Globalizing the Community College: Strategies for Change in the Twenty-First Century (review)

When I saw John Levin's Globalizing the Community College on the bookstore shelf I thought "Oh no, here we go again." Here's another treatise full of tips on how to make colleges leaner and meaner. I expected the usual talk about how institutions can find their market niche, do more with less, get more bang for their buck, and so on. Just a few months before, in the fall 2000 issue of the Community College Review, Levin (2000) foretold his position, or so it seemed. In cold, dispassionate terms, he described the future of two-year schools:

. . . community colleges will function more on a model compatible with business norms: a fluid organization, with little reverence for academic traditions, little evidence of a dominant professional class of faculty and more evidence of a professional managerial class, more emphasis on technology and less on full-time labor (p. 21).

I have been an instructor at community and technical colleges for nine years. As I read this passage the first time I thought about my profession, my students, and my discipline. I heard a death knell ringing. When the full-length book was released, I presumed there would be plans therein. I expected to find strategies for automating community colleges to the point where they dispense credentials like candy from a coin-operated vendor, but I was pleasantly surprised. When community college professionals pick up Levin's new volume, what they'll hold in their hands is not a set of strategies at all. Instead they will hold in their hands a mirror. In these pages readers will see a clear reflection of what community colleges are today, and an image of what two-year schools may become if steps aren't taken to reverse current trends.

Globalizing the Community College is built on a mass of data collected at seven institutions in the western U.S. and Canada. The study followed a "qualitative multiple case study design" which involved "document analysis, interviews, informal conversations, observations and the use of informants" (p. 7). The study focused generally on the changing role, mission and organization of community colleges during the decade of the 1990s. Specifically, the study was designed to shed light on the "external forces that influenced or precipitated internal change" (p. 6). Those forces include politics and electronic information, along with the broader push of cultural and economic globalization.

Levin uses an eclectic theoretical framework to interpret data collected over three years, 1996 to 1999. At times, the analysis is informed by the venerable tradition of Max Weber, made contemporary in the sociology of Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell (1983). At other times, the analysis bends more toward the canons of freshman literature courses, Charles Dickens (1988) and Thomas Hardy (1958). In between, there is a mixed bag of citations, owing much to the research on community colleges in both the U.S. and Canada (Dennison & Gallagher, 1989; Kent, 1995). Occasionally, the approach feels stretched between disparate perspectives. Yet, the wide range of views and data do not detract from the analysis, given the broad, indeed "global" nature of the subject.

In short, Levin suggests the cultural and economic globalization of the 1990s created a landscape on which community colleges were transformed as institutions. In some cases, such as that of shrinking public support for higher education, community colleges were forced to change in response to a new fiscal climate. In other cases, decision-makers in community colleges precipitated changes on their own, without direct external pressure. Through the process of identifying themselves as corporate board members, college officials initiated changes in their institutions that largely reflected the interests of business and industry. This was a major switch, as the guiding values of two-year schools had previously been tied closely (in the 1960s and 1970s...