Richard L. Wagoner

Community College Fundraising: The Voluntary Support of Education Survey as a Sampling Tool for Research

This article describes the Voluntary Support for Education (VSE) Survey, an instrument created by the Council for Aid to Education. Our objective is to explain VSEs potential value as a tool to inform both institutional and academic research regarding fund-raising activities at community colleges. Of particular interest is how the data available in the VSE offer considerably more nuance than Internal Revenue Service form 990 available to researchers. In addition to this general discussion, we will present a specific example of how the VSE was used as a tool to create a sample of institutions for a study investigating the fund-raising practices of college presidents.

Faculty and Institutional Management and Governance

The changing face of management and governance is one of the major implications of a workforce in higher education that is structured by global economic competition. As community colleges continue to respond to local economic needs and employer demands, relying more heavily on workplace efficiencies such as the increasing use of part-time labor, they have the potential to turn themselves into businesses to the detriment of their social and educational missions. An environment of high productivity, dynamic change, and competition has become the norm. Community college faculty are not only working inside the classroom but at many institutions, they are also participating with the management in institutional governance. Although governance “is the mechanism through which higher education’s major stakeholders actively participate in the decisions that affect their lives within the campus community,”1 faculty participation may be furthering the interests of the management in increasing the productivity of the institution’s workforce.

From Comprehensive Community College to Nouveau College

Our purpose is to explore the multifaceted work of community college faculty, including their occupational and professional identities and roles. The overarching observation we make and explore in this book is that community college faculty resemble, or indeed are, New Economy workers. That is, they have become aligned with a globalized economy that values flexible, specialized production, particularly knowledge production tied to new technologies, and “multifaceted, pan-occupational team players,” who contribute to reduced costs, increased profits, or produce measurable outcomes, and expand markets.1 Our perspective carries with it the assumption that community colleges are now different institutions from what they have been in the past. We use neo-liberalism, globalization, postindustrialism, new capitalism, and the New Economy as concepts that frame our understanding of the community college. These concepts suggest that advanced production relies upon new technologies, and the work ethic of a labor force that is shaped by both a managerial class and corporate elites, along with global competition, defines organizations that function in a contemporary political economy. In this chapter, we explore our conceptualization of the twenty-first century community college and how this conceptualization presents an alternative discourse about community colleges as institutions. As well, and of significance to this book as a whole, we suggest implications of this conceptualization for faculty.

The Professional Identity of Community College Faculty

In this final chapter we reflect, within the context of what we call nouveau college, on the professional role and status of community college faculty. Community college faculty are educators as well as corporate workers employed within an organization that encompasses cultural, economic, educational, and social missions. Community colleges have not only multiple missions1 but also various purposes and functions.2 These multiple missions have been cast within neo-liberal practices including economic competition which have corporatized faculty work and left professionals questioning, as does a part-time faculty member at Suburban Valley Community College in California: “How do we move back and reconstruct the profession? Economically and structurally we can’t just jump back. It’s got to be a process.” Or perhaps, for many community college faculty, the question is not whether or how to move back and reconstruct, but rather how to move forward and create their professional role in the New Economy.

Themes and Overview

In this chapter, we introduce readers to a complex topic that involves both an academic labor force—community college faculty—and their occupational and institutional context. This context includes a political and economic environment that has been variously termed “the new economy,” “neo-liberalism,” “new capitalism,” and “fast capitalism.”1 Although we pose an argument in this chapter, it is not until chapter 3 that we offer an extended discussion of the concepts and theories that form the basis of this argument. The reader may find that there is greater clarity in our argument if chapter 3 is read first, and we offer this as an alternative to following our numerical ordering of chapters. We aver to those who move with us chapter by chapter that what is not explained satisfactorily in one chapter will be clarified in a later chapter. We begin, then, with what we view as the enunciation of our major theme and the issues that both frame and characterize our treatment of community college faculty.

Corporatism and Neo-Liberal Ideology: The Values and Meanings of Faculty Work

In this chapter, we describe the tensions between the educational values and the economic values of faculty work. Faculty perceptions and administrative perceptions are compared and combined to provide understandings of the relationships of the values and meanings of faculty work to the institution. By work, we refer to instructional roles—teaching, curriculum design and development, and advising of students—and administrative roles for full-time faculty—committee work, supervising staff and overseeing the work of part-time faculty, program maintenance (for example, supply and equipment over-sight), and responding to requests from administrators (for example, attendance at college functions, providing information on programs or students). As these roles and their accompanying expectations expand, faculty work—particularly work for full-time faculty—becomes more institutional, more aligned with the needs and the demands of those who direct the institution. Community college faculty work, in short, is increasingly managed following the pattern of economic globalization, consistent with a neo-liberal ideology.

The Scholarly Literature, The Theoretical Bases, and Research Methods

Existing literature on the subjects of globalization, neo-liberalism, and community college faculty is extensive and diverse. However, the connection between and among these subjects has little precedent, with some exceptions.1 In the literature on universities and four-year colleges, the past decade has produced several instructive works that integrate globalization, neo-liberalism, and academic faculty.2 Of these only Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades make the leap beyond universities to include community college faculty.3 Community College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy is the first work to focus primarily on this connection and to use the concepts of neo-liberalism and globalization to explain faculty work in community colleges.

Part-Time Community College Faculty as New Economy Temporary Labor

Both strikingly and significantly, over the past thirty years, part-time faculty have become the majority of community college faculty.1 During the same period this condition paralleled that of temporary labor generally in organizations in what is referred to as the New Economy.2 In this sense, part-timers can be understood as a direct link between labor in the New Economy and community colleges.3 According to the American Association of Community Colleges, 64 percent of all community college faculty were part-time in 1998.4 While part-time faculty have traditionally been part of the community college labor pool, their use increased precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s. This alteration is consistent with the community college’s emphasis during this period on economic competitiveness, including the relative decline in government funding and the increasing resource acquisition behaviors of institutional members as well as privatization of services.5 That is, the increased reliance on part-time faculty is directly related to the globalization of community colleges and the ascendancy of New Economy management principles.