University Efforts Research Articles

The Perceived Problems of Community College Department/Division Chairpersons as Revealed by the Nominal Group Process

Abstract Department/division chairpersons are key personnel in the two-year college's effort to adapt to the rapidly changing education milieu and instructional demands of the 1970s and 1980s. However, they often appear to function less than effectively. In this article a procedure for identifying factors preventing chairpersons from exercising leadership is suggested. That procedure is the nominal group process, a group consensus-reaching technique widely acclaimed by organizational development specialists and useful in a variety of administrative functions. Further, the use of the procedure at a recent chairpersons' workshop is reviewed and a description of the most prevalent factors the participants perceived as preventing from doing their jobs is summarized. The workshop attendees identified four broad categories of obstacles to their effectiveness: (1) lack of clear role definition, (2) weak support and direction from upper-level administrative personnel, (3) faculty-related problems, and (4) internal organization/management problems.

Segregation, Separatism, and Sectarianism: Ohio Blacks and Wilberforce University's Effort to Obtain Federal Funds, 1891

A problem posed by the efforts of the last few years to integrate the faculties and student bodies of the nation's previously, almost exclusively, white colleges and universities is the fate of scores of smaller Southern black institutions of higher education now threatened with declining enrollments and a shortage of qualified faculty. Historically the victims of discriminatory funding and general neglect by Southern legislatures, or affiliated with the relatively poor black churches (and in both cases lacking a body of affluent alumni), many of these schools have remained financially marginal up to recent years when the Federal Government and the foundations began to take serious interest in them. Furthermore, racist notions of the uneducability of Blacks and of the place of Blacks in the social order, which have influenced the allocation of funds and the planning of curricula, have been responsible in the past for deemphasizing the liberal arts and the sciences in favor of industrial and vocational training. Thus, these institutions have been limited in their ability to offer the range and depth of education and the spacious, carefully planned learning environment available at the more amply endowed white institutions. It is not surprising, then, that no one has given serious thought to integrating these traditionally black institutions. Indeed, their black and white critics have seemed willing to allow those that cannot compete for students, staff, and resources in today's educational market to die a quiet, natural death. Ironically, however, if race has been a factor working to the detriment of these schools, whether in the past because of discrimination or in the present because of an attempt to end discrimination, it may also be the most

The Significance of the Joint University Libraries

TH E DEDICATION of a new library building to serve the students and scholars of a great modern university is always an occasion for special ceremonial. And well it should be. It marks the addition to the varied resources of the university of a new, carefully planned building set apart to aid the university in achieving the ends for which the university has been established and maintained by society. It tremendously reinforces the university's efforts to conserve and revitalize knowledge and ideas from the past, to discover new knowledge and develop new ideas, and to pass this cumulated heritage on to succeeding generations through instruction, publication, and public service. It signalizes the supplementation of old forces and the release of new forces within society which inevitably contribute to its increasing understanding and cultural enrichment.