Americans are increasingly concerned about academic quality (Hauptman & Kim, 2009). This concern about academic quality is a product of the relative decline of the American economy, American Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores, American baccalaureate attainment rates, and various other indicators of national competitiveness (Kanter, 2011). Educating about 40% of all postsecondary students and suffering from persistently low completion rates, community colleges are not immune from public concern about academic quality (Alstadt, Fingerhut, & Kazis, 2012). Pressure on community college leaders to promote academic quality comes from a variety of quarters, including students and parents, faculty and staff members, board members, program and regional accreditors, funding agencies, citizens, taxpayers, employers, and state and federal government agencies (Hom, 2011). Unfortunately, different community college stakeholders have different, and often shifting, definitions of academic quality (Newton, 2010). The open-ended nature of the term "quality" makes such complexity possible, if not inevitable. As Bassis (2015) asserted, issues related to academic quality are disconcerting and perspectives vary widely, "influenced in no small part by where one sits" (p. 2). A community college leader's decisions about academic quality can lead to the uneven distribution of academic, technological, or physical plant resources, and the downgrading of other, opposing stakeholder-driven definitions of academic quality. When we choose one value-laden interpretation of the term quality, we invariably give up on another incommensurate interpretation of the same word (Kenny, 2000). As Northcraft and Neale (1996) argued, most organizational decisions between competing values inherently affect resource allocation. Community colleges leaders who fail to prioritize different stakeholder-driven definitions of academic quality properly often fail to make informed strategic decisions that advance a college's mission (Hom, 2011). Employing total quality management, stakeholder theory, and the theory of the public sphere, the researcher used a critical interpretative synthesis methodology to describe varied stakeholder-driven definitions of academic quality and provide community college administrators with a theoretical model for prioritizing them. Total quality management provides a practical framework for incorporating customer feedback into an actionable definition of quality (Crosby, 1979; Deming, 1986; Juran, 1989; Sparks & Legault, 2001); stakeholder theory provides a method for broadening leaders' perspectives about an organization's purpose or bottom line (Freeman, 1984, 1994); and the theory of the public sphere offers leaders a theoretical model for understanding how men and women can democratically resolve differences between different or competing claims about values (Habermas, 1989). [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]