"The Promise of the Humanities at Community Colleges: Reflections from the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship Program" features essays from 12 community college faculty members who participated in a fellowship program that supported 110 scholars between 2019 and 2022. Published on the Manifold digital platform with support from the Mellon Foundation, the report marks ACLS's first publication native to the platform.
The collection addresses a significant gap in higher education literature by documenting how humanities research functions in an environment characterized by heavy teaching loads, diverse student populations, limited resources, and deep community connections. Community colleges represent the largest growth area in American higher education, yet faculty scholarship at these institutions remains understudied and undervalued.
"Community colleges continue to serve as the backbone of American higher education, serving a wide variety of learners across ethnic, economic, and age groups," said Nike Nivar Ortiz, ACLS program officer. "With this report, we hope to showcase the important role of the humanities and social sciences at these vital institutions, and the impact of providing more time and resources for faculty research."
The essays are organized around four central themes: research landscapes, student engagement and pedagogy, community engagement and public-facing work, and equitable practices. Contributors represent diverse disciplines and institutional contexts across the country.
Faculty authors include Lucha Arévalo of Río Hondo College, Cinder Cooper Barnes of Montgomery College, Beth Baunoch of Community College of Baltimore County, Santiago Andres Garcia of Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, Prithi Kanakamedala of CUNY's Bronx Community College, Megan Klein of Oakton College, Charlotte Lee of Berkeley City College, Sophie Maríñez of CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College, William Morgan of Lone Star College, Katherine Rowell of Sinclair Community College, Jaime Thomas of Cypress College, and Jewon Woo of Lorain County Community College.
The collection was edited by Carmen Carrasquillo, professor of English and vice president of the Academic Senate at San Diego Miramar College, and Brian Stipelman, associate vice president for academic affairs and dean of liberal arts at Frederick Community College. Both served as leaders in the fellowship program's review and selection process.
The Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship Program, which operated from 2019 to 2022, provided crucial support for humanities and social science faculty at two-year institutions to pursue research while maintaining their teaching responsibilities. The program recognized that community college faculty make vital contributions to scholarship, teaching, and local communities despite operating under resource constraints that differ significantly from four-year institutions.
Publication on the Manifold platform enables interactive engagement with the material through annotation tools, allowing scholars and administrators to adapt recommendations for their own campuses. The digital format reflects ACLS's commitment to making scholarship accessible and actionable across different institutional contexts.
The report arrives as humanities disciplines face mounting criticism about their value and relevance, particularly at institutions focused on workforce development and career preparation. By documenting innovative research and teaching practices at community colleges, the collection positions humanistic inquiry as a public good with practical applications for diverse student populations.
ACLS, founded a century ago, serves as a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations representing American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The organization operates on the principle that knowledge is a public good and works to expand access to scholarly knowledge while promoting diversity of identity and experience in academic research.
