The Scholarly Contributions of Arthur M. Cohen

Abstract

In 2004, Arthur M. Cohen retired from faculty at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after an exceptional 40-year career. Working with spouse and colleague Florence B. Brawer, Professor Cohen established and led ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges from 1966 through 2003; founded New Directions for Community Colleges series; conducted groundbreaking research through Center for Study of Community Colleges; and authored key works, including The American Community a standard that is now in its fourth edition. In addition, Professor Cohen guided dissertation work of nearly 70 doctoral candidates specializing in community college education. This special issue of Community College Review is a Festschrift honoring and celebrating Professor Cohen's contributions to field of community college education. The six articles in this issue discuss Cohen's various roles as scholar and researcher, teacher and mentor, builder and guardian of a community college literary database, and insightful commentator and understanding critic of that most unique segment of U.S. higher education--the community college. The fact that today we can even speak of the field of community college is in large part due to work of Arthur Cohen. He was interested in community college at a time when it was finding its place within U.S. system of higher education institutions, perceived by some as stepchild of higher education, by others as an extension of secondary education, and by still others as career academies. Cohen helped shape perception--and acceptance--of community college as a true collegiate institution. During Arthur Cohen's long tenure at UCLA, he built a body of empirical research, including longitudinal studies, that few faculty produce. With Florence Brawer and doctoral students who were part of research unit that he established at UCLA, Center for Study of Community Colleges, he conducted no less than nine national community college curriculum studies, 10 years' worth of national studies, and several more national studies of community college faculty. As Trudy Bers notes in her article Advancing Research on Community College, Cohen's transfer rate work was among earliest benchmarking projects and his work helped to establish transfer, in addition to graduation, as a significant indicator of positive student outcomes. His research studies in area of curriculum helped track trends in community college liberal and nonliberal arts subjects over more than 20 years. The careful methodology of these studies provides a means for others to replicate research and continue monitoring trends in community college curriculum. The empirical research Cohen conducted helped establish a base of scholarship in field. Findings from this research appear throughout many publications over years, including seminal work that he and Florence Brawer wrote, The American Community now in its fourth edition. During his 3rd year at UCLA, Cohen became director of ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges. He secured contract from U.S. Office of Education to establish clearinghouse at UCLA in 1966 and successfully maintained contract in subsequent renewal bids until U.S. Department of Education merged all 16 clearinghouses in one centralized unit in 2003. He was one of only two persons to serve as a clearinghouse director for 37 years. Under his leadership, Clearinghouse built a rich archive for community college practitioners and scholars, processing 19,711 documents and 10,387 journal articles for inclusion in ERIC's bibliographic database. In addition to literature database in ERIC, Cohen also directed a large publications program that, at one point, included 24 different annual publications. Altogether, Clearinghouse published 135 issues of quarterly journal, New Directions for Community Colleges, as well as numerous information analysis products, such as ERIC Digests, literature reviews, bibliographies, and other publications. …