Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [67]
Unlike many academics, I didn’t feel provoked by your New York Times article so much as saddened. You articulated the presence in elite research institutions of fragmentation and incoherence reeling toward educational disaster. Travel 10 miles from Morningside Heights [where Columbia is located] westward and you’ll find the same fragmentation and incoherence, but at the other end of the academic spectrum: the community college, where I teach. Here, though, these destructive elements are configured in entirely different—often diametrically opposed—ways. Compared to the Ivies, the community college is bizarro world.
I’ve had the privilege of struggling through both types of alienation and dehumanization, leaving me now truly untethered to anything I’d call an intellectual community. I started my academic career at Columbia, where I earned my doctorate in English, and I will end my academic career at an institution that many folks from the elite schools wouldn’t even consider higher education. But it is—we are just the shameful shadow of the other. Who celebrates acceptance to community college when we have open admissions?
After all, the first community college, Joliet Junior College, in Illinois, was created in 1901 at the behest of William Rainey Harper, then president of the University of Chicago. This two-year college served the purpose of taking the pressure off of the University of Chicago to accept (less than stellar) hordes of students who wanted access to higher education.
I’ll try to list what I know about my employer, colleagues, and students, much of which will be true of other community colleges.
1. By contract, faculty members teach a minimum of fifteen credits or, generally speaking, five courses per semester for a minimum total of ten courses a year. Faculty may teach up to seven courses per semester if they wish. They may also teach in both of two intensive summer sessions. Most of my fulltime colleagues (myself included) have taught overload. There is such fear that the overload option may be taken away from them that the faculty voted down a proposal to reduce course load to four classes per semester.
2. By contract, faculty must be on campus a minimum of four days a week. We are allowed one non-teaching day. Faculty must also schedule a minimum of three office hours per week on three different days.
3. Class size is usually set at a minimum of twelve students; however, very few classes run fewer than twenty-five students and many courses run at fifty. There are often not enough chairs and class space for the number of students in certain classes. Most professors teach between 100 and 200 students per semester.
4. Faculty members do not have research assistants. Support staff is so scarce that in fifteen years I have never even asked my department secretary to Xerox anything for me.
5. My salary is the same as the very lowest starting salary for a tenure-track professor in the California state system. A full professor, I share an office the size of a large closet with three other faculty members. This is the norm.
6. Most everyone who fulfills his/her contractual duties (which do not include publishing) will attain tenure. The faculty promotions committee has used scholarly achievement against applicants for promotion—the assumption is that engaging in scholarly work indicates a lack of dedication to college committees and student activities.
7. The rhetoric of the administration is continually about the college’s mission to provide excellent teaching. And yet, many faculty members feel that if the institution were really dedicated to teaching, it would reduce the required course load, since it is next to impossible to teach five classes well per semester. Sabbaticals are not granted but rather applied for. One or two are offered to a faculty of over 400 each year.
8. The majority of all courses offered