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Reviewed by:
  • Rural Community Colleges: Teaching, Learning, and Leading in the Heartland
  • Jane McEldowney Jensen, Associate Professor
Pamela L. Eddy and John P. Murray (Eds.). Rural Community Colleges: Teaching, Learning, and Leading in the Heartland. New Directions for Community Colleges, No. 137. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 120 pp. Paper: $29.00. ISBN: 978-0-7879-9720-5.

Driving down the highway across the United States, you may pass a road sign for a local community college. The farther you are from any major city, the larger that sign will probably be. This is because community colleges are important to rural communities as Pamela Eddy and John Murray's edited volume helps us understand, providing real examples from across the country, introducing new ways to view existing data, and calling on researchers and policymakers to pay attention to what the authors call the "rural differential."

The first two chapters introduce the new Carnegie classification of institutions which provides a typology of rural, suburban, and metropolitan community colleges. This typology, as David Clothy and Stephen Katsinas explain in the first chapter, is critical to our understanding of differences among community colleges and the serious issues they face, particularly with regard to resources.

Along with an accessible introduction to the Carnegie classification scheme and how it has changed, this portion of the text identifies ways in which the new data allow comparative analysis appropriate for community colleges relative to variables like unduplicated headcounts and campus size. Charles Fluharty and Bill Scaggs contend that these variables matter in terms of economies of scale and the ways that rural community colleges are asked to respond to multiple missions, sometimes as the only institution in the area with the social, economic, and political capital to do so.

Michael Miller and Daniel Kissinger's description of the contributions these colleges make to their rural contexts in Chapter 3 is a significant piece in itself as the authors help us understand what it means to be rural—beyond population statistics. Yes, rural community colleges serve areas with low population density, but they also do so as one of the few social engines available to their regions. The authors describe the ways that these colleges provide leisure education, cultural enrichment, and economic development in addition to traditional educational opportunity. Furthermore, each institution must fulfill all these roles in a way that identifies with their community as "both a place and a process that involves symbolic, cultural, and personal interaction" (p. 28).

The next set of chapters introduce some of the practicalities of rural community college administration: attracting the right kind of president, developing local and state leadership to build sustainable communities, recruiting faculty, and helping them be successful. Jay Leist argues in Chapter 4 that presidential searches should be accurate and honest, asking directly for leadership skills suitable to the local needs of the college rather than searching for generic leaders who may not understand or appreciate local challenges. He provides a useful sample position advertisement to demonstrate his point. [End Page 515]

Similarly, Murray and Eddy, in Chapters 6 and 7 respectively, contend that faculty members are more likely to stay if they value the attributes of their rural locations and if the particular challenges of rural faculty appointments are recognized and supported. Both authors recognize that rural instructors share the challenges of underprepared students and heavy teaching loads with their community college peers nationally, but they also acknowledge the sometimes isolating and often rewarding aspect of teaching in rural locations.

Identifying and recruiting faculty and administrators to rural community colleges is difficult but critical to the role of the community college as catalysts for economic renewal. Because of the rural campus locations, this human capital must often be home-grown. Molly Clark and Ed Davis provide an example of the MidSouth Community College Fellowship Program, a regionally specific partnership to provide leadership development which includes a curriculum of rural sociology, rural community and economic development, rural government administration, public program evaluation, regional economics, and applied regional economics. Related examples of leadership development from the Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) and the Rural Public Policy Roundtable are referenced in the final chapter.

The last few chapters of...

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