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The Two-Year Attraction

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By Jennifer Jacobson

Only lackluster Ph.D.'s who can't find jobs at four-year institutions aspire to teach at community colleges, with their heavy course loads and unprepared students. Work there and risk killing your academic career. So goes the stereotypical advice given to graduate students.

Sean P. Murphy didn't heed that warning.

He chose to work as an associate professor of English at the College of Lake County, a community college in the Chicago suburbs, where he found better pay, smaller classes, and more freedom to decide which courses to teach than he did at the four-year institutions he saw. In fact, he likes the place so much that he started an internship program in which nearby graduate students teach there to learn what a community college is like.

"When I first started teaching at the College of Lake County, I thought, 'What's an associate degree going to get anyone?,'" he says. But "to see people start to consider themselves as learners has been empowering for me. I like seeing this ability awakened in people."

Calvin L. Christman recalls plenty of his colleagues at four-year institutions telling him to make wide circles around community colleges. "'I don't know, Cal, if you're going to like a community college, if you're going to get the intellectual stimulation,'" he remembers them saying. "'You'll be on the fringes of the profession.'"

He thought so, too, especially with a degree in history from Dartmouth College, two master's degrees -- one in history and one in teaching -- from Vanderbilt University, and a Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University.

"I never quite foresaw that I'd be teaching at a community college," he says. "I wanted to go to a place like Dartmouth" or "end up at a good, small, four-year college."

Instead, for almost 30 years, he has taught quite happily at Cedar Valley College, a two-year institution in Lancaster, Tex.

Not too long ago, many in academe believed that the stigma of teaching at a community college could ruin a career. That attitude, however, is changing.

At a time when Ph.D.'s, especially in the humanities, far outpace the academic jobs available, the number of them teaching at two-year institutions appears to be increasing, although no one tracks the numbers. These days, even professors who never intended to teach at a community college find themselves satisfied there.

Those professors are primarily the ones "who like teaching most," says George R. Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. In a university setting, the requirements of research and scholarly writing constantly tug at a professor's time, he says. At a community college, professors may do these things, but they're not required.

What attracts many to two-year institutions is a greater opportunity to interact with students and to experiment in classes "to determine how best to support students in their learning," Mr. Boggs says. "That's where the reward is."

Mr. Murphy relishes his hands-on role at Lake County, where professors are expected "to go that extra mile" in supporting students, he says.

A Good Listener

About to begin an evening session of Composition I, Mr. Murphy, with his youthful looks and spiky black hair, resembles an urban graduate student more than a suburban professor. His classroom is a windowless box, with fluorescent lights, where about 20 students wait in yellow-and-orange fiberglass chairs.

The average age of students at Lake County is 30, and half of those in this course are older than the 18-to-22-year-olds typically found at a four-year college. Laura M. Phillips, 32, tells the professor as soon as he walks in that she doubts her ability to write a coherent sentence. Visibly nervous about returning to college, she says it was English that drove her away in the first place.

She has found a good listener in Mr. Murphy, also 32, who reassures her that she'll be all right. A week later, she turns in two drafts of her first paper. When he asks how it went, she responds, "OK."

For someone who is so resistant to English, he says later, "to do the work and feel like it's OK, for me is rewarding."

So is his recollection of working with a 40-year-old woman who enrolled in Lake County two years ago to earn a certificate in medical transcription. She stayed to take courses so that she could one day become a teacher.

In 1997, two years away from finishing his Ph.D. in English at Kent State University, those awards weren't so apparent to Mr. Murphy. He went on the academic job market for the first time, landing two interviews for tenure-track positions at four-year institutions, but no jobs. Although he applied to some community colleges that year, he did so halfheartedly. Instead, he took a one-year fellowship at Kent State to finish his dissertation.

Back on the market the following year, he found his luck no better, and so he gave the community-college market a wholehearted try. He accepted Lake County's offer because he found the people on the search committee "bright, down-to-earth, and friendly" and the English department "large and vital," with 25 full-time faculty members who had a wide variety of interests.

In his first faculty meeting, he learned that an English professor at Lake County had recently published a journal article. Mr. Murphy was pleased to "realize people had publishing agendas at a community college."

His starting salary was $49,000 for teaching four courses a semester, with about 25 students in each class. The typical load at Lake County is five courses, but since he had to attend a three-hour class once a week for new faculty members during his first semester, and started putting together the internship program during his second semester, he has never taught the five-course load.

But he still wanted to teach at a four-year institution. After two years at Lake County, he took a tenure-track position teaching 20th-century British and Irish literature at Central Michigan University. "Much to my surprise, I agonized over whether to take it," he says.

Mr. Murphy knew that he was enjoying his Lake County colleagues and the emphasis on teaching. "I wasn't sure that was going to replicate itself anywhere else." In fact, he says, "I was quite sure it wouldn't."

He was right. So, in 2002, he left his $40,000 position at Central Michigan after just one year for his old job -- which, with raises, paid $60,000 -- at Lake County. In addition to running the internship program, he's again teaching four classes a semester.

Fitting Education In

While his students are different from the ones he taught at the university, Mr. Murphy says, that does not mean they are less motivated. "Students at community colleges are entirely commuters. They fit school into their lives.

Many are working and raising children or have other family responsibilities." If sometimes they turn in papers late, it's usually with good reason, he says. "They're not at a frat party or something."

At Lake County, he teaches composition as well as courses in British and Irish literature since the Romantic period, covering authors from Wordsworth to Salman Rushdie. He plans one day to incorporate Irish studies, his specialty, into one of his composition courses.

Already, though, he says, he has more freedom in how to teach than he did with the three literature courses he taught each semester at Central Michigan. For example, three years ago, in a composition course on student protest, he took the class to Kent State University to participate in observances of the 30th anniversary of the fatal shootings there.

After the visit, students wrote "reflection papers," which he gave to the Kent State library.

People who get Ph.D.'s in literature, he argues, should be prepared to teach more than just literature, and they shouldn't view composition classes as a step down. "If I can't teach critical thinking, then something went horribly wrong in the course of my education," he says.

To prepare potential professors for jobs at two-year institutions, Mr. Murphy created a semester-long internship program for graduate students to teach at Lake County. The Illinois Board of Higher Education provided $24,000 to get the program started in 2000, and the college now pays for the internships itself.

Each of five graduate students from Chicago-area institutions, including DePaul University, Loyola University Chicago, and Roosevelt University, earn $1,800 to teach a composition course at Lake County.

They also observe Mr. Murphy's classes as well as others, and meet with him once a week to learn about the history of community colleges and the history of writing instruction, and to find out how their own teaching is going. "The goal is for students to learn about community colleges, or this one in particular, by immersing themselves in its culture for a semester," he says. "Since I didn't learn a whole lot about community colleges as a graduate student, I was trying to open up the school as a resource to people."

He designed the program with Ph.D.'s in mind, he says, but has found that many of the 10 or so applicants each semester are in master's programs. By the time people are working toward Ph.D.'s, he figures, most see themselves at four-year institutions, not two-year ones. Doctoral candidates' decisions -- including his own -- to make their careers at community colleges might represent "a shift in academic culture," he adds, although "not a sea change yet."

Even his own graduate adviser, who is also a friend, was ambivalent about Mr. Murphy's career choice, he recalls. But Kent State's Claire A. Culleton says that if she displayed such ambivalence, it was because "even as a graduate student, Sean was displaying real promise as a publishing scholar. I thought he'd really shine at a research institution -- not only shine there, but get promoted accordingly."

He was "really doing fantastic work in the teaching sector and community-outreach sector" at Lake County, she adds. "I was just worried his research would fall by the wayside. But it's not. He's able to keep that up."

Alicia Juarrero, a professor of philosophy at Prince George's Community College, in Largo, Md., says her career disproves two misconceptions about community-college professors: that they don't do research and that they aren't well paid.

She has published a book, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (1999, MIT Press), and dozens of papers in refereed journals. And she makes nearly $70,000 a year. According to the American Association of University Professors' report on faculty salaries for 2002-3 academic year, that's considerably more than the average salary for community-college professors, which was about $51,000.

Her salary is not far out of line, however, with the $65,600 average for full professors who have worked at community colleges for 7 to 10 years, says John W. Curtis, the AAUP's director of research.

Full professors at community colleges in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin earn an average of $79,000, according to a regional breakdown in the AAUP report. Community colleges there "are competing with some larger private universities in the same urban areas," Mr. Curtis notes. "Many have to pay higher salaries to get qualified faculty."

Besides, he adds, a lot of the faculty -- especially in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio -- are unionized, and salaries in union settings tend to be higher. The lowest average regional salary is $66,400 for full professors at community colleges in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

"Almost all community colleges are public, so the salaries of people in community colleges are usually related to the amount of public investment in the community-college or higher-education system in general," Mr. Curtis says.

And, given the sluggish national economy, most community colleges are facing pretty tight budgets, he adds. "Community colleges usually are just operating at this point, especially on a bare minimum. They barely have enough to pay the people they have. Enrollments have been growing in the last 5, 10 years, so they've had to really try to do more with less."

Mr. Boggs, of the community-college association, says that the economic downturn is unlikely to affect salaries much, and that many small, rural two-year colleges offer lower salaries to begin with.

"It is more likely that a college that had to make budget cuts would institute a hiring freeze or an early-retirement incentive rather than lowering faculty salaries," he says. As for Ms. Juarrero, she says she never planned to build her career at a two-year institution.

But when her husband landed a job at a think tank in Washington, in 1975, she applied to Prince George's, since there were no openings at four-year institutions in the area. The worst thing about teaching at a community college is the five-course load, she says. The best is the lack of pressure to do research.

"Because community colleges evaluate faculty members on teaching ability, but not publication record, I found that I have the freedom to become what I jokingly call a dilettante, since nobody was pressuring me to have published a book within two years after having started," she says.

That enabled her to attend neurology lectures at the National Institutes of Health, not far from her office, and to do research for her area of expertise, the philosophy of the mind.

Not that her schedule is leisurely. She has been asked to do a doctoral-level, independent study with a student at the University of Maryland University College and is working on a Web site to help Latino immigrants through the home-buying process. She also teaches two classes at a retirement center in Mitchellville, Md., and in February accompanied students in an art-and-architecture class at Prince George's on a trip to her native Cuba.

'Tenure on the Titanic'

After Cedar Valley College's Mr. Christman earned his Ph.D., he landed a tenure-track position, and eventually tenure, at William Penn College (now William Penn University), in Oskaloosa, Iowa. In 1976, however, he decided to leave, as enrollment kept shrinking. "I felt like I had tenure on the Titanic," he says.

He chose Cedar Valley, where he became a history professor on a new campus of the Dallas County Community College District. He remembers the instant 70-percent increase in his paycheck. His salary is now about $72,000.

He has stayed, though, mostly because he feels that what he does is valuable. He teaches students ranging in age from "the 16-year-old who was home-schooled and gets permission to take my class to those in their early 80s," he says.

One of the simultaneously frustrating and challenging things about his job, he says, is facing such a a broad variety of ages and backgrounds.

Sandria D. Rodriguez, dean of communication arts, humanities, and fine arts at the College of Lake County, has seen her institution benefit from changing attitudes about community colleges as more Ph.D.'s apply to teach there.

In May, she was the graduation speaker at Loyola University Chicago's School of Education, where she had earned her Ph.D. The occasion signals the acceptance of community-college professors and administrators as part of the larger academic community, she says. "I don't think they would have [invited me] if they had perceived any problem with my identity as a community-college person."

Mr. Murphy is certainly continuing on his path without any apparent stigma. He has a contract with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press to turn his dissertation on Joyce into a book, has published an article on Samuel Beckett, and is earning a master's degree in philosophy through a distance-education program run by California State University-Dominguez Hills.

He is also editing a collection of essays written by people who have built their careers at institutions that emphasize teaching.

"I wanted voices to say there were exciting things going on in teaching colleges," Mr. Murphy says.

After all, he's not the only community-college professor who's happy.