It is of interest to note that Jill Biden, wife of the vice president, teaches in a community college in Delaware and is a great believer in this branch of higher education. Mrs. Biden has a doctorate in education, and her dissertation was titled “Student Retention in Community Colleges: Meeting Students’ Needs.” Since 1993 she has taught remedial writing and English Composition at Delaware Technical and Community College.

She has remarked of her work, ”I feel like I can make a greater difference in their lives. I just love that population. It just feels really comfortable to me. I love the women who are coming back to school and getting their degrees, because they’re so focused.”

It would be wonderful if Mrs. Biden would take as one of her Second Lady causes promotion of, and improvement in, our community colleges. These colleges do tremendous work in preparing people for careers who are not ready for, or have no need of, the four-year degree. In addition, the wasteful and costly college dropout rate could be lessened if students at the appropriate level of preparation were directed toward community colleges rather than to four-year programs.

One possibility for improvement might be the strengthening of a modest liberal-arts component in the Associate of Arts degree, so that students might gain familiarity with the best that has been thought and said in our great tradition. The Great Books Curriculum that Prof. Bruce Gans has developed with enormous success at Wright College in Chicago, reported on the front page of the New York Times, is one excellent example of what can be done.

Professor Gans has gone on to form the National Great Books Curriculum Academic Community and has already replicated his success at several other schools. As Gans has written in a letter to supporters, “the National Great Books Curriculum Academic Community aims to use Great Books to help students increase their cultural literacy, gain analytical skills, acquire the ability to read complex texts and earn academic self respect and accomplishment.”

How inspiring it would be to see Dr. Biden, a figure on the national level, join in this great work and in other worthy measures toward the improvement and enhancement of our community colleges.