Book Review: The Community’s College: The Pursuit of Democracy, Economic Development, and Success

Abstract

For over a century, community colleges have represented a crucial component of the American higher education system. In The Community’s College: The Pursuit of Democracy, Economic Development, and Success, Robert Pura and Tara Parker seek to refute any historically reductive conceptualizations of community colleges by providing an anecdotally driven rebranding of their subject as a consequential resource on numerous contemporaneous fronts. Pura, a former community college president, and Parker, a university educator and researcher, posit community colleges as fundamentally structured to aid against the throes of modern economic instability. The authors also envision community colleges as critical touchpoints for civic engagement and as the bastions of American democracy. Pura and Parker promptly outline their central themes in the book’s introductory section: community colleges are expected to engage a broad population of students with various vocational intentions, and yet these institutions remain comparatively underfunded and are unable to increase revenue through the mechanisms employed by four-year universities. Despite the challenges presented to these institutions, the authors assert that community colleges, particularly when fiscally solvent, are inherently positioned to promote educational equity to an even greater degree than their fouryear counterparts. Pura and Parker ultimately conclude that mission-driven leadership from an administrative level can be the catalyst for maximizing the potential of community colleges. The authors frame their narrative structure in each chapter through Pura’s experiential lens and Parker’s corresponding critical reflections. Parker’s sections add a particularly valuable contextualization of current disparities that exist in the higher education continuum. Every chapter concludes with provocative questions which are intended to generate discourse among community college personnel. The first four chapters provide readers with an overview of the philosophical framework and operational mechanics of community colleges. In these sections, Pura weaves personal anecdotes with seminal works from philosopher John Dewey to frame community colleges as entities that are inextricably linked with an idealized fulfillment of American democracy. Pura’s own leadership philosophy is most evident in Chapter 4, which