An important public announcement for followers of the Dean’s Blog
You know how we have a Surgeon General whose job it is to ensure that members of the public are informed about practices that are either conducive or detrimental to good physical health? Well, I’ve realized this morning, reading Inside Higher Ed that we need an analogous role for our intellectual health. As in, the front half of mens sana in corpore sano.
Finding no suitable candidates available nearby, I have named myself Philosopher General. I will periodically issue guidelines and warnings that will help you safeguard your intellectual health. Like this:
Philosopher General’s Warning: Reading this post has been shown to cause reflection in test subjects.
I read — with some interest and no surprise — the recent Inside Higher Ed article, “Presidents Divided on Community College Bachelor’s Degrees.” Here’s the gist: CC presidents are for, and 4-year presidents are against. Shocking.
Reading beyond the obvious, I couldn’t help but notice people bandying the theme of “quality.” As in, University presidents worry that the quality of CC bachelor’s degrees won’t be up to par. This is a very interesting coincidence, as I was just in a conversation with officials of a few universities about CC transfer students, where the same theme — quality — kept cropping up.
It’s easy for those of us who took our Ph.D.’s and traipsed off to teaching careers at community colleges to feel, well, a little defensive. After all, I’ve heard people say, we have Ph.D.’s, in many cases from the same institutions that aren’t particularly friendly to CC students. Some people will see this as defensive, but I just want to ask some questions and make some observations.
Is the quality problem CC faculty? or is it CC students? Both?
I realize that my musings about this may not win friends, but that’s why you got the Philosopher General’s Warning.
If the institutions that are concerned about quality awarded Ph.D.s to those CC professors, are they saying that they have worries about the competence of their own graduates? Or that they give the Ph.D. and it’s up to the newly minted Doctor to live up to it, perhaps by not teaching in a community college? And isn’t it the case that — proximity being what it is — 4-years’ and CCs’ bachelors are approved by the same accrediting bodies? Can it be that SACS only gets it right some of the time?
And then there’s the peculiar case of Teaching Assistants. How much undergraduate teaching is carried out by students? Last time I looked at CC’s, the amount of teaching by grad students was nearly, uh . . . nearly none.
Suppose someone looks at this from the methodological perspective of a hypothetical course called “Praxis and Culture,” which a hypothetical person took from a hypothetical Marxist at the University of Chicago. Sorry. I meant, the University of Hypothetical Chicago.
What if these worries about quality turn out on inspection to be rationalizaations that conceal worries about market share? How do we talk about that?
To be honest (not hypothetical), I’m torn. I’m attracted to some of the promised security of centrally planned economies. But I’m also pretty keen to see the sort of innovation that competition can offer. Why wouldn’t these considerations apply in higher ed, too?
