#70 Creating Content is HARD!

Yeah, I guess you could read that either way.  CON-tent or con-TENT. 

I took the Thanksgiving Holiday off from this blog, though not necessarily from my classes.  I did do some work -- made a little video to say goodbye to my online classes, graded final assignments, dealt with whiny students, you know, the usual.  But, more to the point, I enjoyed time with friends and spouse and ate a lot of pie.

Enjoying my life is a high value for me.  When I did a values analysis a few months ago I rated "pleasure" well ahead of "status."  This may be one reason that I am a community college teacher.  Tonight I want to respond briefly to an article by Rob Jenkins in the November 12 Chronicle of Higher Education.  In "It's a Viable Career Path," Jenkins rails against graduate programs which take money from suckers, oops, I mean hard-working students without informing them about one of the major career avenues, community college teaching.   He goes on to celebrate the joys of working at a community college.

He notes that many university graduate program teachers are ill-informed about community colleges and see them as just a "pit-stop" in the race toward bigger and more status-filled job opportunities.  That wasn't the problem I faced.  Some folks at Utah were actually against their students getting CC jobs.  One of my professors expressed it in words to this effect:  When we spend so much time and effort on educating you, it's our investment.  That investment doesn't pay off if you go into community college teaching.  It's like we wasted our our time when we see you take that route.

In a way this makes sense.  At that time communication programs at the research universities were sometimes ranked with an algorithm that included how many articles those who had graduated from the programs published in any one year.  So, if a student went on to get a non-publishing job it DID have the power to lower the statistics for that particular department. 

I have no data to back up my belief, but I would imagine that the prejudice against CC teaching is still alive.  That's why I had to laugh at this rather Pollyannish comment about the silliness of thinking that any job outside of the research university would be thought a failure for a PhD.  "I'd like to think that, as professionals and as human beings, we've moved beyond those kinds of petty biases, especially in the face of a deepening job crisis in academe."  

I agreed with his comment, that "based on what I hear and read, the community-college environment appears to be far less stressful." For 18 of our 42 years together, my relational partner was a university professor so I got to see close up and personal what working at a small state research institution was like and the politics, even at such a minor institution, were brutal.  Not only that, but I have friends at universities and almost everything I hear about them convinces me that they are high stress environments.  There's a quote often miss-attributed to Henry Kissinger that "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." 

My experience at COCC has been that while we do have plenty of politics and conflicts, they are rarely vicious.  Not never.  Rarely.  Even as department chair, I faced very few really bad situations.  Of course, the ones I did face convinced me that I never wanted to do administration again.  So I didn't apply for the dean jobs that came up. 

And now, I never will.