Q&A: John Cise on a career in community colleges

One day in the mid 1960s, John Cise received a phone call out of the blue. It was an offer to teach physics at the fledgling Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. He jumped at the offer, which came with a salary of $6000 a year—twice what he was making teaching high school at the time.

Cise liked teaching, and he decided to stay in the education business. He went on to earn a PhD, and he became a founding dean at Austin Community College (ACC) in Texas.

Among US college graduates in the class of 2016, 27.4% began their higher education studies at a two-year college; for physics bachelor’s degree recipients, that percentage has fluctuated around 12% since 2001. (Data are from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics, which also publishes Physics Today.) In January the college advice website Intelligent.com ranked ACC 24th overall in the country in engineering; it was the only community college listed in the ranking of 50 best US engineering programs. “Community colleges are great for people who are motivated and need to save money,” says Cise.

PT: How did you get into physics education?

CISE: I did physics because it was fun. I was always curious, and I always enjoyed explaining things. Teaching came naturally to me. I did some research and attended a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in New York City in the early 1970s. I met Robert Little—he was the AAPT president at the time. He was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin [UT Austin], and when I stopped by there, the people seemed friendly. I took a year off from my job at Cuyahoga and came down to Texas to do my coursework for my PhD, which was a combination of graduate physics and science education. Little became my adviser.

PT: How did you end up at Austin Community College?

CISE: I went back to Cleveland and taught another year at Cuyahoga. But I liked Austin, and I heard they were starting a community college. I found out they needed a dean. They flew me down to Austin for an interview and hired me at 32 years old to be the initial dean of science and math.

PT: What was that like?

CISE: We got started on a shoestring with absolutely no money at all. Most of the faculty and deans were in their thirties. We were post-hippy-era people, and we operated on the belief that things would work out.

Austin Community College started in 1973 in an old Black inner-city high school in East Austin. That school was vacated when the schools were integrated. We had our administration offices there. All the science labs were torn out, and vocational faculty took over those spaces. The head dean showed me a big pile of stuff from the labs and told me to take any supplies I needed. We operated out of several Austin public high schools at night, but we didn’t have access to science labs during the day. And for higher-level classes like organic chemistry, microbiology, and physiology, the high schools didn’t cut it. For those classes, we developed a relationship with Huston–Tillotson College [a historically Black school, now Huston–Tillotson University], and we taught there for the first two or three years.

PT: How prepared were you?

CISE: I wasn’t. I went about hiring the initial math and biology faculty, and within a couple of months we were ready. By about 1978, we were able to start teaching science classes in our facilities. By the late 1970s, we had four locations. Today ACC has a dozen campuses.

PT: Did Austin Community College attract students?

CISE: Yes. The first year the college probably had 1500–2000. Some 50 000 attend now.

PT: You switched from being a dean to teaching. Why?

CISE: I was dean for about 10 years. I finished my PhD during that time too. But I have always liked teaching, and I wanted to focus on it. My PhD dissertation used samples of ACC students. The theme was self-paced individualized instruction, whereby students take a test when they feel they have learned the objectives for a course. At the time, self-paced instruction was an interesting concept, and it was successful at very good universities. We were attempting it at a community college, and we found that very few students completed courses. They didn’t have the prerequisites, and at the community-college level, that form of instruction was a failure. After two or three years, we switched to face-to-face, in-class instruction.

PT: Who studies physics at community college?

CISE: Community colleges are open door. That means that a third to half of your students are unprepared and don’t have good study habits. The trouble is that nobody checks the prerequisites carefully. That’s a big problem. One of my main jobs, especially later in life, was to evaluate students’ transcripts and pretest their skills. Perhaps 5–10% take physics as a requirement for a vocational degree—sonography, radiology, and the like. Students who are ambitious and who really knuckle down and do the work can do very well. I have had students who transferred to UC [University of California] Berkeley, MIT, and other top-notch institutions.

PT: Did you ever consider teaching at a four-year college?

CISE: No. I had such positive experiences in Cleveland for 7 years, and then 47 years at ACC—I was very content in just being a specialist in education at the freshman and sophomore levels. I never really wanted to teach relativity or quantum theory, which was part of my PhD program. I was really interested in teaching classical physics well.

PT: What roles do you see for community colleges in the broader context of US higher education?

CISE: Community colleges are sources of workers that have proper digital skills. What I find amazing at ACC in the past few years is how we have become connected to Texas A&M University, Texas State University, and the University of Texas at San Antonio—they have all developed relationships with ACC and want our students. They need them to stay in business. ACC and other community colleges produce high-quality transfer students. Community colleges have a big impact. [See Physics Today, November 2016, page 26 .]

I doubt the high-tech industry would be moving to Austin in droves if it weren’t for ACC, and, of course, UT Austin. Companies like Tesla need an educated workforce.

And of course, community colleges are an excellent deal financially. You don’t have the dorm experience, you don’t have a football team, you don’t have Bevo [UT Austin’s longhorn mascot]. But for a student who doesn’t have much cash and wants to get a degree, community college is a good deal.

Not only is it a big savings for the first two years, but students also get small classes. The physics labs were always 24 students—4 students to a table, and 6 tables per lab; all classes at our college and most community colleges are very small. It’s very intimate and you get close contact with your instructors.

PT: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

CISE: About a dozen years ago, I started a website based on New York Times articles that had a physics application angle. I’ve given numerous talks on them. I take an article, edit it, chop it up, add graphics, a short introduction, questions, hints, and answers, and then use it in teaching. It’s a way to break away from textbooks, which are pretty vanilla. My goal is to take what is going on right now and make it relevant to basic classical physics. We don’t have to go far to find physics—it’s happening all around us. One of the most unbelievable recent facts was that oceans are warming at a rate equivalent to blowing up 400 000 Hiroshima-scale atomic bombs per day. I thought this was unbelievable, but it’s true, and you can figure it out using basic introductory physics.

PT: What are your plans now?

CISE: I retired at 79, just before the pandemic started. I plan to stay physically fit by developing muscle strength and mentally active working on my New York Times physics applications website. I hope to have the opportunity to visit my family.