Confessions of a Community College Dean

A new correspondent writes: "I just want to know how to get a job as a CC professor and keep it."

By Dean Dad

The Boy had basketball camp last week, and The Girl had “zoo camp” at a local zoo. Both were day camps, so whatever they did during the day, they were home at night. This week, they’ve been partly absent.

By Dean Dad

I’m just old enough to remember when evening classes were the hotbed of enrollment growth.

By Dean Dad

Someone at work sends you an email that you aren’t quite sure how to interpret. Maybe the phrasing is ambiguous, maybe it uses a term with different meanings, or maybe there just isn’t enough context to decide what’s being said. It seems weirdly hostile, but you don’t know why there would be hostility. What do you do?

By Dean Dad

I’ve followed with interest the gradually-unfolding story from New Jersey about Peter Burnham’s fall from grace as former president of Brookdale Community College.

By Dean Dad

An occasional correspondent writes: "How much do instructors have to adapt their courses and their styles to the needs of the students?"

By Dean Dad

In a conversation a few days ago, some thoughtful faculty noted in passing that the state’s constant drumbeat about job placement and STEM fields -- two different things, btw -- was becoming a factor in faculty morale in the humanities and social sciences. They heard every invocation of college-as-personnel-office as an attack on what they do, and as a harbinger of even-more-diminished resources to come.

By Dean Dad

CUNY’s New Community College, in New York City, is attracting plenty of attention in higher ed circles. It’s an attempt to apply a panoply of best practices in raising graduation rates to a population that desperately needs it. Whether it becomes an exemplar of a new model, or withers on the vine as an expensive boutique project, remains to be seen.

By Dean Dad