Community colleges, faculty deserve higher recognition

by Dr. Tahita Fulkerson
TCC dean, instruction/accreditation services

I always read Jeff Guinn’s reports and essays with great appreciation. His preparation and kind wit make his writing some of the best in area newspapers.
Thus, as a community college teacher for more than 20 years, I was excited at the prospect of reading your books editor’s essay about Cleatus Rattan, the Texas poet laureate who teaches at Cisco Junior College, where he has been “reluctantly teaching language arts” for “more than three decades.”
However, by the time I had read enough of Guinn’s article to find my friend Jim Lee’s remark that in academia “any junior college is considered Siberia,” I knew that I had to present another view of professional life at two-year colleges.
Guinn’s article and Lee’s comments suggest an angst and a worldview that might be true for Rattan, but those specifics should not be generalized to all colleges or all teachers.
Indeed, both the specifics and the generalizations of the article fly in the face of what I know about community colleges, particularly Tarrant County College.
Lee’s assertion that most junior college teachers “would probably eat wood to get out” of their Siberia is colorful but untrue, based on what I have seen in evaluating classes.
In fact, some of the best teaching in the world occurs at community colleges. Community college teachers face their open-admissions students with energy, humor and skill. And they routinely teach five classes each semester.
Still, even with these loads, instructors plan field trips to local art museums and important national geological sites. They take students to Austin to see the Legislature in action (or inaction) and to New York City to experience arts and theater. They oversee internships in medical settings and develop international study opportunities in Mexico and Paris.
With all these opportunities, community college students are not in junior college—they are in college.
When they transfer to four-year colleges, they succeed with grade point averages and classroom experiences that equal and often surpass those of the four-year college’s native students.
Tarrant County College employs faculty members with extraordinarily active, satisfying intellectual lives in addition to their professional work in the classroom.
They write textbooks, articles, poetry, successful novels and book reviews—and are published. They develop creative, effective Internet courses taken by distance learners throughout the country.
They serve on local boards, teach church school classes and raise money for charities. They serve and lead on state, national and international committees. Our faculty include nationally known artists, alumni of the Peace Corps and Fulbright scholars.
Few if any faculty members at TCC are ready to eat wood.
If Rattan would “eat wood” to leave his employer of three decades, it may be because he just doesn’t understand the mission of the institution.
At Cisco’s recent 50-year reunion, old college chums were delighted and proud of the number of them who had completed their two-year degrees at Cisco and gone on to complete the bachelor’s plus professional credentials such as the CPA. One person who attended noted that the reunion was distinctive for the successes of its returning graduates.
As for Guinn’s references to athletes at Cisco, to large spaces allocated to welding classes or to Rattan’s poem about students interested only in the ABCs, I’d say: Don’t worry. Cisco Junior College is doing exactly what its community wants and needs, in the same way that more than 1,100 other community colleges are in the United States.
In the current issue of Community College Week, Antonio Pérez, president of Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, makes the point concisely: Community colleges “meet students where they are academically, and help them excel.”
Almost every two-year college in the nation is committed to that mission, whether preparing students for jobs or for further education, and are doing so at an affordable rate.
And Rattan’s unhappiness? Perhaps he might consider that poetry is not the only vehicle to “generate strong emotion.” Good teaching does, too.
Copyright 2004 Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Reprinted by permission.