The Tip of the Iceberg, But What's Underneath?: Hidden Shared Governance in the Community College

ABSTRACT This article proposes a new way of thinking about shared governance, focusing on the informal and sometimes unintentional interactions among faculty, staff, and even students. We argue that an operational place to start reconceptualizing shared governance is to look at the everyday interactions that collectively make up the hidden experiences of shared governance, or what we also refer to as the “base” rather than the “tip” of an iceberg. As such, shared governance can be viewed as a socially constructed concept that requires new and different thinking about how decisions are made and how a college's culture makes, and accepts decisions. We conclude with several recommendations for practice which collectively stress reconsidering what shared governance means on an individual campus and how it contributes to strategically thinking and articulately how shared involvement can play an important role in determining the future of a college.