Rank and salary of instructors at the community junior college

Should faculty members in community junior colleges enjoy academic rank just as do faculty in four-year colleges and universities? Do their functions and academic prerequisites so differ that they deserve classification by separate systems? Academic rank and promotion procedures (from instructor to assistant professor to associate professor to full professor), inherited from the German universities, carry tremendous social, civic, and political influence. Even though the full professor title has become a prize, more or less for longevity rather than achievement, it still remains an arena of sanctity. Criteria for promotion in four-year institutions pertain to three areas: teaching, research, and service. But because effectiveness of teaching is the most difficult to evaluate, the greatest emphasis falls on the more easily measured volumes of published papers and on numbers of committees on which the faculty member has served. reason we find it hard to evaluate effective teaching is because no one has ever agreed upon the proper outcome of teaching. Could the institutions promote a faculty member on the basis of how many of his graduates succeeded in graduate school, met with economic success, or became a model citizen? Even if these measures were agreed upon, it would require almost a lifetime before the teacher received his award. In his comical but mostly true account on College Professoring, Kolstoe lists reasons many of his colleagues offered for believing they were good teachers: One said he was good because he was suave, charming, and sophisticated in his lectures. Another was good because his notes were well organized and easy to follow. Another because he was extremely careful about his documentation. Another because he kept his lectures refreshed with reports of his current research. Another because he continually pointed out the relevance of his topic to current happenings. Another because he identified the historical antecedents of present events. Another because he challenged his students to defend their opinions. The list was endless.1 Community junior colleges heavily emphasize effective teaching. As a result of liberal admission policies, teachers encounter a wider range of student abilities than do their counterparts in four-year institutions. They meet poor achievers classified by harsh conservatives as not college material (implying a clairvoyance no one has, I suspect). They are bound by a moral imperative to give of themselves creatively and to stir and excite the

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• The Two-Year College

  Philip D Vairo•The Journal of Higher Education•1966

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• College Professorino

  Elizabeth A Greenleaf•The Journal of Higher Education•1976

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