Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions that community college and
university faculty have about similarities and differences in their professional roles.
The research design included a qualitative ethnographic case study methodology
with faculty participants purposively selected from two public colleges in the Pacific
Northwest: a community college and a co-located university branch campus. Face-to-face interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed then subjected to analytic
induction to provide for the emergence of themes. The community college faculty
perceived their own professional role as focused on teaching, whereas they perceived
university faculty as more focused on research. The community college faculty also
described a perceived academic hierarchy with themselves lower than university
faculty. The university faculty perceived their own professional role as combining
teaching and research in a complementary way, whereas they perceived community
college faculty as burdened by heavy teaching loads. The university faculty also
contended that the demands of research and publication placed upon them are not
fully understood by others. Faculty from both institutions made comments about the
utility of a broader, more comprehensive concept of scholarship as well as the notion
of institutional pluralism including a place for both community colleges and
universities. Finally, both faculties described the benefits from and barriers to
community college and university faculty collaboration and inter-institutional
cooperation as well as mechanisms to improve them.
