Community Colleges Are a Uniquely American Contribution to Higher Education
James Dean…Ross Perot…Venus Williams…Annette Benning…Nolan Ryan…Tipper Gore…Morgan Freeman…Tom Petty...Robin Williams...Rosie Perez…Dustin Hoffman…Kweisi Mfume…Calvin Klein…Sam Shepard…Rita Mae Brown…Clint Eastwood…Roger Clemens…Diane Keaton…Jackie Robinson…Connecting the dots between these names might not be quite as difficult as it appears at first glance. The Six-Degrees-of-Separation factor in this case is the educational opportunities provided by the nation’s community college system: every person on this seemingly incongruous list attended a community college, from Garland Junior College in Massachusetts (Tipper Gore) to Texarkana College in Texas (Ross Perot) to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City (Calvin Klein) to Palm Beach Community College in Florida (Venus Williams) to Baltimore City Community College in Maryland (Kweisi Mfume) to our own Los Angeles County’s Pasadena City College (Jackie Robinson), Los Angeles City College (Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, and Rosie Perez) and, finally, Santa Monica College (James Dean and Dustin Hoffman). “I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have become an actor,” stated Dustin Hoffman in 1999 if the two-time Academy Award-winner hadn’t signed up for theater classes at SMC. His teacher, Mary Jean Sutcliff, “just seemed to understand that a door was opened for me and that I was very passionate about it.” A high-school dropout, Kweisi Mfume, hung out with “hoodlums, slickers and wannabes” until, inspired by the death of his mother, he earned his GED and then enrolled at Baltimore City Community College. Mfume went on to earn a Master’s Degree at John Hopkins University, become a community activist, Baltimore City Councilman and Congressman. In 1995, Kweisi Mfume was asked to lead the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a position he holds to this day. “I never cease to wonder at how education freed me,” wrote Mfume in his 1996 autobiography,
No Free Ride: From the Mean Streets to the Mainstream.
America’s community colleges are celebrating a centennial: in 1901 the first such institution in the nation was established: Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Illinois. 1920 saw the founding of the American Association of Junior Colleges, an advocacy organization now representing some 1,100 community colleges throughout the United States. Santa Monica College was established in 1929 when 153 students enrolled for classes at the College’s “campus” which at that time was housed within a facility at Santa Monica High School. The present site on Pico Boulevard opened in 1952; there are currently over 31,000 students attending the College. The California Master Plan for Higher Education, devised and established by Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown in 1960, remains one of the signal achievements of educational planning in the history of the world. By dividing the higher institutions of learning into three tiers—the UC’s, the State Universities, and the community colleges—and making the system easily affordable to the citizens of the State, Governor Brown created a plan that has continually placed California at the leading edge of higher education. Santa Monica College has certainly been a vital member of this network—the College has routinely been the number one transfer school into the UC system and also funnels thousands of students into the State Universities each year. “Santa Monica College is one of the flagship campuses of the whole two-year college movement,” stated California State Librarian Kevin Starr at the groundbreaking ceremony for SMC’s new library on October 9, 2001. “This is where the ideal of a community college was formed and formulated in a very powerful way.”
What is that ideal? “Santa Monica College educates the whole person,” says Starr, elucidating the role SMC has historically played in both defining and achieving that ideal. “It’s one thing to be a sort of ‘great intellectual,’ say profound things, et cetera, and be absolutely oblivious to the practical necessities of life. On the other hand, it’s an equally bad situation to be so totally practical that you lack a sense of the speculative dimensions of life, the life of the imagination, the life of the spirit, the finer landscapes of human culture. The two-year community college program—and Santa Monica College, in particular—has stood for the continuity of knowledge. That knowledge, as we human beings encounter it, represents a continuity from the practical to the speculative and back again. It’s a circle. You can’t divide one from the other. That ideal of thinking well and doing well—the idea of understanding and doing as part of the same act is at the core of this institution. I think that’s extraordinarily important and represents a great high civic and educational ideal.”
The community college is also the place where anyone can rejuvenate their academic career: “These are the classrooms that give the student adrift a second chance,” says Speaker of the California Assembly, Bob Hertzberg. “These classrooms give the single mother the ability to return to meaningful work and the laid off worker the high tech retraining he needs to get a job.” Santa Monica College President Dr. Piedad Robertson agrees with Speaker Hertzberg’s comments: “We serve not only the high school graduates,” she says, “but also the twenty-seven-year-olds, the returning students, the welfare recipients, the ones who simply say, ‘Now it’s my time.’ It is the role of the community college to serve everyone.” The academic achievements of community college students should never be underestimated, however: students transferring from SMC have continued their studies at such prestigious universities as Smith College, New York University, Stanford University, UCLA, and USC, just to cite a few. And while the terms ‘vocational schools,’ ‘technical institutes,’ and even ‘junior colleges’ have unfairly carried connotations of a second-class education, learning a skill, mastering a craft, and honing an art are things that a good two-year college can provide to any student willing to learn.
“Community colleges all over the nation are gaining in importance because they are affordable and they offer training in a wide variety of areas,” says Fran Pavley, a former educator with eighteen years experience teaching at the middle school level and the current Assemblywoman for the 41st District that encompasses Santa Monica and the West Los Angeles area. Speaker Hertzberg concurs with his colleaugue: “We need to strengthen our community colleges because—for Californians of all ages—they are the true classrooms of the new economy.” Such skills as nursing, fire technology, emergency management, dental hygiene, administration of justice, automotive technology, cosmetology, medical transcription, electronics engineering technology, hotel management, environmental safety and health, and ophthalmic technology have all provided excellent careers for people as well as vital services that make our community a viable place to live. The State Librarian has his own personal story to illustrate this point: “My daughter Jessica is a graduate of the community college system,” Kevin Starr told his audience at the groundbreaking ceremony for SMC’s new library. Jessica Starr graduated from the Statler Hotel and Restaurant Program at City College of San Francisco, went on to open a successful café in San Francisco’s North Beach and is currently the manager of a yacht marina in New York.
“I always was just very grateful to the faculty and to the experience that she had at that program so that Jessica could move into what she wanted to do with her life.”
“What she wanted to do with her life.” Perhaps that’s the simplest way of putting it. The role of the community college is to help students do what they want with their lives. And that’s what the 108 community colleges in the State of California and the 1,100 community colleges nationwide are doing. From Berkshire Community College in Massachusetts to Paducah Community College in Kentucky to Sitting Bull College in North Dakota to Mercy College of Health Sciences in Iowa to Clackamas Community College in Oregon to Laredo Community College in Texas to Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia to Prince William Sound Community College in Alaska to our own Santa Monica College here near the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean, that’s what we do best, serve the community, serve the student, serve you.
Kevin Starr, California state librarian and author:
excerpts from Santa Monica College Library Expansion Groundbreaking Ceremony Address
SMC AS A FLAGSHIP CAMPUS.
“Santa Monica College is—and you share this with Pasadena and Santa Rosa [community colleges]—the flagship campus of the whole two-year college movement. What Santa Monica College pioneered, way back before World War II, has become part of the California Master Plan. And historically, [here] is where the ideal of a community college—the two-year college, the continuity between speculative and practical education—[here] is where that great ideal was formulated in a very powerful way.”
SMC AS SAINT AUGUSTINE’S COLLEGE.
“I remember when I went to Catholic schools as a boy, the story of St. Monica—after whom Santa Monica is named—who had a playboy son, Augustine, who just wouldn’t behave himself, wouldn’t go to school, was running around in a chariot, and hangin’ out with all sorts of disreputable people. And she kept saying, ‘Come on, Augustine. Get your act together.’ And of course, he did—and became a great theologian and writer. So I, also, am very moved by the model of St. Monica as a mother and all those students who have come here to Santa Monica College over the years as ‘Augustines’ and
got
their acts together.”
THE LIBRARY OF CALIFORNIA.
“I was asked by a reporter from the student newspaper, ‘Well, why are you here? Why did you come here?’ Of course, I have many, many reasons—why I am here. [One reason] is the idea of the ‘Library of California’—legislation passed by the State, which allows us to grant Federal and State monies for any of our 8,000 public and private libraries in the state.”
LIBRARIES AND CIVILIZATION.
“It’s a great pleasure as State Librarian—this is one of the pleasures of this job—to dedicate libraries, because libraries are new beginnings [and] simultaneously one of the most ancient institutions of our human civilization. Lewis Mumford, the historian of cities, tells us you go back to the earliest cities, 5,000 years ago, and there was something like a library there, something like an archive, and in fact, the early beginnings of civilization resembled the library—that we inventory human capacity, we arrange, we remember, we heal through knowledge.”
SMC AS A WORLD OF LEARNING AND DOING.
“Well, the two-year community college program—and Santa Monica College, in particular—has stood for the continuity of knowledge. That knowledge, as we human beings encounter, represents a continuity from the practical to the speculative and back again. It’s a circle. You can’t divide one from the other. That ideal of
thinking
well and
doing
well that is in our Western civilization from the time of the ancient Greeks, that is in our Asian civilization from the time of Confucius—even older than that—the idea of
understanding
and
doing
as part of the
same
act is at the core of this institution. We do in order to learn and we learn in order to do.”
COMMUNITY COLLEGES REFLECT THE AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT.
“The great American writer and philosopher William James, in his book
Pragmatism, in fact, says that we Americans temperamentally really don’t believe in something unless it works. We have that side to us. William James emphasizes this side, this temperament. Robert Frost, one of our great poets, emphasizes that he never really understood what a poem would be until he started to try and write it. He found the poem he wanted in trying to write the poem.”
KEEPING KNOWLEDGE WHOLE.
“We make—John Donne, the 17th-century poet, said in one of his poems—[we] make this ‘room an everywhere.’ Well this college, this library,
is
an everywhere. It’s not just Santa Monica, it’s not just California, it’s not just the United States. It’s the world; it’s the whole human dimension, adventure, that comes here. We librarians have
insisted
upon that, of keeping knowledge whole, just as you in the community college movement have kept knowledge whole. We insist on
all
forms of knowledge, from books to digital, from print to ephemera—the whole continuity of information—will be in this library. And we like to think, also, that our libraries are fun.”