Interview with David Bodary, Ph.D. Professor of Communication at Sinclair Community College December 2008 How long have you been in your current position? Since 1994 when I joined the organization. Can you please tell me about your academic background? I have a bachelors of science from Eastern Michigan University. I have a master s from Wayne State University in 1992, and a Ph.D. from Wayne State University in 1999. All in communication? The bachelors from Eastern Michigan was in organizational communication. It was a bachelors of science because I started out as a management major so I had a lot more of a traditional science as opposed to an arts background. And then the master s was in general speech and the Ph.D. was in interpersonal and small group communication. Can you take me through your career trajectory leading up to, but not including, your current position any other jobs you have held, how long you stayed in each one, why you decided to move from one job to the next, and so on? In college I worked in a management position for a major retail chain as an internship. I was an assistant manager intern, and that was a fine experience for me to realize that I never wanted to work in retail again. But that connected with my organizational communication interest at the time and my degree that I was seeking at Eastern Michigan. After my graduation from Eastern Michigan, I worked for a healthcare maintenance organization in the city of Detroit. In fact, I worked for one of the few black-owned and black-operated healthcare companies in the country. And I did that in a marketing capacity for about one year and it led me to realize that I was really good at the service side of the job, but I wasn t really good at the sales side of the cold calling and the kind of hard sell needed to be successful. So I had some hesitation about how effectively I could pursue that as a career.
And at the same time I had applied to three graduate schools, and over that summer at the end of the first year at that job I had been accepted by all three. I went to graduate school from there. I was accepted by Wayne State, Michigan State and Purdue and chose Purdue. So this was for your master s degree? Yes, that was beginning my master s degree. So did you start at Purdue and then switch to Wayne State? That is correct. I started at Purdue, but in the summer between my first and second year of the two-year master s Susan and I were married. And in those particular years the job outlook in West Lafayette was really bad. My wife had a good job in the Dearborn, Michigan area and no prospects in the West Lafayette area, so we made the difficult decision of coming back to what for me was home, and not completing at Purdue but instead pursuing my graduate completion at Wayne State. May I ask what kind of profession your wife is in? She actually has a dual major in organizational communication and public policy from Eastern Michigan University. At the time she was working in a trade association, the Society for Manufacturing Engineers. It would be like NCA is for the communication folks this was for the engineering folks, and they would serve not only academics but also applied practitioners. In those years she was involved with some pretty cool computer integration technology. We were just beginning to get an HP computer to be able to talk to an IBM printer for instance. This was in the 80s before a lot of the assumptions about integrated technology could be made. So they created the protocols, the language that allowed various machines to talk to one another. It was very exciting, and of course that led to our decision that it made more sense for me to come back to the Detroit area as opposed to her giving up that opportunity. Did you do your master s full-time? No, I did not. I did my master s part-time. In fact, I accepted another internship/co-op opportunity with the Unisys Corporation in Michigan. I worked in an HR capacity first as a coop and then they hired me full-time. So I continued the master s at night at Wayne State in a part-time capacity for what ended up being a couple of years. I started that master s in 1988 with a few credits from Purdue and I finished in 92.
And then did you transition immediately to working on the Ph.D.? Yes. Quickly into the master s I realized that a master s would not be a terminal degree for me. I had to go on to the Ph.D., and so the line between the one and the other became quite blurred. I continued to complete the master s credits, but I knew all along that I was going to finish the Ph.D. eventually. Did you keep working at Unisys while you went on to your Ph.D.? Eventually I quit my job at Unisys and took the opportunity to be a graduate teaching assistant at Wayne State. It took me a few years to get that to happen. It was interesting to me when I was first applying to graduate schools Purdue offered me a graduate teaching assistantship even though I basically had no master s coursework. Wayne State offered me the chance to take classes there but no GTA, and Michigan State may have offered a GTA but I forget. But then, of course, once I had the teaching experience at Purdue I became more attractive to Wayne State as a GTA and so they hired me. That resolved my financial dilemma of how am I going to pay for graduate school, so I was able to quit my job and I would have to say that was probably about 1990. But there was clearly a moment and it probably happened in West Lafayette when I realized graduate school was so exciting, and the opportunity to learn more about the field of communication was so energizing for me, that I was bound for teaching and I was bound for advanced graduate work. So getting back to the Detroit area it was never a question in my mind as to what I was doing. I was pursuing a graduate degree so that I could teach. There wasn t this thought that I was going to somehow fall in love with HR and find that forever fulfilling. That was kind of biding my time in order to get enough money to be able to pay for graduate school, and then when the graduate assistantship came that resolved itself and I could move away from it. At the time they were laying people off like mad, so it wasn t a fun place to be anyway. Did you then move when you completed the Ph.D.? No. I pursued a career at a community college in the mid 90s and they were looking for people with a master s. It was a full-time tenure-track job at a community college and master s was adequate, although they were certainly engaged or excited that I was pursuing more. But it was not a requirement that I even have my A.B.D. the master s alone was enough. So I left the Detroit area in 94 having fulfilled all of my coursework and being A.B.D. The community college was satisfied with that they were like great, come on, you can finish it in good time, and they weren t even concerned if I did finish it. But certainly that was a goal of mine and it took me five years to complete the degree. I would say it was super hard to be able to do that
because I had two children and I was thrown into a new job with a heavy teaching load. It was tough to find the time to complete the dissertation project, but in the end I was able to do that. How did you find your current position? My wife and I had decided we were going to pursue opportunities anywhere between Detroit and Dayton along I-75 because her family was in the Dayton area and my family was in the Detroit area and, of course, there are a ton of schools that are in that corridor. That left a lot of options for us and I was watching the Chronicle of Higher Education and Spectra. I wasn t done with my degree so I wasn t pursuing too hard, but I was interested in watching and beginning that process. I had also attended and done some interviewing at the NCA job fair. Then a person at Wayne State interviewed at Sinclair for a job and came back disheartened. This just wasn t for her, it wasn t a good fit, and she described all the reasons that it wasn t a good fit and all those reasons were reasons for me that made it a great fit for me. It was a two year school, it was an open-enrollment institution, and it was in an urban setting. It wasn t a traditional old red brick, land grant kind of feel that so many of the marketing materials suggest when we look at our land grant colleges the lovely fall setting with the leaves falling. There was no ivy on the brick. It was built in the 70s largely. Her interests and my interests were different, so everything she described not liking I found attractive. I inquired further. I contacted the chair and asked if they were still searching for candidates, and he indicated that the search had closed without successfully finding a candidate. So I told him I was going to send my information. Shortly thereafter they re-opened the search, they called me in, I interviewed along with a number of other people, and they hired me full-time tenure track. Then at that point did your wife start looking for a job? Ten days prior to starting my job we had our second child. We delivered in Michigan, and the baby stayed in the hospital for nine days. On the tenth day we drove to Dayton. In the meantime I found a house and we had quickly moved in. So when we came back to the Dayton area my wife did not start working immediately. At the time I was the primary breadwinner and then eventually she started to work part-time. That has reversed since then. She now earns more than what I make and I am the one in that role of having a more flexible schedule. So I m the one who sees the kids to the bus in the morning and is able to be in the driveway when the seven year old gets off the bus in the afternoon. That sort of flexibility is one of the factors that make teaching for me such a viable career option at this point. I love to teach and I love to be in the classroom, so I don t love teaching because I get to be home at three o clock, but it certainly makes my life doable.
Do you have a lot of flexibility in terms of determining your teaching schedule? Have you been able to work that around your children s schedules? Yes. When I entered the institution, I think I was maybe the fourth or the fifth person out of eight full-time faculty members in the Department. So in terms of seniority the people ahead of me would get to pick their schedules first and then I could identify what I liked out of what was left. Now recall this is a two year institution open enrollment campus. It s not like we are teaching forty different courses. We have a lot of courses on the books, but for the most part there are probably ten that we teach regularly. So most of us are teaching an interpersonal section or multiple sections of public speaking, and then occasionally you might get an interviewing class, a small group class, or a mass communication class, depending on your specialty or expertise. But we are teaching almost entirely interpersonal and public speaking. So what does that all mean? It means my timing trickles down to me and I m able to pick classes that I want and it happens I like to teach the early classes because that allows me to get my kids on the bus and then get to class. I only live fifteen minutes from work, so the kids get on the bus, I drive downtown, I walk into my classroom, I teach 8-9-10, do an office hour, do some committee work, and by 2:30 I can be heading home and catch my daughter off the bus. Then I can go back to my home office at night and catch up on the emails and the other things that make up the day. That s the flexibility. You mentioned that you do some committee work as part of a routine day. Can you share a little bit about how that fits into your full range of responsibilities? First of all, the committee work that I am responsible for is what I choose. So, generally speaking, I m not forced into committees that I have no interest in. As a result, I ve been involved in committees like the general education committee of the campus. I held the role where I chaired that for a number of years. I ve also served on the assessment committee a number of times. Currently I am working with the student judicial affairs committee and I chair what essentially is the student conduct board. The role there would be to meet in circumstances where a student has behaved badly. As the law requires, that student is given due process and this committee ensures that student s due process. And perhaps then we would decide there would be some sanction or limitation on his access to campus resources. Are you typically working on more than one of these committees at a time? Typically more than one, but it s a matter of choice. I m also involved in a lot of other things. For the Center for Teaching and Learning I ve been responsible for some book reading discussion groups. I m involved with some committees that have made choices about technology for the campus. For instance, I was asked to sit on a committee dealing with making the choice of video conferencing software and I accepted that invitation. So you might end up on one if you
are really good at saying no, or you might end up on four that have varying levels of responsibility. What is your teaching load? I teach at a campus that is currently in a quarter system, so that means we could teach essentially four quarters a year, including a summer quarter. My responsibilities are to teach 5-5-5 so five courses fall, five courses winter, five courses spring. And you don t teach in the summer? And I choose not to teach in the summer. By the time you have taught 5-5-5 you re ready for the summer. And our kids are off in the summer, so I almost had to be off. It didn t make financial sense for me to teach classes and pay for someone to watch my kids. Are there any other key responsibilities of your job that we haven t talked about yet that we should keep in mind? Well, we would certainly have classroom and we talked about load. There are also different preps. We then would have the service to the campus or the college, and then there is really the expectation for the service to the community. In a community college, the community in the name is essential. So if the community members don t feel like we are contributing in some positive way to them, they tend to be less invested in us. And it happens that my campus is supported by a tax levy from our local county community, and that tax levy covers a substantial part of the students tuition. So certainly we feel the responsibility to make sure our community benefits by the support they are providing us not just through the education of our students, but also through the service that we provide to the community. So it s things like I serve on Habitat for Humanity committees. And in my own church I take a major role in coordinating and preparing the people that end up being readers in the services since my profession is public speaking and these people need help in terms of being effective as they read. So that makes a natural fit. But we do other things as well. There are all kinds of ways as faculty that we serve the community through volunteer sorts of things, and that s a part of what is expected of us. Would you say that that is an expectation generally across community colleges?
I can only speak for my experience here, but it would seem reasonable to me that if the community college is advancing its purpose which is to serve its local community then that has to happen, either through what we do academically by making sure the courses we are teaching are matching the needs of our community or by what we do beyond that academic effort in terms of the other things we do to service that community. I have a skill set that people in my community benefit from, so I am encouraged and allowed the opportunity to share that and I have done various works for the VA center locally or for a number of local corporations, I ve met business people who need speech coaching and things of that nature. Do you travel for your job? Do I have to travel, no. Urged to travel? Yes. As a priority in my own professional career I travel for the national conference and the regional conference. And I am able to obtain funding that covers pretty much 100% of both of those from my institution, either from departmental funds or professional development funds the college makes available through the provost s office or something like that. So, yes, we are encouraged to travel. I was with the President of the college about 6 months ago, and he asked if I had any interest in traveling internationally. Specifically, we have a sister school in Scotland, and he was encouraging me to think about making a trip to Scotland and maybe teaching for a week or two weeks there sort of an exchange with them. So there is definitely the encouragement from the institution to broaden our own perspectives through international travel or by working with other professionals at other institutions in order to bring those things back to our campus and share them with others and in essence advance and broaden our own campus. Most jobs have a wide range of challenges, and the biggest challenges can vary across jobs. Some people find the intellectual rigors of their positions to be most challenging. In other positions the biggest challenges are managerial, and in others they are political. What would you say are some of the most challenging things to navigate in your current job? Well I certainly think it s challenging to balance the work load the in-class teaching load along with the other responsibilities. I think the other challenges have to do with the open enrollment campus that leads you to have a heterogeneous population a diverse learning population. I will have a sixteen year old in class who is taking courses at the college through their local high school in what is known as a post-secondary educational opportunity. And I will have a student from the Dayton Early College Academy, another high school equivalent which is a charter school, and this person is coming from an urban background. And then I ll have a person with a bachelors degree who is changing careers and a person who is retired and is taking advantage of our senior program which allows seniors to take classes for free once regular enrollment is closed and late enrollment starts.
So I have sixteen year olds and I have sixty years old, and that s a diversity of age. But imagine then a diversity of learning style and a diversity of the equipment they come to the classroom with in the sense of reading levels, English language skills, cognitive abilities. And maybe those are the easier differences. The other difference that I encounter is sometimes even tougher, and that is the student who comes with lots of life baggage. They have two part-time jobs because the workplace environment doesn t offer many full-time jobs with benefits. So they are working a lot of hours and trying to go to school full-time and they ve got a kid or two, sometimes without the support of a spouse. Those are the kinds of bigger challenges that I sometimes encounter because, of course, we are trying to help all of our students to advance and to make it to whatever that next goal is for them. Sometimes that next goal is a better job, sometimes that next goal is completion of an associates degree, or maybe it s transferring to the four year institution to get their bachelors. So there are many different needs that students come with. It s not like they all come to my classroom ready to read at the college level, ready to speak at the college level, and with a clear goal of what they want to accomplish. Many aren t familiar with whether they want an associates or whether they want a bachelors, and they don t know whether they are going to be able to afford to takes classes next term all of that kind of baggage. So those to me are some of those challenges we are going to encounter that might be a little bit unique, although I know my colleagues at the four year schools face the same challenges with respect to students economic issues that they are taking classes part-time or they are working two part-time jobs while they work to take classes full time. That, I think, is more the reality of the landscape of the college student these days. It s challenging and it s invigorating too. As I said, I realized I wanted to teach, I loved the opportunity to be involved with the teaching and learning process, so that s exciting at the same time that it s challenging, and that s okay. I don t have a lot of political challenges, fortunately, because my chair is awesome. It happens that we have got a great team, and it doesn t happen accidentally. We apply the skills that we teach in class to create a climate that allows people to really flourish, so we have a really supportive climate, and my chair is largely to credit for that. There are times at the institutional level where there are politics and games, but by and large this institution is pretty forward thinking, working hard to not just get by but to get better and better. So my impression is that we can move past many of those things more easily than some other institutions and I am pleased with that. We have talked about several dimensions of your job that you enjoy. What would you bring to the top as your favorite part of the job? The classroom time. I could run off a list of twelve students this past term who were just a joy to work with. That s what my passion is. That s what I enjoy. That s why this was a good fit for me and it wasn t a good fit for my colleague who interviewed and said I wouldn t want to work
there. There is a match and the classroom interaction excites me. And for me, it isn t just the really good student that excites me most, although that certainly is fun. It s the student who has got various challenges. I can think of a couple of students with individualized learning plans who need certain kinds of accommodations. Maybe they don t earn the highest grades, but I know having had them in my class that they have benefited dramatically. And that to me is the satisfaction when you know that a student benefited from your work in a way that they hadn t experienced in the past, that they have improved in their skill level, that they have really changed in some fashion, they are better equipped skill-wise and they understand concepts better such that they have changed, and that is very fulfilling. What would you say are the least favorite parts of your job? There are times when grading can be monotonous. There is also part of me that wishes I could see further development beyond the sophomore year. There is this desire to know how that student will be as a senior because I got them started and now they are going on to Wright State University or to the University of Dayton, which is great. But I wonder who they become a little further down that path. Of course, you never really know because you only see them for that freshman and sophomore level and then they enter another institution as a junior. And I think the other thing is that I wish I had more time to read more of the literature to be more involved in terms of sharing through the writing process and the publication process what I have learned that works or doesn t work. I still desire to publish good research, and yet the reality is with the load that I ve got it is tough to do that. So sometimes that can be disheartening. I have done it a couple of times and it s very satisfying, but I think it can be disheartening when I realize how much time I don t have for a lot of what graduate school prepared me to do. What might you consider as next steps in your career? Well, I taught for a private four year institution locally, and the student population is very different. And to some extent I was less satisfied with that. The students came from the top of their classes as opposed to maybe struggling to finish high school. Certainly it was fun because you could do more stuff, but I really in some ways believe they could have learned without me. And so I really think I ll have to continue to work at an institution where the students really need me. If I think about it, I would want to be more involved with engaging my students civically. Now that could be in the form of service learning activities or other kinds of service expectations required by a college. So when I see jobs posted at institutions that have those service expectations, that kind of peaks my interest. And I think if I were to change institutions, it would be to go to a four year school that was probably a smaller institution with that sense of service. But will I do that? Probably not. There are a lot of advantages to staying within the Ohio system.
The mission of this institution matches my objective so well that it really makes it difficult to find something that would fit as well anywhere else. For me meeting and working with students who are probably the first in their family to go to college who, in their own minds, probably don t believe they are college ready or college capable, but when I meet them and we begin to work toward that objective clearly, they can do it but just don t know they can do it it s really kind of cool. It s kind of magical. So there is a lot that s very fulfilling when you work in that kind of environment and the students so value and appreciate you, and that s clearly the sense that I get from the students I interact with. They appreciate my efforts and contribution. They don t always accept my efforts or do what I tell them to do, but they understand that it s in their best interest and they understand that if they really want to learn and get better, these are the things they need to do. Their lives sometimes forbid them or limit their ability to pursue those things, but they know and they value what I suggest, and that makes my work environment a very positive one. As we start to wrap up, I d like to ask if there is anything we haven t yet discussed that you think is important for people to know to understand your current job and the broader career trajectory you have chosen? One thing that I think is important to mention is how much support I have gotten through the community college section of NCA. There are great faculty working at community colleges throughout the county who will support and share resources and really help you to be effective in this sort of environment. And it s important because most of our graduate degree granting institutions don t have a lot of experience with open enrollment campuses, with the kinds of students we might encounter. You re learning when you take the job. You learn on the fly pretty quickly and that community college section really supports our ability to be effective and that has been super. And the same goes for the regional association there is a similar community college interest group at the regional association, and they are great and supporting us to be effective. And that goes for all faculty at NCA everyone is so supportive of sharing resources, whether they are coming from the basic course or from the public speaking section. Everyone is so willing to help and that has been great and it certainly has allowed me to do my job better as a result. Because of the size of my institution we have 23,000 students, so this is a large community college I know that I am among a select group in that most community colleges are much smaller than mine and don t necessarily have the staff or size of faculty that I ve got. I can interact with faculty here. A lot of the community colleges across the country might have two full-time faculty in the department and then hire a bunch of adjunct faculty, so their experiences are going to be quite different from mine and their level of funding to go to conferences and things like that will be quite different from mine.
The other thing that has been important and helpful to me is that I continue to read the literature. I continue to be involved professionally, and that s so important to my vibrance as a faculty member. It would be easy to stagnate and find yourself lost back in 1980 (from my experience-- and maybe it s 1990 for someone else) because you are overwhelmed by the classload and you sometimes just say forget it I m not going to read Comm Ed or I m not going to look at Spectra or I don t have time to submit something this year. But I ve tried to stay involved that way because it does add back to what I can do in the classroom, and I think that s really important. I want to sensitize people to one more thing. Working at a community college is an option, not a diminished option. In the graduate education I received the expectation was if you go to a research one institution you re going to teach at a research one institution and to some extent whether or not that s a good match for you personally. My choice to teach in a community college was not in any way settling for anything. It s a great match it s good for me and it s good for the students.