Shared Governance in Community Colleges. Public community college governance stands quite apart from the governance of systems employed by public universities and public elementary and secondary schools.
Governance is a function of structure and of how people act within that structure.
The bureaucratic model describes a traditional, rule bound, hierarchical power structure similar to K-12 structures. Authority is delegated from the top down with the faculty, staff and students each occupying respectively lower levels of the pyramid. The collegial model proposes a community of scholars, with consensual decision making processes involving all constituencies affected by the decisions. The purpose of this digest is to define shared governance, discuss the way shared governance is actually structured in community colleges, and to identify issues suggested by recent community college shared governance experiences. Shared governance is a social system of self government wherein decision-making responsibility is shared among those affected by the decisions.