The Two-Year Track

Not a 'Toy College'

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By Leslie A. Pahl

Picture an idyllic summer day in Maine. I'm sipping on a chilled Pinot Gris, chatting with my sister's new boyfriend. We're exchanging pleasantries, getting to know one another, when the boyfriend, responding to my question of "And what do you do?" says, "Well, I'm going through a certificate program as an occupational therapist at our local toy college."

Smiling politely, I take another sip of the Pinot, trying to square the idea of occupational therapy with toy making. Then I realize that he is referring to the community college he attends.

Although I have spent the past 13 years teaching, and lately doing some noninstructional work, at a two-year college in California, I was more bemused than offended. I had already banished the stigmatic "junior" college label from my vocabulary, suggesting as it did the unequal and often condescending relationship between older and younger siblings. Think Wally and the Beaver.

But "toy college"?

My sister quickly switched the topic to our coming lobster feed and I put the "toy college" remark out of my mind. I was slightly piqued -- "toy college, harrumph!" -- but I also chided myself for feeling defensive.

Over the past decade I had come to embrace the community-college mission in its many facets to such an extent that even that old saw about "making a difference" rang true. Still, I'll admit that that process had been more adaptation than instant embrace, more mail-order-bride love than Romeo-and-Juliet passion.

During my first few years of teaching at the City College of San Francisco, the students disappointed me. They seemed so different from those I had encountered as a graduate-student instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, where I received my Ph.D. in German literature.

Now, as they say, I am fine with it. Rather than feel I have come down in the world-according-to-academe, I feel fortunate to have a teaching job, albeit part-time, in the Bay Area. A job at a four-year college in North Dakota or Arizona would have held little allure.

And then I read an article in The Chronicle, called "A Ph.D. and a Failure," which sparked a round-robin of responses among colleagues, also Ph.D.'s at the college, to whom I forwarded the article. Suddenly, the slight sting of "toy college" returned.

The article decried academic culture for defining failure as "anything other than achieving the ultimate goal of a tenure-track professorship." It cited the "abundance of shame, depression, anxiety, and paralysis" common to graduate students who had been unable to find tenure-track jobs at research universities.

Who knew I was so depressed? My colleagues apparently didn't know they were supposed to feel that way either, for while their responses to the article contained a tinge of regret -- as such road-not-taken reflections tend to do for just about anyone past a certain age -- the consensus among us was one of satisfaction; even, dare I say it, happiness with our lot as Ph.D.'s from a research university who "ended up" at a community college.

From my vantage point, the "shame, depression, anxiety, and paralysis" that we are supposed to feel as "failed" Ph.D.'s is, in part, self-inflicted -- too many people believe they will luck into the big-time tenure-track position (just do the math, folks!). It's also inflicted by graduate programs focused too myopically on a single career path for Ph.D.'s.

At the risk of sounding like my grandmother, here's what I would say to any such tortured souls: You don't know how good you have it now.

With workshops on nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s drawing large crowds and with symposia seeking to recast the vision of academic success, I see much more enlightenment now than 15 years ago. For example, a former Berkeley colleague who is now a tenured faculty member at a research university tells me that the director of graduate studies there has organized regular panels for students to talk about career alternatives and to hear from those who have "bailed" or made the transition (depending on how you want to frame the debate) and have done just fine.

Back in the day, there was no forum for discussing alternatives to academe. No one even mentioned the community-college system to me as an alternative to überacademe.

Remember, the world will look much different once you're out of the graduate-school cauldron. As a male colleague in the sciences at City College put it, "back in 1994, I might have thought that I'd be happier elsewhere, but I quickly outgrew that."

My own trajectory from university to community college went roughly as follows: After earning my Ph.D. I realized I was totally unsuited for, and thus disinclined to pursue, a traditional academic career. I found myself applying to the teaching pool at City College.

Amazingly, I was called in to interview and began teaching that very fall semester. After struggling for the first few semesters to reconcile what I saw as a great disparity between the students at City College and those at Berkeley, and as I became more familiar with my students here, their diverse backgrounds and academic goals, I realized that the two groups weren't as dissimilar as I had thought.

It's just that the community college's mission is different from that of a research university. And that's as it should be. You wouldn't go to the Pottery Barn for Ikea furniture, would you? As with instructors, a "one size fits all" approach doesn't work with students, either.

Sure, there is occasional resistance to the Ph.D. in the community-college setting. One colleague, like myself a Berkeley Ph.D., recalled that when she was initially hired, other instructors said things like, "People with doctorates won't want to come here, so let's not even bother giving them an interview," or "People with doctorates don't know how to teach." And yet, she had come to City College with many years' experience teaching both part-time and full-time, at two-year and four-year institutions.

So there are misconceptions all around. And who knows what the students' take is on being taught by a Ph.D. at a community college? That's a question for another day.

How does the college's administration feel about hiring Ph.D.'s? City College employs about 90 Ph.D.'s, so they must be seen as enough of an asset to hire in such numbers, given their higher pay scale.

I stopped in to talk about this with our library dean. Ph.D.'s, she said, can be counted on to be innovative and energetic. She likened the Ph.D. at a two-year college to a "bridge," someone capable of motivating, organizing, and coordinating often-disparate elements to deliver the best education possible to students with diverse needs, backgrounds, and competencies.

I'll take that "bridge" metaphor over the "step down" one any day. Yes, there is important work to be done at a community college, and the Ph.D. who believes that the two-year track couldn't possibly be a viable alternative to the four-year route is missing out.