[* Disclosure: I'm turning in grades for my last class (ever?) today. I'm not really a comp teacher anymore, am I?]

You’re always a member of the Invisible Society of Composition Teachers, moving almost invisibly through the basement hallways of institutions of higher education across the nation. That’s why you have those four Cs tattooed across the inside of your elbow, just as all of us do, so we can identify ourselves to one another and make the secret composition-teacher hooting call when we meet.

I mean. . .

You do have the tattoo, don’t you?

As you explore correlations between college composition and class, how have you accounted for the community college? Back in the early 70s, Sam Bowles and a colleague did this analysis that suggested American higher ed is stratified, with the lowest classes going to community colleges and never getting out. They drew in part on Burton Clark’s study about the “cooling out” function of CC’s. That’s about the only intellectual construct I’ve seen university researchers use regarding CC students. It was useful and provocative in its day, but my own experience says its way out of date.

In my view, class analysis is not terrifically useful at a community college. Everyone comes and we try to find the right program and the appropriate challenge for them. My college is in the middle of a an affluent suburb. Many students who qualify for the university come here by choice or necessity (parents’ divorce, for instance). The bulk of our faculty have strong anti-hierarchical and anti-elitism attitudes.

Now economic and material circumstances certainly affect our students, but I’m wondering how your research would address class in a community college context.

[The CCCC tatoo is no longer authorized, due to budget cutbacks in Urbana.]

Tough, tough question. I’m aware of the Bowles and Gintis study — it shows up in every flippin bibliography I see — so yeah, “Schooling in Capitalist America” is on my list for this month. And I kinda agree with their thesis. John Alberti had a nice piece on “second-tier” schools in the May 2001 CE; it seems to me instructive that a number of the Ivies don’t have required first-year composition courses (though, yes, of course, Harvard-where-it-all-started still does).

My own undergraduate education makes me see things a little differently from you. I started out at Small Expensive Competitive Private College, decided I didn’t like it after a year and a half and transferred to Small Impoverished Campus of Big Wealthy County Community College for a semester, and then went to Big State U. Students’ class-as-wealth and class-as-educational-preparedness and class-as-job-they-hoped-to-get-upon-graduation correlated very closely to the perceived “prestige” of the institutions.

I’m also aware that — although composition gets taught in community colleges — there seems to be a bit of classism in the journals; from what I understand, there’s a perception of CCC as somehow belonging ‘more’ to 4-year schools and TETYC being the marginalized Other. So I think there is a class system in higher ed, and there are concentric or interlocking circles of class systems.

But none of that really answers your question. From reading your weblog, though, I’d suggest that community colleges seem to be even more on the vocational side of the vocational education / liberal education binary than do Alberti’s “second-tier” schools. What’s your take?