and redirect citizen expectation is not new. Among others, the GI Bills were created to compensate for a postwar oversupply of labor. While the GI Bills were not pernicious, they delayed entry into the work force, and they also broadened both skills and the educational bases for citizenship. On the other hand, the present use of the community college to reshape the work force is a response which threatens our democracy even more than the decline of the middle class. The community colleges are in effect institutionalizing the disenfranchisement of our working class. This can be a recipe for a cycle of limited opportunity and possible social unrest.
Even within the community college itself, we have sown the seeds of our own powerlessness. From the onset of the modern community college, we have emphasized the secondary school model of the faculty member: an employee who teaches and responds to administrative direction, but who does not lead either in terms of curriculum or in terms of external activities (e.g., research, publication, consulting). Thus, community college faculty members themselves have historically been disenfranchised within the context of their own institutions. As the public schools have become anti-intellectual institutions and their faculties reduced to the role of production workers, community colleges have increasingly become anti-intellectual institutions and their faculties functionaries within them. Small wonder, then, that those colleges were extremely vulnerable to pressures for a shift from the founding Jeffersonian model to the bureaucratic corporate model.
We are faced with a situation imbued with paradox. On the one hand, the proponents of traditional higher education are bemoaning the decline of general education, while on the other hand the spokesmen for the corporate community are demanding increased training for a remodeled work force in an increasingly competitive work place. Since the corporate influence has considerable political and at least short-term economic influence on this highly vulnerable facet of the postsecondary community, general education has largely been sacrificed, although in a covert manner. General education has never been clearly articulated within the community college, and therefore its vulnerability has been enhanced. Academic faculty have been the spokespeople of the collegiate function, and they have been neutralized by a lack of power to resist the demands of the corporate model.
We have succumbed to pressures and have become a training, rather than educational, arena. This shift to a training modality has also been encouraged by enrollment trends. Students, too, respond to short-term political and economic pressures. Since we have always drawn disproportionately from the underclass, and since that class has had its tentative economic situation made even more tentative by reductions in a variety of federal and state programs, it is not surprising that our students have a difficult time thinking ahead to the implications of curricular tracking.
Balance Restored
Administrators serve as the connectors and buffer between the society, here community and state, and the instructional activities of the institution. They must mediate between ideological, political, and economic demands as well as opportunities presented by society, and pressures generated by managing within a postsecondary institution and a specific institutional culture. Administrators must both manage and lead. To maintain balance, they must pay attention to both external forces represented by ideology, expressed in political and economic terms, and to the internal forces represented by faculty pressures on curriculum issues.
Just as the disenfranchised faculty inadvertently contributed to vulnerability by bowing to external pressures, that same faculty may be the means by which balance can be restored. And it may take place in a very interesting way. The ideology of the community college shapes the goals of the institution, and the goals shape the curriculum. During periods of shift and uncertainty, the institution's goals and curriculum are vulnerable. At the course level, faculty can control curriculum since they determine what will be taught, which texts and materials will be used, and how material is taught. If faculty examine their purposes and goals critically, they can make decisions designed to educate students in the Jeffersonian Model as opposed to the Bureaucratic Corporate Model. They can work to shift the emphasis of instruction toward the empowerment of the individual.
The key emphasis of the bureaucratic corporate model is that outcomes must be evaluated. From this mind set, the community college (and to a lesser extent, other post-secondary institutions) has found itself involved in student educational outcomes assessment. This assessment process, if properly designed, can meet the demands of external powers while at the same time delivering significant control of curriculum and college into the hands of faculty.
In order to actualize this, community college faculty must take advantage of a major way in which they differ from secondary school faculty. They have been institutionalized as the subject matter experts, while in the secondary school the administrators are institutionalized as subject matter experts. Thus in a community college, the setting of educational goals and the measurement of those goals can be defensibly argued as a responsibility of faculty. It is clear that in performing outcomes assessments the faculty must take into account the stated needs of a variety of constituencies, and they must also have the final say on what is to be accomplished and how it is to be measured. They can function as intellectuals, as thinking beings, concerned with values and long-term goals within an anti-intellectual environment.
Once the faculty have a strong role in goal setting and assessment schemes, they in effect have control over the curricular decision-making process. Although that control is likely to be constrained by budget levels, even they can be made vulnerable to data generated via outcomes assessment. Certainly outcomes assessment has the potential to bring the academic budgeting process out of the closet and before faculty forums. Outcomes assessment may provide a potent counterbalance to the present process in which budgeting is not clearly tied to curriculum based decision-making.
Conclusion
The thesis of this paper is that the ideology of the community college is out of balance. This situation has led to imbalance in the broad mission within the community college movement, in institutional goal statements, and in the curriculum. The established functions of collegiate, career, community, and remedial education are still intact, but out of balance. While ideology is set by society at large, the more specific ideologies of institutions are set by forces both within and external to the institutions. People working within these institutions have a responsibility to function intelligently and to exercise judgment about the form and direction that the institution will take. We have seen and are seeing national and state level activities focused on redefining our institutional missions. Faculty and administrators must also recognize and foster local initiatives at each community college that will address the broad issues of the ideology; they must structure the mission of institutions in a way they believe best enhances the larger society; and they must then develop the curricula which represent the beliefs and commitments of the collegiate community. It is our responsibility as the professionals in the community college to consider the purpose of our institutions and, by addressing the issue of balance, to influence the future direction. Our responsibility is to lead, not simply to be led.
Darrel Clowes is Associate Professor, Community College Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia.
Bernard H. Levin is Professor of Psychology at Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia.