Returning to the Topic -- The Idealism of Community College

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Responding to a late 20th century ideal of universal access to higher education for all Americans, especially those without the financial means or academic credentials to compete for established four-year universities, the vision of community colleges in the United States promised open access for all community residents to accredited low-costs colleges with close ties to both business and secondary education. After World War II, the Truman Commission in 1947 argued for principles of democracy and expansion of universal higher education, positioned these institutions not only opportunity to higher education merely to economic improvement, but even a fundamental call for a liberalized citizenry:
American colleges and universities must envision a much larger role for higher education in the national life. They can no longer consider themselves merely the institute for producing an intellectual elite; they must become the means by which every citizen, youth, and adult is enabled to encourage to carry has education, formal and informal, as far as his native capacities permit.

This conception is the inevitable consequence of the democratic faith; universal education is indispensable to the full and liberal realization of the democratic ideal. No society can long remain free unless where ignorance prevails…. Education that liberates and ennobles must be made equally available to all. Justice to the individual demands this; the safety and progress of the Nation depend upon it America cannot afford to let any of its potential human resources go undiscovered and undeveloped. (President’s Commission on Higher Education 101)
These very idealistic politics include both realistic and critical calls for personal potential and human dignity. This quest of “potential human resources” immediately positions otherwise disadvantaged students with promise, where the community expects not only to find a college where pedagogy and other training to “liberate” community members in a larger national discourse. On the other hand, the mission of community colleges can overlook the “individual demands” for liberal and democratic ideals, but instead may reinforce the economic, intellectual, and social environments. This is especially a possible when founders, administrators, and faculty of the college have historically trained and raised from dominant culture– white, Protestant, masculinist, middle class – and thus they are unprepared to understand fundamental lifeworld of multicultural students, namely Black and Latinx, working class and poverty class families.

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