Introduction

Authors: Carmen Carrasquillo, San Diego Miramar College, and Brian Stipelman, Frederick Community College

Conceived as “democracy’s colleges,” typical community colleges are affordable, flexible, and accessible by design. They bring the transformative experience of higher education to everyone regardless of prior educational experience, race, gender, age, citizenship, caregiving, or economic circumstances. Though often given a secondary status when policymakers, professional societies, and the public envision the college experience, community colleges are the secret heart of American higher education. And despite a disproportionately significant drop in enrollments due to COVID-19, community colleges enroll the second largest percentage of college students (thirty-one percent), behind four-year public schools (forty-two percent) and ahead of four-year private schools (twenty-three percent), while enrolling students for half the number of credits.

How we collectively envision the role and function of a community college is especially significant given their structural role within the US system of higher education. Community colleges regularly serve individuals in the most vulnerable demographics of American society. They typically enroll higher percentages of parenting, lower income, and working students and students in minoritized populations than their four-year counterparts do.

To serve such vulnerable populations is to function as the pulsing lifeblood at the center of communities and to manifest Horace Mann’s vision of education as the great equalizer. Community colleges reject the deterministic notion that zip code is destiny and work to boost student success by assessing and addressing institutional inequities. Furthermore, community colleges strive to embrace an emancipatory and life-affirming approach that values students’ lived experience and cultural wealth. Rather than be disrupted by hierarchical biases within higher education that can render them invisible to those who hold the purse strings, community colleges persist in creating learning environments that help launch students toward successful outcomes.

One could simply visit a local community college district board of trustees meeting, where narratives of student success abound. There, one would learn about the student who graduated from high school with a 1.9 overall GPA yet determinedly and resiliently joined the community college honors program, earned a dean’s list distinction, won major scholarships, and transferred to University of California, Berkeley. There, one would meet the once-homeless student who juggled single motherhood and part-time work and became the first in her family to earn a degree. Whether they are a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) student earning an associate’s degree and headed to a university to study literature, a Somali immigrant pursuing a certificate in English language acquisition or a local high school graduate who could not afford to attend the universities they were accepted to and chose the more affordable option for the first two years toward a bachelor's degree, the real-world community college student pursues diverse goals. Community colleges have much to be proud of and, with additional funding and resources, could yield even more transformational effects in higher education and across the nation. The funding picture can be murky, however, without a clearer view of how localized funding can affect budgeting priorities.

Community colleges derive a sizable portion of their funding from the communities they support. This localized funding and the geographically concentrated nature of the student population ties the community college’s mission and educational programming directly to community needs. Workforce and regional economic needs and development are typically prioritized. Certainly, this is the dominant public perception of a community college’s function—serving lower income, often minoritized students looking for a college credential to unlock economic mobility.

This is legitimately an important part of a community college’s work, but it also reflects a reductive understanding of who the community college student is and what they need. Yes, community college students need a career. Students at every level of higher education care about economic outcomes, and every degree is ultimately a career degree. But this hyperfixation on immediate workforce training tends to both downplay the number of students seeking to transfer in the pursuit of more “traditional” four-year degrees (with the community college offering years one and two of that degree) and ignore the community college’s role in helping students develop the skills needed to participate meaningfully in democratic society and the tools needed to live a good life. It reproduces class and caste dynamics that tell us the humanities are the exclusive province of the elite.

This lack of awareness spreads into the academy as well. For instance, the recently published Humanities for All: Essays on the Public Humanities in Higher Education report by the National Humanities Alliance tracks national work on the public humanities across multiple dimensions: informing contemporary debates, amplifying community voices and histories, helping those same communities navigate difficult experiences, preserving culture in times of transformation, and of course expanding educational access (Humanities). It profiles sixty-one initiatives across the country, only one of which was from a community college. This representational imbalance is complex and multifaceted, but the institutions most deeply embedded within our communities are not effectively resourced to do this work, and what work is happening is systematically devalued or rendered invisible.

To counter this omission, consider the community college humanities student. Like Audre Lorde’s mythical “black unicorn,” the literature-loving art history aficionado and media studies devotee often resides on a community college campus and works with mentor professors to engage intellectually with numerous humanities research issues. Indeed, in 2017, Inside Higher Ed reported the increasing number of community college students from underrepresented groups choosing to study the humanities (Smith). At some community colleges, humanities students benefit from grants that prioritize direct student aid, mentoring, counseling, career advising, and other types of support to cultivate their successful transfer as humanities majors (“PATH Program”). And, in 2022, the University of California at Berkeley reported a 121% increase in first-year students pursuing arts and humanities majors (Nietzel). Perhaps the pandemic or the sharply divided political climate has generated renewed interest in a humanities education that affords reflection and critical thinking about the ethical and societal dilemmas facing us today. Whatever the impetus, the collectivist values undergirding community colleges arguably offer hope not just for encouraging individual upward mobility but also for sustaining the values of a democratic society.

If you believe that the legacy of thousands of years of human experience, the study of how to live well and find meaning, belongs to all people regardless of their demographics, then the health of the humanities at community colleges should be of concern. If you adopt a more instrumental (though not mutually exclusive) view that community colleges play a central role in the creation of a productive and adaptable workforce that serves the economic needs of its community, the humanities are still a foundational and essential vehicle for teaching empathy, communication, critical and creative thinking, cultural competence, adaptability, and other skills that employers want to see in their employees and are ill-prepared to teach themselves. The rising concerns of four-year higher education—creating an educational environment that fosters inclusion and belonging; introducing college-level material to nontraditional students; linking educational experiences to career pathways; breaking down barriers between students, communities, and higher education; training a generation of leaders and citizens who will not simply reproduce the experiences of the past—this has long been the work of community colleges and their faculties. These challenges are not new for this sector of higher education. Despite being underresourced, undervalued, and frequently invisible, community colleges have been grappling with these same issues for generations and are ideally situated to clarify the challenges of our time and clear the pathway forward.

The community college is the locus for any conversation about the future of the humanities since, for millions of students, time spent at a community college may constitute their only exposure to the humanities. Thus, the nature and quality of that experience matters. It matters to the students, it matters to their communities, and it matters to the ongoing cultural transmission of our collective legacy. How we teach the humanities will determine how we respond to generational challenges like climate change and generational transformations like the emergence of artificial intelligence in everyday life. It will shape how we adapt to the unseen and unanticipated revolutions to come. And it raises the question, who are the faculty members shouldering the burden of providing this experience, and how do we provide them with sufficient resources to engage in their work? This is especially important if we take seriously the proposition that maintaining an active research agenda helps faculty stay up to date and relevant in their teaching, ensuring that their disciplinary perspectives do not remain frozen at the moment of credentialing. Supporting community college faculty as ongoing and active participants in the academy ensures that the evolutionary development and transformation of academic disciplines are informed by a diverse group of perspectives that more accurately reflect the lived experience of the people who constitute our communities. And, as we will see, doing so dramatically increases the scope, breadth, and impact of humanities scholarship while making stunningly effective use of the resources available to support this work.

In 2018, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, ACLS created a community college research fellowship—an effort to make significant funding available to a wide array of community college scholars across numerous disciplines throughout the humanities and interpretive social sciences. One hundred and ten winners were selected over a four-year cycle, each winner receiving a fellowship up to forty thousand dollars. This funding paid for travel, student support, conference attendance, and research materials. Most importantly, it enabled the recipients to buy back time, the rarest of commodities for community college faculty, who generally teach credit loads of at least fifteen credits per semester, at salary rates that lag behind those of their four-year counterparts. As their home institutions often lack the resources to support grant writing, ACLS made this application process as simple and direct as possible, ensuring access for faculty with limited time and resources to navigate what is often a baroque and discouraging process—more barrier than opportunity.

While these teaching loads can create barriers without appropriate resources to support scholarship, that focus on teaching and pedagogy also makes community college faculty uniquely situated to center students in their research and practice. That student-centeredness is quite visible in community college faculty’s engagement with professional research and pedagogical endeavors. Nationwide, community college faculty participate in numerous professional development workshops, seminars, webinars, academies, conferences, and other activities designed to support faculty as they create curricular and extracurricular opportunities to advance student success and engagement. Community colleges pride themselves on meeting students where they are, paying close attention to their lived experience, and incorporating student voice into all endeavors in a quest to infuse equity-mindedness throughout the entire institution (Dowd). And, as the scholars published within this volume can attest, faculty members in the humanities are equity change agents, creating sense-making and critical thinking curricular opportunities for increased student engagement and increased access to resources.

The most promising strategies for retaining, engaging, and propelling students forward must involve efforts to dismantle systemic inequalities in and out of the classroom (Bensimon and Malcolm). Community colleges deeply committed to authentic equity practices know it is not enough to fund monthly celebrations of cultural diversity. Rather, they critically and continually examine institutional policies, practices, and processes for potential inequities affecting students and address them. Such institutions do not shy away from candid, courageous conversations about oppressive structures within the institution; they support employee resource groups, such as Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and allies, and collaborate campus-wide to disrupt and work to eliminate racist, classist, ableist, transphobic, and other forms of oppression.

Humanities faculty members at community colleges respond to this obligation to the less advantaged groups they serve through mindful research and equitable practices that place these diverse communities at the center. To engage the community college student is to understand their intersecting identities, to be unafraid to unmask the perpetuated inequities that disenfranchise them, and to slay that monster of harm through asset-based, equitable, and just learning environments.

While resources vary from one community college district to another, when funds are identified and earmarked for faculty professional development, they are often leveraged to support training focused on advancing student success through key interventions meant to keep students enrolled and engaged. Student services faculty members are often the unsung heroes, connecting students with specialized counseling, basic needs, veterans and disability programs, and numerous other services critical for student retention, persistence, and success. Partnering with their counselor colleagues, community college classroom faculty likewise invest in promising pedagogical practices to create teaching and learning spaces that affirm community cultural wealth (Acevedo and Solorzano) and are validating and engaging. ACLS community college scholars in the humanities reflect this investment as they work to curate more affordable, accessible, engaging, and empowering opportunities for their students’ learning and success.

Before the semester begins, conversations at first-week faculty meetings are often exchanges about new, creative ways to engage students through multiple institutional and “intrusive” interventions (Wood et al.). The air is tinged with possibility as faculty members ponder how they can make their courses more accessible, more affordable, and more just. Materials and strategies are shared about how to teach critical thinking through inquiry-based discussion (Blankstein and Noguera), how to build community inside a classroom of many different modalities (face-to-face, partially online, fully online) through humanizing methods and an asset-based lens (Raygoza et al.), and how to engage students in culturally responsive ways and in ways that prepare them for and inspire their participation in our democracy (Horsford). In short, community college faculty members’ pedagogical thrust is aimed at creating engaging teaching and learning spaces that support student success, whether the student’s goal is to transfer, earn a certificate, enter the workforce, or engage in lifelong learning. The voices of the ACLS scholar-practitioners in this volume amplify the role the humanities play to harness the transformative power of research and pedagogy. As their stories attest, that is a transformation that goes beyond the classroom with enormous potential to transform communities and society at large.

Over the last five years, ACLS scholars have engaged in incredible and transformative work whose impact is felt not only in traditional spaces like peer-reviewed journals but within their communities. Their research often involved students or focused on developing humanities-infused pedagogy. Their scholarship generated and disseminated new knowledge while simultaneously democratizing access and understanding. This volume tells the story of the challenges community college humanities researchers face, what they are uniquely situated to contribute, and how we all benefit from their work. Their personal narratives, shared through twelve different voices recounting experiences both unique and universal, tell the story of human costs and human impact, of the incredible obstacles they face, and of the critical need and moral imperative to tear those obstacles down.

That pressing need to tear down barriers came into sharper focus as Americans grappled with the tragic death of George Floyd in 2020. The nation’s community colleges engaged in profound discussions about their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and, like so many other public institutions, reimagined strategies to promote anti-racist education designed to address inequities (Bensimon). Over half of California’s community college students are from historically underrepresented groups, including African American and Latinx students, and two-thirds are from the lowest income families ($30,000 or less, Increasing Equity). Recent national statistics show forty-five percent of two-year-college students are BIPOC (Current Term Enrollment Estimates).

Armed with disaggregated data showing disproportionate outcomes across specific student populations, community colleges understand they play a significant role in advancing equitable student outcomes. Equity planning efforts have included professional learning emphasizing transformational pedagogies and trauma-informed student services, the development of new and expanded social justice and ethnic studies programs, and workforce diversification goals.

Community colleges have sent teams to equity institutes and conferences, and educators across the country engage in discussions about inclusive, high-impact practices to serve the needs of highly diverse, low-income, and first-generation students (McNair et al.). How to embed equitable practices to serve the historically marginalized and other student populations is the chief intellectual and practical pursuit of the ACLS scholars included in this publication.

We have arranged their stories into four thematic chapters. We begin with an overview of the research landscape and reflections on challenges facing an active research agenda in a community college environment. This is followed by a look at how this research is informed by a pedagogy that empowers students. The ACLS scholars then explore the many publics who are exposed to and affected by their research, before concluding with a discussion of how their work centers equity and elevates marginalized voices.

Chapter 1: The Research Landscape

Three questions animate our first sequence of essays. Why is it important to support humanities research at community colleges, what barriers prevent that support, and what does the failure to support cost our disciplines and communities? In our first essay, Sophie Maríñez, professor of Modern Languages, Cultures, and Literature at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, reflects on how community college researchers are impacted by their status at the bottom of the “economy of academic prestige”: “Their lower social capital bars them from resources, funding, and other opportunities outside their institutions, thus reproducing the false, circular logic that faculty members at community colleges are not intellectually engaged.” In particular, she is concerned about the impact on both scholars and the student populations educated by them. She discusses how existing structures impose barriers that prevented her from advancing her work without her ACLS fellowship, even in a comparatively research-friendly system like the City University of New York. She argues that faculty scholarship and teaching excellence are intertwined and that funding imperatives that starve one to support the other are misguided. Having strong students requires structures that give members of the faculty access to time to support research, time that is reinvested back into classroom practice.

William A. Morgan, professor of History at Lone Star College, explores “the epistemological imperative” of supporting community college faculty research—namely, the thousands of research agendas that wither under the workload expectations of community college faculties. Given the increasing number of PhDs teaching at community colleges, there is an enormous investment of time and labor expended training these faculty to be researchers and supporting the start of their research, but not in supporting its continuance. Morgan’s own work on the Cuban slave experience was delayed almost fifteen years and likely would have been indefinitely if not for the support from the Mellon/ACLS fellowship. Morgan’s is one story among thousands. As he concludes, “Emblematic of a larger, systemic problem for researchers, scholars, and higher education as a whole, there remains an epistemological imperative to support the growing class of two-year faculty members, who have extensive training and a desire for advancing their field yet lack the necessary resources to do so.”

Community college faculty research impacts communities in which they are situated, and Jewon Woo, professor of English at Lorain County Community College, Ohio, expands on Morgan’s argument by highlighting how failing to support the research of community college faculty ends up impoverishing the community itself. As she argues for the value community scholarship, she explores the challenges community college faculty face engaging in this work, including “time poverty for research, inadequate research infrastructure, and difficulty maintaining research outcomes.” She concludes her reflection, and this section, with a thoughtful discussion of achievable, concrete steps that can be taken to address the barriers.

Chapter 2: Student Engagement and Pedagogy

As the contributors to Chapter 1 make clear, community college faculty members confront myriad challenges to producing research, yet they engage intentionally and creatively in scholarship benefiting their own professional growth and teaching effectiveness and the success of their students. Indeed, driven by the mission to meet the needs of highly diverse community college students, many of whom enter the two-year college seeking a second-chance education (Rose), community college faculty recognize that their institutions are potentially powerful catalysts for change and student empowerment. Community colleges thus seek to build capacity, providing professional learning toward creating transformative campus cultures where the student experience is highly participatory and engaged.

Understanding that student engagement is often key to encouraging retention and resilience, faculty seek actionable solutions to address equity gaps found across disproportionately impacted student populations. Whether through formal training in courses and academies where discussions center on culturally responsive, high-impact practices (Research Planning and Professional Development) or through more informal participation in activities such as community-cultivation circles (“Restorative Justice”), student-centered community college faculty address opportunity gaps by learning about and sharing knowledge on a variety of topics connected to student engagement.

Chapter 2, “Student Engagement and Pedagogy,” opens with Cinder Cooper Barnes, professor of English at Montgomery College, whose essay interrogates the notion that humanities education is or should be reserved for the elite and highlights the perils of denying students the opportunity to learn the “civic and societal leadership skills [that] come with liberal-arts- and humanities-driven education.” Describing the worrisome defunding of humanities education at some four-year institutions, Cooper Barnes argues against the false-dilemma thinking behind emphasizing workforce readiness at the expense of humanities education within the community college sector. To advocate for the value of the humanities, Cooper Barnes describes efforts to make more visible the innovative approaches some community colleges and philanthropic organizations are taking to strengthen humanities education at two-year colleges.

Imagine a high-impact classroom practice for student engagement that is intentionally connected to the networking, resume-building, and work-experience skills gained most often through participation in extracurricular activities, such as internships or club-life experiences. Associate professor of communication and media studies Beth Baunoch guides her Community College of Baltimore County students through numerous classroom-based projects that replicate frequently unattainable out-of-class experiences. Community college students must balance the demands of academics, work, and family life, a fact that precludes involvement outside the classroom. She asserts that “we can help students gain experiences to add to their resumes, assign work for portfolios, and engage in networking in class.”

The chapter closes with a community college professor’s foray into the world of open educational resources (OER). A self-described skeptic, Charlotte Lee, professor of political science at Berkeley City College, offers an intriguing reflection about her journey from initial doubter to curious adopter to passionate champion for the OER cause. Acknowledging the “real decision-making power” community college faculty have in the choice of college-classroom materials, Lee presents a case for the adoption of equity-focused and collaborative OER materials and considers the implications of artificial intelligence used in OER creation. Lee concludes that “community colleges are poised to continue being leaders in the creation and adoption of these materials. This is motivated by our complex and inspiring student bodies and the dedicated faculty members that anchor the institutional work.”

Chapter 3: Community Engagement and Public-Facing Work

This emphasis on student engagement, whether through practices that support accessibility or ensuring course content supports social mobility, at its core, prioritizes a pedagogy that brings the humanities into both the lived and aspirational experiences of students in a manner that recognizes the transformational capacity of the humanities in everyday life. But the impact of this work regularly transcends any individual student. A focus on community is at the heart of much of the work carried out by ACLS scholars, not only in advancing scholarship but in transforming the communities of which they are a part.

Community college faculty are especially well situated to engage in community action research that collapses false dichotomies between workforce training and civic engagement. As Katherine Rowell, professor of Sociology at Sinclair Community College, argues, “Community-driven research, which engages faculty members, students, and the communities they serve, bridges workforce preparation and democratic engagement.” Rowell’s scholarship around evictions and housing insecurity continues to echo throughout her community of Dayton, Ohio. It has developed partnerships between two-and four-year institutions and turned students into researchers, and the impact of their work was transformative for them and their community. But, like all the ACLS scholars, Rowell reflects on the fragility of her work and the need for more robust support within the broad array of academic structures that facilitate humanities research, including their disciplinary associations.

The chapter continues with Prithi Kanakamedala, a professor of History at Bronx Community College CUNY; her work on Brooklyn’s free Black abolitionist community is a study in the types of partnerships that Rowell described. Her research has gone through multiple stages, but at every point it was developed in collaboration with the community, which in turn achieved a deeper understanding of its history through that collaborative discovery process. Hers is a work that recognizes not only our shared cultural and historical inheritance but the role we each play in understanding and interpreting it. Roles and partnerships necessarily evolve as a project adapts itself to different partners throughout different funding cycles. And Kanakamedala rightly invites us to “engage in further dialogue about how we rethink the grant-writing model of delivering the ‘deliverables’ as a mode of project success, and to think that the deliverable might be one of process—that can also sustain a project through many life cycles.”

Lucha Arévalo’s work, on the other hand, reflects on the power of community-engaged scholarship that is the heart of humanities research. Arévalo is an Associate Professor of Chicanx and Latinx Studies at Río Hondo College in Whittier, California; her ACLS-funded project enabled her students to create children’s picture books and went beyond the classroom to engage the community with their scholarship. She describes her project as “part of a creative and critical race literacy curriculum centered on empowering students to create the stories and illustrations they wish would have been introduced to them as children and, in doing so, to explore the healing power of art and storytelling.” Through partnerships with her college library and child development center and support from ACLS, Arévalo led efforts to revitalize a children’s literature area known as the Tree House, serving intergenerational audiences for years to come.

Chapter 4: Equity and Access

Whether they speak about collaboration across departments benefiting a campus community, historical legacy projects preserving marginalized voices within a city, or the exciting possibilities of participatory action research, the third section’s authors tell eloquent stories about community engagement. In the fourth section, essayists center their reflections on traditionally marginalized communities and share details about successful equitable practices meant to serve those who have historically been disadvantaged and denied opportunities.

Embracing open access and more affordable education for all as the community college system’s mission requires critical reflection. Are we successfully enacting the value of equity-mindedness we often espouse? Who is being left out? Megan Klein, professor of social sciences at Oakton College, reflects about the reemergence of community college Higher Education in Prison (HEP) Programs and elevates the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated students. How can community colleges more intentionally address these students’ needs? Klein suggests a multipronged approach: borrowing ideas from existing initiatives that are successfully meeting the “post-prison hierarchy of needs,” listening to students’ voices about their lived experiences, increasing access through pedagogical equity-embedded practices, and partnering with equity- and justice-based organizations. The ultimate stakeholder is society itself, for, as Klein writes, “The data are clear: Folks who are incarcerated and have access to higher education are much less likely to return to jail or prison after they are released than folks who do not. In fact, the five-year rate of recidivism drops dramatically with degree completion, decreasing from seventy-five percent to fourteen percent for folks who earn an associate’s degree, to five percent for folks who earn a bachelor’s degree, and to less than one percent for folks who earn an advanced degree while incarcerated.”

A dean of social sciences at Cypress College, Jamie Thomas approaches this section’s theme of equitable practices by deconstructing the impact of language socialization on teaching and learning spaces. Thomas describes shifting the emphasis of a professional development course she coauthored from achievement gaps to opportunity gaps. “What I have since learned as an African American woman, linguist, and equity advocate has transformed the way I teach, and the way I lead as a community college administrator and professional development facilitator, because I have grown into greater respect and conscientious support of the educational journeys of both students and colleagues.” Available to the extensive California community college network of faculty members, counselors, administrators, and others, the course, Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching, affords enrollees learning opportunities about potential biases as barriers to student success. If practitioners become more aware of how some forms of communication are privileged over others and how some types of cultural knowledge are devalued, making the shift cultivates care, increases engagement, and creates opportunities for student (and instructor) success.

Writing from the perspective of an Indigenous Chicano anthropologist, Los Angeles Trade–Technical College professor Santiago Andrés Garcia narrates a profoundly personal reflection detailing a professional journey as teacher and equity champion. Garcia reflects on his efforts to advance equity through an ACLS-funded Mesoamerican clay-figurine project. Demonstrating deep compassion and care for his students, many of whom are pursuing an education while dealing with multiple financial, personal, and societal challenges, Garcia emphasizes his role in building capacity and teaching from a place of empathy. Garcia reflects, “In thinking about equity, I follow the Center for Urban Education, which writes, ‘Equity-minded individuals are aware of the socio-historical context of exclusionary practices and racism in higher education and the impact of power asymmetries on opportunities and outcomes, particularly for African Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans.’”

Conclusion

We hope hearing these stories will encourage the decision-makers who are gatekeepers, patrons, and custodians of the humanities to center community college faculty members in their thinking—whether this is college presidents or state lawmakers taking them seriously as researchers, professional societies highlighting their work, graduate programs training their students to engage in community-oriented practices, or funders making resources available so their research can continue. As these reflections demonstrate, even modest investments of resources can be transformative, and this investment is a moral imperative. It is here, at the community college, that critical elements of the nation’s population will encounter their shared history, the legacy of the human experience, and humanity’s experiments in living well. It is here that the democratic values and epistemological habits of mind needed to preserve a free society will be inculcated. It is in the community college that we are forging a sustainable future informed by an understanding of our past. That work, and the people carrying it out, need your support, and these reflections explain why.

Post-election, this scholarly project has taken on an added dimension of importance, for community colleges in general and for the students from the many disadvantaged and vulnerable communities we serve. Although federal funding for community colleges is minimal compared to that of four-year colleges and universities, most goes toward financial aid to students and toward relief packages supporting students (such as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security [CARES] Act; Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act; and American Rescue Plan Act). To further support student success and, by extension, the broader marginalized communities we serve, funding community college faculty research is also essential. Beyond financial considerations, there is a palpable fear in the air as we face great uncertainty about protections in place for undocumented, transgender, disabled, and other student populations. President Obama once praised community colleges as places where low-income people from all backgrounds resiliently pursue higher education against the odds; these same places must now prepare to defend access to education and to resources in 2025 and beyond. Community colleges are often underestimated yet are important economic engines for local workforces, clear transfer pathways to universities, and valuable lifelong-learning avenues for diverse communities. At the ACLS 2025 Annual Meeting, Laurie Patton, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, asserted that there is no more important time to be a humanist in American history. Indeed, community college humanists are working actively to dismantle systemic inequalities and to increase the diversity of humanistic knowledge. As these ACLS scholars make clear, our commitment to our democratizing mission stands, for the humanities can unlock the gateway to a more equitable and socially just world.

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