WE COULD DO OUR JOB, IF WE KNEW WHAT OUR JOB WAS. The dean at Anonymous Community is not impressed with Strapped. (Apparently neither are many of the volunteer reviewers.)

It is to the dean's smackdown of a stupid statement about community colleges that I wish to speak.

“Unlike universities, community colleges aren’t geared solely to the needs of undergraduates.”

That was the stupid statement. On to the smack-down.

Although it’s only March, this is a strong contender for Howler of the Year.

If you’ve ever been to a university, you would have noticed graduate students. You also would have noticed faculty who only teach graduate students, and graduate students who teach undergraduate students. You would have noticed faculty jockeying to avoid lower-level undergrad courses like the plague. You would have noticed gargantuan sums of cash going into football stadiums, and research labs, and student centers with climbing walls.

If you wander around your typical community college, you would find actual faculty teaching lower-level undergraduate courses. You would not find a football stadium. You would not find substantial research labs. You would not find climbing walls. You would also find much lower tuition levels, reflecting the no-frills atmosphere and allowing the non-wealthy to attend.

What the dean has confirmed, indirectly, is that the hardest job in higher education is being a professor at a mid-major (in the old Carnegie classifications, a "public comprehensive.") The mid-majors tend to have aspirations, sometimes realized, more frequently frustrated, for national prominence in research and the performing arts, as well as the occasional bracket-busting or appearance in a BCS bowl. My own biases may have placed these items in the wrong order.

Why do I make this claim? Start with that "If you’ve ever been to a university, you would have noticed graduate students. You also would have noticed faculty who only teach graduate students, and graduate students who teach undergraduate students." Certainly true of the Ivies ... some of them are so well-endowed and so well plugged into the grants machinery that the undergraduate program is window dressing. The academic stars can be characterized as "trained bears" that put on the odd performance in an undergraduate class (I saw that metaphor someplace but can't recall for the credit) while the undergraduates are often self-motivated or parentally guilt-tripped enough to synthesize the material in coffee house or tavern with an encyclopedia behind the bar. The state flagships often credit a star professor with multiple courses for showing up before 800 people in an auditorium plus others watching on television, and they make promiscuous use of graduate assistants to conduct "discussion sections" and grade the papers, that is, if the assessment hasn't been converted to quickly-graded fill in the bubble exams. Faculty in the mid-majors might not receive that sort of support (put another way, their universities might not get away with that sort of neglect of teaching) but they're competing for journal space and grant money with their more favorably-treated colleagues at the private Research Is and the flagships.

Then consider the football programs and climbing walls. Herein lies another source of frustration. On one hand, some administrators and some legislators have ambitions to convert their public comprehensive into something more highly thought of. (Northern Illinois, for example, at one time received an infusion of state money to strengthen several graduate programs. The athletic department had visions of replacing Northwestern in the Big Ten -- that despite Northwestern recently ending a long football losing streak with a non-conference win over a California Bowl-bound Northern Illinois team.) On the other hand, there are administrators and legislators that view their public comprehensives as community colleges with climbing walls. (If you're at a public university not named for a cardinal compass point, you probably have sensed this for some time already.)

That tension makes recruiting faculty, let alone maintaining faculty morale, difficult. The faculty at the Research I know what the mission is, as do the faculty at the community college. At the mid-major, a department might advertise for faculty with the expectation that they will be competitive as scholars. But that might not be the future mission of the university.