Confessions of a Community College Dean

A reader asks about moving from a faculty slot to a position in retention and student services.

You’d think I would have learned to expect it by now, but I’m still surprised by the volume of email and delayed meetings that backs up while I’m traveling. Yesterday was a dig-out-from-the-avalanche day, and today features seven scheduled meetings. This is why I don’t travel much.

A new, young correspondent writes: "What departments/subjects, in your experience, do community colleges have the greatest demand for? Which, if any, departments do administrations have difficulty filling positions in? Simply put, which Masters degree would make me most valuable as a candidate: Political Science, Economics, History or an MBA?"

Every educator knows the wonderful feeling when a student who hadn’t shown much suddenly catches fire. Day 3 was devoted to students like that. Even though I usually suffer pretty awful conference fatigue by the third day, this was a wonderful way to wrap it up. In various ways, nearly everything was about ways to include students who sometimes get excluded.

Go to enough panels, and you start to detect themes.

The theme for this year’s League for Innovation conference seems to be “where is everybody?” Attendance seems visibly down from last year. Last year’s conference was in San Diego. This year’s is in Philly. I’m not saying that’s the reason; I’m not saying that’s not the reason

I have to admit enjoying Senator Santorum’s assertion that Satan controls higher education in America. To be fair, there is some evidence for his claim. If you’ve ever tried finding a student parking space around noon on a Tuesday in September at a major public university, you know that Satan has major influence in the world of parking deck architecture.

Has your college found a reasonably elegant way to handle grades of “incomplete?”