After a career that began in the university setting but included more than 10 years’ teaching at community colleges, I recently decided it was time to go back and teach at a four-year institution. I made the journey—and took the pay cut that went with it—in order to teach and serve as a department chair at the antithesis of the community college: a small, private liberal-arts university.
After such a long time in a community-college setting, I was left thinking about what had gone wrong with my experience, and why it was that I wanted to leave.
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I was new to the idea of community college when I first taught at one. I had come to the United States with a freshly minted Ph.D. from England, where the university system was much more hierarchical and exclusive than the open-door system I discovered here. I was one of the last generations to come through the British 11-plus exam, which streamed students in secondary education and practically determined, by the time they were 11, whether or not they were likely to study at a university.
So the community-college system seemed like a radical social experiment to me. Adults could go back to study? Students with middling or even poor results could migrate to a college education? It seemed like a utopian socialist program from an Eastern-bloc nation or a progressive Scandinavian country—not America.
In my experience, community-college students who transfer to four-year programs tend to do as well as or better than regular university students, and do so on a tighter budget. Community colleges are often better prepared to do the kinds of remedial work necessary to bridge students successfully from their too-often problematic high schools. Community colleges are also often enriched by nontraditional students, who bring a wealth of insight and personal experience to the classroom that make some university classrooms feel like kindergarten by comparison.
My first graduation experience, in a sultry west-Texas gym, was a revelation. Shortly before, I had received my doctorate in the nave at Canterbury Cathedral—but in Texas, the whoops and hollers of students, family members, and friends who were exultant over the awarding of an associate degree put my graduation ceremony, with all its austere pomp, to shame.
It was a delight to see the success stories roll out of the community-college classroom. Whether the students moved on to four-year programs or were vocational-program graduates or simply began to believe in themselves again, one class at a time, I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the arc that was completed over and over again. And I was not alone. I had colleagues who were invested in students’ success rather than their own narrower personal agendas, and I worked at an institution that genuinely cared. When I moved to another community college, in another state, I was again impressed by my colleagues and students, and happy to be a part of an institution so focused on student success.
So why did I choose to switch back to the university setting after so many happy years on the educational front lines?
There are drawbacks, of course, to the community-college experience. For example, while many students treat their freshman year of college as “Year 13"—an extension of their high-school experience but with fewer restraints—that tendency is worse at community colleges, because many such students are local residents who have rejoined high-school classmates. That can blur the transition to community college. Those students are surrounded by familiar faces and old behavioral patterns that reinforce long-held, and often retrogressive, habits.
Another problem with community colleges, from a professor’s point of view, is one of duration. Two-year colleges are frustrating for those academics (presumably most of us) who thrill to the rewarding relationships they can forge with students. Although there is a plus side for those who like the ephemeral nature of our profession—an unpleasant class will last only 14 to 17 weeks, while a soul-sucking office job can go on for years—the flip side is true, too. Just when a professor has trained some students so that they are a full-blown delight, they leave, and someone else gets to teach them through to their peak.
Students, however, are often not the main problem for the community-college professor. Administrators are.
Community colleges too often diminish themselves, defining themselves as glorified high schools, with a range of peculiar and reductive behaviors aimed at faculty members. Like high schools, community colleges often require their new and returning faculty members to engage in extended, and often painfully useless, “in-services"—curious ceremonies that usually include a keynote lecture of questionable significance, such as a presentation about the quirks of Generation Y (or whatever letter we’re on) or the latest in learning styles—followed, of course, by frivolous icebreakers.
But that’s not all. Let us not forget the oppressive teaching schedules that crush research, engagement with the discipline, and, yes, let’s admit it, fresh, innovative teaching. Or the redundant and excessive office-hour requirements, which persist even though students often—and on some commuter campuses, nearly always—communicate digitally. It all seems proof of an embedded but largely unfounded fear that faculty members who are not sitting in their campus offices during the workday are most likely not working.
Despite all that, there remains a lot of innovative, personal, and vivid teaching that takes place at community colleges—sometimes to a much greater degree than in large, impersonal university forums, and often with more entrepreneurial flair.
But that pervasive, subtle distrust of community-college faculty members by administrators, the suspicion that those instructors might have too much time on their hands, lingers. So administrators pile up the teaching load, the committee burdens, and the required campus presence, regardless of whether faculty members would be more productive out of the office, and regardless of whether they need and deserve the intellectual space to read, think, write, and stay current to keep the classroom vital and rewarding, and keep themselves charged and alive.
Surely the success of community colleges is almost always due to the energy of faculty members rather than the administrations of executives who incomprehensibly elect to model their institutions on a flawed K-12 model rather than on universities. The irony is that community colleges would operate better, for all concerned, if they stayed true to their unique mission and rigorously followed their charge, but nonetheless thought of themselves as universities rather than high schools.
It’s time that community colleges finally grew up. If they did, I’d probably still be teaching at one.