Two from EAP honored by community college researchers

Two faculty members from the Department of Educational Administration and Policy – Professor Dale Campbell and Professor and Chair Linda Serra Hagedorn – were honored April 13 by the Council for the Study of Community Colleges.

Campbell, director of the Community College Research Consortium, received the organization’s Distinguished Service Award, which recognizes people and organizations which have made outstanding contributions to innovation and leadership in community colleges – with a focus on application rather than scholarship alone.

Campbell has been the driving force behind UF’s Bellwether Awards, which are granted every year to honor community college administrators for excellence in leadership. His research focuses on trends of concern to community college administrators; Campbell and his colleagues were among the first to sound the warning about the looming shortage of qualified community college administrators.

Hagedorn, who also directs the department’s Institute of Higher Education, was honored with the CSCC’s Senior Scholar Award, which recognizes outstanding theoretical and applied research that contributes to the body of knowledge about community colleges. The award acknowledges Hagedorn’s extensive work as the principal investigator on a project titled Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students, or TRUCCS, a longitudinal study of community college students that includes information from transcripts. Among other topics, TRUCCS has shed new light on the concept of “critical mass” in minority student recruiting and the deleterious effects of “course-shopping” by students.

The CSCC is an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges. It members include university-based researchers and community college practitioners who further scholarship on the community college enterprise.