The American Community College and the Recovery of Public Space

• In Event: 63.087 - Sheraton Roundtable Session 11 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 63.087-4 - Revisiting the Contradictory College: 25 Years Later

Abstract

As Dougherty (1994) observed in The Contradictory College, the emergence of the vocational education mission at junior colleges during the mid 20th century was the consequence of several factors. During the Great Depression, vocational programs were started when there was a growing population of unemployed adults in the community anxious to prepare themselves for a competitive labor market. World War II had a modest impact on the growth of vocational education programs as some junior colleges, faced with declining enrollment, offered programs in aviation and related fields, to prepare them for positions in the military. During the 1950s, junior colleges (now increasingly renamed “community colleges”) experienced a demand for secretarial programs, accounting programs, and some allied health fields. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, however, community college vocational programs began to divert students out of transfer programs (e.g., Clark, 1960; Brint & Karabel, 1989). Accordingly, an institution that was initially intended to improve social mobility appeared to be undermining progress towards this end. Dougherty found that the vocationalization of community colleges was not adequately explained by Pluralist Functionalist Theory (Cremin, 1977; Trow, 1961) or Marxist Instrumentalist Theory (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Katz, 1968). Instead, Dougherty’s data reveled that state and local officials were the most influential actors in promoting vocationalization and they were responding to a variety of conditions important to them given their specific positions and offices.

Dougherty also found, however, that “the community college sits at the fault line between two conflicting imperatives: the democratic demand for a college that promotes equality and democratic citizenship and the limitations of a capitalist economy that has only so many jobs to give out” (p. 271). The contradiction, in other words, was one that went beyond the split between transfer and vocational curricula. The community college also sat on the fault line between democracy and capitalism.

In my paper, I have two main objectives. First, I revisit The Contradictory College to show how its findings and application of state relative autonomy theory remains relevant to recovering the institution’s recommended role as broad-based “active [p.68] center of adult education” attending to all the educational needs of out-of-school citizens (President’s Commission on Higher Education, 1947, p. 67 – 68). Second, in an era when the institutions of American democracy appear to be faltering, this paper asks how the fundamental and continuing contradictions identified by Dougherty may impede or support the recovery of a democratic public space (Arendt, 1979/1951; Benhabib, 2000; Young-Bruehl, 2006) where citizens can learn not only how to live and support themselves, but to act and through action, protect their democracy.

Author

• Clifford P. Harbour, University of North Texas