Admittedly, when I first started ajduncting at Salt Lake Community College a few years back, it was just a job: we were still smack dab in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years, and I had just finished an MA in English--a barely employable degree even in a good economy! At the time, I was just happy to pay the rent. I treated the whole experience as the first step on some ladder, as though I were starting at the bottom.
But the community college atmosphere quickly grew on me, and not just because I love teaching--there's just this refreshing lack of pretentiousness about the student body. These are not the privileged out partying on their parent's tuition money you see--no, these students are often of the genuinely poor, first-generation college students, immigrants, UN refugees, recovering drug addicts, single mothers, working adults reinventing themselves, military veterans adjusting to civilian life, escapees from abusive relationships, and high-school flame-outs pulling their lives together.
There is a genuineness about them, an urgency, a sense of actual life-or-death stakes involved in these peoples' educations. You can drop the formalities with them; they aren't there to show off but to learn, and you aren't there to impress but help them. In CC instruction, you feel like you are actually helping people in actual need.
In a sense, NBC's genius sitcom Community, although it reifies the worst stereotypes of community college administration, is spot-on about the student body: these are strikingly intelligent people with more life experience than your average university freshman, folks with legit problems who are taking action to get their lives in order. These students are merely inexperienced, not dumb; they are neither intimidated nor impressed by your doctorates and fellowships--they are there to learn, so you better actually have something, because they have more important things to worry about.
I'm concerned with these "non-traditional" (whatever that means) student bodies because I'm an aspiring Post-Colonial scholar in my PhD program you see, wherein my whole research orientation is geared towards studying the literatures of the marginalized, the colonized, the subaltern and the silenced. It's fun, fascinating stuff. But while Post-Colonial theorists merely discuss the struggles of minority populations navigating the Anglo-centrism of the academy, community colleges are on the front lines of that dilemma!
Should the focus be on helping these students gain access to the mainstream American workforce (which, let's be brutally honest, means "acting white"), or do we help give voice to those denied a voice (for if we don't, who will)? Can't we do both? Should we? How do we do that? What's the right balance? Are we selling them out when we teach them how to "assimilate," or are we segregating them out when we don't? Again, at community colleges, with their disproportionately high minority populations, these aren't mere theoretical quandaries, but real world concerns!
Here there is no theory, but actual marginalized populations performing the very navigations that Post-Colonial theory discusses. Here, we encounter not theory, but praxus! I'm not discounting theory, theory is important for recognizing, learning about, and acknowledging the concerns of the marginalized; but although it can be rewarding for a professor to compliment my Post-Colonial reading of some obscure text, what was always more rewarding was when students came up to me after the semester and thanked me for helping them finally understand how to write a convincing paper, which was almost compensation enough for my poor pay. For I hadn't just helped someone in theory, but in practice.
But when you're at a major research institution, the theory remains largely that, theory. The Ivory Tower becomes less a figure of speech than a fact; the needs of the oppressed become more abstract, which is ironic, given that de-humanization is exactly what Post-Colonial theory is supposed to combat. The self-proclaimed "liberal" professors and grad students at such institutions are in danger of becoming like what (I believe) Orwell called "those Marxists who have never had a cup of coffee inside a working-class home," those who possess theory but no experience. Reading all the Baudrillard and Althusser in the world will not help you discuss reform with the laid-off dock workers; a thorough command of Spivak and Bhaba will not help you connect with the children of undocumented Mexican immigrants, or with the Sudanese Lost Boys sitting quietly in the back.
Again, all this is not to discount Baudrillad and Althusser and Spivak and Bhaba; high theory is necessary to change the tenor of discussion among the elite, to influence the policy makers. But change, reform, and revolution is never just a top-down affair; far more important is the work from the bottom up, of helping the marginalized and impoverished to gain the skills and self-confidence necessary to improve their own situations and the world around them. And again, the front-lines of these populations are not at the university but community college level. You feel like you're actually closer to the streets effecting change there--shoot, some of your students have just barely came from the streets themselves.
Everything the elite professors theorize about? It's occurring in real time at our nation's community colleges--and I often think that if we English scholars were truly serious about all of our theory, then far more of us would quit turning up our noses at community colleges as being somehow beneath us, and instead roll up our sleeves and do the real work of helping fellow human beings. It is not enough to theorize; we must be able to apply our theories, and community colleges are the first, best places to do that.
Quite frankly, for all of our world-class research universities, community colleges are what the American education system should be most proud of. I'm not aware of any thing even remotely similar to them in any other nation on Earth. In other countries, especially in Western Europe and East Asia, standardized tests are filing students off to either working-class trade schools or elite-college tracks by the age of 14. In Germany, if you fail just 3 college courses, you are not only flunked out of college, but out of all colleges in the country, with no possibility of re-entry or redemption. There are no second chances, no hope of breaking out of the rigid class structures.
But America, despite all of its other problems, is still the second-chance nation! The "American Dream," the real possibility of a clean start, of upward mobility, of a fresh break from the past, in spite of all our institutionalized racism and manifest destiny and slavery and exploitation of the third world and bloody foreign policy that has near tarnished our reputation beyond repair, this dream is still alive at our community colleges! Again, these places are not about the theory of American idealism, but the praxus. If America is worth saving, it's for institutions like the community college system.
These colleges need our support, but not in a condescending, patronizing, pat-on-the-head sort of way. For those of us in Post-Colonialism or Neo-Marxism or Gender Studies or what have you, I have often pondered that perhaps the place where we could be doing the most good is not cloistered in some distinguished Professorship on Fellowship writing a book-length treatment of Foucault and Berardi and Deleuze and Guattari or whatever for tenure, but by turning from the vanities of prestige and honors of man to instead work among the nonprivileged, with those students most trying to pull themselves up.
Perhaps it would be helpful to remember that the first universities in old Europe were founded by religious orders, by those seeking not after power and wealth, but knowledge and service. Maybe now is the time for us scholars to return to our roots.
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