The project director selected was Roger H. Garrison, for fifteen years instructor and then chairman of the English Department at Briarcliff College, Briarcliff Manor, New York; and for four years following that, vice-president of that institution. Mr. Garrison is the author of two college textbooks: A Creative Approach to Writing, and The Adventure of Learning in College. He has written extensively on junior college faculty matters and has spoken to many faculty groups around the country. In 1965, he was the Danforth Foundation lecturer on education. Four years ago, he founded and directed a workshop for junior college teachers, now an annual event at Bennett College, Millbrook, New York. He is a member of the Committee on Teaching of the Association for Higher Education. Since 1961, he has taken an active part in the national convention of the American Association of Junior Colleges.

In designing and conducting this study, Mr. Garrison was advised by a project committee, with wide geographic representation, consisting of the president of a private, two-year, church-related institution; the president of a private liberal arts college; the dean of a public junior college; the president of a junior college district; a university professor directing a graduate program in junior college teacher internships; a state director of public community colleges; a faculty member from an independent junior college; and a faculty member from a public junior college.

Since the number of institutions which could be effectively visited by one person within an academic year was strictly limited, the Project Advisory Committee determined approximately a dozen general categories of institutions; and then, bearing in mind geographic distribution, institutional size and aims, the project director and the committee selected twenty-eight colleges; and subsequently refined the list to fourteen. (However, as the report indicates, visits were eventually made to twenty different institutions.)

The combined strength of American higher education lies clearly in its diversity. Among themselves, junior colleges demonstrate great variety of type, purposes, and programs. For this reason, it was advisable to approach this project on a "case study" basis. The small, but repre

4

sentative sample of junior colleges selected reflected the heterogeneity of the two-year institutions and the varied composition and situations of their faculties.

Something must be said about the differing social and educational values which characterize junior colleges in this country. The vastly expanding public two-year college is, by and large, committed to the premise that all students should have opportunity for education beyond high school. These colleges are increasingly known as "open-door," or comprehensive colleges, with emphasis on appropriate course placement and selective retention of students. The public two-year college is also increasingly committed to semiprofessional and technical education, believing that today's society holds opportunities for achievement in a vast number of occupations which do not require the traditional baccalaureate degree. Thus, alongside the traditional academic transfer courses of study, there are increasing numbers of programs in the technologies, allied medical fields, and business fields.

Moreover, the comprehensive public two-year colleges are sensitive and responsive to the needs, interests, and educational requirements of the communities in which they are located. This response, for example, frequently takes the form of continuing education for adults, the use of local industrial and business advisory councils, and civic, cultural, and artistic events for the general enrichment of community life. In a sense, therefore, the community college is as much a social movement as an educational enterprise, and is perhaps closer to realizing a concept of a "people's college" than any other institution in the United States.

Clearly, the central person in this enterprise is the individual teacher. The report, presented on these pages, is, in a sense, the voice of the junior college faculty member as he identifies his own current and future professional situation and expresses his views about the issues and problems facing him in the kinds of institutions in which he teaches.

EDMUND J. GLEAZER, JR.

Executive Director

American Association of Junior Colleges

5

The Study: PURPOSE

AND METHOD

The essential mandate of this study was simple, clearand challengingly inclusive. It was to identify some of the current issues and problems affecting the junior college faculty member as he plays his key role in the explosively expanding two-year colleges throughout the country. Such identification was to be made by asking teachers to speak frankly for themselves, naming and characterizing the problems as seen in their own personal - professional context. Few junior college teachers have a national perspective; but a nationwide sampling of their opinions, as it turned out, provided a striking pattern of near-unanimity in certain problem areas.

It is likely that in the coming decade, new two-year institutions will be added at the rate of about fifty a year to the already existent 815 colleges. Fifty new junior colleges were established in 1965 and another fifty in 1966. To staff these campuses, and to replace teachers who retire, drop out, or move to other employment, conservative estimates indicate a need for at least 100,000 additional instructors by 1975.

Further, each year, a larger percentage of junior colleges could be characterized as "youthful;" less than five years old; freshly organized and staffed; without the internal stabilities of custom, refined routines, and long-workedfor objectives. Yet at the same time, many of them, especially in urban areas, are faced with a sometimes staggering annual growth of student populations, with all of the concomitant pressures on facilities, curriculum, trained administrative personnel and, of course, on teachers.

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One instructor summarized the situation by wryly paraphrasing Alice In Wonderland: "It's taken me only two semesters of teaching here to feel that all of us are running like hell to stay in the same place."

It was in the context of these, and many other realities that a preliminary investigative study of faculty needs and problems had been seen by the American Association of Junior Colleges as urgently needed. Historically and currently, the Association has been largely an administrator's group; probably necessarily so, since membership in the Association is primarily institutional. Hence, perceptions of faculty problems have been largely one-sided and imprecise. Except on a regional, or occasionally a state basis, the individual faculty member has lacked real opportunity to make known his own views on matters affecting his professional activity and his welfare. The primary aim of this study was to get the faculty member to speak for himself; to identify in his own words and in the matrix of his own working life, what he could see as his professional situation, and what factors were affecting it, both now and as these might develop in the future.

The basic research scheme of the study was, like its purpose, both simple and direct: to interview informally and confidentially enough teachers in representative colleges to find significant common denominators of response; to make some assessment of the meaning of these responses; and to make recommendations (so far as possible based on what faculty themselves stated) for specific programs of action directed toward the resolution of issues and problems identified.

In planning the method of the study, the project committee and the investigator had to determine (1) what could reasonably be accomplished by one man during the mid-September to mid-June academic year, and (2) to assure that the necessarily limited random sampling would, with some fidelity, represent the thinking of junior college faculty as a group. Accordingly, broadly general "types" of two-year institutions were identified (see list at the end of this chapter), and fourteen colleges were chosen to be visited for periods of at least a week, and with very large ones, ten days or two weeks. (Twenty colleges were even

7

tually visited, for varying periods of time, by the end of the study.)

The following letter, describing the intent of the study, was sent to the presidents of the colleges selected:

I am writing to ask the privilege of visiting your campus
for a period of time during this coming academic year.
The American Association of Junior Colleges is keenly
interested in the nature and meaning of issues affecting
the two-year college faculty member, especially at a time.
when the two-year colleges are growing so rapidly,
and when many thousands more instructors must be
recruited and oriented toward junior college teaching.
Yet little is objectively known about what the junior
college teacher, himself, identifies as his professional
needs, problems and satisfactions.

Accordingly, I have been asked during this coming year
to visit a representative group of colleges across the
country to talk with faculty and administrators and
perhaps, on occasion, with student groups, to identify
major areas of concern that could be called common
denominators with faculty in all types of two-year
institutions. Such areas might include, for example: the
role of faculty in institutional policy making; academic
rank; appropriate professional affiliations; faculty self-
image as to their "status" in higher education; oppor-
tunities for professional growth on the job; faculty views
of the basic kinds of academic and/or other preparation
for teaching; commitment to teaching students with a
wide range of abilities; and similar matters, some of
which may not now be apparent. In all of this, the
primary viewpoint considered will be that of the faculty
member how he sees the issues that affect him, and
what he hopes and suggests may productively be done
in relation to them.

Let me assure you immediately that in no sense whatever
would my visit and my observations be intended or
designed to be an evaluation in any form of a single
institution. Indeed, the Project Advisory Committee for
this effort, as well as the officers of the American
Association of Junior Colleges, have stated as basic
policy that this study is to observe scrupulously the
anonymity of all persons and of the individual institutions.
visited. Indeed, to do otherwise would be to destroy the
professional validity of the study. I would hope, in fact,
that you and your faculty should you agree to my visit
- would consider me as "researcher-in-residence," so to