Epistemological Imperature for Funding Community College Research

Author: William Morgan, Lone Star College

In 2008, I graduated from the University of Texas with a PhD in Latin American history from a department then ranked number one in the world in this field. My dissertation examined the Cuban tobacco slave plantation, which, in contrast to the traditional focus on Cuban sugar slavery, promised to expand the depth and understanding of forced labor in one of the most important slave economies of the modern world. This also happened to be at the peak of the Great Recession, which for academia translated into a severe collapse of the job market. In the wake of one of the worst professional crises in recent history, and having moved to Houston following my spouse, I was hired first as an adjunct and then as a full-time professor at Lone Star College. This employment proved fortuitous and reflected the peculiar positioning of higher education in a depressed economy where enrollment, particularly among community colleges, typically rises as the economy stalls. Over the last fifteen years, Lone Star has offered me not only secure employment but also the opportunity to teach, and I really mean teach, thousands of students meaningful historical understanding. However, a traditional 5/5/2 teaching course load over twelve months left little time and opportunity for either research or writing, essentially erasing years of intensive, expert training and eliding a deeply personal commitment to expanding my unique contribution to the field Latin American history.

Despite the structural prohibitions embedded in a job that effectively rendered moot a not-easily-earned background of intellectual preparation, spanning multiple and repeated tours of archival research in Cuba, Spain, and regional libraries across the country, my dedication to producing an original contribution to the field of historical slavery remained steadfast. Over the past decade and a half, I have been able to publish several peer-reviewed articles and edited chapters on the Cuban tobacco slave economy. These attempts at adding to the larger historical scholarship of this era hold a degree of academic merit, yet they also represent a professional schism facing an increasing number of community college faculty members, who are conventionally forced to abandon research training and research interests due to the conflicting expectations of teaching institutions.

On one hand, publications stemming from active research agendas represent the culmination of a professional trajectory backed by the considerable outlay of academic capital. On the other hand, because these activities occur in addition to primary teaching responsibilities exclusively prioritizing an identity as an educator rather than a scholar, they also represent an unnecessarily arduous navigation of a false binary imposed upon many faculty members at two-year institutions. Illustrating the problematic nature of conflicting systems for a new generation of community college faculty members—those holding doctoral degrees and wishing to continue to contribute to their respective fields—the near absence of institutional funding and limited cultural support from my college left little value in research activities. Consequently, I did not benefit from the dedicated resources, specifically in the form of money and time, traditionally reserved for graduate students or for my peers at research intuitions. This made the pace of production excruciatingly slow and personally costly, effectively making these endeavors a second, unremunerated job. Nevertheless, I did this because I was trained to do it and because I believed it mattered. Subsequently, this research has positioned me as the one of the few scholars in the world working in this subject and within the larger field, part of an important cadre of scholars redefining the Cuban and Atlantic World slave economy of the nineteenth century.

On the merits of this research, I was awarded a 2020 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship, a truly unique and generous funding opportunity that finally gave me the resources needed to complete, after more than a decade, my manuscript Cuban Tobacco in the Age of Second Slavery, currently under contract with the University of Georgia and scheduled to be published in spring 2026. In terms of impact on the larger scholarship, my book argues for a new geographic and commodity frontier of second-stage, global planter capitalism on the backs of tens of thousands of enslaved individuals forced to labor in Cuba’s tobacco plantations. And yet without a once-in-a-generation funding opportunity this contribution to expanding the known parameters of Atlantic slavery would not have been possible. Reflecting the shallow and transitory nature of research funding for community college faculty members, the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship no longer exists, and along with it any substantial avenue for epistemological advancement for an entire community of scholars has been lost. Consequently, on the importance of funding research by community college faculty members, the question is not why we should fund it but what is lost if we do not.

The lack of traditional research-funding opportunities for community colleges combined with the increasingly common professional trajectory of faculty members entering the ranks of community colleges with a terminal degree has put at stake a widespread and tremendous loss of intellectual knowledge and expertise. Bookended by the Great Recession and the impact of COVID-19, the higher education landscape has undergone significant change over the last two decades. More generally, and perhaps more substantively as well, an expected enrollment cliff—signified by a dramatic, multiyear decline in college enrollments—promises a further recalibration of higher education going forward. For purposes under consideration here, three of the more significant changes were the unprecedented increases in the number of PhDs awarded in the preceding period, the similarly unprecedented decrease in the number of university hiring lines in the ensuing period, and a general constriction of budgets across higher education. This combination of factors effectively saturated the market with newly minted PhDs, many of whom, responding to both push and pull influences, sought positions at two-year institutions. As of 2013, faculty members holding PhDs have remained in the minority but still represent one-third of all two-year-college instructors, while many disciplines, particularly in the humanities (forty-two percent) and social sciences (sixty-three percent), show even greater concentrations (Laurence)—and these numbers have likely increased since then. Amid professional upheaval, these positions represented a beneficial lifeline for many academics who, unable to secure traditional but rapidly diminishing faculty postings, otherwise would have been pushed completely out of higher education. However, because community colleges are still operating on a model that near-exclusively privileges teaching responsibilities as the foundational faculty expectation, these colleges are unprepared for the changing needs of a new and different faculty cohort. Principally, many of these new faculty members possessing extensive training and highly specialized expertise found few, if any, outlets capable of supporting continued development of their unique research projects. Maintaining this model within a rapidly changing faculty landscape fundamentally ensures a loss of both research training and intellectual capacity critical for the continuation of epistemological expansion.

Anecdotally, my department at Lone Star College–Montgomery illustrates the unfolding of and problems originating from this process. In relation to the recent influx of PhD-holding applicants, since 2008 all new faculty hires have held PhDs, bringing the department total to five out of six professors holding terminal degrees. Although circumstantial, this ratio is a far cry from estimates of one-fifth of community college faculty members holding doctoral degrees in the 1990s and early 2000s and implies a new baseline characteristic for hiring among community colleges. Attuned to the perceived value these degrees hold institutionally, as one colleague remarked in the last hiring round, “all things being equal, why wouldn’t we hire someone with a PhD?” And yet, while the surplus of PhDs in the market certainly justifies new arguments for exclusively looking toward applicants holding doctoral degrees, the largely superficial institutional and shallow larger professional support for one of the most important qualifications for those earning PhDs—their ability and desire to have active research agendas—fundamentally engenders a crisis of knowledge production.

On an essential level, the difference between faculty members holding master’s degrees and those having doctoral degrees rests on the ability and training to perform high-level, specialized research. This difference explicitly embraces the value associated with a unique and specialized type of knowledge creation that forms the backbone of advancing original inquiries in the common pursuit of better understanding the world. If the modern reality for new faculty lines among two-year institutions centers around faculty members holding PhDs, the question cannot be simply why not hire individuals with doctoral degrees but rather what is the best pathway to ensure that their research training and expertise are not lost.

Structurally, the changing landscape of higher education has forced more PhDs into the ranks of community colleges, but, in the absence of a corresponding evolution—or even modification—of conventional practices emphasizing teaching, many new faculty hires have been forced to abandon the very research projects that secured their doctoral degrees. The result is a modern cohort hired partially on the basis of their research acumen and results but left with little opportunity to continue these intellectual pursuits. A conspicuous demonstration of this can be seen within this same department, where the impact of limited research funding is magnified on an individual, departmental, and college-wide level. Apart from myself, two professors largely abandoned original research projects over the course of their careers to focus on teaching, one professor sought publishing opportunities outside of traditional avenues, and the most recent hire is several years into navigating the difficult and slow process of continuing their doctoral research and writing. Within a college serving nearly fifteen thousand students and a department where eighty percent of the faculty members hold doctoral degrees, the contribution to our larger discipline has been prohibitively marginal at best.

As a system, Lone Star College enrolls ninety-five thousand students, and, given that the eight campus history departments demonstrate similar PhD-holding faculty member ratios and limited research publication patterns, one can only imagine the impact of this writ large when extrapolated among the majority of community college history departments in America. In the abstract, the loss of intellectual capital is conspicuous but hard to quantify. A larger perspective concentrating on the field of history itself offers a similar but more concrete assessment of the conditions and consequences associated with the new reality of community college faculties. According to recent data available from the National Science Foundation’s annual report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates cited in American Historical Association’s annual jobs report, in 2008–09, history departments in the United States awarded 1,045 new PhDs—representing the second-largest number of history doctoral degrees conferred since 1977 (Division). The increase in PhDs reflected a broader trend developed over the previous decade in which history departments, showing a “certain amount of ‘irrational exuberance,’” progressively increased the number of students admitted to doctoral programs (Townsend). The recklessness of this steady increase was underlined by continuing patterns of job postings that failed to correlate with the number of PhDs produced and highlighted by the “substantial drop” in the number of available jobs for that year, leaving more than half (fifty-two percent) of all new PhDs unemployed for that year. Significant for faculty positions, less than thirty percent of new PhDs found teaching positions in higher education, a percentage slightly lower than the thirty-two-percent average for new PhDs in the humanities as a whole (Townsend).

This initial data outlines the structural conditions recent PhD recipients have had to navigate over the past two decades—namely, an annual surfeit of highly trained professionals facing an increasingly smaller number of traditional job openings. Community colleges have been a primary beneficiary of these results and a practical lifeline for a significant number of recent PhD recipients. A larger perspective provides more clarity on just how much of an impact these patterns are having on community college faculty numbers. According to a more extensive analysis by the American Historical Association, in a long view of the 8,523 historians who earned PhDs at American universities from 2004 to 2013, the percentage of faculty members hired at non-tenure-track, two-year colleges more than doubled from 2004 to 2013 (in contrast to the steady decline of hires at four-year universities; Where Historians Work, 2004–13). An update to the data analyzing career outcomes added four additional years and increased the number of historians represented from 8,523 to 12,310 (Where Historians Work, 2014–17). Notably, the previous trends in the number of historians with PhDs who hold tenure-track positions at four-year universities “has continued to decline” for PhDs who graduated between 2014 and 2017 (Shannon and Swafford). Analysis of more recent job reports further underlines the lack of “any sustained progress recovering from the 2008–09 recession” (Ruediger). Additional conclusions indicate a “largely static academic job market, particularly for faculty positions” and a general concern that “the contractions in the academic job market have caused significant pain and anxiety for a generation of history PhDs” (Ruediger).

Essentially, over the last two decades, the history profession created an unsustainable dynamic in which a majority of new scholars (having spent an average of ten years in graduate training) found a deficit of positions in higher education. These conditions made for a hypercompetitive job market that effectively pushed more and more scholars down the ranks of prestige university positions and into what used to be considered nontraditional appointments at two-year colleges. External economic and social conditions have forced a recalibrated but inchoate professional trajectory for many highly trained researchers, and an increasing number of these professionals are finding homes at community colleges. However, a subsequent reconsideration of how to best protect and promote the substantial intellectual capital and training that this cohort possesses has yet to fundamentally appear. Institutionally, community colleges are predicated on teaching a large number of undergraduates, and outside of a few notable exceptions two-year-college faculty members are severely constrained by a conventional lack of research support. As more and more PhD recipients are populating these ranks, academia and its contribution to the larger world face a critical moment, where both individual and collective knowledge production reach a terminal point as an increasing number of researchers, having limited support, have ceased to generate and expand intellectual knowledge. If an epistemological crisis is to be prevented, it is imperative to find new avenues of support, outside of traditional lines predominantly reserved for faculty members at four-year research institutions and in supplementation to the virtually nonexistent institutional support within community colleges. Excluded, on one end, by diminishing opportunities for faculty positions at four-year institutions and constrained, on the other end, by an emphasis on teaching at the expense of research, any hope of maintaining, much less expanding, foundational knowledge creation for a new generation of researchers will have to be met with nontraditional, third-party funding organizations. It is this group that is ultimately tasked with addressing what is lost if a newly reconstituted professional cohort of well-trained, highly skilled researchers within two-year colleges is not supported.

Of the hundreds of PhDs annually who find employment at two-year colleges but without any substantial opportunity and support to continue their research agenda, my experience, having benefited from rare support, has been exceptional. It has also been costly. Beyond the labor, time, and financial sacrifices, the protracted effort of reaching this stage has forced me to abandon additional intellectual pursuits that held the potential to further expand the understanding of Cuban slavery. This includes previous research focusing on the social parameters of the Cuban tobacco slave community that argued for higher ratios of family formation, spaces of autonomy, and increased rates of self-purchase in contrast to the conventional understanding of the Cuban slave experience. While this may seem of narrow value from the outside, for the community of scholars interested in the multiple expressions of slave life this represented a potential line of inquiry and knowledge expansion now lost. Effectively, after nearly two decades spent reaching this point, it is inconceivable that a similar journey could be undertaken, leaving these investigations to essentially be abandoned and their potential contributions to expanding this field absent. 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-college faculty members, who have extensive training and a desire to advance their field yet lack the necessary resources to do so. At stake is nothing less than the diminution of the essential knowledge creation that forms the backbone of the advancement of original inquiries in the common pursuit of better understanding the world.

Works Cited

Division of Science Resources Statistics. Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities, 2009. National Science Foundation, Dec. 2010. NSF report 11-306.

Laurence, David. “A Profile of the Non-Tenure-Track Academic Workforce.” ADE Bulletin, vol. 153, 2013, pp. 6–22.

Ruediger, Dylan. “The 2019 AHA Jobs Report: A Closer Look at Faculty Hiring.” Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, 28 Jan. 2019, www.historians.org/perspectives-article/the-2019-aha-jobs-report-a-closer-look-at-faculty-hiring-february-2019/.

Shannon, Hope, and Emily Swafford. “Four More Years: A Where Historians Work Update.” Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, 13 Oct. 2022, www.historians.org/perspectives-article/four-more-years-a-where-historians-work-update-november-2022/.

Townsend, Robert B. “New History PhDs in 2009 Surged to Second-Highest Level in Thirty-Two Years.” Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, 1 Mar. 2011, www.historians.org/perspectives-article/new-history-phds-in-2009-surged-to-second-highest-level-in-32-years-march-2011/.

Where Historians Work, 2004–13. American Historical Association, 2018, www.historians.org/community-careers/where-historians-work/where-historians-work-2004-13/.

Where Historians Work, 2014–17. American Historical Association, 2022, www.historians.org/community-careers/where-historians-work/where-historians-work-2014-17/.