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149 Faculty Engagement in the Community Colleges: Constructing a New Ecology of Learning Robert W. Franco The following perspective on engagement in America’s community colleges is shaped by more than thirty years as a practicing ecological anthropologist deeply concerned about the condition of new Samoan and Pacific Islander immigrants as they adapt to life in American cities. These “new neighbors” (MacPherson, Shore, & Franco, 1977) have unique and deep cultural and linguistic traditions shaped by sustaining and evolving cultures on distant islands, but they experience many of the same challenges that American minorities and immigrants have faced for centuries. Most Asian immigrant groups originally came to the United States as immigrant labor in the late nineteenth century. At this same time, the United States was coming as a colonizer to Hawaii, American Samoa, and Guam. Native Hawaiians survived the initial American onslaught, are revitalized, and are attempting to establish their own sovereign nation. American Samoans are “U.S. nationals,” who genuinely celebrated their centennial as an American territory in 2000. Samoans from the independent nation of Samoa and their kin from American Samoa now make up populations of more than 200,000 in many states in the western United States. Guam’s residents are U.S. citizens, and Guam’s indigenous Chamorros have survived western colonial dominance stretching back to 1522, when Magellan was the first European to discover the island. Of all the Asian American countries of origin, only the Philippines, including the Mindanao region that is primarily Muslim in religious and cultural background, was fully colonized after the Spanish-American War, whereas Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were settings for major warfare in the mid-to-late twentieth century. All these places have emerged in different places in a globalizing age. For nearly twenty-five years, as a community college faculty member with extensive teaching and administrative responsibilities, I have been unable to sustain this research and R O B E R T W . F R A N C O 150 have encouraged and mentored Hawaiian and Pacific Island scholars to pursue the equity and opportunity issues embedded in their history. Over this period, I have remained focused on the role of community colleges in meeting the challenge of equal opportunity in higher education for Americans of all ethnic, cultural, and class backgrounds. My scholarly research has shaped my engagement in meeting this huge challenge. I have seen hundreds of Hawaiians, Samoans, and Pacific Islanders succeed in college, and I have celebrated their graduations with their families on the college’s Great Lawn. I have also tracked their numbers in Hawaii’s prisons and compared them with the number of two-year and four-year degree completers in the University of Hawaii system. I have also tracked health, housing, and employment indicators for these groups. There is much work ahead, both locally and nationally, even for these smaller ethnic groups. After nearly thirty years as a practicing ecological anthropologist and community college faculty member, my greatest fear is that I have been an unwitting actor in a Darwinian dilemma. Has my career in the community college diverted my scholarly research and my ability to make a substantial difference in the social indicators I just described? Might I have done more to improve these numbers in a university research position? The American Community College: Dreams Fulfilled or Diverted? Within American higher education, only the community college is a community-based organization . Tracing their roots to the early 1900s, these colleges, initially called junior colleges, with reduced entrance requirements and tuition, support millions of worthy local students as they enter their “open doors” to pursue civic, career, and degree goals and dreams. Early proponents of the junior college referred to them as America’s “democracy colleges,” with a strong relationship to their communities, emphasizing equal opportunity and civic participation and valuing diversity (Gleazer, 1994; see also Franco, 2002; Zlotkowski et al., 2004). Early in the twentieth century, Dean Alexis Lange of the University of California School of Education and other national leaders “urged the junior colleges to give high priority to programs that would prepare their students for effective participation in community life” (Gleazer, 1994, p. ix). According to Bogue (1950, pp. 336–337), Lange called for a junior college department of civic education with a curriculum that would “quicken” students’ “communal sympathies,” “deepen their sense of indissoluble oneness with their fellows,” and encourage them “to participate vigorously, militantly, if need be, in advancing community welfare.” Further, he suggested pedagogical innovations...

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