Admin Doing it Right: My Community College Education and NBC’s Community
By: Miranda Mccasland
Tags: College, Community College, Higher Education, University

Okay, let’s start with me saying this: I grew up in and around community college administration. I’ve spent many an hour waiting for my mom to be ready to leave work because she was busy finalizing a letter to a student, fixing an issue for a student or handling a special project. I’ve waited in the library, I’ve waited in the Student Commons, I’ve worked out while I waited, I’ve napped on her office sofa waiting.

I’ve worked at a community college in some way, shape, or form for my entire college career — Admissions, Tutoring, Research and Assessment, Orientation, Communications.

So yeah, I have some thoughts on the inner workings of the community college. Its pitfalls. Its shining hours.

None of my pitfalls or impressions of community college professionals include the words “Welcome to Dean-dale Community Colle-dean. I’m a silly goose. Honk honk. Dean-a-lee-doo! Look at me!” (Community season 3, episode 8).

Community presents the audience with quite the set of administrators and higher education professionals who are so out of the norm of education professionals that we can only describe them as “other.”

First you have Dean Pelton, Greendale’s only dean who somehow is an academic dean, dean of students and college president wrapped into one. Peloton only holds a Bachelor’s degree, yet makes a majority of decisions for the school. His core obsessions are seeming cool to students, an odd form of inclusivity that if presented in real life could only be seen as satirical and helping Greendale grow enrollment through off the mark branding efforts.

Peloton is supposedly regulated by a School Board, but this two person board almost never makes an appearance in the show and when they do their primary concerns are how they can make more money off of Greendale and what other investments they can be concerned about. They aren’t concerned with the academic rigor of a Greendale education or the wellbeing of their students.

Then you have the professors who are recurring characters in the show: Ben Chang and Ian Duncan. If we have to say something nice about Chang, he cares a lot about his students, as does Duncan. Chang knows nothing of his initial content area — Spanish — and has merely taken the class as a personality trait. Duncan does know something about his subject, but is willing to take on other subject areas (Anthropology when he studied Psychology) and is often in what would be traditionally inappropriate settings with students — bars, their homes, etc.

None of this is typical behavior in higher education. It’s not what we see faculty or admins doing in other shows involving four-year universities — here they are gruff or distant from the students they are involved with at their worst, and firm and confident at their best (Tobolowsky 22–24).

Community hits the nail on the head here: these people are seen as different. The depiction of these characters mirrors the way real-life community college professionals feel today. Townsend and LaPaglia’s studies found that a majority of community college faculty generally agreed with statements like “four-year college faculty consider CC faculty to be on the margins of higher education” (44).

This is a distinct example of othering. Othering creates categories for us to use to establish who/what is different, out of the norm or not like us/their peers. It’s exclusionary. Othering is key in creating social identities and establishing social order/power dynamics (Zevallos).

Depicting these faculty/administrators as so different, so weird, so inappropriate to their settings places them in a position of being othered. It plays out in real-life, where community college professionals believe that they are considered to be on the margins of academia.

Like every other issue with Community, this degrades the ability of the community college system to shine for what it is: a system full of faculty and staff who are excited about their jobs, qualified for their positions and willing to put elbow grease into making it the best system it can be. It discourages qualified professors and administrators from considering working in the community college field. It influences a belief that community colleges are weird, other or low quality sources of a college experience.