Michael Jacobs, "Scholarship and Community Colleges"

Scholars make for better teachers... but also: rethink what scholarship does.

The ideas in this series so far have tended to focus on certain versions of humanistic research—what kinds of thinking, or acting, or knowing help scholars produce better readings, better forms of historical analysis, better theories? Michael Jacobs is here to remind us that our beliefs about what research is depend partly on the institutional conditions that frame them.

Jacobs draws this emphasis from the specific conditions and responsibilities of his own work: he’s spent the better part of twenty years teaching, chairing, and deaning in community colleges. The argument he makes on that basis is not something like “community college faculty should have different things counted as ‘research.’” It is rather: we can learn from looking at what faculty at community colleges do to expand our sense of what research is, everywhere, and how thinking and interacting with students and communities can work, everywhere. As Jacobs puts it, the goal is to “highlight and enhance” disciplinarity, not sacrifice it to a generalized conception of teaching or service.

Bio

Michael Jacobs is Acting Provost at Monroe Community College, where he served as Dean of Liberal Arts and Business from 2017-2014, and founded the college’s Institute for the Humanities. Before that he was chair of English at Berkeley College (2009-2017). He’s a national advocate for community college education (he won, in 2022, of the Community College Humanities Association’s Distinguished Service Award). He’s also an author of scholarly articles on James Agee, modernism, and Tom Wolfe.