Reprinted by permission from Class to Mass Learning,
New Directions for Community Colleges, No. 7, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Autumn 1974.

H. G. Wells, who often used the future as a safe vantage point from which to comment on the present, once said that an optimist is someone who is not sure what is going to happen to the world. Anyone who writes about the future would seem to be an optimist in assuming that there will be commentators. We, however, tend to be divided: one of us is an optimist, the other pessimistically certain that the scenario of the future includes Malthusian tragedy, ecological disaster, and worse—that we have lost the battle of Armageddon without an opportunity to enlist. Since we agree on the probability that neither Millennium nor The End will occur in the twenty-first century, and that in any event it is best to keep busy while waiting for the next act, we seize gratefully on deJouvenel’s notion that the future is the only thing we can do anything about. We choose to occupy ourselves designing community colleges that might be graceful places for the students of the future: colleges that might affect the shape of that future if they could be created.

fifty years ahead

Our vantage point is the year 2020, a half century from the start of the present decade. We choose 2020 because it allows us the mild jest of our title, because we assume 2020 will be more of a piece with 1974 than with 2120, and because we are not agreed that man will observe the year 2120.

By the year 2000 many of today's college freshmen will be in their forties, and by 2020 they will be approaching maturity, dominant positions in society-and retirement. By the year 2000 most of us now in positions of influence will be elder statesmen, aging tyrants, writers of memoirs, or consultants telling it like it was. By 2020, most of us will be ancestors, and the present will seem as remote as the Civil War seemed to our fathers and mothers in 1920.

We are required to assume that World War III, or a nuclear holocaust of worldwide size, will not have occurred by 2020, although there will have been nuclear blackmail by smaller powers and detonations of small bombs, some homemade, as part of the efforts of revolutionary groups. We assume further that the energy crisis will be accepted as a permanent condition and that man will have adapted, as history encourages us to believe he always has, to the changed conditions-and found new sources of energy, or reorganized his style of life so as to consume less energy, or both. The population of the world will continue to grow, the progeny of those already on earth and the residues of cultural forces that will not have disappeared by 2020; but the rate of growth will have slowed considerably as a result of more sensible population management, or as a result of the worldwide famines predicted for the second half of the twentieth century. The precise impact of the new technology of 2020 is as difficult for us to imagine today as it would have been for someone in 1874 to predict 1924. But it seems safe to say that people will live longer, that mass communication, whether nuclear or battery powered, will have further shrunk the apparent world. It may be as difficult to travel in 2020 as it was in the 1870s with private automobiles as rare as private airplanes are today, with justification and permission required to use public transport, but communication technology will further expand our sense of global commonality.

By 2020, the evidence of television's success in teaching skills formerly learned in schools and colleges will be accepted by all but a dwindling number of academic holdouts, who will continue to search for statistical flaws in the evidence in the hope that "no significant difference" will still be found. International histories of the rise of the media to their positions of centrality will cite Sesame Street as an early, important attempt to design an instructional program that emerged from the nature and the powers of the medium itself and the way viewers related to it, rather than letting the camera record and the cable transmit replicas of the work done in conventional schools. By 2020 the home console will teach children to read, write, calculate, and speak other languages without the intervention of parents or live teachers. But parents and live teachers are no longer threatened with technological obsolescence, since research has uncovered disturbing side effects when children are allowed to spend too much time absorbed in learning alone, and parents and teachers have been assigned learning roles once more; they talk with children and students and encourage them to talk with each other.

Communication satellites and other advances have made it possible to have in each home in the industrialized countries, and in community centers elsewhere, programs from International University, a consortium of the National Media Universities of the world. The natural successor to one-way cable television will be interactive television instruction, in wide use. Videotaped courses, audio cassettes for language instruction, and multimediated courses are widely available for home study.

By 2020 the schools and colleges, then, no longer enjoy a monopoly on schooling; and they have also been forced to relinquish some of their powers to give credentials, to certify and license, and thus to be the universal access route to places of power in the larger society. Credit by examination, the evaluation of competence, however earned, the external degree- tentative explorations in 1974-will be institutionalized by 2020 in the form of national and regional agencies equipped to evaluate, to judge competence, and to certify without reference to formal schools and colleges. Indeed, in 2020 there are laws forbidding questions about details of schooling as part of the process of determining fitness or ability to serve or to work.

We believe that our younger community college faculty, now looking forward to tenure and retirement as community college deans and presidents, are anxiously wondering, Will there be community colleges in 2020? Be comforted: Yes. Many of the buildings raised for community colleges in the past decade will still be lively emporia of learning. They will serve as libraries, storing and distributing the new learning materials; as centers housing specialized and expensive apparatus for learning such as theatres, galleries, computers, laboratories, lecture halls and meeting rooms; as cloisters, with carrels, offices, and gardens set aside for contemplation, rumination, and individual and group reflection. There will be mentors, men and women of talent and accomplishment available for advice, for discussion, leadership, and lectures when groups ask for these. And there will be classes, courses, and curricula resembling those of 1974, available to the large number of people in every community who continue to prefer such instruction to that available in media form, or as an adjunct to media instruction.

mission

These activities and roles, however important they will be to those whose lives they touch, will not define the central mission of the community college in 2020. We shall use as our text for the discovery of that objective Malcolm Cowley's brooding and bitter description, in Exile's Return, of the function of the college as he experienced it in 1916:

Looking backward, I feel that our whole training was involuntarily directed toward destroying whatever roots we had in the soil, toward eradicating our local and regional peculiarities, toward making us homeless citizens of the world ... In college the process of deracination went on remorselessly. We were not being trained for an industry or profession essential to the common life; instead we were being exhorted to enter the international republic of learning, whose traditions are those of Athens, Florence, Paris, Berlin, and Oxford [pp. 27, 29].

"The ideal university," Cowley maintains, "is regarded as having no regional or economic ties.... It exists in a town as if by accident, its real existence being in the immaterial world of scholarship."

Note, first, that the Florence and Oxford of the mind have no hovels, sewers, granaries, plagues, or courts that need the attention and time of the citizen of the international republic of learning; his citizenship implies no obligation to the world community, no enlistment in the struggle for world order; it entitles him to withdrawal and contemplation, or to service in one of the ancient and aristocratic professions. Second, the international republic does not encourage multiple citizenships and plural loyalties, it is not an enlargement of the love of one's neighbors to neighbors everywhere; it is, rather, a repudiation of old friends and their ways, a renunciation of earlier creeds and places and commitments. The citizen of this world must root out his native speech and folkways; he becomes, finally, if Cowley was right, rootless, deracinated, homeless. The university, like the factory-and organized much like it-becomes one of the forces in modern society making for anomie and alienation in a world of strangers.

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 learnings, will emerge from its commitments to the organizing and balancing themes of Community and Cosmopolis.

collegia

We begin by reminding ourselves that the deliberate creation of communities, which has preoccupied monks as well as hippies, celibate Shakers as well as sexual experimenters, fanatics and faddists as well as philosophers, has led to Dystopia rather than Utopia more often than not; Frankenstein's creation may be a monster. Yet the suicide of which Durkheim wrote, and the loneliness of postmodern man, are monstrous too; we must love one another, wrote Auden, or die. "Delivery systems" will make it possible for the men and women of 2020 to learn calculus and computer logic without leaving their living rooms or carrels; but they cannot as easily satisfy their hunger for intimacy, for collaboration, for community. Thus we suggest that the community college of 2020 will add to the missions it supports in 1974, and those we have listed earlier, a responsibility for creating communities of scholars. We propose that the shaping vision of 2020 will not be the Multiversity, or the Idea of University, but the idea of a College, the medieval collegium refurnished and restored. "The types of collegia," wrote Althusius in 1603, "varying according to the circumstances of persons, crafts and functions."

Today there are collegia of bakers, tailors, builders, merchants, coiners of money, as well as philosophers, theologians, government officials, and others that every city needs for the proper functioning of its social life. Some of these collegia are ecclesiastical and sacred, instituted for the sake of divine things; others are secular and profane, instituted for the sake of human things. The first are collegia of theologians and philosophers. The second are collegia of magistrates and judges, and of various craftsmen, merchants, and rural folk [Carney, 1964, pp. 32-33].

Our proposal is precisely that of Althusius brought four centuries ahead; our community college will be a community of collegia varied "according to the circumstances of persons, crafts, and functions," dispersed in space, diverse in pedagogy, learning styles, and modes of governance, sharing resources and certain communal responsibilities, including, hopefully, a responsibility to Cosmopolis.

We must leave for later discussion, well before 2020, such questions as whether a community of collegia will cost more to operate than the present community college, whether it is possible to administer them without overlooking a collegium or two, whether a collegium becomes a prison or a ghetto, who is teacher and who student, and the rest-questions appropriate to our own time as well.

The collegial ideal we propose should be responsive to the needs and the possibilities afforded by a postindustrial society, one that has created the economic and political structures needed to satisfy the material wants of its citizens. Such a society can afford to turn its attention to creating institutions that might recognize and minister to those needs ignored or created by industrialization. Although the rankings of rich and poor, industrialized and underdeveloped, will have changed substantially by 2020, there will continue to be underdeveloped nations. The community colleges of those countries will closely resemble those common in the United States in the period 1950-1970, since the organization of teaching and learning in such institutions mirrors and prepares for life and work in an industrializing society: their routines and disciplines insist that the work ethic and its corollaries be the basic of education for all.

Thus, collegial organization will not be a universal feature of those institutions of the world banded together in World Community College. They will be committed to providing in appropriate ways community-based "development education." Such education rests on the proposition that all societies contain individuals and subcultures that are "underdeveloped": possessors of high and unique cultures, perhaps, but lacking in the skills and mind set necessary for functioning in modern and postmodern societies. World Community College will be pledged to assist such individuals and groups and to provide appropriate education in literacy, citizenship in the larger culture and the world of work.

community and cosmopolis

World Community College will activate its commitment to Cosmopolis by linking far-flung community colleges together into a single worldwide college, a federation whose members share information and resources, exchange teachers and consultants, and open their doors to students from any nation and community in the network.

In earlier, simpler times, the boundaries of "community" were geographically natural, linguistically more or less distinct, economically realistic, and socially and religiously coherent and supportive. Such "natural" communities have been destroyed in much of the industrial world by the forces of science and technology and by the new forms of social and cultural organization they have generated, including, we would argue, the university and the curriculum Cowley describes. The curriculum enlarged the vision and created for its acolytes a sense of community with learners and scholars of other ages and places; the novice felt like Stephen Dedalus, bearing his chalice safely through a throng of foes. And with the gain came a loss, hardly realized at first, a growing sense of being cut off from the renewing springs of some remembered life and time.

We name the loss community, and we propose that the college of 2020 will devote itself, in countries like ours, to learning and neighborliness. We hope, however, that in 2020, like concentric layers of an onion, our consciousness of community will grow from our front yard through streets, neighborhoods, villages, townships, counties, states, nations, continents, the globe, and now beyond, each layer of locale, each layer of consciousness yielding something of its strength to our purposes as educators. 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.

We have already sensed the need for new structures and substructures to counteract the destructive effects of bigness, rush, cost-effectiveness, and mass communication and their abrasive effects on our root-consciousness. We can build small colleges within the big ones, clustered and sheltered around themes and value systems which unify and yet do not isolate groups of teachers and learners. We have seen colleges move out in the past few years into new places, into storefronts, clinics, jails, marketplaces, child care centers, industries, and parks. We have found that we can bring the college where the learners are, leaving the cloister, without necessarily destroying the values of the campus enclave and its hoard of books, microscopes, typewriters, projectors, and volleyballs.

In particular, we have rediscovered what the privileged, and even hoboes, have known for centuries-that learning can take place in far-off lands, or even in the process of getting there. The neighborhood has broadened to include Europe, the Far East, Africa, Asia. There is nothing essentially new in this except the broadening of the base of participation.

We have also learned that informal associations, consortia not only of like but of apparently unlike institutions, can form new "colleges" which are defined by common goals and interests and not by campus roadways. We have glimpsed the idea that a federation of colleges and other educating agencies can create a de facto World Community College if only the stereotypes of what constitutes a "real" college can be overcome. A college can be an idea as well as a place-or instead of being a place to which the learner-supplicant comes. But, as Lincoln said, as our case is new, so must we think anew. "The occasion is piled high with difficulty."

Once we open our minds to the possibility of a community-of-the-world, provided we have a firm home base in the strength of local community, we can apply the same concepts which have made the local community college so vital and successful- the notion that there are no sacred precincts of learning, that there is no one way to learn, even from books and lectures. We have rediscovered the educating potentials of work, of service, of learning in settings where the learning is used and needed and exhibited, of restructuring our approaches to suit the structures of learning tasks. To move out into the World from this base is only an enlargement of consciousness, the realization that the only limits to expansion of our missions and metiers are in our fears of the practical difficulties.

the world in your backyard

The practical difficulties which really hamper the creation of new collegia and new approaches to world community are those which are always with us, and which are not much helped by the technologies: the problems in our own houses and neighborhoods. In the face of grandiose dreams and potentials, it seems hard to face up to our failures in solving the "little" problems among people. Almost fifty years ago, John Dewey brought us down to earth on that thought.

It is said, and said truly, that for the world's peace it is necessary that we understand the peoples of foreign lands. How well do we understand, I wonder, our next door neighbors? It has also been said that if a man love not his fellow man whom he has seen, he cannot love the God whom he has not seen. The chances of regard for distant peoples being effective as long as there is no close neighborhood experience to bring with it insight and understanding of neighbors do not seem better.... Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighbor community [1927, p. 213].

It is most fruitful to search for the wellsprings of community where they come forth naturally, to rediscover and redefine what is already there, and at the same time to reinvigorate and nourish it. There is no need to look far, because human community survives neglect, wars, famines, and the indifference of the highly educated. The resurging interest in a return to community life could lead to a new isolationism, a parochial view. No one who has sensed the size of the total human community and its common stake can ever forget that it is there, and no one who has looked at the world as the astronauts have shown it to us can ever again believe that communities can find their salvation alone within themselves. Hence the community college at its best needs to balance the ever-renewing strength of our "own" communities with the fact of the true community of mankind.

In short, if we yield too easily to a grand concern with the Whole World, without putting down our roots into the community closest to home, we may cut ourselves off from the reality of the challenge on our own street and think we have "solved" some great problems of Humankind. We must not forget, in our enthusiasm for thinking of our stage of enterprise as the whole great globe, that much of the globe is still carved into large and small baronies, with high walls, within which millions still live in fear and physical hunger. An American who has not traveled widely abroad may overlook the simple fact that he can travel from New York to San Francisco without ever passing a border at which his identity must be proved or challenged-assuming he keeps out of trouble with the law. There are still few areas of the planet where one can travel for three thousand miles in one direction without producing passports, without registering at every hotel with the local police. But there may still be neighborhoods in America where conditions are as oppressive as in any underdeveloped country in the world.

We need not travel to Africa or Asia to find conditions and ways of life quite different from those in the neighborhoods where the typical reader of this article may live. Again, as Dewey said, good neighborliness begins at home, and one of the missions of World Community College is to help the learner find the world in his own neighborhood, town, or county.

The image we have of the true World Community College is that it is both a College of the World Community and a Community College of the World. Its roots lie close at hand, with the overpowering need to understand-and perhaps, of necessity, to love-our own communities and to rebuild and strengthen our sense of community as an antidote to the deracination of the liberal education idea in vacuum. On such a ground, and probably only on such a ground, can a true sense of world community be built. To paraphrase John Dewey, if we cannot save our own community and rebuild it, how can we save and rebuild the world?

It is an old, trite saying that an educated man knows something about everything and everything about something. The World Community College of the next century-and we hope we don't have to wait so long!-may aim at the ideal of knowing something about every community of the world and everything about its own. The hardest target of all may be to rebuild not only a sense of community but the reality of community, in a world which has perfected the means of our disorientation and fractionation. Alone in our houses, we can feel smugly in touch with the whole world through the mass media, or through books, and the miracle of modern transportation makes it cheaper for a New Yorker to fly to London or Lisbon than to Los Angeles. To travel widely, to live in the great world of the accessible continents, is perhaps easier now than it ever was or ever will be again. The object of the great liberal tradition in education was to free men from parochialism, and we have made a good stab at that. There is among a small minority a true international community of thinkers, scholars, and creative talents. But unless this sense of world community is firmly based in the parish, the local community, it is exploitative, skimming off the cream of the best everywhere while building much less than the best where we live our daily lives.

In his inaugural address, Harvard's Charles William Eliot referred to the major struggle of his time between the proponents of the liberal arts and the practical sciences. In his then radical view, there was no choice: "We shall have them both, and at their best." The choice now is not whether to clean up our own backyards or save the world from ecological and other forms of destruction: we must save them both, because neither can survive without the other. It is to this bipolar, straddling, tension-producing, challenging task that World Community College must be dedicated.