Yesterday’s cross post from the AAAUP Listserv reflected response by a leading
member of the community college faculty to comments by UW faculty on the
quality of education students get at the community colleges.
Paul Burstein ruffled some feathers on the AAUP Listserv when he questioned
community college education was as good a criterion for completing a
UW degree as taking the first two years at the UW. This is a real issue because
about 1/3 of UW degrees go to students who transfer from Washington’s
community colleges. It is also an issue because one major reason these colleges are
less expensive is that the state only funds faculty to teach rather than to pursue
academic careers. In many cases, the community college courses are taught as
piece work, with pay by the class hour raising a good reason to worry that
community college students do not get the presumed benefit from studying with
faculty who are working in the field of their expertise.
Professor Burstein:
…. if the state legislature is so enthusiastic about
community colleges mainly because they’re cheaper to run, and we keep
hearing about how poor the working conditions are for faculty, how they
often can’t get to know the students because they have no offices, or
can’t stay around campus because they have to run off to teach their
next course at a different location, and yet all of this doesn’t
influence the quality of education, the logical conclusion would seem to
be that we could have all our lower-division courses at the UW taught by
part-time faculty paid by the course, given no institutional support,
and little opportunity to get to know the students and provide the kind
of personal guidance that is allegedly so important (see Charles Blow’s
recent column in the New York Times). Indeed, why should the UW have
four-year colleges at all? Overhead must be higher here than at
community colleges, and so a lot of money would be saved by eliminating
lower-division courses (of course so many such courses are so large that
they may be profit centers; no doubt we could turn this calculation over
to some accountants who neither know nor care anything about education).
It may very well be that a system that relies on and exploits contingent
faculty is a terrible system, but in what way is it terrible? Saying
it’s terrible for faculty probably won’t matter to the legislature at
this point, and if it works fine for the students and is cheaper than
relying on tenured and tenure-track faculty, don’t we have a really good
argument here for undermining the whole notion that there’s some
advantage to having campuses provide four years of education to
undergraduates?
I remember that when Richard White finally abandoned the UW History
Department for Stanford, he had some very powerful things to say in an
op-ed in the Seattle Times. Among other things, he decried the emphasis
in this state on having students do two years at community colleges and
then move on to the UW or other university campuses to finish their
degrees. For one thing, he argued (if I remember correctly) setting up
education this way undermines the sense of community students can get if
they’re at the same institution for four years. I don’t think he was
necessarily referring to an intellectual community specifically, but
wouldn’t that be one implication? Won’t students–at least those who
are interested, or who can become interested if the right opportunities
present themselves–be more likely to find supportive and stimulating
intellectual communities at four-year campuses with regular faculty who
are paid enough so they can earn a living from one job and have office
hours and be able to devote more time to particular students?
The community colleges in this state seem very creative and sensitive to
the needs of the communities in which they are located. But if their
low-cost/contingent faculty approach produces the same quality of
education as the first-two years of the UW, what do we need the first
two years of the UW for? Sports, I suppose. For sports, at least,
people seem to think that four years in one location is associated with
better results.
As to the accusation of elitism, this mystifies me. If we make
judgments about quality when hiring faculty, using conventional academic
criteria such as quality of research, isn’t that inherently “elitist”?
If elitist means having superior talent (which is what the dictionary
says), aren’t we supposed to be elitist? If not, we could hire faculty
chosen at random from among the sets of applicants, and students
likewise. Supposedly around the state people don’t like the UW because
we’re so elitist. Except for sports–with regard to sports, people are
big fans of being elitist.
Paul Burstein