Technology & Learning
Community

From the Facilitator

January 1998

Connecting Conversations
by Carol Cross, Web Facilitator, Technology and Learning Community

And you read your Emily Dickinson, 
And I my Robert Frost, 
And we note our place with bookmarkers 
That measure what we've lost. 
Like a poem poorly written, 
We are verses out of rhythm, 
Couplets out of rhyme, 
In syncopated time, 
And the Dangling Conversation 
And the superficial sighs, 
Are the borders of our lives. 

from The Dangling Conversation 
Words and Music by Paul Simon 
©1966 Paul Simon (BMI) 

The first news of the year may not have been encouraging to
community college educators. 

After the end of the year semester break, community college
professionals were welcomed back to work with the following: 
 
Money, not learning, is freshmen's top goal 
by Mary Beth Marklein 

Monday, January 12, 1998 
USA Today 

College freshmen are studying less and skipping class more than their counterparts in previous years, but record numbers of first-year students also say they expect to earn above-average grades and advanced degrees, says a survey released today.

And even though 74.3% of freshmen say a very important reason they decided to attend college is to “learn more about things,” similar percentages cite getting a good job and making more money as reasons for going to college.

Most findings show that today's freshmen “see education as a means to an end...as opposed to being based on their intrinsic interest in learning,” says survey director Linda Sax of UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute.

So much for our Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, our ideals about stirring young minds and hearts, our desire to inculcate our students with our love for a general education and lifelong learning. What they want are good grades, less time on campus, and a fast track to a high-paying job, thank you very much.

Then, on January 14, the six community colleges and other institutions that make up the City University of New York (CUNY) received the following castigation during Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's annual The State of the City Address:

...(T)he CUNY system...is in need of even more reform than the public school system and has made no progress in establishing standards. In fact, CUNY's standards are declining. Only 32% of incoming freshmen at CUNY senior colleges pass the basic CUNY skills tests in math, writing, and reading. Sadly, only 14% of incoming freshmen at CUNY community colleges pass these three tests. These tests are geared to the 10th and 11th grade education standard. That means almost 68% of incoming freshmen at CUNY senior colleges and 86% of incoming freshmen at CUNY community colleges can't read, write, or do math at the 11th grade level.

And after what should be a higher education, these students show little progress. The overall graduation rate for the two-year community colleges is approximately 1% in two years....Since 1980, the graduation rate has declined steadily. Overall, it has plummeted. In the face of this continued and relentless decline, those who were running the system did nothing--not a single thing--to reverse the obliteration of standards not only of excelle nce, but of any standards at all.

Giuliani's conclusion about the CUNY situation strike at the heart of one of the most deeply-held beliefs among community college professionals: 
Open enrollment is a mistake. It should be changed....Now, immediately, for the next entering class, the CUNY Board should prescribe an entrance examination which demonstrates that applicants can meet and achieve passing grades in the basic subjects of learning. The exam should be competitive and only those with passing grades should be admitted to the limited positions available in the two-year and four-year programs.

And while Giuliani's views may be extreme and may be directed at only a single institution --at least for now--it would be a mistake for educators from other states to dismiss them. For they  are only the most intemperate extension of the rumblings about the lack of accountability, program duplication, and inadequate educational outcomes that many legislators across the country are increasingly voicing about higher education.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote about the very rich, “They are different from you and me.” Increasingly, community college educators must feel that way about the communities they serve. The clear underlying message behind both stories above is that neither the politicians who fund them, nor the students who use them, share the predominant community college value system. To both groups, education is not an unassailable benefit in and of itself, but is merely a means to an end, some other tangible or material goal. The primacy of opportunity represented by the community college's open door policy is giving way to a demand by students and the community alike to see proven results from their financial investment in their two-year colleges.

Too often, community college educators typically respond to news like the above in one of two ways. One, we become defensive: “We get handed the products of 12 years of neglect and failure by the public school systems and get blamed for not creating miracles;” “Look at the kinds of students--and their misplaced value systems--we are supposed to teach these days;” “Politicians have no idea of the nature of community college education and the difficulty of quantifying the work we do and the results we produce;” etc. Or two, we get dismissive; “Well, that just shows the lack of values and work ethic among Generation X;” “What do you expect from a politician ?”; or “The Board will never go along with that.”

However, either of those responses is counterproductive. For the truth is, both our democratic and capitalistic systems give ultimate power to community opinion, EVEN if it is “wrong.” Education is encouraged to hold different ideas and value systems, and some of our structures, such as tenure, are designed to protect us from the tyranny of majority opinion. But if we allow such structures and such attitudes to isolate us, either we will find our value systems under an assault that we are unprepared to rebut, or we will be bypassed like quaint relics, abandoned for others more "in tune" with current mores.

This is not to suggest that we should necessarily capitulate our values; like most of the people I know who work with community colleges, I am firmly committed to both open access and educational standards. But we do need to recognize that other opinions are increasingly prevalent and that they have both power and, to some extent, validity. We need to acknowledge such differences and discuss them in an atmosphere of civility and respect for other viewpoints t hat is increasingly missing in our public debates among politicians and the media.

Most of all, we need to find the common ground, the fundamental values, that we do share, and work out a way to accommodate those between differing perspectives. It is easy for us in community colleges to dismiss the two-year degree attainment statistic cited by Giuliani as a virtually meaningless measurement of the community college's merit, given the nature of its mission and student population. We can reject the idea that the degree is worth only what it will produce in terms of income as being a limited and immature criteria of quality. But we need to address such calls for some kind of yardstick by which we can evaluate what we do in community colleges, for we all-- students, politicians, and educators alike --want to establish the value of a community college education. Likewise, most citizens still firmly endorse the American dream of equality of opportunity; however, not everyone shares our view of the community college open admissions policy as a tangible expression of and vehicle for that traditional dream.

We need to stop having dangling conversations: those discussions in which we miss each other's point by staying within the blinders of our certainty about the correctness of our position. Instead, we must seek connecting conversations, where we seek to understand where other people are coming from as a basis for finding community. It is time to once again explore and reinvent with our funders, our employers, and our students, the value of education and the role of the community college in these changing times. 
Our ongoing goal with the Technology and Learning Community website is to stimulate such dialogue among educators and the public about these kinds of issues, particularly as they relate to the use of information technology. We are trying to use this latest communication technology of the World Wide Web to expand our discussions beyond the small circle of like-minded colleagues with whom we usually restrict such conversations.  

As we experiment with this new technology and this expansive goal, the developers of this site are also continually learning about “what works” and “what doesn't work.” Therefore, those of you who visited TLC last year will see some changes evolving in 1998. One of the first and most dramatic changes will take place in our Forums, which have been redesigned, reorganized, and renamed to better facilitate discussion and to match our new conference tracks for 1998. We hope that you find that the new topics and discussion flow make it easier to locate, follow, and contribute to an ongoing dialogue; let us know. We also intend to spark the discussions more by raising “things that matter” and saying “words that must be said” (other phrases from the fore-mentioned song, for those of you who are not instantly familiar with the Simon and Garfunkle canon ). We are revamping the TLC membership and Innovations and Applications Exchange (IAE) databases to make it easier to answer the kinds of question we've found that you ask. And we have some other exciting developments in store...but more on those as they come closer to fruition.

In short, we're finding ways of bringing you together with the people who may think, work, or believe like you do, and well as developing vehicles for resolving issues with those who do not. For we believe that both are necessary as community colleges continue to pursue our collective agenda of providing educational opportunity while maintaining high standards of quality, all within the new context of the information age.

Want to comment on this article? 
Send email to cross@league.org.