A Community College Professor’s Reflections

@Southern New Mexico Bright Wall Community College

Joey Archbishop, PhD, was at that time of life when a man begins to reflect on the significant events and themes of his life–and how those events and themes shaped him. He had never been a good student in high school, but persevered and graduated without too much trouble. He was never really an athlete, but as a kid, he enjoyed riding motocross bikes in the New Mexico desert–and working on two-stroke engines.

When he was sixteen or so, his career ambition was to work in a motorcycle shop–but his parents would hear nothing about such an idea. They wanted him to go to college and “make something” out of himself. So, through a strange pathway of junior college, college, and a couple of universities–and stopping out and dropping out a few times, he ended up with a career as a community college English professor. He held a PhD in American Lit (Whitman), but most of his work life had been spent teaching 100-level ENG composition courses. Dr. Joey had read so many essays, graded so many papers, attended so many division meetings.

His dad had given him some simple advice, all those years ago, which turned out to be invaluable: “Just get a degree in something. Anything. You will be better off with a degree.” So, Archbishop, after a few starts and stops, became an English major. Reading books and writing about them seemed easy, and interesting, to the young beer-drinking scholar. He ended up having forty-eight credit hours of English for his BA, thirty-six for his MA, and another forty-five for the doctorate. Not always as easy as he hoped, but he had it all done by the time he was thirty-one. He didn’t even have to borrow too much money back then.

Archbishop always enjoyed living “close to the bone.” Besides, as his academic life progressed, he found he enjoyed reading poems by Roethke or novels by Updike more than going to movies, football tailgate parties, or expensive restaurants. You might say he had different priorities–especially as the literature he studied began to impact his own thinking and values.

Both perseverance and chance landed him on the full-time faculty at SNMBWCC. After spending five unsteady years in college and five more in graduate school, school-weary Archbishop had been struggling as a daytime fertilizer salesman in Hamilton City and working evenings as a tutor for SNMBWCC. He began teaching part-time, a class or two a semester, and then obtained a full-time position when the college opened a store-front operation in Columbus. That was when his “academic” life began–back in 1987.

He wanted to teach at a place like Hamilton State University, but he enjoyed his paycheck and good benefits at SNMBWCC.

Still, sometimes Archbishop wondered how his passion for Shelley and Wordsworth and Whitman got him involved in teaching ENG composition at a community college. He had always been interested in making spiritual sense of the natural world–and he had found, of all the literary work he had studied to date, Walt Whitman’s catalogs of animals and botanical forms in Song of Myself to be most relevant to his own world view. His dissertation study, “Hidden Angels in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” was mightily unrelated to teaching writing in comp classes. But he wasn’t complaining. Maybe just surprised his career morphed into writing instruction rather than literary analysis.

There were some attributes of the university life he did not miss. Not a bit. Archbishop would admit he had always promoted good writing skills (punctuation, spelling, paragraphs) rather than political empowerment. At SNMBWCC, he frequently told his students his job was to help them write clearly, not further his or their political agendas. He tried to be a technician of sorts. Sort of a words and grammar mechanic.

Increasingly, though, he really became fixated with trying to figure out how he ended up teaching at a community college. Where had he gone wrong? He appreciated the tenets of community college ideology, but the culture seemed foreign to him. What had happened? Why couldn’t he land a four-year school job despite hundreds of applications?

His dissertation committee had been composed of some stellar folks–national figures in their areas of expertise. He had published several articles about 19^th century American romanticism and transcendentalism.

But there was always been something missing in his personality, in his presence, in his Weltanschauung, which had kept him in his place. When he looked at his life and habits, he could sense what went wrong.

He didn’t exude star power. He didn’t command the attention of the room. He wasn’t self-promoting. The blue-collar types on the Miller High Life commercials (flowers in a beer bottle, spit-shined janitor shoes) reminded him of him. Sort of. Such a man (or woman) knew the job at hand and worked hard. Like recently wealthy industrialists in a W.D. Howells’ novel, Joe was not comfortable with his station. He realized he didn’t dress well. Archbishop couldn’t talk about wine.

And almost sacrilegiously, Archbishop couldn’t imagine spending good money on a cruise or bus tour of Italy.

The world he lived and worked in seemed increasingly crazy to him. And this was the real issue. How can equality and diversity exist simultaneously? And be “celebrated” every half-minute? In the 4^th dimension? Conflicted paradoxes, if he thought about such matters.

Truth of the matter was, he would rather be working on a motorcycle than sitting at a meeting discussing student success or feedback loops or faculty salaries. “Whitman–good. Motorcycles–good. Teaching at the community college? Well, I enjoy my students and colleagues. I’m not complaining,” mused Archbishop out loud to himself. “But what is it? What is my problem?”

(Something was not right with Dr. Archbishop. Or perhaps everything was right!)