University Prof Teaching in a CC

     I am thankful for President Obama's ringing endorsement of the community colleges as institutions of higher learning, equal to the university system in stature.

     After centuries of university dominance as the only institution of higher learning, it was indeed a marked innovation of the University of Chicago to found this new approach to meld vocational training with the aims of higher learning in the early years of the Twentieth Century in Joliet, Illinois.  The university regarded at that time this new fangled learning institution it supported within the university system as providing remedial education that could prepare students who attended it for the University of Chicago main campus in two years, having been acculturated to the basic array of university training at its local "junior college" in Joliet.

     Well, the community college movement in higher education has come a long way, since its inception.  It has significantly established itself as maintaining institutions of higher learning once it accepted the proposition that learners who enter its doors can benefit business, trade and commerce from the higher education that is proffered, an intentional path carved out by educational leaders in the movement but frequently ignored in the traditional university setting.

     I taught some 5 years in the university environment till I switched over to the community college (formerly termed "the junior college") in 1970.  I was attracted by the salary scale, considerably higher than for humanity professors in universities.  But then I devoted 8 years to make its structure redound as truly institutions of higher learning--in the ambience of a neighborhood setting equipped to provide students with the tools of critical analysis of traditional and present-day technology and for creative designing of manifold conceptual alternatives--localized in situ where its students feel most comfortably at home. 

     I found that working with professors of universities, I was able to identify many courses in the philosophy curriculum at universities that could be suitable for offering at the community college.  Specifically, students who took such courses at The College of DuPage, where I taught, could transfer the credits earned to four-year institutions.  No problem.

     At the time I taught at DuPage College, instructors (un-ranked status in the community college) found it difficult to get published in the research journals or by distinguished, academic book-publishing houses.  That difficulty has been largely overcome, I believe.

     The task I had set for myself was to integrate the faculties of the community colleges--some teachers who came from public schools, with those from universities, to get them altogether focused on the tasks of establishing student learning as conducted heretofore in universities only--involving questioning and critical analysis of materials studied. Indeed, the community college setting wherein the training in the methodologies of higher learning takes place should have little relevance to the mission of the community college in promoting the values of higher education in any particular community.  Significantly, community college teachers must always benefit from academic freedom, essential to higher education, and defended by every one of its institutions.