Robin G. Isserles is Professor of Sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she has been teaching for over 20 years. Robin is a proud third generation CUNY student—her maternal grandmother attended City College downtown (later named Baruch College), both of her parents graduated from Queens College, and she earned her PhD in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2002. She has spent her career thinking about pedagogy and classroom teaching, especially for first generation college students, and researching academic interventions designed to support these students. In addition, Robin continues her work to raise the visibility of and respect for community college faculty, staff, and students throughout academia.
From 2011-2013, Robin was invited to serve as Project Director of a $2 million grant to study Academic Momentum at CUNY. This was a research project that sought to test the impact of three different academic interventions on the retention and graduation rates of CUNY community college students. Her direct knowledge of community college students and its institutions provided a necessary addition to the research team. Robin draws extensively on this data in her book, The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching first-generation community college students, she centers students and their lived experiences around how student success could be re-framed and measured. In the book, she proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strives to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. In doing so, her book offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them. In April of 2021, Robin had an opportunity to meet via zoom with Dr. Jill Biden’s policy staff to discuss her book. She looks forward to more such opportunities in the future.
Robin’s current projects include contributing (co-authored with Paoyi Huang) a chapter entitled "The Unanticipated Challenges and Rewards of Carework: Remote Teaching & Student Precarity During COVID-19," to Transcending Crisis: Emotions, Carework, and Human Flourishing (eds. Marci Cottingham, Rebecca Erickson, and Matthew Lee) Routledge Press, forthcoming. And she is co-editing (along with David Levinson) an online series on community colleges as part of the Teachers College Record Commentary Series.
In addition to teaching Introduction to Sociology, Urban Sociology, and the Sociology Capstone course, Robin is actively involved in her department at BMCC, as well as her union, the PSC-CUNY. She also sits on the President’s Advisory Committee on Community College Research at BMCC. Robin takes great delight in mentoring her former students as they continue with their education.
Robin lives in New Jersey with her family and when not teaching, writing, or researching, she enjoys biking, trail hiking, and yoga with Adriene. In another life, she’d be a documentary filmmaker or a jazz pianist.