On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > employable you are. Moreover in Radosh's cases, having taught for
> > years at a community college was probably enough of a disqualification
> > in itself for him to ever get a job at a major university, however
> > good he was or wasn't.
>
> Ah, to hell with the elite universities, community colleges are where
> Lefties ought to be anyway -- training ordinary folks in the gentle art of
> Resistance. Isn't this comm coll/elite univ hierarchy thing mostly
> an East Coast thing, not really applicable to the West? Judging from
> job apps, some of the Left Coast schools are way cool.
>
> -- DRR
I've taught classes at community colleges, small colleges, and big research institutions in various teaching gigs. It's true, most of the big University profs and administrators consider community colleges an academic ghetto. The ironic thing is that most first year college classes at a community college (English comp, Psych, Econ, History) are taught by someone with far more teaching experience, practical knowledge, and better qualifications than the grad student who typically teaches the same courses at a Big U.
Given the ubiquity of community colleges, and the increasing emphasis on higher ed for everybody, I agree with Dennis: our participation in the community colleges is a useful political strategy. Perhaps this is a bit naive, but I think community colleges could become something like the black churches in the South in the 1950s and 1960s--a site of resistance, a practical tool to organize people to fight against injustice in our society.
Miles