The Negative Commandments: Ten Ways Urban Community Colleges Hinder Student Success

One of the goals of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (TRUCCS) project was to understand how the community college fulfills its multiple missions. This article uses qualitative data collected through a series of focus groups with students, faculty and administrators held at the nine Los Angeles campuses during the Fall semester of 2001. In a sister paper, published in the "Community College Journal," the authors described 10 "positive commandments" or factors that promote student success (Hagedorn, Perrakis, & Maxwell, 2006). In this article, the authors took the opposite approach, highlighting 10 negative operating principles found to be consistent among the focus group interviews they conducted. Thus this article takes the approach of what "not" to do. Taken together, these lists of positive and negative "commandments" formed the basis of ongoing research designed to illustrate the duality of institutional management. (Contains 1 footnote.)