THE CHURCH OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGES – Frank Mensel In recent years, when Ive spoken to student audiences, Ive tried to engage their sense of self by telling them that my religion is community colleges, and that they, the students, are my church. Its the feeling I get from a career drawing personal growth and pleasure from the phenomenal rise of community colleges and the opportunities they offer, as the largest provider of undergraduate education. I get it most strongly with students, and I find myself preaching selectively from views that follow. It comes from my love of the American Dream – of which community colleges are now the largest engine – and the ideals that it embodies. Riding its shoulders is the struggle that scholars like to call the American Experiment. They tell us that the jury on this is still out. Yet the struggle itself is the sinew of what makes us American, that keeps democracy working. To keep it working, each generation must bear and lead the struggle for itself. Do the One Percent understand this – that the Experiment puts on them first responsibility for lifting it, to bring both sinew and spirit to it? The Ninety Nine Percent think they dont get it anymore. Community college students are heart and soul of this struggle. If the Good Book is right in telling us that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” then community college students look certain to be in the forefront. In fact, its already happening. They have become, by a growing margin, the largest family in undergraduate education. The students need to see the meaning of this in both individual and collective terms, to see how much the nation is banking on their future for both prosperity and security. I ask them to see themselves as Americas emerging middle class, because thats exactly what they will be. The chances of rebuilding the middle class will be riding on their shoulders, on their ability to advance skills and productivity across the workforce, across the economy, to stand anew at the forefront of global competition. They have become a critical mass: it wont happen without their talent, their muscle. Most know already that nothing builds skill and confidence as surely as work itself. As important as what theyre learning is how they are learning. The majority of community college students are already in the workforce, full-time or part-time. Some colleges have found that count to be as high as 80 percent. These students typically find that completing college is as much a test of time as of means. Its usually the test that best teaches the valuable habit of prioritizing. I challenge them to see the advantages in so proving themselves. American competiveness wont be restored by a higher abundance of bachelors degrees, as President Obama wishes. It will come from hard work, at skills that meet the demands of global commerce, at which America is still advantaged by its experience and leadership in consumer economics. Community colleges will always come first in the delivery of such skills. Building and renewing those skills will grow less by degrees than by lifelong learning. Community colleges are increasingly known as the colleges of lifelong learning, for good reasons. Cost and convenience are just two of them. They are increasingly adroit at listening to employers on emerging skill needs, and blending both regular faculty and adjunct specialists in courses tailored to those needs. When I speak in such detail I know that the students have heard most of it before. Yet perspective can grow by reprocessing the same information. The same goes for experience. Theres perspective in knowing that affluence doesnt always advantage college and life as surely as students imagine. A Student Voices volunteer columnist with the Dallas Morning News, Paul Gudmundson, wrote May 12, 2012: “Coddled and sheltered as a youth, my formative years were marked by an absence of failure . . . of tough losses. I received checks on assignments, rather than grades. . . . I collected awards for little more than showing up for scheduled events. . . . Unfortunately, we have a society that is too obsessed with winning and losing . . . quick to label the absence of victory as failure,” he observes. Paul is coming into his senior year at St. Marks School in Dallas. He concludes, “We place too much value on the end of the road and not enough on the road itself.” Community colleges students could tell him a lot about those perspectives, that road. The road ahead may well be brighter than the past for community colleges in the fruition of the largest professions in the American workforce, and I want students to see it. The majority of classroom teachers, the largest profession, start college in the community colleges -- two-thirds or more in most, if not all, of the States with comprehensive community college systems. California, Texas, Florida,and Illinois come quickly to mind. Community colleges are no less prominent as the first college of the myriad health technologies, law enforcement, fire fighting, and other emergency services. They are responding aggressively to the exploding demands of information technology, without no end in sight as IT continues to revolutionize both the public and private sectors and community life in general. When students want to tell me that by going to a community college theyre going second class, I cant help responding, “Second class is what youre labelling yourself. It hurts only you and your chances in life. If the community college is your one crack at college, youll find no doors closed: Doctor, business owner, pilot, clergyman, teacher, soldier, civic leader -- whatever your ambition you can embark at the nearest community college.” The first time I became conscious of the spiritual strength I draw from community college students I was the kickoff speaker at the four-day summer retreat in which the incoming student government of Victor Valley College of California was gearing up for the new college year. VVC takes its student government very seriously, a mood that touched me. I didnt realize that I was “preaching” until I heard several amens. When I was invited back the next summer as the opening speaker, I found all in the audience of some 30 students and college staff were wearing the same black t-shirt, its back stamped “The Church of the Community Colleges – Frank Mensel.” To more recent audiences Ive increasingly centered the message on what I see community college students doing for America, as they go about bootstrapping and backstrapping their way in life. Very few come with a platinum spoon in their pocket – though, to the credit of the community college, that also is changing. As more students with means choose community college for basic courses and the savings they gain in their degree pursuits, they add very welcome competition and diversity to both course work and campus life, enhancing the meaning that the college name has for both the campus and the community at large. Happily, as I find meekness and humility common in community college students, I stress the learning power that those virtues bring to their college experience. In the typical students, the bootstrapping by which they live gives lift also to the campus, the community, and the American Experiment. It carries the spark thats always been known as the American spirit. If they are going to college on the Pell Grant, I expect them to feel the pride in proving themselves worthy of it. They hurt the college, the nation and themselves most of all, if they take student financial aid for granted. They are the Pell recipients who benefit most from Pell because the grant wont deliver the same credits at any other institutions. With this church, Pell Grants raise no questions of separation of church and state. When I claim that students and I are one church, I see no other congregations that better fit what Ive always believed churches should enlist and serve. It makes me all the more eager, finally, to be about the business of our inheriting the earth, and exercising the care and the will to keep it so fit that we too continue to fit in. Frank Mensel June 2014
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 01:22:08 +0000
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