World Community College^SM:
Has Its Time Come?

By Dr. Steve Eskow
President, The Pangaea Network

"Steve Eskow? I thought you were dead!"

That is how the chancellor greeted me as I entered her office. She went on to explain that she had used a 1974 article of mine in her doctoral dissertation, and she had assumed that by now I was not only a footnote but also a headstone.

The article, "World Community College: A 2020 Vision," co-authored by John Caffrey, appeared in the Autumn 1974 edition of New Directions for Community Colleges. What we saw then, what everyone saw then, was the emergence of a global economy. What we struggled with then was the meaning of this economy and polity for an institution whose vision and rhetoric and structures were deeply, passionately local and communal. We concluded:

We propose, then, that the college of 2020 will be World Community College, and that its structures, and its ways of relating students to each other, to mentors, and to learning, will emerge from its commitments to the organizing and balancing themes of Community and Cosmopolis.

What we thought of 25 years ago as the community college paradox—resolving the polar claims of the local and the global—John Naisbit now calls "The Global Paradox": as the polity and economy grow larger the need and the advantage shift to the smaller entities—including, I venture, the small community college that has maintained the ability to act quickly despite shared and layered governance. And Rosbeth Moss Kanter, in her book World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy, asks questions that every community college needs to confront:

What is the meaning of "community" in a global economy? Do communities matter, and to whom? Can the spirit of community be restored and people reengaged in meaningful civic action to ensure a strong economy and high quality of life?

Kanter answers "yes," as we did in 1974. We pushed the matter further: If we do not balance world-building and world-mindedness with community-building and community-mindedness, we may lose both world and community, as our neighborhoods become local Third Worlds, underdeveloped nations in our backyard, places of poverty and danger, menacing all within and outside of these places of pain.

Much that we predicted in 1974 has come about, not because we were clairvoyant but because we were looking around us, looking at the world of 1974. The signs of community decay were all around us; the handwriting was on the walls of our communities, graffiti for all to read.

We suggested that the new and imperative mission of the community college was to become, in every community, the link between the local and the global:

Perhaps the image of the college we hope for in 2020 is Janus, looking inward to self and Community and outward to humankind and Cosmopolis.

The need for such a root metaphor, for such an image of balance, is highlighted for many of us by the scramble of many colleges to reach and recruit students outside of their traditional service areas. In a Chronicle of Higher Education article, Dr. Martha Kanter, a creative community college leader who heads DeAnza College, one of the truly outstanding colleges of the nation, said: "With the growth of distance education, previous notions of districts, college service areas, and boundaries 'are an old way of thinking....'"

And what of the local community’s claim to the attention of the community college? What Dr. Kanter is saying  is that the local boundary is not a Berlin Wall of separation, but a permeable membrane, a border much like those between our states, or that between the US and Canada borders that create communities whose scale makes them manageable, borders that encourages connection and communication without ignoring the bonds and claims of community. Otherwise California does not need to support 107 community colleges: one community college would be enough to reach all of California before it goes on to Chicago.

The new community college, like the old of my time, needs to be concerned with budget and FTE’s and marketing: I certainly was. If distance education, however, becomes largely a free market scramble for students, with the Chicago City Colleges advertising in Cupertino, California as well as vice versa, we are in danger of losing the soul and the raison d’être of this institution we care about. The community college then becomes part of the problem—the problem of the erosion of the small, the familial, the local, the communal—and not part of the solution. The idea and the ideal of the community college disappear as it searches for new students to support it. We do indeed need to compete with The University of Phoenix, as the eight believe, and we can do so without losing our name and vision.

In our view, then, distance education must justify itself first and foremost because of what it does for our families, our schools and centers and churches, our businesses, our culture: our community.

How, then, does the community college of 1998 do that? How does it link community and world?

We had a program and a prescription in 1974, and much of that program still seems viable. For one, we looked to the communication technologies available then to help us connect our local students and institutions to students and institutions around the world. We did not see, could not see then, that the technology that the technology that would allow our teachers and students to engage in learning dialog with students and teachers everywhere was the computer: that huge whirring machine that (at the time) needed for the floor to be reinforced and for us to divert instructional dollars to air conditioning -- a machine that none of us who were not of the computer priesthood could approach and operate.

In 1974 I was a community college president, struggling with the idea of a community college that was as small as Rockland County in New York (176 square miles) and as large as the world. Part of that struggle involved creating programs and pedagogies that moved Rockland County students around the world to study and serve, and encouraging students from the rest of the nation and the world to come to Rockland Community College. While theorists and practitioners and regulators alike all explained to us why the endeavor was wrong philosophically and impossible in practice, we persisted, and we were able to move many of our students to programs of study and service abroad, and many students from around the country and the world to Rockland County. We got small grants that enabled us to create The College Consortium for International Studies and The Partnership for Service Learning. We persuaded the AACC to form the International Consortium. In 1984 I joined the AACC as staff of the "Keeping America Working" project and learned something of the awesome power of the collective community colleges of our nation.

And in that same year the possibilities of the computer and the international telephone system, in homes and workplaces in the community, and the nation, and the world took possession of me, and the Electronic University Network became my research laboratory as we worked with dozens of colleges and universities trying to learn with them to use this new tool to create colleges in diaspora, learning communities of teachers and students dispersed in time and space.

Here are some of things we think we have learned, and will be sharing with those colleges, schools, and organizations that join us in our new online venture, The Pangaea Network.

I.  The technologies we choose and use should be state of the mind, not state of the art.

Appropriate technologies. If I want to get from here to there quickly, the appropriate technology is the automobile. If I want to get there and get fit, the appropriate technology may be that older and slower technology, the bicycle.

That is: if I want my local students to be able study and discuss with students off campus in the community and elsewhere in the nation and around the world I need to choose a technology that allows for those conversations to happen.

That is: if I want my students at a distance to improve their reading and writing, because their work will require them to read and write; if I want my students to engage in reflection and inquiry; if I want my students to learn the arts of collaboration by collaborating, I need to find and use a technology and group of technologies that require my students to read text and write it, a technology that allows for the formation of communities of conversation, a technology and a pedagogy that build in time for reflection.

2.  Distance education should enlarge and enrich the education of students on campus.

Community college graduates will be using the computer to collaborate with colleagues and customers who may be anywhere: they should have opportunities to develop these arts and skills at the community college.

Community college students have usually not had the opportunities offered by the cosmopolitan universities to be with and learn from and bond with students from other communities and cultures. The computer and distance learning allows local students to take part in classes while at the community college with students elsewhere in our nation, and with students around the world. Distance education begins to level the playing field for the student who stays at home but needs the cosmopolitan experience and mind.

3.  Distance education should bring learning to the people and the places of the local community that the community college campus does not and can not serve.

Local people who travel, whose work or obligations does not allow them to be on campus 15 consecutive Tuesdays to take a course they want and need.

The welfare recipient for whom campus attendance means having other attend to children, an automobile or other form of transport, and time to commute to and from the campus as well as attend classes at times often inconvenient: for such students a way to learning and competence may be home study. (Note to those who worry about the discriminatory costs of computers: the most expensive intellectual technology of all is often the "real" campus, and getting to it.)

The frail elderly, who can use the computer and modem to study along with younger colleagues.

Those with physical limitations for whom the journey to campus is often a journey of pain and for whom home study may lead to marketable skills built around the computer.

All those in the workplace, the hospital, the barracks for whom the journey to campus is difficult or impossible.

4.  Distance education should bring education to our own "developing nations," and to those around the world who want to learn what we have to teach.

Computers in a neighborhood center or social agency or church basement or public school in any of our ghettoes or troubled communities can move instruction from our community colleges to those neighborhoods.

The center or agency or church or school can be in Latin America, or in Africa, or Asia, or anywhere in the world where we are invited to teach.

5.  Distance education should make all of the college environment available to distant students.

The classroom and instructor, of course. And the library and the librarian, and the counseling center and the counselors and financial aid and student government staff, and the student center, and the lecture, and the extracurriculum.

6.  The many issues surrounding distance education should be resolved in a context of action research as well as debate and controversy.

Can many welfare mothers learn to use the computer, and learn to learn at home via distance education. There are yea-sayers and nay-sayers: let’s find out and report our successes and failures accurately to colleagues and the world, continue and grow the program if successful, confess and close down the program if it does not serve.

Can distance education move instruction and competence into the prison and make a difference in recidivism? Let’s find out.

Can colleges and churches collaborate to bring learning to troubled neighborhoods despite our history of church-state separation and related issues? Let’s find out.

The arts and sciences of finding out create opportunities for faculty and staff to take part in opening up the new frontiers of distance learning.

So: my colleagues and I have spent more than a decade searching for ways to use technology to organize and balance the themes of community and world. As president of The Electronic University Network, I’ve had that decade of on the job training, working with many courageous colleges and universities to explore this new territory.

Two years ago we decided that we had to go back to the drawing board, and create a new service that embodied and came closer to realizing the principles above. We’ve spent two years with two imaginative corporate partners creating a new service that we think is the world’s first online service that is wholly devoted to education and training. It goes well beyond anything we’ve done in the past and in our view well beyond anything currently available from others

Pangaea: the one landmass that was before the forces of time and weather and global pressures and shifts separated the continents. Pangaea: the one world that we can begin to approach as the webs of communication knit us together.

The Pangaea Network is our new service, our next step toward World Community College.

For those who care, then, the promise of a World Community College is alive and well. We both invite all of our community college friends, past and future, who share our positions to join with us in our search for stronger communities and a peaceful and prosperous world: in our search for World Community College.

Dr. Eskow can be reached at his office in Santa Barbara, CA: 805-692-6998.