Advocate Online

Speaking Out

'Honored but Invisible'

Although they have received frequent mention in the national press for the last several years, community colleges continue to be, as the title of one well-known study asserts, “honored but invisible.”

Honored for their support of community and workplace literacy and for helping to realize for many the dream of higher education, but “invisible” when good work—in particular the scholarship and research of community college faculty— fails to receive recognition alongside that of colleagues from four-year institutions.

So many misunderstandings about the community college mission abound. Some think that we are simply an extension of high school; others feel we are merely vocational schools. To challenge these misconceptions, community college faculty need to render our work in a visible and authentic way to those who do not know first-hand what it is we do. We need to construct for them, and perhaps for ourselves as well, an image of our work as intellectually rigorous and, yes, eminently practical.

We ought not to balk when deciding whether to renew a subscription to a journal in our field or respond to a conference call for presentations, nor should we dismiss our own abilities to render our work in writing. More broadly, we ought not to succumb to the easy, yet ultimately flawed, thinking, that by participating in our profession’s conversations we shortchange our students. They are enormously enriched by our professional engagement.

As an editor of an academic journal that seeks to strike a balance between theory and practice and that encourages contributions that ground discussions of teaching in sound scholarship, I have read first-rate manuscripts written by two-year college faculty that treat teaching as a serious subject for research and that teach us all by example what it means to be an effective teacher-scholar.

However, while these authors typically cite important work done by colleagues at four-year institutions, I have noted that scholars who are affiliated with four-year colleges rarely cite the good work done by two-year college professors. It is time for a change. I call upon colleagues from four-year institutions to meet two-year college faculty half-way: let’s read each other’s work and recognize the quality of that work. Let’s acknowledge in our usual way—through citation and referencing—the scholarship and research done on either side of the two year/four-year divide. We, and our students, ought to expect no less.

Howard Tinberg is a professor of English at Bristol Community College, a member of the Massachusetts Community College Council and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the 2004 CASE/Carnegie Community College Professor of the Year.