“Notes from No-Man’s Land” is the story of the mid-sized twenty-first century community college where I have worked for almost two decades. It is about me and my students mainly, but it is also about America, about higher education, and about the decay of both. Sometimes I will describe my students in close detail. I don’t know whether those I describe would recognize themselves in the pictures I paint.
No-Man’s Land is part of the American college system which during the neoliberal or late capitalist era (or whatever you want to call it) was set adrift. After decades of state and federal funding cuts, curriculum bureaucratization, administrative expansion and enrollment decline—after national diminishment of the liberal arts, the life of the mind, and the discipline of study—community colleges stand battered and wobbling. Over 50% of undergrads have some contact with community colleges. Yet, these significant civic institutions have never been on solid social ground. They and their students were vulnerable and expendable from their inception as junior colleges in the progressive era and remained so through their postwar expansion and into their anemic present.
A Quick and Dirty History of the 2-Year College.
America’s colleges and universities were an elite affair from the start. By the turn of the twentieth century, the nation’s founding universities were finishing schools for the upper classes, where football and social clubs took precedence over studying. In this era, the challenge of organized labor against capital, as well as mass immigration, brought calls to loosen this exclusive system. Educational “democratization” was one of many Progressive reformist answers to the period’s crisis. Collegiate leaders from U Mich, Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago conceived a plan which would protect four-year colleges and universities from applicants who, in their opinion, were neither qualified nor able. James Russell, Dean of Columbia’s Teachers College, wondered “how can we justify [the] practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders?” The answer for these gentlemen was straightforward—make a college for the masses—a two-year stint that would “divert students away from the university.” (Diverted Dream 25).
Although most attending students planned to transfer and complete a bachelor’s degree, the junior college’s founders hoped to make the two-year degree “the capstone to secondary education” leaving senior colleges insulated from lower-level and lower-class graduates.
The community college emerged from another period of political crisis, the 1960s. At this stage the 2-year college sat at the crossroads of Great Society state liberalism, cold war competition, the first leg of postwar austerity, and, less directly, New Left idealism. Pres. Johnson’s solution to American unemployment and incipient deindustrialization was to find the problem in the worker not the economy. Great Society programs invested in job training and “workforce development” rather than employment or re-industrialization. With the meritocratic guarantee of career advancement through higher ed, the community college absorbed and busied the aspiring middle and working class—stabilizing American society in a moment of disintegration. Like all systems of class containment, students in both the nineteenth century junior college and the twentieth century community college succeeded. They used this mechanism, despite its debased motives, to move up the social hierarchy and become professionals. But they were not the majority. Far less than half of community college students complete an Associate’s degree, much less a Bachelor’s. As Pierre Bourdieu rightly observed in 1977, “the controlled mobility of a limited category of individuals… is not incompatible with the permanence of structures … it is even capable of contributing to social stability in the only way conceivable in societies based upon democratic ideals and thereby may help to perpetuate the structure of class relations.”
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the professional class/the petit bourgeoisie circled the educational wagons, erecting nearly impenetrable walls around prestigious colleges and universities. They weighed these protected spaces with outsized status. For the average American high school grad, who had come up in an entirely different educational universe, catching up was inconceivable. In that rigid hierarchy, community colleges became the higher ed pitstop for young adults wandering around America looking for a place to succeed.
This class structure existed when I first took my job at a 2-year college in the aughts. In my more naïve and optimistic days, I believed in the community college mission. I influenced students’ lives regularly. I watched many triumph—getting degrees, some going so far as a PhD (ok, only one student did that, but I’m just sayin’). Some successes were less flashy—an addicted student—who once came to class babbling and very high—dropped out, returned, completed her degree and then transferred. Another who came to our school after getting ripped off by a for-profit tech school (he and his working-class family didn’t understand the system) and eventually went to graduate school in psychology. There are even smaller stories of personal accomplishment, so many I can’t remember them all.
I always understood the position of the community college in the collegiate pecking order and understood the role these schools played in maintaining society. But we all have to make a living and as far as academia goes being a community college prof is part social service, part cheerleader-mentor-disciplinarian, part cultural liaison, and part intellectual inspiration. There is a certain decency and honor to the work. But that does not mean that I was fulfilled or that I was not embittered by what I saw my college do to my students: teaching to the lowest common denominator, shoving them relentlessly away from their innate interests towards a J-O-B, instrumentalizing every minute of their college experience.
I crossed the Rubicon when I accepted a position in the basement of the higher ed edifice. There was no scrambling out and up to a four year college. Once I stepped in, I was tainted.