ADMINISTRATION

Boricua’s governance is legally centralized. Authority flows from the Board of Trustees to the President, who formally shares his governing responsibilities with an Executive Council comprising the Vice Presidents and other senior administrators. The next most visible governing structure is the Academic Senate, which has powers to advise the President on academic issues.

Individuals outside this avowedly “non-traditional” institution may have difficulty in detecting its emerging patterns of cooperation and responsibility. Explication of several aspects of Boricua’s self-image may mitigate this difficulty.

• Boricua aspires to be an educational community for all of its participants. While rhetoric of this kind may be found in higher educational circles, Boricua is literal in its aspiration of that ideal and continues to invest heavily in its implementation. Just as each Boricua student builds his or her educational program around individualized instruction and small group colloquia, each faculty member and administrator participates every week in individualized supervision with a senior faculty mentor or administrator. Faculty members also participate with their peers for two to three hours each week in colloquia led by an academic officer. Beyond rhetoric, therefore, every participant in the College is involved in a formal learning process that incorporates both teaching and learning roles.

• This community-of-learners model has pragmatic benefits, of course, for a young institution that has sought from its beginning to have a community-based faculty, staff and student body. After years of investment in an intensive program of in-service training, the College has developed a cadre of Puerto Rican-Latino and other professionals who operate the College with increasing skill and confidence. This model has implications for governance. When an institution characterizes its most important communication linkages in educational terms, it intentionally blurs the functions of teaching (education), supervising (administration) and policy formation (governance).

• Rejecting pluralism as an overriding value, or even the dominant constraint, Boricua is a voluntary association of people steadfastly committed to a set of educational and social values and is unabashed in its continual socialization of participants to its values and goals. To the extent the institution is successful in its socializing efforts, therefore, the range of viewpoints accommodated within a governing consensus is much narrower than the range encountered in other educational institutions.

• The College reflects a cultural style that is familial rather than contractually hierarchical. Participants tend to be deferential toward established authority. College leaders are solicitous, within the constraints of institutional values, and of participants’ interests and views. Various earlier Middle States Association evaluation reports correctly characterized Boricua’s decision-making style as “centralized although participative.”

• Boricua’s emerging governing patterns, therefore, embody neither the structured tension between faculty and administration, nor the rigid differentiation between professional faculty and enrolled learners that characterize the governance of most American colleges and universities. The key structural dynamic for developing governing consensus is the interaction among a cadre of advocates of Boricua’s humanistic educational philosophy, culture, and model of instruction, in overlapping, weekly participatory colloquia. All institutional participants are ultimately involved in this process as a matter of principle. The outcomes of this interactive process become official operational policy through the imprimatur of the President and his Executive Council, under guidance of the Board of Trustees.