Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College

Minding the Dream provides challenging, reflective, and practitioner-based information about community colleges that is data-based, clear and accessible for the general reader as well as the scholar.

New employees, current leaders, graduate students, legislators, and boards of trustees need a grounded sense of the magnitude of the community college sector. Minding the Dream evokes the laudatory goals of the early pioneers of the community college movement, while accurately framing key programs and political conundrums challenging community colleges. Minding the Dream celebrates community colleges’ successes and is scrupulously honest about their failings.

Community college leaders need honest information about what’s working and need to be challenged about the things that are not. State Legislatures and Congress need updated facts to assist them in making wise funding decisions regarding community colleges. Community college advocates need updated information to assist them in their advocacy work, and Higher Education programs need an updated book about community colleges to use as a basic text. These are the people who can benefit from reading Minding the Dream.

Gail Mellow, the president of LaGuardia Community College in metropolitan New York, is a long time advocate for community colleges. A national speaker and writer, her focus is to create equity for community colleges for their vital role educating students for a global economy and spurring economic development for the communities they serve.

Cynthia Heelan, Ph.D., is retired president of Colorado Mountain College and an educational consultant. She is a national facilitator and Distinguished Advocate for the Center for Renewal and Wholeness in Higher Education (www.richlandcollege.edu/crwhe/) She is the author of the Heart at Work: Stories About Speaking From the Heart at Work, and co-author, with Dr. Gail Mellow, of Minding the Dream: Process and Practice or the American Community College. After a long and distinguished career in higher education, she assists educational organizations in leading and planning in ways that engage the entire institution’s heart and voice. She is a board member and board chair emeritus for Battery Dance Company of New York City. Dr. Heelan holds a Ph.D. in policy analysis and administration and a Masters Degree in Adult Education from the University of Minnesota. She was an Archibald Bush Foundation Fellow in the College Management Program at Carnegie Mellon U.