Democracy's college: A case study of social processes in an urban community college

Abstract

In professional education literature, the American community college is referred to as "democracy's college" (Diekhoff, 1950, Griffith & Connor, 1994). Yet, what it means to be democracy's college is cloudy and uncertain. In the literature on community colleges, there is a great deal of ambiguity with respect to the schools' social and political goals. This study was designed to generate theoretical concepts that describe the processes involved in the structuring of a particular college's social and political purpose. This is a case study of Cactus Community College. In this study I used a variety of qualitative methods to explore and document some of the institution's basic social processes. The techniques I used include participant observation, interviews, a survey, and content analysis. Through each of these means, I gathered data that describe the public role of the college as it is enacted by the students and personnel who live and work there. I used Glaser and Strauss' "grounded theory method" to organize the sampling and analysis of data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), and I used Anthony Giddens' "structuration" theory as an interpretive framework (Giddens, 1976, 1984, 1992). Together, the method and framework allowed me to develop a model of theoretical concepts that describe some of the basic social processes at Cactus Community College.