r. John Levin is the Joseph E. Moore Professor of Higher Education at North Carolina State University . He is a highly respected researcher and author of two books and numerous journal articles pertaining to the community college. His most recent book, Community College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy was published by Palgrave Macmillan in February 2006.

UPDATE: The first two decades of your involvement with community colleges were as an English instructor, and in various administrative roles. Please describe how your comprehensive background working within the community college system informed your ability and interests as a researcher and professor in higher education with a focus on the community college.

Dr. Levin: I worked in community colleges, beginning in the 1970s and currently use some of those initial experiences as if they happened yesterday in a way I refer to as a "telescoping phenomenon." There are three foundational parts. First, I was a faculty member in a community college that was just opening its doors; we were a group of about 50 faculty who established curriculum and policies for the institution. We had a very small administrative structure which formed in my head what was possible with a small bureaucracy. Our department chairs were elected; they were faculty. That initial experience and the following 11 years, when I continued to be a faculty member teaching English literature, influenced me greatly. Also, my experiences working with students, particularly students who did not do well in high school or were older, returning students in their 30s or 40s, influenced how I view the community college and formed a kind of bedrock of both the types of students that inhabit community colleges and the faculty that are there.

The second phase began when that institution became too large and split into two institutions. I started at the new institution as a Director, an administrative position responsible for Arts and Sciences. Again, without much policy and procedure we began again to manage an institution. However, we had a new president and a more sophisticated administrative structure. That was influential because it taught me about some problems with power and authority. During this phase of administrative experience, I also became the supervisor of 50 full time faculty and about 60-100 part time faculty for a period of about 10 years; many of those people had been my colleagues previously.

The third phase was when I moved to another institution, which was not new but was a distance education institution trying to become more traditional and trying to become unionized. I became head of the campus and gained experience building the college's first permanent building. I participated as a manager in the first negotiations as well as helped write the first collective agreement. That was influential to the extent that I had a good relationship with faculty, and I also advised faculty on the language that was appropriate for the collective agreement.

When I started to become a researcher seriously in the end of 1980s and early 1990s, and then as a full-time researcher in 1993, those experiences sat on my shoulder-as well as the people, several of whom I still keep in contact with. I still occasionally ask them to show up at places where I am speaking to make sure I am being honest about my views of colleges.

UPDATE: Beginning in 1996, while you were at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona and director of the Community College Institute, you conducted a long-term investigation studying organizational change, leadership, and management behaviors within Canadian and American community colleges. Could you recount some of your findings in that study that have added to the literature on governance in community colleges?

Dr. Levin: I define, view, and have experienced governance very broadly. It has to do with both the values of the institution-how people believe they are acting and under what kinds of authority, moral, and educational structures-as well as what we usually think of as traditional forms of governance, that is, decision-making. What I noticed in my research over the period of 1996-2001 (and beyond) were the severe pressures upon the institution from the outside. Traditionally, I've alluded to the fact that the study of higher education governance is normally seen as rather static. That is, it's an internal phenomenon of decision-making, where decision-making comes from the state level (or policy official level) and is enacted at the institution. But what I saw were severe pressures from what I call the "globalization phenomenon," which included the state's increasing role in the affairs of the institution to both view the institution as a vehicle of public policy as well as to steer the institution toward more efficient, productive practices, as well as to become an instrument of the state in workforce development. That was not totally new in the late 1980s because it was there in the 1970s as well. But it was increased in emphasis and increased in the coerciveness of government (state and federal).

There was also a movement of government away from financing the institution at a level that institutions had been accustomed to. Thus, while community colleges grew in enrollment numbers, considerably since the late 1980s, state government funding did not keep up. In that sense, we talk about the role of the state as well as their resource allocations that provide pressure on the institution. The institution, in order to respond through various strategies, tries to become more efficient and effective. That efficiency leads to, on the one hand, greater productivity. Because the major costs of the institution are labor costs, it means hiring part time faculty instead of full time faculty to deal with increasing population growth. Nationally, today, we have 67% of the faculty employees at community colleges classified as part time. Part-timers sometimes do not have offices or e-mail accounts. Forty percent of them often have other full time jobs and other responsibilities; they are not fully vested in the institution. What that means is that added pressure is put on full time faculty for committee workload. It's also a pressure on the students, because they often have trouble finding part time faculty who often don't have offices on campus.

Another example would be during the late 1980s-beginning 1990s: institutions became much more entrepreneurial in seeking new resources, whether it was through contract training with the private sector or finding donors, that is, corporate sponsors such as banks that would put logos on campus or when Coke or Pepsi advertised in the restrooms, which would bring in money. Another pressure is from advanced technology and electronic communications, which is beyond the control of the institution. Many scholars, such as Manuel Castells, have talked about the change of structure of society, which changes work structures, and the change of pace of society because of communications technology. Another example includes the rapid decision processes that occur in community colleges through the use of electronic technology: e-mail and things that speed up the entire process-so much so that instead of in the 1970s where a decision may have taken two weeks to be realized, it may take two hours today because of this technology.

The last area is culture and particularly has to do with student demographics because of immigration to the United States and Canada . I mention Canada because it's a destination for Asian immigrants. Historically, until the 1970s and 1980s, immigrants to North America were largely European. That flow stopped or was subdued; the flow is now from Asia and Eastern Europe, since the demise of the Soviet Union, and from war torn countries (the Balkans) as well as (particularly for the U.S.) from Mexico. Those are the big traffic zones. These immigrants have changed the nature of communities and societies in North America and thus, have changed community colleges particularly with the influx of English as a second language students. And starting in the 1970s, and continuing to reach a higher and higher level, are what we refer to as remedial basic education and adult high school completion students, which number in the millions in community colleges. They add pressure to the institution to change curriculum and to change teaching approaches.

This is not a new phenomenon. In 1979, Suanne Roueche and Nora Comstock at the University of Texas had a federal grant to study literacy, and Dick Richardson and his colleagues at Arizona State University had a similar grant. The Roueche/Comstock study never made it to publication, probably because it was too controversial, but the Richardson study did; it's called Literacy and the Open Access College (1983). It was at that time Richardson defined this new population of students coming into community colleges as "non-traditional" or in need of remediation. That underprepared population had a tremendous effect on what he called "biting," that is, taking little chunks out of text and giving it to students to learn as opposed to the whole text. Some would call it "dumbing down" the curriculum, but I would say, to some extent, it was trying to meet the needs of students. This seemed to be a kind of harbinger of things to come. By 1991, McGrath and Spear, who worked at the Community College of Philadelphia, critiqued this change at the community college and hearkened back to a day that never was: a day when most of our students at the community college were philosophy, history, political science, and English students and they could be taught at a university level [ The Academic Crisis of the Community College , 1991]. They referred to this as the period of the "disarticulation of the curriculum." What they meant was that there was no coherence-nobody taught "the cannon" anymore; instead, they were learning how to write memos or paragraphs, as opposed to discussing Plato or Shakespeare.

All of these large, external changes having influence on the institution lead to social change in the interaction between faculty and administration, which in turn lead to different sets of relationships between the institution and its constituents, and thus to different kinds of relationships and structures between faculty and students. We can see coming out of this, certainly, distance education or on-line learning. We also see more unionized faculty and management antagonism over resources and job security, particularly benefits. We can see coming out of this the role and the rise of the part time faculty with its associations and its attempt to change work to be more dignified. All of these, because they come from similar sources outside the institution, tend to lead to isomorphic changes, that is, changes that make community colleges look similar to each other and approach problems in a similar way. But actually, community colleges are quite different from each other.

Among practitioners the concept of best practices is what people look for in order to deal with these external pressures, whether it's part time faculty, or distance education, or shrinking resources. They talk to each other and institutions start to behave more alike: partially because they are coerced by government to be more efficient and partially because they are copying more successful, sometimes high status, community colleges. All of that means governance is more focused these days on issues of competitive survival, on issues of resources, and issues of changing student populations. I doubt that too many people sit around and talk about underlying assumptions of the value of education; I don't mean that's been lost, but it and other things have given way to more pressing economic concerns.

UPDATE: With the impending dearth of leaders formally prepared to assume the top administrative positions in American community colleges, many are ramping up their efforts to "grow their own," providing leadership development opportunities to faculty who are expected to assume increasing responsibility in shared decision-making as faculty members, committee and senate leaders or in administrative roles as department chairs, deans, and other formally recognized leadership positions. Based on your research, what potential impact does this have on institutional decision-making?

Dr. Levin: I have one view split into three parts. I think that understanding an institution, its culture and how things work, is important. But also, too much of the same-that is, administrators at one college educating other administrators or faculty at the same college in order to become leaders-leads to a kind of reproduction syndrome. It's a problem of homogenization or "group think." In order to combat it, the institution needs to have ideas from the outside, a kind of immigration pattern. The problem is that faculty are not a very mobile group; they tend to stay in their own institution for most, or all, of their lives. This means that if change and new ideas are to come about, a college needs to bring in new administrators from external places, outside the state and from other systems.

The other part is that there's this notion of a crisis of leadership in community colleges. Maybe I haven't seen the data clearly enough, but it seems to me that leaders have been coming and going for years. The graying of the administration is also a graying of the faculty, and remember there are many more faculty. When we talk about turn over of large populations, we are talking on a relative scale. So, we have to replace 500 presidents in the next 2-3 years. I don't see that as a serious problem, but the view that the replacements are going to come from an older faculty is probably problematic. People have not thought that out.

The other point I want to make is that while I understand these programs for leaders need to be hands-on, real world experiences, sometimes they are too much "a-theoretical." That is, there is little to no basic theory that underlie this training. I like to stress the importance of academic education in any kind of leadership development opportunity for faculty or administrators who are going to become leaders. Obviously, the ideal is to take courses at a higher education program at a university, but you can still have professional development programs that are not university based but have a component of academic education. "There's nothing more practical than a good theory," said a theorist [Kurt Lewin] because theory comes out of empirical investigations that can support the theory to say that the theory has applicability. Whereas, best practices or anecdotal bases for preparation of people might work for an individual case, but they cannot necessarily be generalized or may not work in other places. Having some theoretical background or understanding of organizational theory (for example, understanding power and influence from a theoretical perspective) and having some understanding of the histories of community colleges and of higher education are also valuable.

UPDATE: Technology-based instruction and distributed learning has altered the culture of the community college and its faculty. What have you observed about this cultural change that faculty and administrators should keep in mind as we continue to promote and rely on this form of delivery?

Dr. Levin: We have written a book called Community College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy (Palgrave, 2006) in which we cover various aspects of post-industrial society that have influenced or relate to the work of faculty. One of those is certainly technology-based instruction and distributed learning. The underlying assumption of that chapter is that technology and the use of technology in instruction essentially structures both instruction and the work of faculty. That is, how faculty work-what they do, how their day is organized, and what curriculum they choose-is heavily shaped by the use of technology.

Second, the same technology structures social relationships. An extreme example is where an instructor is at the computer night and day, communicating with students but never seeing the students face-to-face. The kind of relationship, on a social basis, that instructor develops with students is shaped, and one might say 'controlled,' by the technology. I'm not saying that's bad or wrong, it's just different. We also know that we don't yet know how information is communicated in an on-line course and how it's taken and understood by the person on the other end. It's becoming clear to me that there's a difference between various demographic populations and their use of technology. For example, the variable of age probably has an effect on the use of technology, the meaning one takes from it, and the relationship one develops. I think that socio-economic background has an impact, as well as age, on how you develop social relationships. One's cultural capital (knowledge, family background, or ability to speak the language) takes on a certain role in a face-to-face encounter and another role in the online environment. That's the cultural shift I see happening.

I notice when I evaluate or talk to faculty who are using on-line instruction, or when I talk to graduate students [enrolled in online courses], the preference is for face-to-face-for connection. The choice of on-line is convenience: [I hear] "I can't make the class." "I can't drive all the way to the campus." "I've got children; can I do it some other way?" That's perfectly understandable to me. But what's not understandable is when that same phenomenon occurs when people are on campus, when people could meet, when people are not subjected to responsibilities that keep them away from campus.

The last thing I would say about technology-based instruction is the principal reason (although it's touted as access) in all of higher ed for the use of on-line education is cost. We speculate in our book there will be no reduced cost with on-line education compared to face-to-face, but there will be more work for faculty.

UPDATE: You have described that the predominant expression of faculty values is at odds with the economic behaviors of the institution. Explain the outcomes of this tension on faculty and the institution in general.

Dr. Levin: I look at faculty and administrators in their professional identity or professional views (as opposed to their personal views). What I've seen in my research in talking to faculty in seven different institutions in one study as well as large number of administrators is that while everybody has good intentions, they are structured to some extent by their roles; administrators take on the role of manager, and faculty take on the role of educator. That doesn't mean that administrators aren't educators, too, or that faculty aren't managers as well, but their predominant roles are quite different. This relates to your first question and my comment about my experiences both as a manager and as a faculty member. The community of interest is not shared among faculty and administrators; the essential function of the administrator is different from the essential function of the faculty member. They express different values and perceive the world from their perspectives somewhat differently. What I note in my research is that administrators, largely, have an economic, neo-liberal philosophy. There's an important role for the institution in the economy-that the function, largely, of the community college is to produce the workforce or produce individuals who are prepared to go out and work and do so in an economically efficient manner-and to get the most out of their institutions with the dollars they've been given.

The faculty's fundamental focus is on the students they teach, not so much the [students'] long-term goals becoming workers, but more within the instructional environment where [faculty] are trying to teach them concepts, skills, techniques, and ideas. To that extent, [faculty and administrators] live in separate worlds. Norton Grubb, in his book, Honored But Invisible , where he looks at teaching, sees the same phenomenon of the separate worlds. Where I differ from Grubb is that he sees administrators as aloof from faculty-maybe he means just the teaching part. I see [administrators] as enmeshed with faculty: almost too involved with faculty in the work of faculty. What I have seen is that faculty are compromised, because although they have different views and values than administrators, they do also serve as vehicles for this neo-liberal state (for the ends that administrators want). They may have a class size of 25 or 30 and the institution can't hire another faculty member or there's more demand for a class, and they'll take on more students. This is particularly obvious in the social sciences, humanities, or sciences where you have 40 students in a lab with one faculty member, which is, if not illegal, at least highly dangerous-which I observed in my study.

The faculty are also obliged to become more entrepreneurial-out raising money or involved in contract training or even recruiting students. Students are dollars. This is how the state funds most institutions, based on full-time equivalency: the more students you have, the more funding you get. Also, by teaching the courses and the programs they do, the faculty become vehicles of the political economy. They're training for business and industry even though they may think they are fundamentally just teaching students ideas.

Faculty have jumped on the train called the 'learning college.' That particular concept is somewhat distasteful to me because a component of the movement seems to imply the use of technology for technology's sake, another kind of efficiency (low cost for student learning) model. Faculty have moved on that train; some of them because they like technology, but mostly because the ideology of the institution is in that direction, and to some extent, administrators are compelled to say, "Let's do this faster, more efficiently, and technology is the way." As my former colleagues at the University of Arizona [Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades] talk about in their books on higher education (referring mostly to universities) is that the instructional environment, and the students in it, become the site where the technology (hardware and software) is experimented. Also they argue that we're teaching our students in colleges to become good consumers, to go out and buy and to use the electronic technology. So I'd call it a vicious, not a virtuous, circle.

In my research I found that technology leads to more work for everybody, both administrators and faculty. I don't know about students; I haven't studied them from this perspective, although my current study of students indicates that there are stratified populations in the use of technology. You'll have students who are middle/upper middle class in the sciences and nursing and they're using technology. You'll find students in adult basic education or some with lower socio-economic status and they have no understanding of technology at all. The point about technology at work is that administrators work 6 ½ days a week, and much of that is facilitated by technology. They're on their cell phones, their computers, on-line, both inside and outside their office. There is no distinction between personal life, social life, and professional life. And some faculty I have talked to have a life that's comprised of work, work, and work that is facilitated by computers, and electronic mail is probably the most endemic disease we have.

UPDATE: Given that technology is not going to go away, nor is the economic pressure on community colleges going to lessen, do you have any thoughts about: Within this new world, what can we do to preserve the kind of academic discourse or preserve faculty values-supporting faculty who've gone into a profession to help, to teach?

Dr. Levin: We try to raise the question in our new book. I don't think that there is a simple answer but there are a variety of perspectives that come with the question, and they go back to the issue of governance. One has to do with faculty asserting themselves and their role as integral-as the core of the institution, first and foremost, not simply a labor force. This means they have to establish a pronounced professional identity for themselves, which is difficult. It could include strengthening professional identity in the sense that faculty belong to an association or increasing their discipline affiliations and feel they're autonomous in their work. Years ago, George Vaughan and Jim Palmer wrote about the importance of faculty engaged in research toward scholarship. That is another option for faculty: to do some writing in their field.

They also need to have voice and start to challenge some of the untested assumptions about the new economy, and what I call the " Nouveau College " (the importance of the use of technology, and the use of training as opposed to educating). Moreover, one needs to take a sober look at what has changed because of all of the new solutions for the community college: whether it's greater efficiency, whether it's the concepts of learning college; whether it's the use of technology. What has changed? Have students become smarter? Are the transfer rates going up from college to university? The answers to all those questions are more or less "No." Nothing much as changed as far as student education. The problem with the new economy or Nouveau College is that we have difficulty with making discrimination between what's important what's not important- between making decisions on "Is this something we have to act on now, or is this something we can leave? Is this something we can put to a committee or is this something that takes executive decision? Is dealing with an incident with a student with a disability important, or is attending the ribbon cutting ceremony of yet another building more important?" Sometimes administrators and faculty are faced with these choices and it's difficult to understand what's the priority. The priorities have to be set within an institution on the values of that institution. When an institution's mission states it wants to become a leader in serving business and industry's needs, it tells me where their priorities are. If an institution articulates that its priority is the community it serves or is the relationships established within the institution, that tells me something else. Institutions need to think about that. They need to think about why they exist, their purpose, and they have to think about themselves within a larger socio-economic context.

Maybe you've been at a community college, like my colleagues here in North Carolina , for 25-30 years and you've been doing workforce training. Who is educating the basic education students? Well, the community college is, but is it a priority? Does the government fund them in the way they should? No, they fund them with 2/3 worth of a regular student. We have to think about the value of education. There is a kind of contradiction here. The futurists talk to us about the importance of training for the workforce. At the same time, they talk about the fact that people under 25 change jobs once a year and that people over 25 change jobs every 3 years. Does that mean that we're going to train them for new skills every year? Does that mean that people are going to go back to college every 3 years? I don't think that's going to happen; people don't have the time. What is it then that we want people to learn [while they are in our community colleges]? Can an educated person who can think, read, write, spell, and do math be adjustable or adaptable? I think so, probably more likely than somebody who has a highly specialized training focus.

 Dr. John Levin serves as the 2005-06 President of the Council for the Study of Community Colleges, an affiliate council of the American Association of Community Colleges and can be reached at jslevin2@unity.ncsu.edu.

 The interview was conducted by Catherine Kirby, Information Specialist at the Office of Community College Research and Leadership at UIUC. Ms. Kirby's e-mail address is ckirby@uiuc.edu.