John at Jocalo recently posted some extended polemical thoughts about the relationship between composition in four-year universities and composition in two-year colleges. My initial sense is one of agreement with John on many points, and particularly on the point that university-based compositionists hold many unexamined and problematic assumptions about community-college-based compositionists, and that those assumptions have remained troublingly unexamined for a long time, in what might be described as a sort of willful blindness. I won’t here rehearse all the arguments John makes: he makes them far more passionately and eloquently than I could, and his thoughts are well worth reading and considering at length.
Brief initial reactions: first, I think that some of John’s “five features of two-year college English,” which he says “offer an effective critique of practice in university English,” actually are very much present in university English. As a graduate students, I’ve been at two different universities while those universities were undergoing external reviews/audits; both universities, it was acknowledged, did quite well at “focus[ing] on student learning and on community needs” and on “responding to what students need to know.” But it seems to me that John, in his five features, is shooting at a lot of targets: his argument shifts from composition to English in general, to allow him to suggest that English doesn’t “honor the scholarship of teaching and see pedagogy as a worthy enterprise.” Yes, compositionists seem, generally, to be more invested in the practice and study of pedagogy than literature folks, and in fact, when I was at the Rhetoric Society of America conference, I heard several people express their relief at not having to answer the “But what do you do with this in the classroom?” question like they do at CCCC. Yes, there’s a stereotype of the MLA scholar who disdains the classroom for the intricacies of his (yes, it’s still very often a ‘he’) research. But that stereotype is losing ground, as a look at the pedagogical focus of many recent articles in College English will demonstrate, and as a look at the journal Pedagogy itself will demonstrate, and I think the authors of those articles in those journals might be distressed at the breadth of the brush with which John paints them.
Second, I was intrigued at John’s first “feature” of two-year college English, by which teachers react “to the heavily instrumental and transactional language needs of [their] students.” I guess I’d ask John: are these students, then, a significant component of what differentiates two-year college English from four-year college English? Because I think that’s getting at what John’s trying to do, in laying out the major differences between the two. But we’re talking about two sets of differences here: differences in the ways the two types of institutions teach and theorize composition, and differences in the ways the two types of institutions teach and theorize English. John suggests that two-year colleges tend to “integrate literature, composition, rhetoric, and linguistics” more than four-year colleges. From my scant experience, I’d agree, though I notice that John doesn’t include creative writing: how many two-year colleges offer many creative writing courses? In the four universities I’ve been at, linguistics has always been a discipline and a department entirely separate from English. (Brief wonder: what if we took the literature classes out of all the language departments, including English and Classics, and put them with Comparative Literature departments into a department of Philology? Ah, but then the MLA might not be able to be so “Modern.”) But I’ll also say that at one university, there was a highly productive cross-pollination among the creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and literature faculty, with frequently-offered excellent boundary-crossing seminars team-taught by a compositionist and a fiction writer, a fiction writer and a literary scholar, a rhetorician and a poet, a literary scholar and a compositionist. Perhaps more universities might engage in such practices.
Third thought: John asks, “Can we challenge any Ph.D. candidate writing a dissertation on basic writing or first-year composition to demonstrate that they have fully conceptualized the field and reviewed the published work on two-year college English?” I’d say that’s a pretty tall order, fully conceptualizing any field, especially for a graduate student. But before I respond further, let me offer another quotation, this one from Carol Cloos’s essay “Staffing in the Two-Year College” in the MLA’s 1979 Profession, as cited by John: “The English graduate experience, especially the Ph.D. experience, still bases its value system on an implicit social scale, whether it intends to or not. Colleges are judged by the quality of the students they admit rather than by the difficulty and value of the teaching endeavor” (31-32). Clearly, there’s a connection here to my question above for John about understanding the differences between the types of institutions based on the needs of their students. But even more, I hear an academic echo of the “professional class narcissism that sees itself everywhere it looks” described by Linda Brodkey in her essay “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters'” (College English 51.2, February 1989, 125-41). This narcissism, what Kenneth Burke identifies as Veblen’s “one class and its fascinated appeal to itself” (A Rhetoric of Motives 127), is what the university compositionists that John decries are practicing.
What prompts this “mystification of class” (Burke 114)? In his remarks on Carlyle, Burke offers one possible jumping-off point for an answer: “when considering Carlyle, the ‘mystery’ of social relations can become identified with first and last things. But as attenuated, in the forms of social embarassment, it can perhaps be reduced to this: Where there is wealth and poverty, there is awkwardness in any one of these four situations:
- a rich man speaking in praise of wealth
- a rich man speaking in praise of poverty
- a poor man speaking in praise of wealth
- a poor man speaking in praise of poverty
Attenuate this in turn, and you get, as a rhetorical situation, the proposition that in any social inequality there is awkwardness” (125-126). Now, let me be clear: I’m not making a rich kids go to school here / poor kids go to school there distinction. John’s pointed out the diverse economic situations of his students, and I’ve seen just as many rural farm students as I’ve seen students with shiny new cars. But if we’re going to generalize about the differences between two-year and four-year institutions, and suggest that some of those differences may come from the differences between the sorts of students they serve, then maybe we need to attempt to start trying to establish some informed generalizations about those students.
Clearly, my focus in making such generalizations would be on issues of economics and class. I’m far from being at a point where I can fully conceptualize the field of composition as it’s practiced and theorized in two-year and four-year institutions, but I’ll contend that issues economics and class do play some part in the practical and theoretical differences between those two locations. With the citations John’s offered in his appendix, and the work I’ve been doing and continue to do, maybe I can at least offer a small sliver of that conceptualization in working through this dissertation.
In any case, you’ve — as usual — given me a lot to think about, John. Thanks.
But establishing generalizations about CC students is rather difficult. As I just said at Jeff Rice’s blog, the reasons students attend CC’s are too many to list; their economic and social backgrounds are similarly varied. In the past year, I’ve had students who are at the CC for these reasons, for example:
–to raise their GPA’s for a 4-year school
–because they can’t afford a 4-year school
–because of geographic ties to family or work
–to retrain
–to pick up the pieces of their lives after prison
–parents ordered them
–they only seek a 2-year degree or certificate
–to take a few courses for enrichment
–their employer wants them to take a few courses
–they don’t know what they want to do with their lives
Our students range from the ages of seventeen to 80; they live in the poorest sections of two of our state’s major cities and in the suburbs of our wealthiest towns (which happen to be among the wealthiest in the nation). The diversity is mindboggling.
It’s the lack of understanding of this diversity by many of our 4-year colleagues which drives me nuts. They assume the CC student is either unprepared for college or poor. Sure, some of them are, but that only scratches the surface.
What’s so refreshing to me, Mike, is that you are interested in the topic even though you don’t teach at a CC.
Interesting! In my one semester at Montgomery College Takoma Park, I saw a somewhat similar diversity of age and purpose — although many students were still around my age — and an astonishing diversity of ethnicity and national background. Much of that is a function of the super-international Takoma Park itself — and so one might say that geography is an important and overlooked factor in determining who goes to what institution. But from what you’re saying (and I’d be interested to see how much John agrees, and I’ll have to follow up checking out the discussion at Jeff’s), maybe we can make a generalization, namely:
1. Student populations at two-year colleges are often far more diverse than people think.
But see, I’m also thinking, Cindy, about the comment you left here last year about how your institution’s vocationally-oriented mission statement basically acknowledged that, “Yeah, we’re training an underclass.” That might suggest a second generalization, namely:
2. Two-year institutions may fail to acknowledge the diversity of purposes they serve for students.
And of course, from your comment, the third generalization would be that
3. Academics in four-year institutions, serving a fairly homogenous student population, consistently fail to acknowledge the diversity of functions of two-year institutions.
Are those fair, and would you add any others?
First, Mike, let me thank you for the careful reading of my postings on this topic. As you well know, the quality of dialogue corresponds to the shared understandings of the “other”‘s views. You’ve raised excellent points and I’m not going to try to respond on a Saturday night, after a fine dinner and two glasses of sauvignon blanc.
I will note that Cindy’s response is very much to the point, and I’ll have a few things to say about that as well–tomorrow, with a clearer head. Also, it reached 94 degrees here today, which we don’t do very often.
I will reference this discussion on my blog.
I think those are a good start, Mike, though perhaps I would add a variation on #1 and #3: Universities often fail to recognize the academic ability or potential of CC students.
Here are some random thoughts regarding the discussion(s) we’ve been having:
1. Geography and the economy certainly play a part in choosing which CC campus one attends–if one is from an immigrant family living in Takoma Park, one would tend to go to that campus because of proximity (Though our college has started a free shuttle service between the three campuses). Proximity is important when one has a very limited amount of money in one’s pocket.
2. However, if a particular program is offered on one campus alone, then the choice becomes whether or not to participate in that program. And so we sometimes have very exhausted students coming to class–they’ve had to work at two jobs and are taking one or two classes. Or we have single parents who must take a day away from classes to tend to a sick child and are afraid that we are going to flunk them if we do. Geography plays a part in this because these students rely on busses to get to where they are going–to work, school, daycare, the library and so forth. And taking the bus takes time which could be used for studying.
3. On another tangent: how many community colleges have multiple, sizeable campuses? Living in the DC area, I am used to perceiving a community college as being made up of two or three campuses. Our college has about 21,000 students and three campuses. What’s the norm? Or is there a norm?
I mention size because just as university and CC’s have their differences, I’m beginning to wonder about the differences among all of the CC’s in the US. What are the different ways that we define “community” when we create a community college?
4. John, you’ve synthesized what we’ve been talking about and put it in a frame. Thanks. Mike, you work with these ideas so clearly and intelligently that all I can do is point to you and say “What he said.” Cindy, we’re both East Coast CC instructors, and it would be interesting to parse the similarities and differences between our two schools.
More good contributions since yesterday. I’ll try to comment on a few selected points.
Mike’s point about student diversity is crucial. Our local term of art is the “student mix.” On the one hand, we have a strong transfer curriculum because our community has a very high level of education and demands it. But we also have the largest program for disabled students in the state. We have a few students in this program who have been at De Anza for 15 or more years. They are not passing through: we are their destination. More to the point of composition: we have a range of adults who are functionally illiterate, but who seek to get work skills or to eventually qualify for academic level coursework. We also have a huge population of English Language Learners, across a wide range of language ability. No university could or should admit this range of students, but understanding how they can best develop in reading and writing should be of interest to any scholar engaged in teaching adults to improve in the handling of written texts and other significant forms of communication (the objects of rhetorical study). I believe that CC teachers who work a lot with adults with marginal reading/writing abilities have developed knowledge out of practice that should inform the profession. I’m not sure I know a senior scholar in composition studies who agrees with me, at least not to the point they act on that view.
Regarding Mike’s point 2: Over the years, CC’s have been roundly criticized for being all things to all people. When I started out, I was told we had six purposes: transfer education, vocational education, remedial education, counseling/student services, community services, and life-long learning. I suspect most CCs of any size have programs that fall under all six categories, but proportions would differ from local community to local community and according to available resources. In California, each district still has a locally-elected Board of Trustees, so we have strong input from the local community, something most large universities don’t get in that way.
Joanna asks about governance structures. These are particular to each state. In Kentucky, CCs were administered through the University of Kentucky until very recently. Pennsylvania and Ohio have many two-year campuses related to state universities, as well as independent campuses. Florida calls Miami-Dade a college with five or six campuses. In California, the Los Angeles CC District has six or seven colleges.
When City College of New York created “open admissions” it created huge controversy, and created a number of scholars who have been very influential in composition: Mina Shaughnessy, Lynn Quitman Troyka, Donald McQuade, Ira Shor, among others. But California had already created its Master Plan for Higher Ed with open admission CCs and no controversy. That’s an example of what Mike referred to as the “unexamined assumptions” so common in regard to CC composition programs. Texas has a state requirement that forces all higher ed, especially CCs, to meet state testing requirements. This drives their curricula in quite different ways than in other states. It also drives the developmental textbook market, because many Texas CCs have departmental adoptions and the publishers compete for them.
I guess I see a whole host of areas worthy of careful inquiry. And Mike, you are right, a grad student can’t be asked to grasp all this. But the senior professors directing dissertations should be a whole lot less clueless (a lot more clueful?).
Again, thanks, Mike, for focusing the discussion this way.
Oh, I wanted to say something about the class issue, Mike’s central concern.
We usually look at individual student demographics to construct notions of class. If students of a certain economic condition are heavily concentrated in certain institutions, we attribute their class standing to the institution.
But I think we also have a class system of institutions. At one CCCC, in an elevator, I overheard two writing faculty from Harvard bemoaning the need to listen to CC views at an earlier session. What I didn’t say–maybe I should have–is those CC faculty get better paid than you Harvard comp drudges.
OK, that’s a bit unfair, but there’s a class issue operating here based on some perception of institutional status, separate from actual material conditions of the comp teacher. And these situations can differ markedly from state to state. Several years ago, the Soutwest TYCA regional was proud of their resolution calling for all part-time faculty to get paid $2000 a course, up from $1500. I immediately fired off an email to the Regional Chair urging them to frame their position in terms of percent increases, not in flat amounts. As Cindy noted, per course pay differs a lot. And at Foothill-De Anza we got part-time pay put on a schedule indexed to full-time pay, so it goes up everytime there’s a general raise.
We regularly get part-time faculty leaving Santa Clara university to teach with us because they make more in the CC than at that university. So there’s the actual economic condition of given composition faculty, and then the ascribed status of the institution they teach in.
John, your comment that “proportions would differ from local community to local community and according to available resources” turns me immediately back to Cindy’s and Joanna’s comments on geography, and I had a sort of Mister Obvious moment: community colleges are community colleges. Such institutions are far more deeply local than the Big State University or the Fancy Upscale University, and also more local than the small teaching college. When I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, I met an incredibly geographically diverse population; when I was an undergrad at Maryland, and a grad student at Pitt and UMass, there was still a considerable geographic diversity among the students, with a sizable proportion of students from out of state, and a larger proportion of students from very ethnically and economically diverse communities scattered within the state. Even though Pitt has a Johnstown campus in addition to the Pittsburgh campus, I had plenty of students from Johnstown; even though UMass has a Boston campus in addition to the Amherst campus, I’ve had plenty of students from Boston. (Yes, now that I’m asking my students to keep weblogs, I’m geographically and institutionally out of the closet.) But when I was at MCTP, it was overwhelmingly a Takoma Park and Silver Spring student body.
I might argue — and Cindy, Joanna, John, and others, I hope you’ll correct me if I’m wrong — that the students who attend community colleges are predominantly from those communities. I might suggest, furthermore, that those students are often bound to those communities by economic circumstances in ways that students at four-year institutions are not. Yes, this may be my economic perspective clouding all I see, and I understand from all three of you that there are non-economic concerns; things like family needs, or literacy, or disability, or involvement with the corrections system, et cetera.
But I can’t get away from the economic angle. I know quite well that many of my classmates at Carnegie Mellon came from families all over the world who had the means to send their children to study there. I also know that many of my classmates at Maryland came from a swathe of locations ranging from Virginia up to Long Island, but that most of them came from somewhere in Maryland, because in-state tuition was (relatively) cheap, and even out-of-state tuition wasn’t too bad. I also know that many of the first-generation college students I had at Pitt and here at UMass are from families that are just now able to afford sending their sons and daughters away from home for a four-year degree, but still in-state: I’ve had students whose dads worked at the last coke mills on the Monongahela, and students whose parents had small farms in Palmer or Cummington.
So I wonder: how valid would the claim be that there’s a continuum of academic ‘respectability’ that parallels the continuum of the strength of students’ economic ties to the local economy? In other words: academics in four-year institutions have a nasty tendency to sneer at two-year institutions, and that nasty tendency becomes more pronounced in inverse relation to their students’ economic ties to the local community. Is that plausible? (Part of me is working here very much in the mode of that Burkean embarassment I cite above.)
Perhaps what CCC needs in this regard, more than anything else, is the perspective of a geographer. Many people, John included, have remarked upon the Balkanization of English studies. A compositionist, working with a geographer, might be able to make a convincing claim about a similar (and perhaps more literal, given the origin of the term) Balkanization of composition practices and perceptions, perhaps based in part — as I’ve tried to outline above — on the strength of economic ties to local communities.
Mike–I think that in the end, economics plays a big role in choicemaking, whether it’s on the obvious level of affording tuition and transportation, or on a less obvious level–of being from an immigrant family where both parents had to work at two jobs and there was no one at home reinforcing literacy skills.
While we generally do serve students from the community, we also have students coming in from DC or other counties who have heard good things about our school and want to come here. They are willing to sit on the Metro for an hour each way every day if that’s what it takes. But if you went to MC, you probably knew that. I’m bringing it up now just to point out the exceptions to the rule.
And I think that a geographer and a map would be great.
And are there any two-year private colleges anymore? Or did they go the way of the finishing school?
I believe some private two-year colleges exist, though our local example, Menlo College, growed into a four-year college about 10 years ago: market forces, i would guess.
In some parts of the country, two-year technical colleges have been common, but many of them have become “comprehensive.” Many of the colleges on American Indian reservations are two-year colleges, notably Navajo Community Colleges. I guess they are public, but they may not all be governed under state statutes.
So yes, Mike, you are right about the geographic dimension. In a paper I wrote about 25 years ago, but never got published (Harvard Ed Review rejected it, with snippy comments, and I never submitted it elsewhere), I examined the notion “community” as the defining feature of two-year colleges. I think it could be very instructive to contrast the concepts “community” and “universe” as the terms that name the two different institutions. That paper is not in digital format, but I should find a way to get it copied and post it. It’s the work that got my thinking going while in grad school at Stanford.
Here’s the essence of the snobbery issue for me. At Big Game about 10 years ago (it alternates between Cal and Stanford), the Stanford cheering section at a game played at Berkeley held up a huge sign that read “WE GOT IN!” Now even though two of my brothers had Berkeley degrees and I did Stanford grad work, that kind of snottiness is sick. But it pervades higher education.