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Leadership in business versus community college.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

It has become popular to compare the management of community colleges to business management. Given the proclivity recently to describe the community college in terms of a business, is the business enterprise model of leadership an appropriate one for the community college? Are the characteristics of business enterprise leadership the same as those of community college leadership? Community college leadership is fundamentally different from leadership in business organizations.

Introduction

Gumport (2001) explores the management of higher education and business management in her work comparing higher education as a social institution to higher education as an industry. When viewed as an industry higher education is seen as needing to respond to "market forces" by rapidly adjusting academic programs to workforce demands and responding to customer needs and being, by the definition of the nature of markets, competitive. This distinction of social institution versus industry has profound effects on the application of management and leadership within the organization. What vision is to be pursued and what goals and objectives are to be realized? Profits, market share, and return on owners' capital, or societal values, individual learning, and human capital? Anecdotally, we hear the vocabulary of commerce creeping into the language of the community college: students are customers, customer service, serving the needs of customers, colleges need to be entrepreneurial, colleges need to react to the market. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article is a good illustration of this trend:

In some respects the emergence of enrollment management is simply one small indicator of the ascendancy of capitalism and the extent to which the market metaphor has taken hold.... Increasingly, observers of trends in higher education are using terms like 'marketization' and 'commodification' to describe trends in public and institutional policy that are influencing colleges. (Hossler, 2004, p. B3)

My hypothesis is that leadership is fundamentally different between business and community college organizations and that the business model is not appropriate for the community college. The business organization exists to maximize financial return to owners. The community college exists to serve the education and training needs of the individual student and local community. Businesses are measured by objective financial measures but community colleges are measured by such subjective measures as meeting student educational goals, program diversity, and transfer and employment rates.

Management versus Leadership

Organizations are in need of both leadership and management. Using the briefest of definitions, management is the coordination of resources to achieve goals; leadership is developing a strategic vision and guiding the organization through a changing environment. Given the proclivity recently to describe the community college in terms of a business, is the business enterprise model of leadership an appropriate one for the community college? Are the characteristics of business...

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