Conclusions: The Development and Transformation of the Community College in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This chapter returns to the two intertwined arguments of the book. The first is that higher education organizations are directed and shaped by a neoliberal State and that professional work has been altered to a considerable extent by the State and organizational members’ responses to the State. The second is that the effects of neoliberalism are tempered in higher education through at least two phenomena—professionalism and logics of higher education organizations. Logics include mission, culture, history, and values within individual organizations and the features of the institutional field of community colleges or universities. The chapter concludes with ways to view neoliberalism in the academy and the need or not for organizational members to carry out actions of resistance and insistence.