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A keynote speech delivered by Peter A. Spina, Executive Director of the Institute for Community College Development at Cornell University and President Emeritus of Monroe Community College, at the Faculty Showcase conference sponsored by the Middle States region of the College Board at Ocean City, Maryland on November 9, 2000.

In order to introduce some balance in my life, I refereed collegiate wrestling matches. Actually, it wasn't a whole lot different from my day job: those days we were doing a lot of wrestling in community colleges with politicians, with burgeoning labor unions, not to mention with some students who blamed us for all the world's problems. After about twenty years, those college wrestlers began to move around the mat a lot faster than I could, so I gave it up. The following year, the folks running the national tournament asked me if I would evaluate the officials at the tournament and I agreed. I was amazed at how much better a wrestling referee I was from the stands than on the mat! Freed from the emotionality of being in the thick of things, I found that I could see much better a little distance from the fray. I've been retired as a community college president for one year now, and some of the thoughts I'll share with you this morning will reflect views from the stands, rather than being on the community college "mat" where I was for almost four decades.

Generally I like what I see today. Community colleges are very much in favor with public policy makers and business leaders, who see us as a solution to the growing problems of an incredibly tight, competitive labor market. Many value our role in compensating for the failure of the public schools to adequately prepare students for either work or college, especially in the urban areas. There are other manifestations of our relatively new-earned popularity. Our enrollments are historically high, there is a slight but perceptible shift of federal grant funding in programs like NIH and NSF toward community colleges, even the corporate and philanthropic sectors are paying us some attention. Our campuses are sometimes used by politicians, including President Clinton, as venues to expound political platforms. I can assure you that these types of validation weren't there years ago.

But there are some signals out there we must heed - whether we're faculty or administrators - if we want to continue to enjoy the public support we have worked so hard for. And there are adjustments we must make - some of them difficult - if we want to maintain our hard fought status in the 21st century. I'm one of those rabid golfers always looking to improve my mediocre technique. I'm a sucker for video instruction and I've purchased a veritable library of instructional tapes over the years. One tape that particularly impresses me is by Jim McLean who is often featured on the Golf Channel, in case there's anyone in the audience who shares my golf addiction. Not only is his teaching style superb, but McLean's nomenclature is memorable as well. He illustrates several so-called "death moves" in the golf swing which will doom it to failure regardless of talent, effort and enterprise on the part of the golfer. While the comparison is somewhat strained, I contend there are several potential death moves which we in community colleges must avoid if we are to remain viable in the years ahead.

The first is not to recognize and deal with the fact that we are in a very competitive environment that can impact every level of our institutions. Four-year colleges are now fishing in our pond for students. The fastest growing sector in higher education is the proprietary and for-profit schools which often focus on skill sets and, therefore do not have the complexity (and expense) of comprehensive institutions. These are bottom-line driven and often taut time-to-degree or certificate completion rates. Especially in urban areas, these schools are serious competition for community colleges, because this tight labor market compels employers to hire help quickly. A burgeoning relative of the proprietary school is the corporate college, another of our serious competitors. I have carefully observed a large technical services corporation which developed an extensive training apparatus for its thousands of employees without any collegiate involvement. The corporation hired full-time faculty, developed a fairly comprehensive curriculum, and linked pay to the number of skill-set courses workers successfully completed. The company's CEO took this approach because he believed college credit courses were too broad and theoretical to benefit his workers (however he also supports a generous graduate tuition reimbursement program). He felt colleges would not be able to deliver exactly what he wanted fast enough and with enough focus. Furthermore, he was unimpressed by our instructional quality control procedures. If an instructor is not meeting corporate objectives, he/she is discontinued occasionally even in the middle of a training program. Other established corporate colleges offer credit instruction and are regionally accredited. On-line instruction, both within and outside of the academy is also very much the order of the day and poses stern competition for us. Community colleges need to know what the corporates and proprietaries are doing and adapt what's appropriate to our enterprise.

Another death move is to underestimate how very nimble and focused we must be to compete successfully with these new and targeted agencies. To begin with, we must have programs and services available for our students when THEY want them, not when WE want to offer them. We need curriculum review that is continual, instantaneous and derived from a process that incorporates external stakeholder input. Longer term we need to examine closely how we expend our institutional energy, especially how much time we devote to activities not directly impacting the teaching/learning process. If we contract out some ancillary services to those who can do it better/cheaper/faster, we can devote more time to honing our academic edges. Once a radical notion, collegiate outsourcing is expanding beyond bookstores and food service. Some colleges, emulating our corporate confreres, are looking to outsource such areas as payroll, purchasing, maintenance and security. Farther out in time, I predict some of us will examine whether career placement and transfer, enrollment management, strategic planning, development, public relations and others can be outsourced, at least partially. I'm not suggesting abandoning those functions, rather having them done less expensively and possibly better by specialists so we can utilize residual cost and energy savings to pump up teaching and learning agendas.

I offer this vignette to illustrate an attitude I've seen among us which can render us less competitive and can turn into a "death move" unless we modify it. At the climax of the brutal movie Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood, the protagonist, levels a shotgun between the eyes of the sadistic sheriff played by Gene Hackman who pleads for his life. "I don't deserve to die like this: I was building a house…" Hackman importunes. Before he delivers the coup de gras, Eastwood chillingly retorts, "Deserves ain't got nothin' to do with it." As educators we sometimes confuse the inherent value of our work with the attitude that we "deserve" to be supported. This is a seductive and non-productive entitlement mind-set that doesn't work today if it ever did, and we need to shed it. Along with every other public agency, we must constantly promote our worth to stakeholders and publics. To do that effectively we need to drop the notion many academics have that self-aggrandizement is inherently bad. Our initiatives should be chronicled at the national conferences and in the academic literature. Research into our pedagogical successes needs to be reported out in the meaningful literature of higher education. There are many deserving causes out there clamoring for public support, so we must communicate our values and successes aggressively to those who decide how that public support is allocated.

Another kind of universal fatal flaw is one our high school history teachers told us: "don't forget the lessons of history!" It is very important especially for those of us who began in the community college movement in the last 10-15 years to understand what got us here. We filled gaps where senior colleges didn't want to go. They weren't into compensatory education for returning veterans, or servicing part-time students, or developing applied curriculums. They became more immersed in their research function and by doing so de facto de-emphasized teaching and student contact. We stepped into the breech; and, well, the rest is history. But nothing stands still, and today's market asks community colleges to create new adaptations - skill sets, distance learning, applied technologies, workforce training and others. If we don't act to fill these new gaps, one thing is certain in this competitive marketplace: somebody else will!

Another vignette that offers food for thought and capsulizes a potentially fatal attitude flaw: I visited an infirm friend on the day his pacemaker was to be recalibrated. I watched with interest as he telephoned the technical support service working for his physician and held his pacemaker to the phone. The readings emitted by the pacemaker would be eventually transmitted to his doctor who might make life-enhancing adjustments, many without physically seeing the patient. This confluence of technology, convenience and cost is very much worth translating into the community college idiom. Every student survey I ever commissioned revealed that COST and CONVENIENCE were the primary factors why people chose our college. A fairly close second was the quality of instruction and personal contact between students and professionals. Those criteria got us here and are indeed "universals," but they need to be reformatted to modern conditions. Students still choose us because we are cost-competitive and we need to put that at the center of institutional decision making. We must keep costs down! I haven't heard presidents talking much about costs lately, almost acquiescing to the inevitable, I guess. But I bet that keeping costs low is a hot topic at the University of Phoenix! Students also select us because we offer programs and services convenient to them. We need to interpret this important convenience factor into the contemporary idiom. These days so many folks are required to work longer hours with unpredictable schedules, that community colleges have to be extremely flexible in scheduling both programs and services. Our adult students working 10-12 hours daily often can't balance travel to our campuses with family time. These folks want to have family dinner, pay attention to their kids and then turn to their computers for education or training. Colleges that have not accommodated this phenomenon have seen evening, adult enrollments drop. Colleges that insist that "you can't teach certain disciplines that way" have discovered that the proprietary schools and the corporate colleges haven't got that message!

The real challenge is to balance the instructional technology with the personal touch in community colleges. Again focus on what got us here: creating opportunities for students and professionals to interact personally. We could indeed design many of our enterprises to be delivered without any personal touch, and for some students that might suffice. But balancing the cost saving potential of instructional technology with many of our students' needs for personal contact is an issue we need to resolve on our campuses quicker and more decisively in the future.

Another community college strength that sustained us in the past is our ability to meet local educational needs promptly. Yet there is a death move lurking in our virtue that needs to be ironed out. I remember once visiting a corporation to pitch training programs shortly after emerging from a marathon faculty senate meeting. With the endless senate machinations fresh on my mind, I found it ironic when the corporate personnel officer told me that his company would prefer to work with us rather than a nearby four-year college because we could deliver quicker. I remember thinking "God help the four-year colleges if they move slower than we do!" The inability of traditional governance to react to fast-changing educational needs is one of the biggest problems we face. Faculties and presidents need to invent curriculum review processes that are in tune with today's pace. The traditional functions of faculty senate hegemony have little relevance today, except for the issue of quality control. Most presidents I know avoid readdressing academic governance like the plague, but community colleges will not serve their customers as well as they could until new ways to develop and modify the curriculum are implemented.

Another story that gets at flaws sometimes residing in our attitudes: from 1968 (not exactly ancient history) to the present, the height American high jumpers had to jump to qualify for the Olympics has been raised the equivalent of about two inches. That difference - less than the length of your pinky - is very considerable when you're trying to jump over seven feet high. Yet, the science of high jumping hasn't really changed much since 1968. In order to meet the higher standard - literally, the raising of the bar - high jumpers have to work harder, get in better shape, study and improve their jumping technique by analyzing videotapes of their technique and so forth. This parallels what's happening in education today - the bar is being raised because the knowledge base required for virtually every contemporary enterprise has increased dramatically. Entry level workers today simply need to know more than you and I did when we began our careers. There is just more to know and more is expected. The challenge for community college educators in constructing and updating our curriculum is twofold: first, with technology and competition driving dramatic changes in the rules of workforce preparation, we need close ties to businesses through a meaningful curriculum advisory process. Second, we need to work among ourselves on what can be left out of a high powered curriculum. We're much better at adding than subtracting in curriculum matters and we need help in making hard choices about what is realistic and essential for our degree and certificate programs.

Being recently retired from the "mat" has compelled me to look the issue of change right in the eye. Change is difficult for us to come to grips with. I conclude these remarks with two looks at accommodating change that may hold lessons for us working in community colleges. The first is by Marilyn Ferguson who said "It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place between that we fear…it's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. What are we to hold on to?"

The final illustration of a potential death move could permeate our attitudes about change if we let it. A lawyer was surprised to find a very elderly couple in his office one day seeking a divorce. "Sir," he said "you're 96 years of age, and madam, you're 92. You've been married for almost 70 years and you're looking to be divorced. Tell me please, why now?" After a long pause, the elderly wife replied: "It's like this - we've been thinking about it for a long time, but we wanted to wait till all our children were…dead!" Let's not wait that long to make the changes that will keep our community colleges as valuable in this new century as we were in the last.