Challenge and Opportunity: Canada's Community Colleges at the Crossroads

Alexander D. Gregor is associate dean of the Faculty of Education at the
University of Manitoba and co-editor of Postsecondary Education in
Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

The dramatic growth of Canada’s community-college sector over the past
quarter-century has not been accompanied by a commensurate rise in
systematic studies of the community college that take into account
regional variations. This book, essentially an updating of Dennison and
Gallagher’s Canada’s Community Colleges: A Critical Analysis (1986),
is the result of careful cross-country visits and the utilization of an
extensive national network of scholars, administrators, government
officials, and college teachers.

Dennison’s contributions to the current volume include, in addition
to a review of developments since the mid-1980s, an assessment of the
new forces facing Canadian postsecondary education and of their
implications: organizational challenges in an age of austerity,
accountability in an age of increasingly intrusive “stakeholders,”
and the handling of values in an age of diversity and inclusivity. Other
contributors address issues of leadership, organizational culture,
entrepreneurship, curriculum design, and aboriginal education.
Collectively, they present a comprehensive and important overview of the
issues that will face the postsecondary system—and those determining
educational policy—over the next decade.