Forces inside and outside community colleges are changing the context for performance and mandating new conceptions of effectiveness. This article addresses the future of institutional effectiveness in community colleges. Its emphasis is on what is measured and why, beginning with a retrospective look at early efforts in effectiveness, moving to…

Leadership, as it is practiced today in community colleges, has taken three brilliant ideas to excess and made them into guiding ideologies. The first is "growth," a means for gauging organizational legitimacy and success that has eclipsed other means. The second is "complexity," which has gained acceptance as a structural necessity for managing…

This chapter begins with a retrospective look at governance in community colleges based on a working understanding of governance as a correlate of decision making. In its simplest form, governance is "a process for distributing authority, power, and influence in decision making among constituencies" (Alfred and Smydra, 1985, pp. 201-202). What…