The Two-Year Track

Worthy of the Rank?

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By Carlton Myers

At four-year colleges and universities, promotion to full professor seems pretty straightforward. You need an established record of scholarship, teaching, and service to the institution and the community.

Sure, some promotions run into trouble as a result of personality conflicts, political feuds, or technical disputes. But faculty members at four-year institutions all start on a level playing field in at least one respect: Because a Ph.D. is a requirement for being hired in the first place, all applicants for promotion can claim that achievement.

That's not the case for faculty members at community colleges. We are a tremendously varied breed, as is reflected in our academic pedigrees.

Applicants for our faculty positions in the arts and sciences are required to have academic degrees, but no such degrees are required in many nonacademic fields in which we offer courses, like welding. Hiring practices for nonacademic faculty members tend to reward job experience -- if you're going to teach someone to drive a tractor-trailer, you probably ought to have considerable experience doing it yourself.

Even in traditional academic disciplines in the arts and sciences, the hiring criteria at two-year colleges may only require candidates to have a master's degree, so some of us who teach those subjects have Ph.D.'s, and some do not. I myself teach in the sciences and have a master's degree and lots of additional graduate credits but no Ph.D.

All of which has the potential to complicate promotion issues for community-college faculty members.

My two-year college recently went through a battle on that front. It began with the best of intentions: We wanted to find, or forge, a pathway to promote different types of faculty members to full professorship. Along the way, I saw friendly, respectful colleagues become bitter adversaries, and I saw otherwise nonconfrontational people take sides in an argument that never needed to become an argument.

We're a small college, with fewer than 100 full-time faculty members. We teach a wide array of courses, from truck driving to nursing to philosophy, which means we need a diverse set of faculty members. Usually we're a pretty amicable group. We vigorously discuss issues in the faculty senate, but typically end up with clear, sometimes overwhelming, majorities on any issue.

What emerged during the debate over full professorship, however, was a degree of mutual disrespect and tension that I never knew existed. The crux of the conflict was driven by a group of faculty members with Ph.D.'s and Ed.D.'s who tried very hard to convince the rest of us that people who don't hold a doctorate aren't worthy of the highest professorial rank.

They argued that it takes far more work to achieve a doctorate than to get any other kind of qualification, and that it doesn't matter how long you've been a practicing nurse or welder; without a Ph.D., you're never going to have the same kind of academic experience -- and therefore the academic qualification -- to merit the title of full professor.

The blatant lack of respect for faculty members with nonacademic qualifications left a bad taste in my mouth and really changed how I perceived some of my colleagues.

At one point it was proposed that we pick a general number of academic credit hours needed to earn a doctorate. Then, since nonacademic faculty members accrue education and experience by attending workshops, seminars, and conferences rather than academic courses, we tried to find a way to translate "continuing education units," "continuing professional education credits," and a host of other nonacademic but professionally valuable experiences into the equivalent of academic credit hours.

It was a fruitless exercise. Some continuing-education programs are accredited; others are not. Some require an examination; some don't. And we completely dodged the issue that not all academic credit hours are the same -- taking classes for graded credit is not the same learning experience as the hours spent doing research for a thesis or dissertation.

We were trying to fit a hamburger into a hot-dog bun, and all but the blindest of us were able to see that it wasn't going to work.

Some of the Ph.D.'s attempted to hide their disrespect for their degree-lacking colleagues, while other Ph.D.'s were openly dismissive. One of our academic faculty members, in an e-mail message to the rest of us, said that while he really respected and enjoyed working with all of us, the Ph.D. really made him an expert and a scholar, and that you just couldn't be as good a professor without the degree. The message smacked of elitism and pre-civil-rights-era logic: We're all equal, but some of us are more equal than others.

In another e-mail message, a second faculty member questioned the validity of having faculty members vote on the full-professorship issue. "Will this," he mused, "come down to the haves versus the have-nots?" I won't even describe the firestorm that that touched off.

Throughout the debate, the Ph.D.'s failed to recognize that excluding certain faculty members from promotion to full professor becomes a pay issue, and therefore a retention issue. Since salaries are linked to rank, faculty members without doctorates hit a glass ceiling. What incentive do they have to stay with the college? When I raised that issue with one of the Ph.D.'s, her reply was that people without doctorates would certainly have problems finding other jobs -- as though they worked at our college as a last resort.

What disappointed me most, however, wasn't the respect issue or the pay issue. It was that at no time during the debate did I hear anyone link promotion with excellence in teaching.

We can all agree that earning a Ph.D. makes someone an acknowledged expert in their discipline. I've heard it said that on the day of your doctoral defense, you know more about your research topic than anyone else in academe. That's probably true.

But we are a teaching institution, and you'll never convince me that having a doctorate makes you a better teacher. It may make you a better scholar, but it does not automatically confer excellence in the classroom.

Our faculty senate did, in the end, agree to amend the advancement policy to allow promotion to full professor without a doctorate. It was a close vote -- as close to an even split as any vote I've seen in the senate before -- and I suspect that it may have come down, in the words of my tactless colleague, to the haves and the have-nots voting against one another.

The issue, at least for now, appears settled, and I think it was a good decision for the college. Academe is very feudal in its mindset, but we don't need, and shouldn't want, a class of disgruntled serfs.

So how will the new policy affect me? I'm not a nonacademic faculty member or a Ph.D. I'm in a third group of people who got lost in the debate -- faculty members who teach in the arts and sciences but only have a master's. I have a modest record of peer-reviewed research publications and, by all accounts, I'm a good teacher.

The new policy benefits me: I was not eligible for full professorship before the change, and I am now. I'm happy about that.

However, I'm more conflicted now about my place in the college, and about my standing among my peers. The Ph.D.'s will tell me, to my face, that they think I do a good job and that they respect me. But what do they really think?

I suspect I know the answer, at least in part. After the vote, I told one of my colleagues that I thought the faculty senate had done the right thing and mentioned how glad I was that I would have the chance to advance to the highest professorial rank some day. My colleague looked startled and asked in an incredulous tone, "So now you think you're eligible?"

That may not be the majority view on our faculty, but now I know it's out there. So I've been keeping my eyes open at faculty discussions, making sure that if I contribute, I have evidence to support my statements. I examine my colleagues' motives when they speak, and I'm more sensitive to politics at the institution.

And I'm keeping an eye out for other job openings. I like academe. I like my subject matter. I love the freedom to think about things, and, most of all, I love teaching college students. I genuinely like and respect most of my colleagues.

I'm just not so sure they feel the same way about me.