“Many of the full-time faculty who created the current levels of success for community colleges are retiring in hordes, with only a few graduate programs to prepare their replacements.”
Wow, not just a dearth of qualified replacements, for this
community college version of the “greatest generation,” but also a dearth of grad
programs that can bring them up to snuff.
This alarming, but not entirely accurate, news is from a article in a series on “completion rates,” sponsored
by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and attributed to “national
educational leaders and practitioners.”
The specific leader here, who has constructed his views
around the idea that community colleges are enjoying their “Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame,” is Dr. Terry O’Banion of Walden University, a private for-profit. According to Modern Language Association’s handy site on the academic workforce, Walden employs exactly
zero full-time tenure or tenure track faculty among its employees and, among
the 1800 faculty reported, only 100 full-timers.
What to make of such an
educational leader, then, when he writes
this:
