Servingness as Organizational Practice: Critical Transformational Leadership in Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges

• In Event: Power, Privilege, and Positionality in Higher Education

Abstract

Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges (HSCCs) enroll a substantial and growing share of the nation’s Latinx, first-generation, working-class, Black, Native, and immigrant students. As open-access institutions embedded within stratified state systems, HSCCs occupy a pivotal position in either reproducing or interrupting educational inequality. While the Sociology of Education has richly examined opportunity gaps, racialized policy regimes, and institutional stratification, less attention has been given to leadership as an organizational mechanism shaping the conditions under which mobility becomes possible.
This paper advances Critical Transformational Leadership (CTL) as a sociological framework for analyzing how leadership institutionalizes “servingness” beyond demographic designation. Rather than treating leadership as managerial efficiency or individual charisma, CTL conceptualizes leadership as a structural process through which governance, budgeting, hiring, and accountability systems are aligned with equity goals. The guiding question is: How do leaders in HSCCs institutionalize servingness, and how do leadership practices shape organizational capacity for mobility under political and fiscal constraint?
Drawing on a multi-site qualitative Comparative Case Study (CCS) of seven HSCCs in Arizona and New Mexico, the study analyzes 73 semi-structured interviews, 63 hours of observations, and institutional documents. Using horizontal, vertical, and transversal comparative axes, the analysis identifies organizational mechanisms distinguishing rhetorical commitment from enacted practice.
Findings show that leadership operates as a structural condition shaping institutional coherence and opportunity structures. Institutions enacting CTL embedded distributed governance, normalized racial literacy in decision-making, treated budgets as redistributive tools, and institutionalized belonging as infrastructure rather than programming. In contrast, hierarchical or colorblind approaches fragmented equity initiatives and weakened mobility pathways.
By theorizing servingness as organizational practice and leadership as a meso-level mechanism linking racialized policy environments to student experience, this study extends sociological understandings of how institutions sustain, or undermine, mobility in stratified higher education systems.

Author

• Anthony Hernandez, University of Wisconsin Colleges