The authors are faculty in history and English, respectively, at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. What their students want and need, and what the institution's role in the community should be, remain open questions, with policy implications at the departmental, college, city, and even national level. Indeed, President Obama put community colleges into the political spotlight with his call for a multibillion-dollar investment in initiatives to increase the number of community college graduates. Learning communities have been celebrated as being precisely the kind of innovation that community colleges need. Kingsborough's Opening Doors Learning Communities program places cohorts of first-semester students in small (25 students), thematically related courses--in their case, a developmental English class and a history class. In this article, the authors offer a critical assessment of their experiences teaching in Kingsborough Community College's learning communities--in a descriptive, personal mode that echoes the frequent conversations they have together--to illuminate how official data fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that they believe is vital for larger institutional decision making. (Contains 1 note.)