Hugo Schwyzer

I generally try and keep up with the very interesting Confessions of a Community College Dean blog, hosted at Inside Higher Education.

This week, an interesting piece by the unnamed dean on his preference for hiring Ph.Ds for full-time teaching positions at the community college. Dean writes:

Certainly, the single clearest criterion we look at is teaching ability, especially in the areas we need taught. I’ve seen Ph.D.’s fall flat here, and the degree won’t save them. I’ll grant that good-faith observers can differ on the relative performance of one teacher as against another – that’s one of the reasons that we have search committees. But a demonstration that fails to show, say, mastery of the subject matter, or the ability to speak clearly enough to be understood, is the kiss of death.

Although our degrees top out at the two-year level, our students don’t. A gratifying number of them go on to four-year degrees and beyond, up to and including medical school, law school, and grad school. I believe that part of the job of a cc is to prepare those students to succeed at the next level(s). To the extent that we can give the students exposure to the same faculty they’d get at the next level, I think we do them a service. (Honestly, in many cases, I think we do better than some of our four-year competitors at teaching intro courses. The four-year schools sometimes treat intro courses as afterthoughts or grudging obligations; they’re our bread-and-butter. Our intro classes are small, and taught mostly by full-time faculty. That certainly isn’t the case at, say, Flagship State.)

The sentence I placed in bold is an argument I’ve never considered.

As I’ve written before, I didn’t start graduate school at UCLA intending to teach permanently at a community college. I hadn’t ruled out the possibility either. My late father was a professor at UCSB, my mother a (now-retired) instructor at Monterey Peninsula College. Throughout my childhood, I had both parents as role models — and each taught at a different level in the state system of public education. When I started the pursuit of the Ph.D., I certainly expected to follow more in my father’s footsteps than my mother’s.

It was only when I started working as a teaching assistant (back in early 1991) that I realized that being in front of a classroom was electrifying and thrilling; doing research and writing was dull by comparison. I’d always known I was more of a performer than a deep thinker, and doing research and TA work at the same time made it clear that my future preference would be for a job at an institution where good teaching was the sole criterion for success.

When I was hired full-time at Pasadena City College in 1994, my dissertation adviser told me I would be “a fool” if I took the job. He had invested a lot of time in me as his protege, and wanted me to continue to do the research I had started to do on late-medieval English church history. I assured him that I would finish the dissertation I had started, but that teaching was my first love. He, a two-time winner of UCLA’s distinguished teaching award, pointed out that research excellence and outstanding teaching were not mutually exclusive. And I admitted he was right — but the shot at “instant financial security” that the PCC job offered was too tempting to decline, especially as I was about to get married for the second time.

Slightly fewer than half of my full-time colleagues at PCC have their Ph.Ds. I certainly didn’t have mine when I started. Though I was ABD (”all but done”, or “all but dissertation”) by 1994 when I started on the tenure-track, it took me another five years to finish the doctorate. It wasn’t until August 26, 1999, that I walked out of Powell Library with a little slip in my hand indicating that all the requirements had been met, the dissertation signed and filed, and the Ph.D at last in hand. Teaching full-time, going through a divorce and two severe mental breakdowns in the mid-1990s had slowed the pace of my writing.

When I finally got the Ph.D., my colleagues threw me a small party. My friend Marc Dollinger (now a professor of Jewish ethics at SF State, and himself a Cal undergrad, UCLA Ph.D.), put up signs all over the department — including the men’s restroom — saying “Hugo is Phinally PhinisheD.” It was very sweet. The congratulations I got from my mother and father and brother — all Ph.Ds themselves — were of course the sweetest. I felt as if I had finally gained membership in the one club to which I had most aspired to belong.

But my teaching didn’t change as a result of my getting the Ph.D. My students called me “Hugo” when I was a fresh-faced 27 year-old; most still call me “Hugo” now as I head into middle-age. The plaque on my door was changed by the college from “Mr. Hugo Schwyzer” to “Dr. Hugo Schwyzer” but that was not at my behest, and it seems to have had no impact on the respect I receive from my students. While “phinally phinishing” the Ph.D. felt good emotionally, it had very little connection to my work in the classroom.

I don’t think most PCC students know which of their professors have doctorates and which don’t. I certainly see no evidence that they have more automatic respect for those of us with Ph.Ds than for our colleagues with terminal M.A. degrees. Because my dissertation topic (the role of the bishops of Durham and the archbishops of York in providing for the defense of northern England during the reign of Edwards I, II, and III) has nothing to do with anything I teach at the college, I very rarely reference my own work while I am teaching.

The dean’s point in the blog that community colleges ought to offer future transfer students exposure to the same sort of profs they will encounter at the next level is a valid one. It makes sense, too, to counter the argument that the two-year colleges lack the academic quality of four-year institutions. Whether or not the Ph.D. means much in terms of improving teaching, it certainly means something to the public. My college, as far as I can tell, likes to tout the relatively high percentage of Ph.Ds on the faculty. To the extent that that assuages the anxieties of parents and students about the quality of the two-year professoriate, I’m willing to believe that possession of a Ph.D. ought to be a tie-breaker in hiring — but only when all else is truly equal. Beyond the “PR value”, I’m not sure the doctorate means much at our level.

I’m glad I have my Ph.D. (My diplomas are all in a box somewhere, mind you. OKOP never put degrees on the wall, after all; it seems showy and aggressive.) If a student comes to visit me and tells me that he or she is considering a Ph.D. in history, I’m very encouraging. I make it clear that the road to a doctorate is long and challenging. I tell them that though I personally loathed doing the research I had to do to produce my dissertation, I was elated when I finished. I did feel validated as a scholar and an intellectual, and even if I intended to walk away from the ivory tower, I knew I carried with me everlasting evidence of at least a basic level of skill and tenacity. I tell my students that a dissertation of hundreds (even thousands) of pages is written a sentence at a time (in my case, over nearly five years). And I do tell them that if they intend to teach at the four-year level, the Ph.D. will be indispensable. Going through the hoops to get that highest of degrees does, I tell them, prove something to those who make hiring decisions. It establishes credibility as a scholar in a way that few other things do.

The subjects I most enjoy teaching these days (ancient near eastern religion, contemporary gender studies) are more than a little far afield from my dissertation work. If those three little letters after my name increase my credibility in the eyes of my students, I’m at best ambivalent. If that increased credibility for me is linked to doubts in the skills of a colleague with a terminal M.A., that’s troubling.

Many of my students, I think, don’t know I have a Ph.D. unless they scrutinize my nameplate outside my office or look in the college catalogue. And though I am moderately proud of what I was able to do, that pride is almost entirely private.