The Community College and the Good Society

How the Liberal Arts Were Undermined and What We Can Do to Bring Them Back

Chad Hanson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351484718
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

The community college is the largest single sector of the U.S. higher education network. As of 2005, 40 percent of newly enrolled undergraduate students attended community colleges. The American two-year school is a vast, rapidly changing, and under-studied institution. The aim of The Community College and the Good Society is tocritically analyze the internal changes and external forces that shifted the focus of the two-year college-from the liberal arts to job training. Chad Hanson raises a series of questions about what is lost or forsaken when public institutions become preoccupied with economic goals. When educational institutions turn their attention toward training workers to private-sector specifications, Hanson argues, our social and cultural lives suffer. He describes the "the learning college movement, " an ideological framework that justifies the current emphasis on vocational training. In addition, he explores the implications of competency-based education, a philosophy and method for creating curriculum with strong support among administrators and boards of trustees. For more than four decades, a steady stream of commentary aimed at understanding the two-year school made its way into the literature on higher education. In this work, Hanson provides an alternative view of the community college. He offers suggestions for new teaching strategies, curriculum, and organizational structure. These changes will encourage the potential for the two-year college to flourish as an institution that provides a permanent place for the arts and sciences.

Part One:

Change on Campus

1

Political Culture:
The Quiet Shift toward Job Training

The community college is an American institution. No other nation supports a network of similar schools on such a wide scale. At present, there are 979 two-year colleges in the United States, enrolling 40 percent of first-time undergraduates. The school is significant to the nation for reasons other than its size, however. The community college acts as a cultural barometer. To understand the community college is to understand how we live and who we are as a society. For the careful observer, two-year schools offer a reflection of the way we see ourselves. They provide us with avenues upon which to pursue our private aspirations, but they also serve as a means for the nation to invest in an array institutions that contribute to a way of life that is consistent with our cultural ideals.

Of course, ideals shift from one generation to the next. Social change is inevitable, but in democracies we assume that the nature of change should be decided through the course of vigorous debate. Public colleges bend their practices to match the desires of people touched by their services, and as such they adjust to the times, but the changes unfolding in two-year schools are taking place without the benefit of open dialogue or critical analysis. Over the course of the past two generations, education scholars maintained a moderate level of interest in the changing nature of the two-year school. In the meantime, however, officials from both political parties became resigned to the idea that community colleges function best when they focus on occupational training as opposed to the liberal arts. Likewise, in the colleges themselves, educational objectives were displaced by goals related to labor force development.

The Stage for a Debate

The community college began as part of a plan to break undergraduate degrees in half—the first two years broad and general, the third and fourth years aimed at immersion in the perspective and methods of a discipline (Deiner, 1986). In their early history, two-year colleges expanded with the purpose of serving as vehicles for providing local access to the freshman and sophomore years of bachelor’s degrees, but as community colleges evolved their orientation toward the baccalaureate changed. Community colleges developed multi-faceted missions. In addition to university transfer, they added remedial courses, vocational training, and classes of interest to non-degree seeking students (Blocker, Plummer, and Richardson, 1965). Here, in the twenty-first century, the community college remains comprehensive, but priorities shifted. At present, job training overshadows other aspects of the school’s mission or purpose (Ayers, 2005).

In the 1930s, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) began promoting vocational curricula, and the focus on training held a prominent place on the agenda of administrators and AACC staff through the forties and fifties (Brick, 1963; Labaree, 1997). Then the 1960s ushered in a set of changes. In the sixties and seventies, “individual and community betterment” became a concern for faculty, irrespective and at times in spite of commercial interests (Levin, 2001, p. 170). The sixties and seventies were a period of social unrest and personal introspection. Community colleges reflected broader cultural patterns by stressing education for the sake of equipping students with the ability to address questions of political and economic justice. The attempt to inculcate such skills enjoyed a short lifespan, however. From the 1980s to the present, community colleges pursued the goal of training personnel to specifications set by employers (Levin, 2001).

During the first wave of vocationalism in the 1930s, students were reluctant to participate. Early occupational programs struggled to enroll an adequate number of trainees, but today vocationalism enjoys a level of support unseen in the past (Dougherty, 1994; Roksa, 2006). At present, an increasing number of community college students enroll in short-term certificate programs, and most students pursuing associate degrees choose occupational majors. In other words, “The occupation-oriented student has become the modal student” (Alfonson, Bailey, and Scott, 2005, p. 209).

In a democracy, change in the nature and purpose of public institutions ought to be the subject of community-wide deliberation, but no such debate took place on the topic of the community college. In the past half century, university-based researchers drew attention to the shift toward vocationalism in two-year schools, but their efforts only produced a smattering of articles, and roughly one book per decade (Clark, 1960; Zwerling, 1976; Brint and Karabel, 1989; Dougherty, 1994; Levin, 2001).

The body of work is small but valuable, as it is the only quarter where questions surface with respect to the motives and consequences of the historic change in the mission of the two-year college. Even so, despite a handful of exceptions (McGrath and Spear, 1991) there have been few public discussions on the subject, and few debates within the schools themselves. The move away from the liberal arts and toward job training advanced without a thorough consideration of the implications or alternatives.

The lack of discourse is vexing since a debate about the community college’s shifting mission could easily mirror the debates Americans hold on subjects such as taxation, health care, K-12 education, or the environment. Given the number of Americans affected in some way by community colleges, the institution’s role ought to be the subject of ongoing dialogue. For example, questions about the purpose of the school, if raised by students, staff or faculty could easily match the questions that the nation’s founders addressed when they fought to forge an understanding of the role civic institutions fulfill in a democracy.

Community colleges receive little public attention, but in early U.S. history national leaders held deep discussions on the subject of social institutions and their function. Of those conversations, the most well known is the debate between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. The two statesmen differed when it came to questions about the purpose of public agencies. They also held contrary views on the role that citizens fulfill in a self-governed society, and their thoughts lend themselves to an analysis of the community college, as the schools’ purpose is that of making education available to a broad cross-section of the population.

Hamilton and the Hierarchical Society

Hamilton co-authored the Federalist Papers. Together with John Jay and James Madison, the three published a series of eighty-five essays in 1787 urging Americans to adopt a constitution designed to create a strong central government. Hamilton is considered the intellectual force at work in the Papers, but it is important to note that his views on the nature of society took shape, not in the new American states, but during his childhood in the West Indies (Staloff, 2005). Eighteenth-century colonial societies were stratified, and Hamilton came to see political and economic inequality as a result of natural distinctions between members of differing social classes. He believed a nation’s economy served as an arbiter of personal merit and leadership potential. He assumed, in nations where citizens pursue self-interests, superior individuals rise toward positions of power. In Hamilton’s words, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people” (Elliot’s Debates Vol.4., p. 244, quoted in Parrington, 1927, p. 307).

Hamilton traveled in aristocratic circles and harbored ill feelings toward those he thought of as commoners. In particular, he distrusted their judgment. In his mind, most are unfit to perform civic duties, and he fought to reserve political offices for those with financial means. He wrote, “The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government” (Elliot’s Debates Vol. 4., p. 244, quoted in Parrington, 1927, p. 307). Hamilton’s prototype society functioned as a competition where individuals pursue profit in unregulated markets. He claimed that competition separated elites from the masses and from their position at the top of the hierarchy, he believed the dominant class would maintain order and stability.

Hamilton conceived public institutions in the same fashion as he conceived the private sector—an arena where self-interests prevail—and Hamilton’s views echo through the literature on community colleges. For example, in The American Community College (1987) Cohen and Brawer suggest of the nation’s network of two-year schools, “It is a system for individuals, and it does what the best educational forms have always done: it helps individuals” (p. 356). Cohen and Brawer conceive community colleges in terms that are individualistic and, like Hamilton, they exhibit distaste for those given to poor performance in the competition that takes place in the U.S. economy. Kelly and Harbison describe Hamilton’s perspective as follows:

Hamilton was the national spokesman for those of wealth and standing—for the rich, the wise and the well born, as he liked to term them. He neither understood nor sympathized with the great mass of people of little or no property. He simply attributed their incapacity to indolence. (1970, p. 177)

In a similar vein, Cohen and Brawer make it plain that community colleges are not obliged to introduce students from the lower classes to the humanities, scholarship, or the life of the mind; and they suggest that two-year schools do not have the capacity to “make learned scholars of television-ridden troglodytes” (1987, p. 356). Contemporary authors commenting on two-year colleges also hold Hamiltonian views similar to those of Cohen and Brawer (Rouche and Jones Eds., 2005). Few give thought to the role of education in transforming television-ridden troglodytes into citizens with the capacity to analyze their interests or take action in the public sphere.

The move toward a vocational curriculum in the community college is consistent with Hamilton’s conception of the role civic institutions fulfill in a capitalist nation. He argued that public institutions function best when they serve supporting roles, propping up the interests of businesses. Parrington suggests, “In developing his policies as Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton applied his favorite principle, that government and property must join in a close working alliance” (1927, p. 308). Workforce development programs in community colleges embody the sort of alliance Hamilton envisioned, as they represent a tax-supported means to subsidize training costs incurred in the private sector.

Hamilton stressed the idea that a country’s citizens are not equal with respect to their potential for success. Thus, a hierarchical network of postsecondary schools suits his philosophy: elite liberal arts colleges and universities to groom leaders, low status vocational institutes to supply businesses with competent, submissive employees. The Hamiltonian framework, when applied to education, favors a network of institutions shepherding citizens to “appropriate,” though unequal stations in society.

Jefferson and Popular Sovereignty

In contrast to Hamilton, Jefferson harbored a concern over “the disparities that commercial societies encourage” (Parrington, 1927, p. 46). Jefferson regarded civic virtue as a cornerstone of self-governance, and from his standpoint, social and economic equality were preconditions for creating widespread devotion to public participation. Hamilton preferred social relations where the pursuit of self-interest dominated, but Jefferson’s plan for the nation hinged on the hope that citizens would temper their self-interests with a commitment to the common good. In the words of Morton Frisch:

Hamilton was much more attracted by the commercial aspect than the civic-spirited aspect of a regime. But Jefferson believed that a democratic society must have a more solid base than acquisitiveness. Civil society, he thought, can be healthy only if the pervasive selfish concern for material well-being and the acquisition of wealth be subordinated to civic-spiritedness. (1991, p. 45)

In opposition to the countries of Europe, where the pursuit of self-interest wrought distinct class divisions, Jefferson’s plan for the American nation turned on the development of a civic culture strong enough to bend a diverse society toward common purposes. Jefferson knew, however, that a civic culture alone would not suffice as a means of moderating self-interest or encouraging community involvement. He knew if business life evolved in such a way that a class of elites came to predominate, they would control the affairs of state as well as the economy. Political power would be taken from the hands of working people, and democratic ends would be subordinated to the goals of commerce.

In Thomas Jefferson and the Development of American Public Education, James Bryant Conant quotes the third president to the effect that the nation would suffer if we failed to take steps to avail ourselves of the talents, “which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich” (1963, p. 43). Jefferson alleged, if the American school system developed in such a way that the children of well-heeled citizens received an education of a different type than those born into families of modest means, the talents of working people would be left uncultivated. Moreover, he believed if a large pool of talent went undeveloped it would leave a well-educated minority in a position to control public affairs, and he believed a permanent class of elites would use government offices to serve their own interests as opposed to those of the nation.

In contrast to European societies, ruled by landowners and industrialists, Jefferson believed, for Americans, “The future would be better to the degree that mastery passed into common hands” (Parrington, 1927, p. 360). For Jefferson, education held the promise of making citizens, even those of humble means, ready to participate in political processes. Although he did not live to see the birth and subsequent growth of two-year colleges, Jefferson’s University of Virginia took the nation one step toward establishing a postsecondary network built to serve a wide cross-section of the polity. He believed public education encouraged a broad commitment to the arts and sciences, and from his standpoint, such a commitment held the promise of ensuring intellectual equality, an essential ingredient in his plan to keep the nation from lapsing into a rigid social class system.

Jefferson worked to avoid the formation of a multi-generational class structure in America, and he tried to convince the nation that a hierarchal order would result if educational opportunities were distributed unequally. Over the course of his life, he encouraged his countrymen to devise and fund a school system with the ability to prepare all citizens to conduct themselves with high levels of creativity and competence. According to Conant, “Jefferson justified his proposals by arguing that if they were adopted, the ‘worth and genius—from every condition of life,’ would be able to ‘defeat the competition of wealth and birth’” (1963, p. 159).

The People’s College

There is disagreement about the precise intent of those that played key roles in the founding and growth of two-year colleges, but of the figures that did the most to promote the community college as an institution, the historical record suggests that their goals were Jeffersonian. They intended to offer two years worth of general education, to the broadest number of people, and under the best conditions for fostering the goals of the liberal arts.

Near the turn of the last century, University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper became alarmed by the changing skills and interests of university faculty. In the late eighteen hundreds, leaders in American education became enamored with Germany’s postsecondary schools, and in the German university faculty worked in specialized fields characterized by technical expertise. As American universities began to devote themselves to research and graduate training, Harper watched undergraduate teaching lose its place at the heart of the baccalaureate enterprise. By 1900, he publicly lamented the situation that freshman found when they left high schools to enter universities. In an address to the National Education Association, Harper noted of such students, “Not infrequent...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: What are Community Colleges For?
• Part One: Change on Campus
• Part Two: External Forces and Their Impact
• Part Three: The Promise of the Arts and Sciences
• Epilogue: The Twenty-First-Century College
• References
• Index