CLARK Kerr, former chair of Carnegie Council on Higher Education, recently described community col leges as the great, surging of higher educa tion providing youth service opportunities that bring together now separate streams of work and educa tion (4). Yet, as one reviewer noted, this great surging segment was left out of A Nation at Risk, a controver sial 1983 report on nation's high schools. Prepared by National Commission on Excellence in Educa tion, report scores four-year colleges and universi ties for neglecting to provide leadership in setting standards and monitoring programs that would raise sights of those who set high schools' curricula (Healy 14). The omission of community colleges from report is striking not simply because community col leges currently employ one-third of all college teachers and enroll one-third of all college students but because they have been successfully engaged throughout their century-long history in doing exactly what report claims colleges and universities have failed to do: facilitating entry of high school graduates into worlds of education and work. Why do so many educators continue to discount role of community colleges in higher education despite valuable youth service function they provide? De spite record-setting enrollments in 1970s? Despite innovative approaches to student recruitment and basic skills instruction that have gradually worked their way into even most select universities (Cross 34)? Howard London, in his study of attitudes of community col lege teachers, believes that educators' lack of interest in work of two-year colleges is partly due to these in stitutions themselves. Because recent growth spurt among two-year colleges has been a gangling, awkward, adolescent one complete with problems of self consciousness and self-identity, community college in structors find themselves in a limbo between high schools and four-year colleges and thus have enormous ambiva lence when defining their own roles (London 64). This in-between status is reinforced by hiring practices of community colleges; administrators generally recruit teachers from education layers that sandwich their institutions since there are only about a hundred pro grams expressly designed to train community college in structors. A 1976 survey by Center for Community Colleges shows that 33% of teachers come from high school faculties; 11% from four-year college faculties; 25% from graduate schools (with or without completed degrees); 5% directly from undergraduate institutions; and remaining 25% from trades, government, and industry (Weddington 39-41). Unfortunately, diver sity of two-year teaching personnel and pragmatism Linda Ching Sledge