Reflecting on the Future of Academia: From the Vantage of Community College
By Elsa Dias, Pikes Peak State College
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn’s Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023 book, The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities, provides a successful critique of the limitations of shared governance within the current model of higher education. His arguments suggest that the corporate governance of the academy must be reimagined (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, ch. 6). This analysis, however, is a missed opportunity to engage genuinely with the realities of community colleges, which often are quite different from the realities of those working and learning in liberal arts colleges and large research institutions. I come into this conversation from the community college perspective, where I have taught since 2004. At my institution, decisions are made without faculty input because state legislation creates considerable obstacles for meaningful shared governance, and institutional governance is highly centralized (Hammond, Baser, and Cassell Reference Hammond, Baser and Cassell2020). Faculty members lack control over online course offerings, curriculum, pay, and contracts. Footnote 1 This multilayer bureaucracy of community colleges and their respective state systems are not adequately analyzed in Kaufman-Osborn’s book. This is most evident in the fact that the proposed alternative, a Commonwealth University, is incompatible with the realities of community colleges, and it omits the unique differences among institutions of higher education and their respective faculty. This raises the question: What is higher education truly about?
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- PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , October 2025.