I had "academic freedom" at the Collegium Excellens as long as some aggrieved student didn't register a complaint with the dean. Infrequently over my 32 years (May 15, 2005, marks my first year out of harness.) in those groves of academe, I was summoned to the dean's office. A student or a parent couldn't get their heads out of grades K-12 and I would be asked for an explanation. Rarely did the conversation turn on subject matter or political opinions. Instead, the bulk of these encounters with academic "authority" revolved around my manner of speaking or my personal style in the classroom. I read this youngster's account of academic freedom in a two-year setting and there was a cry in my heart: "Free at last, God a'mighty, Free at last!" If this is (fair & balanced) relief, so be it.
[x OAH Newsletter]
Challenges to Academic Freedom in Community College History Programs
by Scott Rausch
The main challenges to academic freedom in the community college setting come from internal administrative and bureaucratic forces more than outside pressure and public controversy. Generally, it is not controversy over publications, public lectures, or overt political positions that are at issue at the community college level. Although, once in a while, a liberal faculty member will be denounced from a local conservative pulpit--by and large the pressures restricting academic freedom are from administrators and other faculty--largely over curriculum issues. The two-year college emphasis is much more on teaching, often to the exclusion of research and publication, so the main issues of academic freedom involve how the historian teaches in the classroom.
First, there are limits in terms of course content. Some of these are unavoidable--community colleges by necessity teach primarily lower-division survey classes, and this will naturally limit the options of teaching a class in one’s specialty. However, survey classes can themselves provide a kind of freedom, because of the enormous range of subtopics one can teach within any survey. Unfortunately, this potential for enjoying an open-ended teaching assignment is often reduced by official course descriptions and syllabus requirements than are often more strictly and narrowly defined than at four-year schools.
In the community college system, committees that oversee course descriptions, distribution lists, degree requirements, official education goals, etc., can have enormous influence over the content of courses. Every institution has a different process to make curricular changes, but usually changes must go through a committee with at most one historian present, and the process can be shaped by partisan forces that go beyond legitimate administrative issues. These deliberations expose all the political, bureaucratic, and personal tensions within the faculty, to the detriment of freedom in the classroom. Putting a class on a distribution list can sometimes be a matter of matching the committee’s dominant political ideology or academic philosophy more than a matter of the historian’s expertise or competence.
The opportunity to teach a class depends very much on how applicable it is for students’ degree requirements. Community colleges pay such close attention to enrollment levels, and there can be such a powerful undercurrent of competition to attract the most students, that getting a class to count for two requirements instead of just one can make or break that course. Course designation, therefore, is the currency of academic freedom at the two-year level.
In one case, a colleague could not get a U.S. History survey to count for a multicultural studies requirement, because the committee ruled that diversity issues could not be covered in a class organized chronologically, only in one organized thematically. The prospective syllabus focused on the experiences of people of color, issues of immigration and assimilation, questions of race, ethnicity, and gender, etc., but at least one committee member remarked that a history course could never be multicultural because history is a set of stories and facts with no theoretical framework. In another example, the official course description for a World History survey required that the instructor teach topics defined by a Marxist view of history, instead of merely allowing that approach as one of many. In both cases, committees eventually overturned the restrictions, but only after formal processes, and it is likely that such obstacles will be harder to navigate over time, not easier. Added to these obstacles is the fact that many part-time instructors (who in many places teach at least half the history courses offered) lack the continuity, job security, or power to influence these academic structures enough to guarantee their own freedom in the classroom.
Secondly, there is a crucial issue of how faculty teach, in terms of class format, methods of instruction, and especially the use of technology. Here the pressures on academic freedom are more subtle, less raw, but no less powerful. For example, the drive to make technological innovation a goal in itself is much more pronounced at the community college level, and this has profound effects on how faculty teach and how much choice they have in teaching. Administrators and faculty are constantly encouraged to “innovate,” as if newer is always better and more “traditional” methods of instruction are by definition outmoded. This emphasis comes with an overt generational component, a kind of “techno ageism”--the younger the professor and/or the newer the degree, the more the person should and will use online technology. It is comparable to the assumption that every female historian should and will offer a course in women’s history. Tenure and promotion decisions are in part based on one’s willingness to innovate and experiment, not necessarily as a way to promote professional development or improve quality, but to change as a goal in itself. There is a certain degree of academic freedom that comes with being able to refine an established course as one sees fit or at least to choose freely among the technologies available.
In community colleges as well as elsewhere, academic freedom is threatened not only by intrusive federal policies, oppressive government, and reactionary public forces, but also by intrafaculty conflicts, bureaucratic turf battles, labor tensions, and politically charged atmospheres within the institutions themselves. The agents responsible can just as often be in-house academic committees, administration policies which subordinate academic quality to other goals, and overly strict regulations. These forces can be subtle and overt, from inside and outside, and politically from the left and the right. To the threats mentioned in the November 2004 OAH Newsletter report, I would add the special challenges to academic freedom one finds within the community college classroom.
Scott Rausch teaches history at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington.
Copyright © 2005 Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved.
