Community Colleges as Commons

Community colleges are rooted in a geographic context of service to a community. They have been the resource for local economic development and a grassroots based education and class revolution. In relatively quiet and modest ways, community colleges have altered the landscape of access to higher education and access to the skills one needs to be successful. The community college experience is about raising the quality of life for local community members and the opening of possibility. In this way, community colleges have fulfilled a need for a commons where ideas and knowledge is transferred and exchanged where ownership is not by the student, or faculty, or administration, but by the community.

 

The community college as commons, is the place where research and data is collected on community needs, and the place where the resulting action or preparation can take place. The same way fishing communities have used the collected knowledge of shared maps to better traverse costal waters that they all share, and through the sharing of plotted maps in a kind of commerce, of building a sense of identity and belonging, so too have community colleges shaped identity and diversity within regions.

 

The stereotypical view of community colleges as purely job retraining sites for a nation’s blue collar needs, denies a much more complex narrative, one that includes the local industry needs, but also includes the exchange of information that spawns innovation and curiosity. It includes the micro-economies that are neglected by larger metrics, and the diverse economies that impact quality of life in more humanistic terms than a purely capitalist reading. We have to discover ways to help communities re-discover their investment in the commons and the possibilities engendered there, and re-engineer the metrics in ways that can demonstrate the greater impact community colleges have on their regions.

 

From Kevin St. Martin’s “Disrupting Enclosure in New England Fisheries”

 

The fishing commons of New England is represented by a dominant neoclassical discourse of fisheries as a site of potential tragedy only redeemable through a movement toward enclosure and privatization of access to fisheries resources. While this particular narrative of the commons (in fisheries and elsewhere) has been roundly criticized and qualified, it remains hegemonic in New England and is increasingly used to represent fisheries throughout the world. The pervasiveness of this representation is due not only to its enticing promise of delivering stability and environmental sustainability but also to the impossibility of any alternative. This and other representations of the commons relegate economic difference to an epoch before (or beyond) the present of the capitalist commons.

 

St. Martin, K. 2005. “Disrupting Enclosure in New England Fisheries,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16(1): 63-80.