September-October 2008

Defending the Community College Equity Agenda. Edited by Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 328 pages, $45.00 hardcover.

Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College. Gail O. Mellow and Cynthia Heelan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008, 352 pages, $49.95 hardcover.

“The President’s Commission on Higher Education has been charged with the task of ... re-examining the objectives, methods, and facilities of higher education in the United States in the light of the social role it has to play.” These words introduced the Truman Commission Report on Higher Education for Democracy in 1947, a document widely credited with leading to the creation of comprehensive community colleges as stewards of the American Dream. The two books reviewed here examine what that charge means in today’s economy and the challenges that community colleges face as they update their stewardship role. Both books agree that access to college, once the centerpiece of the community college’s “equity agenda” (Bailey and Morris) or “dream” (Mellow and Heelan), is no longer enough. It is now necessary to attend also to what happens once students are in college and to what helps or hinders them from reaching their educational goals.

Although the two books frame this issue in similar ways, they represent different genres and have different temporal horizons. Defending the Community College Equity Agenda is a collection of reports on an ambitious collaborative research project conducted under the auspices of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University. In Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College, Gail Mellow and Cynthia Heelan, long-time community college leaders, issue a call to arms. The CCRC researchers focus on developments that appeared to challenge the “equity agenda” when their project was conceived in the late 1990s, while Mellow and Heelan explore issues that seem most critical for “minding the dream” today. That these challenges and issues are not quite the same suggests how rapidly change has occurred in recent years and how the significance it has for community colleges has evolved.

Defending the Community College
Equity Agenda, edited by Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest, stands out from most academic essay collections. The editors—director and assistant director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia—along with the other nine authors, were all participants in an extraordinary research project involving extensive fieldwork at fifteen community colleges (rural, urban, and suburban) in six states. At each campus in this study, the team interviewed administrators, faculty, counselors, students, and clients, allowing for “triangulation across a variety of college stakeholders” (p. 23). As the editors point out in their introduction, “the book is the result of a collective process and reflects a collective perspective” (p.23). It is a richly documented, artfully presented, and highly readable work.

Become a Subscriber   |   Access for Current Subscribers