Richard C. Richardson

Adapting to Diversity: Organizational Influences on Student Achievement.

During the past decade the literature on minorities in higher education has grown geometrically. Disparities in participation and graduation rates for blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics have been discussed extensively [2, 7, 20]. Increasingly, stereotypes are being replaced by detailed information about specific racial or ethnic groups [9, 10, 22, 24, 27, 33]. Although the importance of institutional variables is now recognized [1, 22], most research has focused on student characteristics. It is necessary to go back more than a decade to find a systematic study that has the organization rather than the student as the unit of analysis [25]. Within the last several years the policyoriented literature has begun to focus on state and institutional interventions, but the reports have been largely descriptive with little attempt at evaluation or model building [13, 20, 37]. Most of the interventions aimed at improving participation and achievement rates have been designed to change students or to buffer them from the impact of environments perceived by many as cold, hostile, or even racist. The idea that institutions might also need to change in fundamental ways has been largely missing, in part because our society has historically treated minority populations as inferior. To sug-

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF MORALE RESEARCH: A CRITICAL REVIEW

in the area of morale as compared with the insights developed by industry. The situation had not improved materially by 1952 when Oppenheimer and Britton (35) emphasized the fact that institutions of higher learning had lagged far behind industries in studying staff morale. Hebeisen (21), contrary to usual practice, changed his position from personnel administrator in industry to a similar position in education. He found direct transfer in matters of technique and added that the same understanding of human relations was essential to each. Redeffer (38) was critical of available morale research and cited industrial research as a desirable example for education to follow. The earliest comprehensive speculative treatment of morale is contained in the Twenty-Second Yearbook of the American A.ssociation of School Admiinistratars. (1) This work contains an excellent review of early literature in the field. Again in the Thirn v-Third Yearbook (3), morale is considered at length, and a report is given of two techniques ofr surveying opinions of staff relations. Call (9) lists the fundamental morale affecting factors. Morale is (efirled in

Defining Institutional Mission: Application of a Research Model.

Despite more than a decade of interest, attempts to apply the results of goals studies and related research on the purposes of higher education to the practical management of colleges and universities have largely failed. This failure is particularly disappointing, for such research has provided little assistance to institutions struggling to define missions that will keep them competitive in the face of the fiscal and demographic realities of the 1980s. Virtually all goals research has used the Educational Testing Services (ETSs) Institutional Goals Inventory (IGI) or one of its specific adaptations, the Small College Goals Inventory (SCGI) and the Community College Goals Inventory (CCGI). The problem has been to translate descriptions of abstract goals provided by these instruments into concrete terms that can be incorporated into the management processes of a college or university. Attempts to relate institutional goals and missions to more concrete and useful objectives have been unsuccessful principally because they have assumed relationships between qualitative goal statements and quantitative objectives that are more apparent than real.

A View of the Market Through Studies of Policy and Governance

The purpose of this article is to develop a research-based conceptualization of a state’s higher education market in the United States. The aim is to synthesize existing notions of the higher education market into a coherent starting point and to organize discussion of the market around subjects related to supply, consumption, and management. The conceptualization provides a state-level view of the higher education market appealing to state policy makers. The article draws on another study linking state policy to postsecondary performance. Results incorporate existing literature germane to the higher education market, within and outside of the higher education discipline.

Can Faculty Unions Provide Leadership on Educational Issues

The history of community colleges to the development of collective bargaining has been one of administrative preeminence in all aspects of institutional decision making including the educational program and modes of instruction. Where faculty senates or committee structures have emerged, they have functioned according to guidelines and limitations devised by administrators. The advisory nature of committees and senates has been stressed. Even where established with the best of intentions, governance procedures have been perceived by faculty to serve more as instruments of propaganda and cooptation than as bona fide instruments for faculty involvement in decision making. Faculty perceptions have been buttressed by the administrative belief that implementation of effective solutions to institutional problems would be hindered rather than helped by a stronger faculty role. In this belief administrators have been aided and sustained by boards of trustees. The unwillingness of administrators to accept faculty as colleagues in the decision making process combined with the strongly bureaucratic character of community colleges has contributed to their susceptibility to collective bargaining. In April, 1978, 230 of the 291 public institutions of higher education organized were two-year colleges.

Community Colleges: Institutional Researchers and the Management Issues of the Eighties

an emphasis on teaching is not incompatible with research focused on evaluating institutional performance. In practice, however, community college administrators have assigned a low priority to institutional studies. Many community colleges continue to function without having any staff member assigned to the institutional research function. Were it not for periodic reviews by accrediting agencies, and the research conducted by staff members in doctoral programs, the limited number of studies currently available would be even smaller. The progress that has occurred in the development of a cadre of institutional researchers in community colleges is a result, to a considerable degree, of the uncertainties and fiscal constraints of the past decades. Community college researchers represent a professional group in search of definition. The lack of clarity in this role stems largely from the fact that community colleges are far more interested in obtaining additional funds than they are in evaluating how well they are using the funds they already have. Many institutional researchers in community colleges spend far more of their time in writing grant proposals than they do in conducting institutional studies. Of course proposal writing and the search for new funds is an extremely important activity for all institutions. The difficulty is that it is so important that institutional studies suffer by contrast. I do not think institutional research in community colleges can achieve an appropriate identity until proposal writing and grant management are recognized as separate and distinct functions. Institutional researchers need to be able to give priority attention to planning,

Presidents and Trustees: They Can Work Together.

The contributions of trustees to the institutions they govern depend largely upon their knowledge of the purposes their colleges were established to serve, as well as their willingness and ability to act upon such knowledge. Few trustees come to their positions with all of the information and skills required to carry out their responsibilities properly. The priorities of community colleges evolve over time as a function of the exchange process between the college and its environment. These priorities are likely to differ for any two institutions, if each accurately reflects the needs of its community. The most visible point of the exchange process is the relationship between the board, selected to represent community needs, and the president, selected for his ability to provide leadership in employing human and financial resources to respond to the priorities established by the board. Both boards and presidents make significant contributions to the process of developing institutional goals. The effectiveness of this process depends, to a substantial degree, upon achieving an appropriate level of trustee involvement in the affairs of the college. The two extremes of underinvolvement and overinvolvement place significant limitations upon the capacity of an institution to develop coherent priorities. In addition, the extremes of involvement inhibit the process of mutual education through which trustees

Defining and Developing Excellence in Three National Settings

Competing definitions of excellence have been the rule at both national and international levels for at least the last twenty years. Writing about American higher education in 1985, Astin identified resource and reputation as dominant measures of excellence and argued that excellence should be assessed from a ‘talent development’ or ‘value added’ perspective (Astin, 1991), definitions that have been difficult to measure and inconsistent with research university perspectives.

Narrowing Limits of Administrative Discretion.

With the close of the 1978-79 Supreme Court term, college and university administrators once again were reminded of the role of the judiciary in the latitude of campus decision makers. Rulings as diverse as private rights of action under Title IX, physical qualifications for admission under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and affirmative action, programs, indicated the extent to which major and often minor decisions must be made subject to an increasingly visible judicial system. Interests of courts in constitutional and statutory rights of employees, when viewed in the perspective of the past fifteen years, evidences a narrowing range of jurisdiction for administrative decisions not likely to result in successful litigation.