Junior College English

JUNIOR COLLEGE ENGLISH Richard Worthen The following paper was delivered at the Antlers Hotel, Saturday, 12 October in conjunction with the RMMLA annual meeting at the Junior-Senior College Colloquium arranged by Michael Shugrue of the MLA Secretariat. Mr. Worthen is co-director of the National Junior College English Study. We need to know more about junior college English instructors, departments , and programs across die country. In view of die impending shortage of trained instructors we will have to make recommendations for carrying on during die next decade. This probably means tiiat we will have to find some acceptable means of training and using teaching associates. Let me say a few words about the larger scene as I see it. United States higher education projections to 1977 taken from The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 1968, show tiiat the most dramatic growth will occur in the junior college movement. For example, the total undergraduate population from 1967 to 1977 will increase from 5,317,000 to 8,259,000; whereas the two-year college population will go from 952,000 to 1,685,000. There are probably 14,000 junior college English instructors in the United States. A rough projection, but the best available at this time, indicates that we may have 30,000 by 1978. Allowing for instructor retirement, dropout, and death, we will probably need 18,000 new junior college English instructors by 1978, or 1800 per year during the next ten years. It is obvious that the M.A. in English will be almost the sole source of trained instructors in die junior college for some time to come, so we must ask if there will be an adequate supply of M.A.'s from the graduate departments. They, according to the Allen study, turned out 4800 M.A.'s in 1966. This fits another piece of data. They turned out 4443 in 1963-64. What about the 53 colleges not offering die Ph.D. tiiat, according to the Allen report, have plans to offer the M.A. but do not specify exactly when? At present the 123 institutions not granting the Ph.D., grant an average of 726 M.A.'s per year. Clearly there will be an increase in the number of M.A.'s in English during the next ten years, but the numbers contributed by our 53 nonPh .D.-granting colleges will not be great, and as for tiieir alleviating the junior college shortage, the increase is probably cancelled out by the number of those M.A. recipients who aspire to the Ph.D. and do not go into teaching. Since junior colleges will need 1800 M.A.'s per year, they would, provided that competition would allow, hire 37% of the new M.A.'s each year. The U-4's, who can compete perhaps better than the junior colleges, will need 1900 per year or 39% of the new M.A.'s. This does not take into account the high school departments which are not going to be denied a major share of the M.A.'s. America's high schools will be hiring about 12,500 new instructors each year; i.e., they—if they could—would consume 260% of the Junior College English41 supply. To sum it up, the actual need is going to be 336% of the supply. But the recipient of the traditional M.A. in English is not equipped to engage successfully in the whole range of assignments that will be his as a member of the staff of the open-door, two-year college, partly because the premises upon which his training is fashioned are the wrong ones. The typical M.A. in English is not a teaching degree. In the universe of the U-4 English establishment, the M.A. is an integral piece of the larger design that generates the Ph.D. in literature. Don Cameron Allen, recognizing this, has observed tiiat "we of the graduate departments should observe the rules of social duty, like other professionals who are supported by society . . . The Ph.D. scholar should never forget that society keeps him physically alive because he is a teacher." The U...