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A Todd Jones
Bakersfield College
What’s in a name?
Assessing the Health of the Discipline at our Community Colleges
How many times have you had to explain to others what you do as a Communication professor? Often, those who are unaware of the nature of our discipline assume that we teach anything from computer programming to advertising. More times than not, the public and even members of the academy don’t know what our discipline is. As we assess the health of the discipline this year, we should specifically take a look at the status of our nation’s community colleges.
Isa Engleberg, immediate past president of NCA, addressed the problem of our disciplines anonymity in her April 2004 Spectra article entitled, “Is Communication Studies a Best-kept Secret or Are We Hiding Our Heads in the Sand?” She was right when she stated, “There is nothing to be gained as a best-kept secret. Hiding our heads in the sand will not advance the discipline.”
It has never ceased to amaze me that our discipline, one of the largest in the nation, is still somewhat unknown to the masses. Indeed, the relative anonymity of the discipline is a serious problem that deserves our immediate attention and action. This is especially true for our nation’s community colleges. As Englenberg mentioned in her article, organizations she contacted for purposes of fund raising were unaware of the existence of NCA or the discipline of Communication. This is indicative of the problem as a whole: many people don’t know who we are or what we do.
To remedy this situation, or at least to more fully promulgate our message, we need to determine the reasons for this problem and solve them. As I see it, it is a matter of lack of education. We need to educate ourselves, the academy, our communities, and society.
First, we need to educate ourselves, our colleagues, and our departments. Many Communication educators, most of them from community colleges, have no contact with NCA, other academic conferences, or academic journals. In fact, many of our colleagues’ only contact with the current status of the discipline is in a new textbook. Using a textbook as our sole source of information is simply not enough to keep us up to date and is a disservice to the students we teach.
On a large scale, this is a problem because our colleagues’ distance from the discipline also distances their departments. Their teaching, departments, and schools become outdated and less aware of issues that affect our discipline. This is evident in the number of departments that still call themselves “Speech”.
It is no secret that there are a number of different titles Communication departments choose to call themselves. This lack of continuity is one of the reasons people don’t know who we are or what we teach. A large proportion of departments in community colleges call still call themselves “Speech,” “Speech Communication,” or the troublesome “Communications.” This leads to confusion and a lack of awareness of who we are and what we teach.
I am not suggesting cookie cutter departments, but I am suggesting that departments at community colleges and universities align themselves with NCA and call themselves “Communication” and nothing else. This would be a major step in solving our anonymity dilemma. Imagine if disciplines such as Psychology, Biology or Math were to be known by a number of different names? The results for them would likely be the same as they currently are for us.
One of these results is that many administrators, academics in other disciplines, and members of our communities – specifically employers - are unaware of what the discipline of Communication is. I believe that we all have the responsibility of educating academia. Near the end of graduate school, four years ago, I started my job search by looking at the job listings on the web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education. This nationally recognized magazine has no listing for Communication, but lists us under “Speech/Rhetoric, and “Other Social Science”. A discipline as large and mainstream as ours should have its own listing.
Bakersfield College Communication faculty are taking steps to build bridges with administration and other departments. We are meeting with a number of department heads and encouraging them to include Communication courses as part of their requirements for earning degrees or certificates in their fields. Along with our Associates degree and Communication certificate programs, we have written and implemented a Business Communication certificate where courses from both departments are required. This not only gets the word out, but it fulfills our number-one goal of serving students.
We have also published a pamphlet describing our discipline, the classes we offer, our certificate programs, and what students can do with a Communication degree. The pamphlet has been distributed to our students, counselors, administration and to the community. This serves as an awareness campaign.
To educate the community we are in the process of assembling an advisory board. This board will consist of influential members of the community who are aware of what skills they, as local employers, are seeking in their current and future employees. We will meet with them on a regular basis to network and to glean from them specific information on the communication skills they need their future employees to have. We hope that this will become a working conduit to the community by better serving employers. We also hope that this will better educate the community as to what the discipline of Communication is.
Finally, I must address the concern of educating our society as a whole. Has anyone considered a popular press magazine similar to Psychology Today? It just seems that a discipline as popular and diverse as Communication should have a beneficial Communication publication that the lay person can easily understand.
I believe that if we all participate in a continuous assessment of the health of our own departments with the intention of aligning ourselves with, and promoting our discipline to, the academy and our communities, this problem of relative anonymity will gradually evaporate. I look forward to the day when I hear the question, “What do you do?” and know that the answer “I teach Communication” will suffice. When that becomes the case, we will have better served our students and our communities.
“A Todd” Jones is an associate Professor of Communication at Bakersfield College in Bakersfield, California. He can be reached at .