The PhD Versus the MA: Community College (Sort of) Edition

Carlton Myers (a pseudonym) has written a fascinating piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education about controversies in his community college regarding promotion to full professor. The gist of the disagreement? Whether those without the PhD ought to be able to gain the rank of full professor at his college. He raises many good points -- for example, if someone is teaching truck driving, or industrial arts, areas that do not have PhDs, not allowing them to become full professors effectively ghettoizes them. By and large I have little to say about the community college experience specifically -- I did not even realize that one could be a full professor at community or junior colleges.

But "Myers" makes some general points that do merit response.

First off, it should be pointed out that it sounds as if Myers works with some world class jerks -- folks with the PhD who lord it over colleagues who don't. If I wanted to be snide I'd have Myers remind himself that his colleagues with PhD's almost inevitably slid through the sluice pit of academia and are at a community college precisely because among PhD's the majority of them (though I'm sure not all of them) were not competitive among their peers.
Myers writes:

The crux of the conflict was driven by a group of faculty members with Ph.D.'s and Ed.D.'s who tried very hard to convince the rest of us that people who don't hold a doctorate aren't worthy of the highest professorial rank. . . .
They argued that it takes far more work to achieve a doctorate than to get any other kind of qualification, and that it doesn't matter how long you've been a practicing nurse or welder; without a Ph.D., you're never going to have the same kind of academic experience -- and therefore the academic qualification -- to merit the title of full professor.

I'm a bit surprised that each discipline did not get some say in how one rises to the rank of full professor. At most four-year places, in any case, the first stage is for the disipline to establish what is expected in the field. For welders, of course there ought to be different standards than for historians. And for historians, the PhD is, as one of my advisors used to say, "the union card" in this profession. The status of "full professor" is not just an internal mnatter -- it is also a sign to the outside profession. This is why, at least in history, I am somewhat surprised that community colleges have a lot of full professors in liberal arts disciplines.

Then:

At one point it was proposed that we pick a general number of academic credit hours needed to earn a doctorate. Then, since nonacademic faculty members accrue education and experience by attending workshops, seminars, and conferences rather than academic courses, we tried to find a way to translate "continuing education units," "continuing professional education credits," and a host of other nonacademic but professionally valuable experiences into the equivalent of academic credit hours.

Again, I can only speak to disciplines in which the PhD is offered. I should note that this proposal went nowhere at "Myers'" school, which is a good thing. Anyone who has both an MA and a PhD knows the vast difference between the two. This is one fact that people with MA's seem to forget -- that most of us with PhD's have MA's as well -- we are not merely people who chose to pursue a different route, we chose the same route, succeeded, and then went a whole lot farther. The gap between my PhD and my MA is much, much wider than that between my BA and MA in terms of qality, the amount of work that went into it, and the "expertise" that came from it. In fact at a good many places the MA is a lot easier to get than a good BA. And I know this not based on some abstract dismissal of the MA, but rather because I have an MA. I know precisely the level of attainment that the one degree represents as opposed to the other. It might be a useful rhetorical tool to pretend that MA's and PhD's inhabit different worlds. We don't. To use a baseball analogy, having the PhD is like making the majors. Getting the MA places you somewhere in the minors, and not necessarily in Triple A -- a wonderful accomplishment and one relatively few people attain, but still along way from Fenway Park.

And so this idea that one could simply accumulate credit hours equivalent to a PhD is hopelessly silly -- which Myers more or less acknowledges, kind of, sort of. In my mind there is a three tiered process to receiving a PhD. That differential in credits is merely the first. Yes, the average PhD requires another couple of years of coursework, but unlike the patchwork approach that many of Myers' colleagues seem to have advocated, that coursework is fairly well organized and structured. More importantly, it is geared toward the second stage of the PhD, and the one that truly separates an MA from a PhD in terms of expertise, awareness of the field, and so forth, and that is the process of studying for, taking, and passing the comprehensive or general exams.

The exams are the process that advances one to candidacy, the one that creates the "ABD," or "All But Dissertation." Every school structures their process differently, but effectively the exam process requires candidates to pass three or four four-to-eight hour written exams in the space of a month, followed by an oral exam that tends to run toward the antagonistic. The exam process is a weeding process, and weed it does. Once you have passed your exams, if they are all anything like they were at Ohio and other places I have heard of, the gap between you and an MA student, even the brightest, is best measured in light years. The synthesis of literally hundreds of books into four make or break exams, plus the historical content as well as analysis contained therein, followed by the cat and mouse game that is the oral exam is an immense process, and it is one that no one would go through, however much of an autodidact they are, without the compulsion of the comprehensive exam process.

Then of course there is the dissertation, the production of a piece of original scholarship that in this day and age usually requires two to three years or more, and that in most cases today is the draft for what will become a book. This immersion, this establishment of mastery over a topic, establishes the often insurmountable gap between the ABD and the PhD, a gap that I have already maintained is leagues removed from even the most rigorous MA.

And don't forget that in this day and age, during all of these steps most PhD students are presenting at conferences, beginning to publish, pursuing fellowship support, working as teaching or research assistants and, let's not forget, by the end teaching their own classes.

I guess this is my roundabout way of saying no, allowing one to take a mishmash of continuing education credits does not at some point equal a PhD.

Myers continues with what will to some be the heart of his argument but for me is a giant red herring:

We can all agree that earning a Ph.D. makes someone an acknowledged expert in their discipline. I've heard it said that on the day of your doctoral defense, you know more about your research topic than anyone else in academe. That's probably true. . . .But we are a teaching institution, and you'll never convince me that having a doctorate makes you a better teacher. It may make you a better scholar, but it does not automatically confer excellence in the classroom.

There are several problems with this argument. For one, while no one may be able to "Convince" Mr. Myers that "having a doctorate makes you a better teacher," he also does nothing to prove the converse. And since teaching at the postsecondary level is a knowledge-based profession, since the coin of our realm is knowledge and ideas, I know I am going to take the expert. And that's the one with the PhD in favor of the one with the MA. I am going to assume -- because it is true -- that the PhD knows incalculably more about his topic than someone with the MA in the same field, and that the gap in knowledge almost inevitably is going to mean that from a content-perspective, which is what we deal with, the PhD likely is the better teacher. It is a fallacy from the education departments that teaching is somehow separate and distinct from what is being taught.

I also love the silly usage of the grandiloquent, self-aggrandizing, but ultimately meaningless phrase "we are a teaching institution." Every college and university in the country is a teaching institution. Some also happen to be a whole lot more. Mr. Myers can pretend, if it makes him sleep better at night, that at his institution teaching is valued but at Harvard it is not, but I would surmise that he is wrong. Every institution with which I have ever been affiliated was a "teaching institution" even if none of them were only teaching institutions. And in all of them, some teachers were better than others. While I'm sure that everyone at Mr. Myers' community college is a star teacher, sparkling, erudite, and chock full o' commitment to the classroom, I would suspect that his school has as many marginal classroom instructors as any four year institution. Or is Mr. Myers arguing that those thousands of students clamoring to get into Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Williams and Swarthmore would really get better educations at his institution than at the places I just mentioned or a couple of hundred others?

Which brings us back to Mr. Myers' own situation, which is telling:

So how will the new policy affect me? I'm not a nonacademic faculty member or a Ph.D. I'm in a third group of people who got lost in the debate -- faculty members who teach in the arts and sciences but only have a master's. I have a modest record of peer-reviewed research publications and, by all accounts, I'm a good teacher. . . .The new policy benefits me: I was not eligible for full professorship before the change, and I am now. I'm happy about that. . . However, I'm more conflicted now about my place in the college, and about my standing among my peers. The Ph.D.'s will tell me, to my face, that they think I do a good job and that they respect me. But what do they really think? . . . I suspect I know the answer, at least in part. After the vote, I told one of my colleagues that I thought the faculty senate had done the right thing and mentioned how glad I was that I would have the chance to advance to the highest professorial rank some day. My colleague looked startled and asked in an incredulous tone, "So now you think you're eligible?"

At first Mr. Myers' collegue seems like an absolute prick. But look a bit more deeply. Mr. Myers is not the welder whose cause he purports to champion. He is not someone who happens to be in a field in which there is no PhD, and so if some snooty colleagues had their druthers he could never get to full professor through no fault of his own. He teaches in a field in which the PhD is offered and in which several of his colleagues clearly have attained this not-modest step. Why on earth should he be eligible for what is, at most places, a relatively rare and honored position? Being a good teacher is a necessary but not sufficient condition for any sort of promotion in higher education. In a world trading in knowledge, Mr. Myers has not done all that he could do to develop the mastery that others have. He couches his sense of entitlement in a sort of "woe is me, I'm underappreciated" solipsism:

And I'm keeping an eye out for other job openings. I like academe. I like my subject matter. I love the freedom to think about things, and, most of all, I love teaching college students. I genuinely like and respect most of my colleagues. . . .I'm just not so sure they feel the same way about me.

And yet at the end of the day, why should he have ever expected to be able to take the shortcut into a community college full professorship? Universities are littered with folks who never attain the rank of full professor. Are we supposed to feel that Mr. Myers has somehow been done wrong because he has found out that some of his community college colleagues don't buy into the concept of skipping steps on the path to career advancement? Perhaps from a professional vantage point Mr. Myers' colleagues feel just about exactly as they should.