Dime-Store Epiphanies

With my schedule this semester, I’m unfortunately again no longer able to burn through two or three hundred pages and write an extended response each night — so I’ll be grateful for what I can get. I’ve been continuing to read Howard Tinberg, and very much enjoying what I’m reading. He’s in Massachusetts, too, but in Fall River, in that far southeastern corner of the state, so that the only way he could be further away from Amherst would be to be in Provincetown or Nantucket. Still, with all the thought-provoking discussions Cindy and Joanna and John and others have offered in relation to his ideas, and with the way that graduate students really get no exposure to the concerns of two-year institutions, I’m thinking about talking to my program and department chair about asking Professor Tinberg to come a couple hours west and give a lecture. There’s one other graduate student in my program with an interest in class studies and community colleges, and for the rest of us, I think it would be a big eye-opener and an informative and provocative exchange.

In my further reading, I was a little tickled to see that my supermarkets-of-higher-education analogies from last time weren’t entirely misplaced. Tinberg writes that in the community college, “what we hope to accomplish in our classrooms must be bigger than a narrow shopping list of ‘what our students need to know'” (12). Of course, I would say that the same holds true for four-year institutions. But there’s a tension here between narrowness and breadth, specialization and generalization, job skills and liberal education, that seems to sometimes shift or contradict itself, and I’m not sure how to sort it all out.

I’ve sometimes been among those who unfairly characterize the function of the community college as narrowly vocational, and people have rightly corrected me for doing so. Lately, I’ve come to see that the functions offered by a two-year institution are often far more diversified than those offered by a four-year institution. And yet Tinberg writes that “Historically, community college instruction has sought to avoid the kind of disciplinary generalization that marks university teaching and research” (11): so there seem to be two opposing views here, that I’m not sure how to reconcile. Nine pages later, Tinberg complicates matters further, suggesting that “Given the comprehensive nature of the community college mission, faculty at the two-year college level are encouraged to view themselves as experts in teaching rather than as experts in teaching a subject” (20). My head’s spinning a little, and I wonder if anyone out there might be willing to help me unspin or unravel these cross-conflicting binaries of two-year versus four-year, narrow vocationalization versus the liberal education, comprehensiveness versus specialization, generalization versus particularity.

But there are other points in Tinberg’s Border Talk that offer me sudden flashes of insight, or confirmation via another perspective of an idea I’ve been wrestling with. A few days ago, I asked how economic these concerns of the two-year college might be. Now, consider Tinberg on time as luxury: “At the two-year college, where the time to reflect — to engage the world of ideas — may indeed be seen as a ‘luxury’ afforded to the few, the academic component of the comprehensive mission can be given short shrift. So often we overhear students as well as colleagues refer to what is needed in ‘the real world,’ a world quite different, apparently, from that of the classroom. So often we two-year college teachers, imbibing the utilitarian milieu of our institutions, view our teaching in purely utilitarian terms” (27). Time, here, is an economic concern, because — as we all know — time is money. Numerous people have pointed out the better ‘deal’ offered by community colleges, but what often goes unsaid is that four-year students simply possess the economic luxury of having more time. Certainly, I’ve had transfer students in my classes, and I’ve been a transfer student myself, from an elite four-year private university to a community college, and from there to a four-year public state university, but the overwhelming majority of my peers at the four-year institutions and my students in the past six years have been straight-through traditional non-transfer students. (I wish we had statistics on this.)

So I’ll propose that many students at four-year institutions take four years, or sometimes five or six. Students at two-year institutions do all sorts of different things. But the big difference, to me, is that most students at four-year institutions share that common privilege of an extended space of time where, while many may work part-time jobs, their primary attention is devoted to their own education. Time paid for, time spent: it’s economic. And that economic difference is perhaps the single most significant difference between two-year students and four-year students, because two-year students don’t universally share the four-year student’s expanse of time paid for and spent.

This feels simultaneously important and staggeringly obvious, and perhaps it’s just another of Mike’s dime-store epiphanies. But does it make sense, at least?