THE PURPOSE OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE, POLITICAL AND OTHERWISE

“The purpose of the community college is to train the local workforce with marketable skills…”. So says Hobbes, my ‘friend’ over at Niagara Times blogspot. The occasion for so instructing us as to the limits of the community college was an excursus on the presumed foolishness of NCCC anthropology Professor Phillip Haseley suggesting that there may well be evidence to justify research on UFO phenomena as legitimate work in academia.

Of course this excursus was simply pretext for trashing the professoriate at N-trip and providing further justification for not granting us even a penny raise in our 4 1/2 year contract dispute with a stonewalling Administration. But then that’s apparently what Dr. Klyczk and Co. is being paid a tidy sum to do which action is obviously being sanctioned by the Board of Trustees and the Niagara County Legislature. In short, "bust the damn Union and to hell with the full-time faculty," is their underlying attitude when it comes right down to it.

But that and Haseley’s foray into the question of the existence of flying saucers and such aside, what exactly is the “purpose” of the community college. Such “job training” may well be important as a task of the community college. I won’t contest that. However, if there is anything else we do of worth, Hobbes fails to grasp exactly what that might be. Of course he doesn’t care what that might be. If it were up to him he would eliminate our entire Social Sciences and Humanities Divisions.

If such draconian measures were undertaken, a major disservice would be done to the people of Niagara County and any other students from the surrounding area who choose to come to NCCC for the excellent preparation we provide for the last two years of college. N-trip provides a general education for those preparing to transfer to a 4-year institution. More specifically it provides, within the limits forced upon it by the present sorely deficient General Education Program, for the kind of critical literacy that prepares a citizen for intelligent and responsible participation in the political world.

The reason such as Hobbes and the power elite he represents would sooner suppress any public knowledge that the community college does anything more than job preparation is not only to accentuate and promote this service. But it is to suppress any suggestion that the community college might serve the purpose of the enlightenment of the people as to what is really in their political interest intellectually and economically.

The community college reduced to job preparation is the prostitution of the institution to the pre-determined needs and wants of an economy to which the workforce must simply conform and adapt. Perish the thought that the “workforce” be educated to decide the kind of economy it wants to create or re-create and thus find worthy of working in.

Hobbes “workforce” is the traditional mass of wage-slaves who have been instrumentalized to provide for the economic status quo and at least to get out of the way of an economy now financialzed as an essential whole and otherwise reduced to a service economy for the established profit and war machine of American transnational capital.

During the recent visit of SUNY’s new Chancellor to the campus of NCCC, I suggested to her that the main problem with SUNY education was an emasculated and impotent General Education Program. In short I told her our present General Education is a lip-service program amounting to, in the en d, little more than a pointless smorgasbord of “exposure” to the Humanities and Social Sciences. I suggested to her more concretely and specifically a solution to this problem perceived to be the same as I interpreted the problem, she admitted, by every other SUNY campus in the State: namely, that General Education is sorely lacking in achieving any meaningful and purposeful common goal for our students and our communities.

My solution is that the organizing principle of General Education should, and possibly only can, be the education toward that which the American populace has in common as a federalist and democratic polity: namely, instruction in democratic participation at the levels of leadership, service, discourse and self-transformation toward the American Ideal. This is what the community college system can do best if we were not in fact being prostituted in the interests of business and industry for cheap and easy job preparation.

The community college is the most important institution of critical learning as determined by the proper roll of the people in securing the sanctity of communities and in re-appropriating the federalist political structure long since undermined by centralist and bureaucratic-technocratic forces in America. Everyone gives lip service to critical thinking as a general education goal. It’s just that we are all for the most part quite disingenuous as to what we believe ought to be criticized. The answer to that question as to the target of critical thinking is: the forces and powers of de-politicization and the market managed homogenization and de-naturing of culture and consciousness. The target moreover is a government at all levels long since de-politicized and reduced to a legitimating arm of big business and banking.

So politically mindless job training is not the task of the community college. It’s fundamental and foremost task is the nurturing of powerful citizens with vision and cultural vitality for freedom, equality, culturally specific communities and the economic capacity for the production of material abundance for all, not just for the privileged.