The two most important words in community college faculty and
administrative lexicons these days are institutional effectiveness.
For more than a decade, pressure for community colleges to prove
their worth has been building among legislators, local governments,
business, industry, community leaders, students, employers of community
college graduates, taxpayers, and the media. This has created a new
approach to leadership.
As Ronald Heifetz explains in Nieman Reports and The Harvard
Business Review, “We put huge pressure on people in positions of
authority to treat adaptive problems as if they were technical, when,
in fact, leadership, in the sense of mobilizing people to tackle tough
problems, often requires raising the tough questions rather than
providing the easy answers.”
Embracing the Tiger, a new book from the American Association of
Community Colleges’ Community College Press, raises the tough questions
about institutional effectiveness and provides a variety of interesting
answers.
This book is the result of a team effort by Dr. John E. Roueche,
Dr. Laurence F. Johnson, Dr. Suanne D. Roueche, and their associates.
They’ve added their voices to those of the leading experimentalists in
the field of community college institutional effectiveness to publish
this collection of research and reports of successful practices. The
essays explain how institutional effectiveness works. Each chapter
shows the leadership principles involved in creating a climate for
documenting institutional accountability.
The future health and security of community colleges depends on
adaptive leadership of the sort described in Embracing the Tiger. As
Ronald Heifetz emphasizes, this leadership “often requires letting
people feel the pinch of reality, rather than protecting them from
change. “
Contributors to the book include: Laurence Johnson, recently of the
League for Innovation in the Community College; Dr. James L. Hudgins,
president of Midlands Technical College in South Carolina; Dr. Byron N.
McClenney, president of the Community College of Denver; Dr. Patrick J.
McAtee, president of Cowley County Community College in Kansas; Dr.
Walter Bumphus, who is leaving his post as president of Brookhaven
College in the Dallas County Community College District, Dr. James
Tschechtelin, president of Baltimore City Community College; Dr. Robert
Gordon, president of Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology in
Ontario, Canada; and Dr. George R. Boggs, president of Palomar College
in California.
