Maintaining an Active Research Agenda While Teaching Full Time at a Community College: Institutional Support for Course Release is Key

Abstract

Maintaining an active research agenda while teaching full-time at a community college can be daunting, but with institutional support for scholarly research by way of course release it is possible. This personal reflection offers up evidence of institutional support from a variety of sources within the public university system of New York City, the City University of New York (CUNY), including that from LaGuardia Community College itself, senior colleges, NEH Grants, and contractually mandated course release by the faculty and staff union, PSC-CUNY. This reflection does not offer a comprehensive account of the working conditions of community colleges across the United States in general. I close my reflection with a brief description of how teaching at LaGuardia Community College has transformed by teaching and research from disciplinary to interdisciplinary. I also thank APSA’s Committee on the Status of Community Colleges in the Profession for including and highlighting community college political science professors' contributions as an important part of the national organization.

Keywords:

• reflection
• collaboration
• diversity
• institutional support

Notes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editor and anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the APSA’s Committee on the Status of Community Colleges in the Profession for including and highlighting community college political science professors' contributions as an important part of the national organization.

Notes

1 It is important to underscore that I was mostly single with little to no care responsibilities for others during my seven-year tenure clock. For this reason, I was able to choose to devote a lot more discretionary time and energy toward teaching, service, and research. I cannot speak to people who are simultaneously and/or primary caregivers.

2 For a full description of APSA’s Committee on the Status of Community Colleges in the Profession and its current members please see https://www.apsanet.org/statuscommitteecc

3 For the breakdown of the 25 campuses that make up the City University of New York see, http://www2.cuny.edu/about/colleges-schools/

4 Last year APSA’s Committee on the Status of Community Colleges in the Profession issued a survey to better understand the working conditions of community college professors across the United States.

5 American Association of University Professor’s “Background Facts on Contingent Faculty Positions” https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts

6 Faculty Fellowship Publication Program: https://www2.cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/hr/recruitment-diversity/innovative-inclusive-programming/faculty-fellowship-publication-program/

7 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nichole Marie Shippen

Nichole Shippen received a PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is currently Program Coordinator and Associate Professor of Political Science at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY and has taught a course on the Politics of Death and Dying for the Political Science Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom (2014), for Palgrave Macmillan’s “Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice Book” Series. Her book reconsiders discretionary time as a measure of freedom through the concept of temporal autonomy as developed through the Aristotelian-Marxist and critical theory traditions. Her research is further enriched by the respective contributions of feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theory. Her current research focuses on border violence through the lens of settler colonialism and critical Indigenous theory. She is in the process of completing an article, “The Politics of Spectral Death: Settler Colonialism and Anti-Indian Violence in a Reservation Border Town,” as part of a larger book project.