Notes
Supporting Humanities Research at Community Colleges: More Urgent Than Ever
Author: Sophie Maríñez, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
The need for funding humanities research conducted by community college faculty has become more urgent than ever, and not just because it is important to support their scholarship... This support also benefits our students, who need and deserve training that fosters a better understanding of our rapidly evolving world, including critical thinking skills that will help them make important decisions in their careers and personal lives. The Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship constitutes a primary example of the transformative effects of such funding and its impact on a community of students and scholars historically neglected and disproportionately affected by neoliberal policies in public higher education.[1]
When I received the fellowship in 2021, I had been working on Haitian-Dominican relations for over seven years, since 2013, when the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic issued Court Ruling 168-13, stripping Dominicans of Haitian descent of their birthright citizenship, effective retroactively to 1929. Instantly, hundreds of thousands became stateless, vulnerable to all kinds of abuses and human rights violations, and lacking an exit card—a slave-like condition that materializes old dreams of reinstating slavery. The outrageous implications of this ruling compelled me to turn my attention away from early modern French literature (my previous area of specialization) and excavate the historical and ideological sources of this rabid manifestation of anti-Blackness.
However, focusing on Caribbean studies—including the history, literature, and cultural productions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—required an extraordinary amount of work. Early internal grants at the City University of New York (CUNY) allowed me to do preliminary research, and a 2019–20 sabbatical leave helped me make new strides. But it was the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship that allowed me to truly bring my work to the next level. The funds covered course buyouts for the 2021–22 academic year, supported activities involving students and broader communities, and catapulted my research into what became Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 27, 2024); winner of the 2025 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award.
The publication of Spirals in the Caribbean was surprisingly timely. It coincided with a surge of anti-Haitian rhetoric in the US presidential election and, once the new administration took office in January 2025, new threats against birthright citizenship in the United States. Folks from all walks of life, including students from Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) and other CUNY campuses (and even Barnard College and Columbia University), attended book events I held at various venues. Some shared their distress of belonging to Latinx families torn apart by diverging views on racial, national, and gender identities. Conversations about anti-Blackness, misogyny, and gendered violence, which I address in my research (see Maríñez), have become more relevant than ever.
To be sure, the value of the fellowship lay both in the time and mental space it provided me to conduct research and write my manuscript and in the profoundly empowering effect of having my work recognized and validated as nationally competitive and significant. This validation, along with the renewed, focused energy I could put into my work, had a domino effect, opening more doors and opportunities and strengthening professional relationships and collaborations with other scholars.[2] It also had a huge impact on my teaching, as I could incorporate my research into my classes and address the legacies of colonialism, including anti-Black racism, human rights violations, and discriminatory legislation—much of which directly resonate with the lived experiences of the student population at CUNY. The news that the fellowship would be discontinued was, of course, disappointing, but it didn’t surprise me. “Another one bites the dust,” I thought, already familiar with these unfortunate casualties in the humanities.
Supporting Research in the Humanities at Community Colleges
Community colleges are uniquely placed to help low-income families unable to access the needed resources to attend elite educational institutions. Paradoxically, as we work with the student population that these selective institutions, by definition, routinely discard, we put into practice social theories at the core of the research of the faculty members teaching at these very institutions. Indeed, for all purposes and intents, community colleges are the opposite of the proverbial ivory tower. Instead, we are like soldiers at the front line of the national battles for public higher education. Not only do we make higher-order ideas accessible to a population that also deserves to understand why the world is the way it is, but as we engage with the students, our research benefits our students and also benefits from the insights and revelations we hear from them, which then shape the direction of our scholarship in a mutually beneficial circuit of what the humanities are all about.
Thus, when we consider this particular population, supporting humanities research at community colleges becomes more urgent than ever. Since many of our students, for a variety of reasons, do not get to transfer to four-year colleges, the short time they spend at a community college is perhaps the only opportunity they will ever have to take classes in English, history, philosophy, world languages and cultures, creative writing, the arts, or social sciences. This may be the only chance they will ever have to enjoy reading the Quijote or a novel by Toni Morrison, develop the ability to debate ideas through logic and evidence-based arguments, or get a glimpse of cultures other than their own and realize that difference is not as threatening as they might have thought. Community colleges may be the only place for them to learn why it is essential to protect the environment or why the use of artificial intelligence carries profound ethical dimensions. Indeed, courses in the humanities may be the only opportunity they will ever have to build critical thinking, interpersonal, and communication skills, which, paradoxically, more than their technical training, are the skills that will lead to promotions at their jobs, thus contributing to upward mobility and financial stability.
In her illuminating book The Cost of Completion: Student Success in Community Colleges, Robin Isserles, a sociologist at BMCC, recounts the history of community colleges, including their competing roles (such as workforce preparation and transfer to bachelor-degree-granting institutions), which carry a slew of contradictory messages and expectations for everyone involved, from students to faculty members to administrators. One of these contradictions is the artificial divide between teaching and research. As Isserles observes, community colleges tend to prioritize teaching excellence for the sake of “student success.” Personally, I have always embraced all forms of teaching innovation, especially active learning, student-centered, and inclusivist pedagogies. However, pedagogical training should not exclude research support. Staying abreast with new developments in our fields reinvigorates our ability to maintain students’ engagement, which, in turn, contributes to their retention and success. This reminder may seem redundant to many. However, in the drive to serve students, administrators may overlook the connection between research and teaching excellence. Being an educator who can effectively engage students in the beauty and urgency of the humanities requires being an engaged scholar, as active and passionate about one’s own intellectual growth as about one’s students.
While community colleges seldom require faculty members to publish for tenure and promotion, many of us do so because it reinvigorates our teaching. Despite the odds against us, such as heavy teaching loads, discouraging administrative barriers, and limited funds and resources, we still manage to produce nationally competitive research. Indeed, so many of the Mellon/ACLS-supported projects culminated with published books and transformative initiatives in the broader communities they serve, which speaks volumes of both the fellowship’s effectiveness and our capacity as scholars. If we can produce these outcomes with a one-time opportunity, imagine what we could do in a culture that invested in permanent, structural, and normalized research support. Simply put, it would boost the impact of the few humanities courses these students may ever take.
The Economy of Academic Prestige: An Ancient Binary
When community college scholars produce nationally significant scholarship, they do so despite a severe lack of support at their institutions. While scholars at R1 institutions can take for granted such resources as start-up funds, new laptops, research assistants, well-funded libraries (with speedy interlibrary loan services), substantial conference travel funds, internal research grants, professional grant writers and editors, humanities institutes and other centers for intellectual exchange, and robust and influential networks, community college scholars rarely have these resources at their disposal. Instead, they carry a heavy teaching load that deprives them of the fundamental time and mental space to read, think, write, and sustain long-term scholarship.
On top of this, they contend with what, following Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of distinction and prestige, social theorists have identified as the “economy of academic prestige” (Buris; Blackmore and Kandiko). In this economy, prestigious fellowships, grant-funding institutions, and university presses tend to prioritize scholars at prestigious institutions in a mutually serving, reciprocal exchange of prestige. In the United States, community colleges stand at the bottom of the social hierarchy of this economy of 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.
This, of course, is nothing new. As Val Buris observed, “[T]he existence of a well-institutionalized and self-perpetuating prestige hierarchy . . . has long been recognized” (239–40). It also manifests a deeply entrenched, organized view of education, harking back to the ancient opposition between “liberal arts” for the elite youth or future rulers and “manual (or mechanical) arts” for the lower classes. This well-known binary reappears today in four-year colleges and R1 universities attended by favored segments of the population, on the one hand, and, on the other, community colleges initially designed to train the masses for technical jobs even as they evolved to also prepare students for college transfer.
Anti-community-college bias also feeds from (and reinforces) the fact that we rarely get proper credit for our graduates’ professional and personal success. One reason may be that students graduating with a bachelor’s degree elsewhere often omit their community college degrees in their résumés. The tendency, in both the academy and the corporate world, to highlight the terminal institution makes community colleges’ contributions invisible. Despite our graduates repeatedly expressing gratitude for the crucial role we played in their personal and academic lives, their résumés give the impression that they only attended their four-year college, thus contributing to a widespread silence on the enormous role we play. Unlike our graduates, however, community college scholars cannot change affiliations. When we apply for fellowships or query publishers, our proposals often land on the desks of committees and acquisition editors who might be more prone to favor scholars from prestigious institutions.
On the Competing Roles of Community Colleges
The artificial divide between research and teaching breeds all kinds of internal contradictions. For instance, as our mission includes preparing students for transfer, faculty hiring policies often require a doctoral degree. This is especially true in desirable urban centers like New York, where administrators know they can recruit candidates with doctoral degrees from prestigious R1 universities.[3] This policy may suggest that they support scholarship as integral to teaching excellence. However, (recent) budget decisions, as detailed below, indicate the opposite. Aspiring faculty members need to excel in academic scholarship to get a foot in the door, but once this door opens, they find policies that either prevent the pursuit of high-quality scholarship or assume that faculty members can achieve it without proper support.
Take as a case in point the contract between CUNY and its union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), a document that clearly illustrates these contradictions. As one of the nation’s largest public university systems, CUNY includes all sectors of higher education, from two-year and community colleges to four-year (senior) colleges to doctorate-granting campuses. Our contract establishes the same rights, salary schedules, compensation benefits, and job expectations for all faculty members, regardless of their campus. On the positive side, this contract grants community college faculty members exceptional benefits compared to most community colleges. For instance, we teach 4/4 courses (or twelve credits per semester) instead of 5/5 and can take sabbatical leaves for a fully paid semester or a year with eighty percent of our salary. The contract also includes twenty-four hours of reassigned time for research to new tenure-track faculty members across the board.
On the negative side, the contract suggests the same expectations for tenure and promotion for both faculty groups, ignoring the vastly different conditions under which each group is expected to meet these expectations. This is especially true with our unequal teaching loads: nine credits per semester for faculty members at senior colleges compared to twelve credits for faculty members at community colleges. Although the union’s contract is vague about specific publication requirements for tenure and promotion (see City University 44–45), some community colleges within CUNY, like BMCC, clearly mandate that “only publications in peer-reviewed and reputable outlets will count toward tenure and promotion” (“Faculty Handbook”). Thus, community college faculty members at CUNY must publish for promotion and tenure while teaching far more than their senior-college counterparts, many of whom graduated with the same degrees from the same institutions. As the contract fails to address this differential, it keeps us in a particularly tough bind: our labor conditions reinforce our position as scholars at the bottom of the academic hierarchy, and yet administrators expect us to publish as if we had the support of a fully funded institution that prioritizes research in the humanities.
After tenure and promotion to full professor, scholars continue to face these discrepancies. For instance, while administrators and department chairs at private institutions or senior colleges within CUNY can give discretionary release time to scholarly active faculty members, such discretion (or the leadership’s intent to make it available) seems absent at community colleges.[4] Faculty members also often find themselves at the mercy of system requirements that further constrain their teaching options, creating more work and less time for research. Within these constraints, deans and department chairs can play a fundamental role in supporting their faculty members. But, even here, the way community colleges are conceptualized and structured leaves limited latitude and resources for deans and chairs willing to support faculty-member research.
The Devastating Loss of Humanities Support at CUNY
The long-standing prioritization of the workforce, particularly in STEM disciplines and health-related professions, saw a new, unprecedented turn during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This aggressive turn against humanities research further affected community colleges, especially at CUNY, where previously existing internal research grants gradually fell under the budget axe.
At BMCC, until 2020, these earlier grants included the Faculty Development Grant and the Faculty Publication Grant, which allowed us to request a one-course reassigned time for research. Even small but effective forms of support such as a five-hundred-dollar micro-grant for external-faculty-member mentoring and a five-hundred-dollar grant for publication expenses have disappeared.[5] Now, instead of internal funding, a link to external funding has been posted, inviting faculty members to apply. Also gone since 2022 is the Distinguished Teaching Award for full-time and part-time faculty members, which did not even offer money and was not restricted to a discipline. Its elimination remains unfathomable but belongs to a broader trend of lack of concrete modes of recognition to excellence in teaching, research, mentoring, and service (including merit-based pay increases or prizes in cash), inducing faculty-member burnout, discouragement, and disengagement.
On top of this, at CUNY, none of the grants and fellowships previously open to humanities scholars across the university remain. Before 2020, they included the William P. Kelly Research Fellowship (which solely served community college faculty members), the Mid-career Faculty Fellowship Program, and Moving from Associate to Full Professor. All this support has vanished; CUNY now mainly supports research in STEM disciplines.[6] The Graduate Center, too, which used to offer twelve or more year-long Advanced Research Collaborative Distinguished Fellowships to faculty members across CUNY with course release equivalent to a full year’s leave, was forced to gradually reduce the number of fellowships and the number of course releases until the program entirely closed in 2023. The only support left comes from the PSC-CUNY Award Program.
In tune with general neoliberal principles of reducing, privatizing, and outsourcing public expenditures, CUNY administrators encourage (or expect) us to seek the support of private foundations and nonprofit organizations or even prominent national fellowships like those of the NEH, which, when awarded, bring prestige to CUNY. However, grant writing is extremely time-consuming; it takes years and many drafts and rejections to build the skills to write top-notch proposals and compete at the national level. We also compete on unequal terms with scholars at R1 and private colleges, who benefit from lighter teaching loads, additional sources of reassigned time, research assistants, and seasoned grant-writing professional staff dedicated to helping them craft winning proposals in the humanities. Needless to say, we are also in competition with scholars whose position in the academic prestige economy, or social capital, contributes to their success, thus reproducing the cyclical logic that reinforces the status quo.
Effective Forms of Research Support
Moving forward, we hope new funding becomes available to revive the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. In the meantime, funders should see the fellowship as an effective support model, as it allows fellows to buy time and mental space to research, think, and write. This model contrasts with other well-intended programs, like the NEH Faculty Awards, which provide stipends that we cannot use for course buyouts. Thus, to apply, we either have to wait to be eligible for a sabbatical or take an often-unpaid academic leave. This form of support limits us to wait years before we can take time off. By contrast, the course buyouts provided by the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship enabled us to materialize time-sensitive projects while maintaining our tenure and sabbatical clocks, normal salaries, and retirement contributions.
More broadly, federal and state entities should prioritize funding humanities research at community colleges. To be sure, all levels of government should support free tuition at community colleges to uphold the nation’s commitment to providing equal opportunity for all. They should also acknowledge the significant impact community college faculty members have in serving disadvantaged populations and include substantial resources to support their research, especially in the humanities. Policy makers should recognize the fact that the more classes we teach, the harder it is to teach them well. Questions they might consider include: Who decided that full-time faculty members at community colleges had to teach five courses per semester to begin with, and why? How can we mitigate the effects of entrenched assumptions and biases that erode the quality of the education most low-income families receive? How can we redress the prevalent academic hierarchy and foster a more balanced distribution of knowledge in the humanities? Answering these questions opens the door for envisioning community colleges in their right dimension: institutions serving a significant segment of voting, tax-paying population, and where a solid investment in humanities research will pay enormous dividends to a nation in dire need of adaptation to significant social, political, and technological change.
Works Cited
Blackmore, Paul, and Camille Kandiko. “Motivation in Academic Life: A Prestige Economy.” Research in Post-Compulsory Education, vol. 16, no. 4, 2011, pp. 399–411.
Buris, Val. “The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks.” American Sociological Review, vol. 69, 2004, pp. 239–64.
The City University of New York Agreement between the City University of New York and the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, December 1, 2017–February 28, 2023. Adopted 1 Dec. 2017. www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/about/administration/offices/labor-relations/28283961_cuny-psc_2017-2023_agreement.pdf.
“Faculty Handbook.” Bureau of Manhattan Community College, www.bmcc.cuny.edu/academics/faculty-affairs/faculty-handbook/. Accessed August 1, 2024.
Isserles, Robin G. The Cost of Completion: Student Success in Community Colleges. Johns Hopkins UP, 2021.
Maríñez, Sophie. “Countering the Anti-Black Narratives That Have Shaped Life in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” Interview by CUNY Graduate Center. CUNY Graduate Center, 12 Sept. 2024, www.gc.cuny.edu/news/countering-anti-black-narratives-have-shaped-life-haiti-and-dominican-republic.
I thank Brian Stipelman for his suggestions on various drafts of this essay. Likewise, my colleague Sharon Avni, also a Mellon/ACLS Fellow, contributed precious insights, reminding me of Robin Isserles’s important book. ↑
This recognition expanded to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which also funded Spirals and recently published a profile article on my work in its blog. ↑
For instance, in my department alone, faculty members have graduated from Yale, Columbia, NYU, Washington University in Saint Louis, and Penn State. LaGuardia Community College also employs humanities faculty members with degrees from Columbia, Yale, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania. ↑
For instance, see this memo from City College establishing reassigned time for faculty members conducting research without grant support (under “Faculty without Sponsored Research,” p. 2). ↑
The Faculty Development Grant was reduced from $5,000 to $3,500, the reassigned time and research travel options were removed, and the amount was turned into a taxable stipend, further reducing the net award. ↑
One exception is the Interdisciplinary Research Grant for projects conducted by two collaborating scholars from different campuses and disciplines. ↑