Abstract
In Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College, Patrick Sullivan (2017) undertakes the task of accounting for how the “moral, civic, and democratic functions of higher education have been lost or largely eclipsed” by an “insistent and narrow focus on the market” (p. 193). His central claim is that neoliberal logics have “led to an extraordinary diminishment of the public and civic functions of higher education” (p. 192). Sullivan invites his readers to scrutinize the value of community colleges through an examination of their history, the ideas surrounding them, and through students’ voices. He does not accept at face value the narratives and benchmarks surrounding the community college. Instead, the volume offers a long interrogation of how 2-year colleges are valued, including who has set these valuations, and what the assumptions are behind those valuations.
Sullivan challenges scholarship that has come to define the community college, including works like Bailey, Smith Jaggers, and Jenkins’s (2015) Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, by examining “beneath the surface of the statistics and graduation rates” and seeking to emphasize the “community college’s contributions to promoting equity, social justice, and the public good in America” (pp. 5-6). Sullivan’s concludes his analysis of what he calls “representative works” that define the public discourse on the community college arguing that this body of scholarship has resisted “new data, ideas, and assessment,” and instead concentrates on reifying a failure narrative (p. 7). After his examination of the public discourse of failure generated by this scholarship, Sullivan argues for seeing the community college as the “heart” of democratic education as envisioned by the Truman commission (p. 397). The conversation Sullivan asks his readers to engage in is especially important in this moment where the idea of the public good is in question and education is often reduced to a “simple economic transaction” (p. 191). He works to put neoliberal economic theory from Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek into conversation with Pierre Bourdieu and John Dewey, and then to show how these educational theorists’ ideas play out in the modern community college.
One of the major achievements of this book is that it offers what Sullivan calls a counter-narrative to the current discussion about community college. He does this by pushing back against the deficit narratives surrounding community colleges, developmental education, and student success. The author offers up well-researched chapters examining student success and developmental education in the community college. In these, he complicates and challenges what he sees as a falsely created crisis in developmental education and a narrow uncontextualized view of student success. Although not all readers will be convinced by his counterargument, the synthesis of the research, along with the interrogation of assumptions in both the administration of, and scholarship about, community colleges is deeply informed and persuasive.
In addition, Sullivan provides qualitative research in the form of narratives from 2-year college students to “theorize a more fluid, less rigid understanding of student transition to higher education” (p. 131). Sullivan argues that the presentation of student voices is important because he wants to “privilege” a “comprehensive, experiential view of the community college,” which he sees as “transcending” the multiple missions and identity of the 2-year college to arrive at a democratically oriented institution serving the public good (p. 12). These narratives provide an important human and humane context. The students’ stories, along with Sullivan’s historical contextualization of the community college and its mission and his commitment to what he predicates as the democratic ideal of the 2-year college, create an engaging and crucial text that provides a contrasting perspective to the dominant grand narrative of community college failure. Sullivan problematizes the common narratives of personal motivation and effort with an understanding of the circumstances from which students and their mostly adjunct instructors find themselves. The student excerpts provide an important shift in perspective for those involved with the 2-year college, but who may not be in the classroom to share the lives of its students.
This volume is a consequential contribution to the field of community college studies as it offers reflection and reframing of the values and mission of the 2-year college. In addition to being a contribution to the conversation around the democratic purpose of the community college, it is also an essential work of synthesis needed to understand the scope of the community college and its place in higher education and our society. Sullivan’s volume is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on economics, sociology, writing studies, higher education and more, all in the service of providing a comprehensive and accessible understanding of what he sees as the role and the challenges of the community college.
Sullivan locates the mission of the community college in the 1947 Truman Commission Report. For Sullivan, this report, with its aspirational language centered on the democratic purpose of education and the role of education in creating a more equal society, is a touchstone from which all thinking about community colleges develops. He believes the “modern community college’s revolutionary open admissions policy” is a “unique and irreplaceable contribution to American life” (375). However, that focus leaves out the previous half century of the history of the community college—one where that purpose was being wrestled with and defined. In contrast, I tend to think that other historical readings of the community college mission as one that is conflicted or where there are multiple missions is more accurate. Although I share Sullivan’s privileging of democratic development and equity found in the Truman Commission report, he too easily dismisses critics of the purpose(s) and outcomes of the community college. His case for reexamining the ideology through which our society determines the purpose of education is compelling, but this conversation is not widespread currently. At this juncture, his view is an outlier in our public discussion of education. The volume makes a strong case for a broadly democratic view of the purpose of the 2-year college, and provides a convincing argument for the potential and realized contribution this institution type makes to the public good.
The book is a noteworthy contribution, in part, because of the broad synthesis of sources Sullivan draws upon and connects in the volume. His discussion of the historical and ideological foundations of neoliberal ideology, especially F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, is an indispensable contextualization for educators and for an educated public. This volume uses a deep understanding of economics and history to inform the author’s discussion of educational policy. There is no more comprehensive discussion of the ideological underpinnings that create the current tensions in the 2-year college. In this work, the book harkens back to older methods of scholarship that are broadly liberal in the sense that they are broad-minded and present a deeply educated worldview. There is a bit of Montaigne’s discursive style here as he takes time to provide deep background before coming back to his thesis on the value of the community college.
The volume, because of its counter-narrative, and its arguments on developmental education and student success, provides a productive center for any graduate course on the comprehensive community college. As a faculty member at a 2-year college who teaches developmental education courses and writing courses, this volume is the one I would choose for my administration to read as it provides a comprehensive and deeply informed perspective. The book provides the reader with one of the most complete pictures of the 2-year college and the material and ideological debates surrounding it.