How have we failed? a conversation about survival with community college leaders (Guest Interview)
I used to present at a lot of academic conferences. Those days are probably over, which means that the relationships built with a nametag lanyard around my neck are even more precious. I recently hosted a Zoom reunion for community college leaders in the Leader’s Alliance of the National Council for Science and the Environment. It was cocktail hour in a few of the time zones involved, which included Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and Hawaiʻi, and the conversation took an interesting turn when I asked this group with over a hundred years of teaching experience (combined), “How is all of this — the pandemic, the social unrest and the fake news, climate change and our failure to respond, systemic racism and the possible collapse of civilization — a failure of our education system, and particularly of the community colleges?”
We refilled our glasses with water, wine, beer, or blue Gatorade, and I pushed the record button. This is the short version of the transcript, which also became a short essay featured in the NCSE newsletter, “The Connection”. (You can read the essay here.) The Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education study and the 22 interviews in the field notes blog is all about this kind of conversation…as well as the actions and decisions that follow.
What do we have to learn from what has gone wrong? I hope that this transcript can stimulate further “conversations of consequence” as colleges begin to hack their budgets and programs. It’s going to be difficult, for sure, but what if community colleges could become the pivot point for an education aligned with nature…and survival?
Nancy Lee Wood (NLW) teaches sustainability at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts: “It’s a failure of the human species to have left the understanding that humankind is part of nature and we are subject to the vicissitudes of nature. We use nature when it’s convenient, but we don’t consider ourselves to be part of nature. And that has infiltrated all of education. We think we have control of nature, but as we are seeing with the pandemic, and seeing with climate change, who actually has control? It’s nature! And we aren’t recognizing that because we’ve been busy trying to control it, thinking that we are separate from it. We are now going through a very, very rude awakening.
Maria Boccalandro (MB) is an administrator in the Dallas Community College District:
“We’ve forgotten how to be humans. Everything is so categorized and we’ve become so specialized, we’ve forgotten things we learned in kindergarten. That poem came back to me: you know, how we should hold hands, take the nap when you are getting grumpy — we are sent to school to be civilized and to be introduced to essential machinery of human society. Early on in our lives we are sent out of the home into the world and sent to school, and we have no choice on this because society judges you, it’s so important to be educated that we must go. It’s the law.
Robert “Bob” Franco (BF) is an administrator at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu:
“The trouble I’m feeling is for 25 years we’ve been trying to teach, through Service-Learning and Campus Compact and Corporation for National Service, how to teach students to be more responsible to others and more self-disciplined. I’ve always tried to follow Ehrlich’s definition of moral and civic responsibility” (which he pasted for us into the chat box):
A morally and civically responsible individual recognizes himself or herself as a member of a larger social fabric and therefore considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own; such a person is willing to see the moral and civic dimensions of issues, to make informed moral and civic judgments, and to take action when appropriate. Ehrlich, 2000.
Stephen Summers (SS) is an administrator at Seminole State College in Florida:
“What keeps jumping out to me, where we’ve failed, is this constant false equivalence that comes up in conversations or the treatment of a topic or dealing with an issue, we want everyone to feel like their opinion matters and they can experess that, but we’ve failed to help students know which ones you really need to listen to. You just don’t know how to sift through information accurately and to weigh what you’re hearing, from here vs. here. And that’s an educational failure. That’s something we have got to do better at. I see that constantly.
Robert Rak (RR) teaches ecology and wastewater technologies at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts: “It’s tough for people. Nowadays fact is equivalent to opinion and we don’t have the difference. Someone can say ‘I read it so it must be true’.”
NLW: “There is an enormous degree of cooperation in nature. We as a species have decided that we are above and beyond nature. We have decided we have nothing to do with nature unless it suits our purposes. Because we have removed ourselves so thoroughly from nature we have removed ourselves from the possibility of connecting with each other in ways that coincide with our survival in nature.
The bottom line is that we are not going to get through what we need to get through if we don’t get down to ecological foundations again. We’ve lost 3 trillion trees. That’s T with a trillion. 3 trillion trees. We’ve paved over wetlands, we’ve paved over everything, we are disrupting everything with our agriculture, we’ve disrupted the weather patterns. We don’t respect soil.
We don’t understand that our real wealth is not in the bank, it’s in soil. And we are so disconnected from that concept that to even say that sounds lunatic for a lot of people. That’s how we have failed in what we educate.
We never talk about how our wellbeing is fundamentally connected to the earth because we’ve removed ourselves from it. It’s only here for our exploitation. And that’s why we can do this deforestation and kill off species, including doing some of the meanest things you can imagine to each other.
RR “At one point in our development we were dependent on each other. We had to work as a group to survive. And people we needed each other and we had to work with nature because we didn’t have our ability to destroy it yet. So we were working more together but now as we started getting more independent we didn’t need to be together so we started thinking ‘ hey, I can do what I want and you can do what you want.’ And now we are each in our own bubble.
BF “If we can do this to nature we can do this to each other. That makes the link to Black Lives Matter and how we have categorized people for exploitative reasons. Race was created as a category to subjugate. It then becomes something that you can do anything to people of other races, just as you can exploit nature.
I hadn’t thought about that before, how our disconnection from nature results in a belief that we can do anything to others.
As a community college person I’ve been taught to make connections in an anthropological perspective to the meaning of work. In our campuses we get more and more honed in to Career and Technical Education fields and workforce, what are economic advisers telling us about jobs, and how to prepare students for the “21st Century workforce”. How long have we heard that thing! We’re in the 3rd decade of it and they are still talking about that!
NLW. “How about preparing students to live on this planet? That’s what we need to be doing.”
BF. “We are going to have to rethink what meaningful work and gainful employment is, and I don’t think we’ve done that yet. It was tech prep in the 90s, then school to work in the 2000s, all that shaping of CC teaching, it’s helpful but it’s not preparing students for the world they are going to need to create for themselves. The real careers of the future are around these issues and water management.
MB “I’m remembering a conversation I had with my father in the late 70s, when I started studying urban planning. He was a civil engineer, he went to MIT. Instead of photography in our house we had these picures of incredible turnpikes he had designed. As a kid I would look at them. One he had named the octopus, one was the centipede, the spider. It was a master of engineering.
When I started studying urban planning I said ‘dad all those things you’ve put in there have broken the cities into little pieces and people can’t get from one place to another’. And he said ‘Maria, we first have to be Developed, and then we can take care of nature’. I said I don’t think so dad…
I must have been 22, and he was 60.
We are at a point where the next generation is asking those questions. As educators we have to listen, and relearn, and incorporate things that are uncomfortable for us. Because we have been formed — or deformed —to be very specific.
BF “I think engineering people pride themselves on problem-solving but they are solving the wrong problem. It’s considered okay if lower income communities have disadvantages because there’s some sense of the greater good for the greater number of people. If that’s the case then some groups will be disadvantaged and that’s considered okay. But those disadvantaged groups were never at the table when those conversations were being had about the freeway, or they were brought in to the discussion so late it was just a token ‘please come hear what we are going to do to you’ kind of report. I keep coming back to where environment and engineering are impacting racial injustice.
NLW “The communities are only an extension of nature. We leave nature out all the time. How could we develop urban areas that are truly in tune with natural elements. The first thing we do is tear down everything natural, and then build up something and say ‘we’ll plant a tree here and there” when in fact we’ve destroyed trees that have been there for a hundred or two hundred years, that are doing enormous work in terms of carbon dioxide drawdown, all of the life in the soil, all of the weather elements that are connected to greenery, this is what we are destroying!
KH (myself) “I’m thinking about how the community colleges grew out of the original GI Bill and how they were intentionally created, or expanded, to accommodate returning soldiers after WWII and then Vietnam. There are things we’ve either taught, or failed to teach, to this bigger swath of population.
Take this separation from nature. We can look at that as something we have taught. We taught students to be separate from nature. Or we can look at it as something that we failed to teach. It’s both, right? Something we taught and something we failed to teach.
What we’ve really done is taught millions more people to become successful consumers, that was the upward mobility mission with 21st century jobs. We wanted these students to develop first, get good jobs first, be economically stable, and somehow then we thought they could learn to care for nature. We are so in love with ourselves that we forgot to teach regard for the non-human. How did this happen?
RR: “Somewhere we started teaching that technology is the end all, and so we forgot some basic things. Just taking care of the soil, basic, low-tech things like that. We can fight the climate crisis by taking care of the soil. We don’t have to build machines that take carbon out of the air, we’ve got trees that do that!
MB: “I agree, it’s interesting how all the solutions are now about mimicking nature, like fractals! That’s nature, one pattern that repeats and repeats. We have really over-complicated things. Coming from Latin America, where institutions are really weak, let me tell you that if you think the government is going to solve poverty, or mental illness, or the water, well good luck with that! We have to do that. We institutionalize everything. It’s like ‘it’s the schools fault.’ If the kids have attention deficit disorder, we put a tag on it. The sick are institutionalized. The elderly are institutionalized. But a person with Downs’ syndrome in a classroom does better! The elderly mixed with a baby is better ! We think we are god or something, creating an institution to solve every problem but that departametnaliza — putting everything in departments, we lose contact. We think we pay taxes so someone else will have to deal with the glitches.
BF: “When you ask about how higher ed became this way, it became this way because of taxation. If you can bring in state revenues the colleges get more money to do what they do. Most local school districts are funded out of the local tax base. Low income communities are not going to provide as much tax to the local school system. But a high-tech community, say San Francisco, their children are going to be going to a better shool. This one policy determines how kids are going through schools!
This tax-based policy making goes back to the 80s, the Reagan administration and the war on the poor. Just when CCs were beginning to flourish there was this other thing going on with school districts and the federal government wanting to pull out. Does the federal government have a role in local schooling and it sounds good to say ‘no, we want our local tax base to pay for our local schools.’ That’s what causes the great divide, because there’s unequal taxes going into classrooms. That local tax policy, let’s keep the feds and the state out of our business — but this is the problem with localism. What happens is that the next big investor wants to built 5000 new homes on ag land, and the state will say yes because that builds the tax base.
SS: “Undeveloped land does not generate taxes.”
RR: “We had a situation here in Fall River where we had the last farm in the city. It was a farm that was from a long time ago, it was just farmland now, but it was part of an orphanage and on the farm they raised the milk and the vegetables and everything for the orphanage, so it was still there, still owned by the Diocese. So the city wanted to purchase the land and keep it as an open space. We (the college) were going to work there and have a sustainable agriculture, get the farm going again, we would also make trails on the grounds and everything, then, a new mayor came in, and he wasn’t too keen on it. We had almost enough money to purchase the land, we were working to do it. I even wrote to the bishop and told him, you are not following what the pope is saying! You are taking this land that could be available to all the people and giving it to just a few rich people who are going to have nice houses.
He said, I understand what you are saying but we already signed the contract.
And so it became a housing development and they call it St. Vincent’s Farm.
It destroyed what was there.
NLW: Like Elm street with not an elm to be found.
KH:Or the shopping district called “Our SALT” on the former salt marsh.
BF: “But not only does the tax base increase, but all of those construction jobs. All of the labor unions and all of that happens. We can send our students to a public forum and there will be 80 construction workers for every 20 who are saying don’t develop it. It’s pretty insidious but it goes back to tax base and jobs and it goes back to what do we consider meaningful work.
What will meaningful and gainful employment mean in the future?
KH:
“What if a community college became where you go to learn how to live a different life? How to have meaning, be connected with nature, with other people. What would it look like if that’s what community college is?
NLW: “That’s exactly what I had in mind with our sustainability program. You talk about jobs, but the problem is people are doing the wrong jobs. There’s other jobs that need to be done. We need to develop an economy that has many different pieces in the basket. That people get done what they need to have done in a variety of ways. It’s not that you go to work for 40 hours a week and you do that for all of your working life. The kinds of things we need to have in our lives: childcare, food, whatever.
We have to find different ways of doing economy, because the economy we are in right now is killing us, because the only way that we begin thinking about how to get done what we need to have done is by going to job and getting paid.
We’ve painted ourselves into a corner and we have no idea how to get out.
And it’s killing us.
RR: “If you aren’t going to make money, you are settling for something else. You go to the community college because you can’t go to the four year school. We are BCC, right, Bristol Community College. They used to call it Barely Concsious College, or Beer Can College. It’s still not the place you go, it’s the place you end up. But that is changing. I was at our big event, Fall River Celebrates America, and I went down there with our engineering stuff and our ROVs, and one mother came up to me and said “my daughter is going to BCC this year and now that I see the stuff you are doing I feel better that she’s going there, there’s important things happening there.”
NLW: “People come to community college thinking about getting a job soon after, they want basic training. But rethinking, what are people going to have to be trained IN? what kind of work can people be doing that fits in with ecological restoration, that fits in with nature? What kinds of economic courses can we be teaching? About how to get things done in their lives outside of going to a 40 hour a week job?
What does it mean to work, to have a vocation, and how can people develop a sense of vocation doing ecological restoration?
Ecological restoration is also healing people, because we are part of nature. Everything that we do has to be for that restoration and that benefit of nature. What’s coming out of the pandemic? Suicides, more people are committing suicide, especially healthcare workers because they are so stressed out, and opioids are going up again! We are so disconnected. This all fits together. How can we evolve community colleges to be teaching the REAL work that needs to be done for ecological restoration on all levels?
KH: “It’s interesting when you say that, thinking about where CCs came from, pivoting the nation after war and these different types of people started coming to college. It was no longer just the elite coming to colleges, but community colleges created a pivot and livelihoods and they changed how we teach.
Maybe we could do that again. Be a pivot point. People in the CC are in the community, where they live and they stay, that’s what’s unique.
BF: “I like the idea of pivoting, similar to the GI Bill, all the people coming home who haven’t worked and there’s very little work for them, it was the community colleges that solved that problem.
During Covid, the nurses and first responders and front line people, most of them started at a community college, and they are saving us because they are so nurturing and caring.
MB: “There are 40 million people that lost jobs that are not coming back! We are in a historic place where the community colleges are in a place to help. Forget about football games and the student experience. This has changed.So for me the 40 million unemployed is our problem. How can we be part of the solution and not the problem? How can we help both societyandthe ecosystem heal and be part of the solution?
RR: “One thing the school started doing at one time was, what do we consider the educated person? And now we tried to put in the sustainability stuff into that, and it was always, well, if we put that in we have to take something else out.
But the educated person is the person who understands the world around them and in in tune somewhat with the world aroundthem, so they have an understanding of how things work and how things are interrelated. That’s the foundation of everything. It’s not just an add on.
NLW: “We are in a crisis, and we are in a crisis because we have removed ourselves from nature. And in the process of trying to heal ourselves and make peace with each other, we ultimately have to make peace with nature.
People really have to understand that we are not going to have societal stability if we donʻt have ecological stability.
SS: “I’m struck again at what an important access point community colleges are for higher education, for underrepresented groups and those who have not been at the table.
If we’re going to flip the script and redefine what a career is, and what will be a future that will work for everyone, community college will be the place where that can happen.
