Martin Spear, as always, has much of interest to say in his current Viewpoints article “The End of Disarticulation.” Do we really operate from a “deficit” model at CCP? And if so, does that “infantilize” students? If Martin’s claim that “there can be no individual classroom solutions to the problem of academic culture” is true, how would our institution go about determining what our culture is and whether it’s the culture we want? Indeed, do we share an academic culture or do we simply offer a number of services tailored to student needs that are so disparate that any thought of an academic culture is merely a passing fancy? I was struck that much of what Martin offers as suggestions for strengthening the faculty are already occurring: the SoTL Series, new faculty orientation and continuing development programs, Teaching Circles, The CASTL Program, Department mentoring programs, Teaching Center programs, Professional Development weeks, and the Lindback Lectures. Nevertheless, as Martin suggests, these fail to cohere into a publicly articulated academic vision that is coordinated and sustained. In the end, what I have always liked about Martin’s work is that he continually asks the fundamental question of who we are as an academic faculty—for without knowing that, how can we possibly know what to do with our students? There is much in Martin’s article that should provoke thought and conversation, and I’m sure Martin would welcome collegial responses to his article. We would be happy to print such responses in upcoming editions of Viewpoints. –Tom Ott
It was gracious of Tom Ott to invite Dennis McGrath and me to speak at the SoTL discussion series last spring, and he had extremely generous things to say about our book, The Academic Crisis of the Community College (ACCC). To say the least, both of us have been pleased to see our book become part of the standard literature on community college education, to see chapters from it anthologized in the ASHE reader on Community Colleges, to see it become required reading at graduate programs in education around the country. We are even pleased to receive the occasional e-mail from graduate students from here or there asking us to comment on a paper or, more often, to explain why we said such outrageous things in the book about this or that.
On the other hand, the book is becoming harder to come by. SUNY sold out their printing, and the economics of academic presses being what they are, very reasonably decided not to run another. Anyone with enough interest can still find copies through Amazon or Alibris or some other online bookseller, but for most people The Academic Crisis of the Community College is the sort of thing one either reads in graduate school or not at all. At CCP for instance, although it was at the center of the curricular wars of the 80s and 90s, the generation who fought those battles have mostly retired from the field, and of course now we are ruled by a Pharaoh who knows not Joseph.
Much remains the same. A new faculty is now faced with the same problems and with essentially the same tired solutions, the prospects for meaningful success perhaps bleaker than ever.
Dennis McGrath used to make a little joke—maybe he still does—that administrators hate to see the word “crisis” in a title of a book, if that title also includes the phrase “community college.” As it happens, college presidents and vice-presidents don’t have absolute power and so can’t be corrupted absolutely. But their own angles of vision make it well nigh impossible for them to notice what both faculty and students can notice easily. Fascinated by their bullet-lists and their forced-choice questionnaires, bullied by their own bosses, and by the press of never-ending managerial deadlines, senior administrators live their professional lives on a treadmill few faculty can even imagine. With their professional reputations, even their very jobs, staked to institutional success, it is not really very surprising that they see success wherever they turn, and the future just an emptiness to be filled with even more. They are inclined by character and by training to manage more than to imagine, to measure more than to understand. For administrators, “managing change” almost always means managing upsizing or downsizing, adding or subtracting programs and personnel. None of that makes them either stupid or corrupt, but it does make them singularly unlikely to notice the qualitative and cultural features of their own institution, or ever really to think anything might be fundamentally problematic with the goings-on. One can take little reassurance from the periodic repetition of the cant that we are an institution characterized by an excellence that only keeps keep getting better and better.
Faculty and students are much better positioned to experience the inadequacies of the College although their characteristic styles of explaining failure are themselves more symptoms of the failure than explanations for it. The Academic Crisis of the Community College was written to describe the precise kind of educational failure community colleges represent.
Whenever Dennis and I have been asked to speak here or there, the inevitable first question is a request to summarize what people sometimes like to call the thesis of the book. My own response to that has always been that I have trouble even pretending a summary of a book that ranges so widely. The best I can ever do quickly is explain that the book is an ethnographic snapshot of conventional forms of community college thought, of organization, of curricular form, and pedagogic methods. Any even marginally competent ethnography will claim to be able to find coherence in the culture under study, and will certainly find that the various aspects of thought, organization, and behavior of ‘the tribe’ form a unity. And so we did, as well, though what we found was not the unity that all of us would have hoped, but a record of how the educational enterprise has gotten corrupted at its heart. This led one early anonymous reviewer of ACCC to see it as a dismal exercise in lamentation. “Everywhere is gloom,” he said. “Nowhere is there a ray of hope. The very programs and initiatives which are designed to improve education are supposed to be utterly flawed.” Neither Dennis nor I think that at all captures the book, but it is easy to understand why it might look that way. Since ACCC is largely a critique of the conventional self-understanding of the community college, it is bound to look aggressively hostile from the point of view of the reigning wisdom.
The problem, as we saw it, was a thoroughgoing mismatch between the instrumentalities of the college and any recognizable intellectual or academic goal. Notice that the title was not “the credit transfer crisis,” for instance, or the “retention crisis,” or any one of a host of other issues, which catch the attention of administrators. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the disciplines the authors come from, the analysis sits at the intersection of sociology and epistemology. Since neither sociology nor epistemology is high on the list of bedside reading for community college administrators, perhaps the enterprise was destined to look to them like something from the third column of the Rosetta Stone. Faculty members, on the other hand, have been inclined to normalize the analysis—indeed the tendency toward normalization is the greatest obstacle any novel account has to face. But the teaching faculty feel their souls are at stake in the classroom, and so are usually much more willing to try to unravel the mysteries of the educational order we have together created.
What took a book to explain (even to ourselves) cannot be explained persuasively in a sentence or two, so I will have to content myself with bare assertion: In the traditional liberal arts, especially, what is called education at community college is a brew of competing agendas. Uncoordinated, unacknowledged and even unrecognized, these agendas bubble up unexpectedly in the various institutional settings and classrooms. Academic disciplines have largely lost their intellectual form and force as they are presented to students, for whom courses necessarily appear as the idiosyncratic inclinations of individual teachers. In effect, students are being trained in a casual relativism, which devalues traditional literate rationality but which is perfectly in keeping with their own pre-theoretical inclinations.
One way to understand this is by way of a thought experiment. Allow for the moment the abstract representation of a student’s experience at CCP (as it appears in the catalog as course requirements, or on the student’s own transcript as a history of course-taking) to drop away and replace it with the imagined day to day, classroom-to-classroom experience of the student. Would it be any surprise if a student navigating her way through the welter of competing practices, understandings and representations that she would see fit to raise her hand in your classroom and ask the dreaded question “What do you want on the paper? On the test? On what have you?” Some of us, who think of ourselves as taking the high road, will tell students “I don’t want anything; the question wants something” and things of the sort. But that only works because it plays so strongly against expectations and is itself a form of self-glamorization. The reality is that at a college without a coherent sense of intellectual life, of intellectual mission, that organizes at the level of the individual classroom professor, it is perfectly rational for students to try to dope out the professors one by one, and for professors to nurture students one by one. If that looks to us like a somewhat degraded set of college/discipline/faculty/student relations, well so be it. Associated with those relations, in the wider picture, is a corrupt social epistemology that supports individual classrooms by negating the intellectual coherence of the college faculty as a whole.
The incoherence of a student’s educational experience is hidden in a number of ways. The least important is the well-known hiddenness of the classroom itself. Almost anything might be going on in the classroom down the hall, after all, or even in your own classroom. The mere thought that anyone might, by authority, peek into the classroom to check what is happening is enough to prompt cries of outrage. I have always thought this is a simple atavistic fear of being found out, elevated into a principle, but it is a fact of life at our own institution that any attempt to observe classrooms by authority would be met by the most powerful resistance. It revives ancient enmities with the administration, who are always imagined, perhaps with frequent justification, to be hostile on the one hand, and not qualified to judge on the other. Besides the fact that this means that not even a House sub-committee is going to be looking at our classrooms anytime soon, it means, on the downside, that we can know what goes on in Sally’s classroom, or Tommy’s discipline, only by rumor and innuendo, and by Sally and Tommy’s self-reports (such as they might be).
I don’t want to underplay the significance of the legal and political supports of hiddenness. But at least as important, and perhaps more so, is its cultural and epistemological support. What has developed here, and elsewhere, and in the literature of Education, is a weak language of description in which almost anything might be described as “analysis,” “argumentation,” “interpretation,” and so on. By the time just about anything anyone says can be called an interpretation (“That’s just my interpretation,” says the student with perfect confidence), when three free-standing and independent claims can pass as an “argument for a thesis,” by the time faculty and administrators care more about whether something is called an analysis than its actually being an analysis, when the most disparate and competing intellectual and academic agendas are described in the same terms, then the College will have lost the ability to recognize theoretical and methodological disagreement, opposition, and difference. Those in a position to remember will recall that the public process by which intellectual opposition was denied or negotiated away produced the most explosive moments of the curricular wars of the last generation.
We did not think ten years ago, nor do we think now, that the decline in academic rigor is something found only at community colleges, nor that the explanation for the decline is to be found in the details of educational institutions only. However we do think that the decline has been more rapid and steep at community colleges than at more traditional four-year colleges and universities, for reasons explained at some length in ACCC.
There are many factors contributing to the decline of academics but I want to point here to just two, which are closely related to each other.
Disarticulation.
Since the niceties of everyday conversation at community colleges have it that we are “student-centered” ACCC began with a quick, if oblique, sketch of the students:
The educational problem of non-traditionality is not really primarily a problem of low skills, or spotty previous high school achievement, or low income, or family responsibilities. More centrally it is what sociologists call a “structural disarticulation” between colleges and their student populations. Even very bright community college students, and there are many, are nontraditional in the sense that they typically carry a spectacularly non-standard repertoire of behaviors and attitudes with which to cope with the traditional requirements of college life. Overwhelmingly, they come from backgrounds which have not prepared them to identify with, or even to recognize the central values and practices of academic life, and which have not provided adequate models of intellectual activity. They do not take themselves seriously as learners of something worth learning, but rather view themselves as engaged in a certification process in which credits are “accumulated” and requirements as unreasonable obstacles placed in their path. Often they come from backgrounds which do not value controversy and debate, so that they tend to reduce reasoned inquiry and principled dispute to just “matters of opinion.” Many, also, have little sense of controlling their lives; they see themselves as having little command of the resources that might improve their prospects. (page 24)
By calling attention to the populational features of community college students we hoped to achieve a novel angle of vision on the problem of community college education. Importantly, the sketch is not really in any important sense an account of individual students at all. It is an account of community colleges as a site of cultural exchange. We have long thought that not noticing that fact leads colleges to implicitly demean the students by imagining them as deficient according to the standards of a culture they don’t really share. Associated with that is what some people call a deficit model of education, which community colleges routinely adopt even while routinely decrying.
Here’s the difference: A deficit model imagines education as accumulation, an emptiness to be filled. Of ten, not always that filling is imagined as in a measuring cup, with the gradations corresponding to the numbered grade levels from elementary and high school. The implied, and sometimes perfectly explicit suggestion, is that individual students are at a lower number than they need to be, so they have to be, as it were, pushed ahead in the sequence.
A disarticulation model does not propose looking at things in anything like that way, and I myself think that deficit models are not particularly ever useful or appealing and in fact manage to get just about everything wrong. But you do see accounts like that around, even among people who disavow them.
To put it bluntly: deficit models tend strongly to infantilize students by implicitly pushing the students to what is imagined to be earlier stages of development. Not uncommonly, students imagined at the “sixth grade reading level” with a nontraditional understanding of classroom dynamics will be treated as adolescents rather than as initiates. Just as the stereotype sees the colonizer patiently speaking slowly to the natives as if they are recalcitrant children, imagining adult students as childlike is a particularly obnoxious concomitant of the failure to recognize community college education as cultural exchange rather than as colonization, or as junior high school revisited.
One useful criterion for locating a deficit model is the extent to which students are treated as adults, with full adult responsibility, and a range of adult interests and capacities. Arguably our very youngest students, say those who are 17 or 18, need professors to cast themselves in loco parentis, but modal community college students are more like a decade older than that and deserve respect more than they need “nurturing” or “caring.”
Disarticulation is a condition of an institution in which clients and providers gaze at each other with mutual incomprehension. Each group will experience a sense of dislocation, of disorientation, of things not being quite right. Each can be expected to act, by and large, in familiar ways, ratified perhaps by long-standing experience. They can be expected to normalize what they encounter, although treating the unfamiliar as if it is familiar doesn’t help much and may hurt. It is a matter not of being stupid or incompetent, or necessarily lazy or anything of the sort. More than anything it is like being a stranger in a strange land. And that, as you know, creates a complex of problems both for the stranger and the land.
It is easy to say, and probably right to say, that if the students think you are doing the right thing, you are probably doing the wrong thing—that is just another way of putting the point of disarticulation—but as with many things easy to say, it’s hard to sustain.
The great benefit of noticing “disarticulation” is that it permits the educational problems of community colleges to be recast as the problem of cultural exchange and initiation and that, of course, would open up roads not traveled.
Our own account of non-traditionality was flawed by being impressionistic and anecdotal. For the College to respond effectively to the problem of disarticulation it has to spend the time and energy to study the student culture through something more sophisticated than focus groups and forced-choice questionnaires. But to the extent that we really care about moving students from A to B, we have to know an awful lot more about the A than we have shown any inclination to know so far. To design effective communication we really do have to know how individual students and classes will likely process their experience, and to the extent that we are in the knowledge business we have to know what their preliminary epistemology is, and how it works in the rough and tumble of the classroom and the curriculum. But we have to know a lot more about B, or what wants to be B as well.
The Teacher Side of the Desk.
When we wrote The Academic Crisis of the Community College back in 1990, we did tend to have our gaze over on the student side of the desk perhaps more than we should have. There were chapters devoted to the curriculum, and to remedial education, and general education and composition programs, but they each assumed a relatively low degree of non-traditionality on the faculty side of the desk.
If we were to re-write it today I think we would find a cultural study of the faculty and a cultural audit of our curriculum to be every bit as important as a study of the students. This is not something many colleges are willing to undertake, perhaps for the reason that everyone in the vicinity prefers fond hopes to hard reality.
That was the big sin of omission. As far as sins of commission are concerned, here’s where we went wrong, or at least not as right as we should have been.
“Disarticulation” explanations proceed by ethnographic methods, which tend very strongly to portray culture, and cultural contact, synchronously, as in a temporal cross-section. That is interesting stuff, and important, but misleading, since educational institutions like ours are in motion through time. If you imagine a student population, and a faculty population as fairly stable and caught in rigid patterns, synchronous ethnographic studies make sense. Institutions characterized by innovation and experiment more than by tradition are much less responsive to such methods.
”Gardeners, roses think, never die.” So also it is tempting to think of educational forms and strategies as enshrined while students come and go, being acted upon. Of course, faculty are a much more stable group than students. There are no students who were here 35 years ago, but their presence lingers in the re-configured habits, attitudes and behaviors of faculty. However much it is romanticized as “what the students taught me,” the fact is that student resistance wears down anyone over time; the small concessions over time amount to a re-configuration of just your one classroom – while everyone else’s is being similarly re-configured. As helpful as it may be for a while to remember that if the students think you are doing the right thing, you are probably doing the wrong thing--that is just another way of putting the point of disarticulation--it’s not really the kind of thing that can be sustained alone over ten or twenty years. Being the last Mandarin may have its own appeal, but even if one could stand alone against the reconfiguration of the academic culture, it could only be as one more idiosyncratic professor to whom students might ask, what do you want me to do? There can be no individual classroom solutions to the problem of the academic culture.
The problem that presses critically, if unnoticed, is how to keep a faculty strong and appropriately coherent.
Even if a whole new faculty are excellent when they walk into their first classes, the institution will work its wonders. The students will want to negotiate standards, senior faculty and administrators will counsel compromise, everybody in the vicinity will want you to learn to be a caring nurturer and there will be no discernible benefit to anyone of trying to impose a remembered classroom culture on this new setting. Thus the problem: how to re-order our professional lives together so that we can present to students an alternative to the habits of mind they brought with them, a coherent picture of the liberal arts as a way of thought, as a way of life.
That is not something that comes naturally nor is it easy of solution. It can’t be done by filling out course proposal forms, or dictating exit criteria. Minimally it will call for intense self-investigation of how our own practiced epistemologies relate to those of students. It calls for the unpleasant recognition that colleges change individual faculty members to bring them into line with their cultural environment and thereby to reduce the dissonance for everybody.
Since students come and go in an endless wave, constantly refreshing the energy on that side of the desk, dissonance reduction means individual faculty members, and the faculty as a group, changing themselves to bring themselves into line with student expectations. Some people call this the “renegotiation of the norms of literacy.” I call it the end of disarticulation.
We have long known that the initiatory experience of teaching at a community college is disorienting. The severing of the professional ties between community college faculty and their disciplines is something we talk about in our chapter “The New Professoriate of the Community College.” There we explain how faculty at community colleges have gotten more and more cast as journeymen in a guild, responsible only occasionally, and vaguely, for their performance.
Lacking strong professional models—one might even say in the absence of the coercion experienced by their colleagues in the junior ranks at four year colleges and universities—the “initiatory experience” of community college faculty consists in the formal severing of ties to their disciplines, the gradual distancing from its ongoing activities. Very quickly their professional identification shifts from the discipline—from Historian or Economist—to be replaced by the approved image of the nurturing “teacher.” In the pressure of day to day negotiations with students, in an environment in which too great a display of professional academic interest is condemned as “elitist”, new faculty now slide into their new role rather easily. Although more than a generation toiled at the task of forming the pattern of that role, it is now just there, ready and waiting for new professors to morph into it. The unnoticed and unremarked-on aspect of this movement is that the prior university and disciplinary cultures were what gave meaning to the habits and practices of intellectual life, which form the discipline. And these were left behind.
Although talk of “generations” of faculty is a bit misleading, since it’s not as if a whole faculty arrives at once on a bus, it is a helpful idealization. The faculty group who came in the early 70s has now started to arrive at retirement age, and for the first time in decades, large numbers of faculty members are in the cohorts of the “junior” faculty. The cultural forces working to normalize them are very strong, and it certainly won’t take twenty years for them to arrive at the repertoire achieved by the senior faculty only after a long march. Indeed some senior administrators are already waxing ecstatic at how much in touch with the students the junior faculty seems to be. If the end of disarticulation is a good thing, then that is a good thing. On the other hand, if we are discontented with what we have become as an institution, speaking from an academic point of view, then we ought to recognize that the arrival of a new faculty presents an epochal opportunity for reshaping the academic environment or at least for creating and sustaining a faculty capable of reshaping it.
Some ideas for direction.
This is the point in the discussion where the approved move is to start up with what a new curriculum should look like, or what particular educational theory is best, or what pedagogy to favor. Although I have often been portrayed otherwise, I have never thought any of those is a useful approach to The Academic Crisis of the Community College. Each of them just dissolves into the brew, as all of our reforms have, and gets normalized fairly quickly. That doesn’t mean we are helpless, just that what might be effective action, where the leverage points are, isn’t always where one routinely thinks to look. The opportunities for effective action are determined by times and circumstances, and this is a special time in the life of our own institution.
From a long view, what is different now is the demographic tilt of the faculty toward the junior side of the career line. That is what presents the unprecedented opportunity to use what he have learned from hard experience and act to strengthen the profession of community college professor. There is no use in pretending that the profession is much like university professor, or for that matter like a high school teacher. The new profession could go the way it has so far, and probably will. However it need not happen that way. We may take the opportunity to strengthen the profession by recognizing the nature of the problem and developing strategies for building and sustaining a strong and coherent faculty. As far as I know, no other college has ever recognized the nature of the problem, or gone any distance at all toward addressing it. We would be the first. If we can do that successfully, then that new faculty can be trusted to do what the earlier generation couldn’t find ways to do: solve the problem of democratic education at the community college. Not to say the obvious, but that is not a little add-on activity to the business of teaching. It is the central problem of our professional lives.
Here is a short list of the kinds of things that might be done to strengthen the faculty over the course of a decade or two:
First a general point, and not one for which I have a specific recommendation beyond the suggestion that people think about it. Over the years the College’s system of rewards and public recognition has been corrupted in various ways. The background for this, of course, is the cultural norm that has it that all teachers are excellent and hence any singling out for rewards or recognition is somehow misguided. To put it somewhat differently, the College has long forgotten how to use the available public symbols to encourage faculty to pursue this rather than that style of professional life. This is a very important matter. No strong academic community can be absent a system of hierarchy, since that hierarchy is largely what guides the initiates. At the point, long ago reached at our own college, when people routinely think that “recognition” (things like academic rank or Lindback awards) is somehow distributed politically, or as payment for services rendered, then the symbol system has become de-legitimated in everybody’s eyes.
That aside, my specific recommendations are offered on the theory that community college faculty, and hence the community college, would be fundamentally strengthened by the creation of surrogates for the academic culture they left behind. Here are some ideas:
Since by the nature of their jobs college administrators work within the horizon of yearly funding cycles, with only secondary interest even five years hence, and no particular interest at all in the problem of the academic culture of their institution, it is, to say the least, unlikely that the College administration would light on any of these as things they would want to do. At a different sort of institution they would fall under a Dean of Faculty. Several presidents ago, I began suggesting that such a position be established. Always the idea was met with a frown and the speaking-to-the-stupid observation that we are in the business of educating the students, not the faculty. What I believe I have come to understand is that one cannot really do the one without the other.
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Maintained by Jay Howard,September 2005