Community College - Part 01

Over the Target

Hillsdale College is an institution that was born in the middle of the 1800s. It was heavily influenced by Abolitionists, but we won’t hold that against them, as we all make mistakes in the ardency of youth. If you peruse their About Page, you will find a substantial amount of heady rhetoric that suspiciously resembles the hollow affectations of the mass of progressive seminaries cavorting as “institutes of learning” in this beclowned era. We may poke fun just a little, but I honestly believe they mean it, while all the other universities say whatever they think will keep young people in debt & surrounded by cantankerous foreigners as the federal money flows into administrator’s pockets.

Hillsdale would probably disagree with me, but until they give me a job, I will maintain my position that Hillsdale is one of a meager few breeding grounds for the Dissenting Elite. They are not alone, but they may as well be. The few institutions left that actually have the means and motive to challenge the overwhelming domination of the progressive religion are a small island in a vast sea of managerial midwit mediocrity. Maybe even against the wishes of those in control of the institution, Hillsdale and its spiritual confederates are the only hope of churning out a native elite capable of uniting Amerikaners and saving us from South Africanization.

Universities, as they were intended to be, are the forward propagators of aristocracy. They were forced to become employment accreditation factories because IQ tests, the single most effective tool humanity has developed for productive civil organization, have been outlawed as a method for putting people in positions where they can get the most benefit from doing the minimum good with the largest net gain in productivity for society as a whole. Exclusivity is a key ingredient in all things elite. Expanding universities to spam midwit foot soldiers for the bloated managerial elite is a waste of time, resources, men, and, most critically, potential mothers. In the current configuration, it is natural to perceive universities as nothing more than future ruins. Trying to actually fix them is quite likely a fool’s errand.

But we cannot be drawn into memetic myopia regarding the importance of elites. A noble is nothing without his retainers. A leader is nothing without the led. While elite culture deserves pointed and expansive attention, so too does that strange, ahistorical creature: the Yeoman, the Middle-Classian, the In-Betweener. Putting these types into the university system en masse was a catastrophic mistake, and they need to be removed from it entirely for their own good.

Usually forgotten and often derided, the community college is the only civic institution currently and explicitly contributing to the productive development of the “critical middle.” Filtering out the potheads circling the drain and the incurably foreign, a huge proportion of the attendants of community collage are the Silent Median. These are the men who will literally keep the lights on, kick the tires, and twist the spanners that keep us cool, warm, hydrated, and safe. We often use the Worst case Scenario to illustrate a point, but I have found that marriages, friendships, and congregations run the risk of dissolution due to so-called minor HVAC or automotive issues than cinema-worthy happenings.

Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame, seems to be the only elite willing or able to put their shoulder on the boulder and heave this critical stone up the hill. Whenever the “plumber vs lawyer” pseudo-debate flairs up online, it never seems to address the shining middle path that is Community College. These places are rather incredible as you feed in people who bloomed late, got lost, or didn’t jump, and you crank out a panoply of types that can move into the trades, hospitality, or a higher level of the academy. Community college is a middle class mixer and a social-type sorter with no competition or comparison at a comparable scale.

Unfortunately, and keeping very much in line with the inertia of the Obama era, all we see fit to do with this incredible resource is to fill it with minorities and migrants then wait for it to collapse. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is an opportunity to provide a space where Elites can link up with their potential bannerman for the betterment of the Commons. When paired with a worthwhile trades program, a community college serves the mixed purposes of refining the lower classes, polishing the middle classes, and redeeming the fallen angels of the upper class. It does this by offering trades as well as stepping stones into the larger academic world. 

University is a waste of time and money for probably ~80% of the people currently forced to participate in it. The whole reason you need a college degree for a job is because they're not allowed to give IQ tests. There is literally no other reason, and making the undergrad diploma a gateway prerequisite for employment consideration destroyed the undergraduate degree as a measure of worth and status, as well it opened a terrible exploit into private businesses for evil managerial Elites. 

We are initially going to focus on the people that should be in academia, as well as the people who should be shunted into the trades from wherever they originate. I am not a tradesman, in fact I'm hilariously bad at all of the arts of the callus, which is ironic given how much of my time I spend building, working on, fixing, and then rebuilding things. The trades aspect of the following idea is equally critical to the academic part. Because of this, someone who actually understands the culture, mindset, and identity of the trades is someone I hope to be corresponding with¹.

In summary, what I propose is the Clever Name Community College². This is an institution in physical space with 3 major sections: housing & amenities in the middle encircled (eventually) by the facilities required for academic instruction, clustered initially on the left, and trades instruction, clustered at first on the right. This is an institute for boys and men with doors open for gentlemen starting at approximately 15 years of age. Both sides of the institute will run more like apprenticeship at scale than the current model of instructor/student so beloved by our moribund education institutions.

The Trades Wing will have at its core merit, excellence, capacity, and demonstrability. Initially, it should be focused on the basics, taking the raw material of young men, middle-aged men, and old men who have an aptitude or desire, but need to be properly indoctrinated so that they can begin on the path world class tradesmanship. This is only a point of departure, as massed resources need to be put into the workshops, classrooms, repair bays, and mock cockpits, bridges, and operating booths, but while that capital slowly finds its way to where it belongs, what we can do with a classroom and good instructors is develop a boot camp to help turn white collars gray as well as dry the wetness behind ears. A little known secret of marksman/ shooting instruction is how incredibly important the basics are, most of which can be accomplished with blue guns and dry fire exercises. We will build the blue gun/ dry fire equivalent for the Greater Trades. We are going to put a pin in it here, and circle back the millisecond the right man for the job throws his hat into the ring. 

In terms of institutional DNA, the Academic Wing will also start out much the same. We are building an organization where fathers will be comfortable placing their nerdy and hidebound pre-teens alongside know-it-all teenagers, directionless 20 somethings, and frantic 30-year-olds. Because merit and demonstrability are the lodestones of the organization, it is neither wise nor effective to divide cohorts by age. Sectionization will be done by demonstrable capacity and practical familiarity. Every young and old man in this program will be here voluntarily. There will be no compulsory participation, and while tardiness/ absence limitations shall be established by specific professors, it must be a fundamental tenet that successful participation, contribution, and dominance goes to those who show up. 

Just as age-based cohorts have a place at other institutions but not at this one, so too will the silo paradigm of the current academy be unwelcome. Every course must be connected both genetically and culturally to at least two other courses directly. This means that professors must coordinate directly in terms of syllabuses. This coordination will not be a measly single waste-of-time conference in the middle of the summer, rather constant communication & conflict between the professors as they create and perfect rubrics, select and reject texts, and generate the raw material of the restored academe. That last one is an important innovation that will one day be commonplace in the larger institutional ecosystem. In brief summary, there will be no make work, no pointless projects, no unread theses. All of the assigned work will have academic value that is portable, applicable, and hopefully profitable³. This is why coordination between professors is crucial: the professors will be bringing their work, whether it's the content they create, the jobs they do, the art they develop, or whatever it is that makes them a contribution to the organization. Their students will be the interns they never had, the peer group denied to them, the staff support they were afraid to even dream of having. 

Any current academic, parent, or Closet Karen Case will be raising eyebrows right about now, so I'm just going to come out and say it: in addition to paying a relatively small sum to attend, the students will be offering their minds and sweat to further the endeavors of the professors. No, they will not be paid in money. Yes, they will reap the academic benefits as partners, peers, and contributors, and in time will make money from the friendships, associations, and connections this process generates⁴. We need to divorce ourselves from the now corrupted concept of liberal arts education. In its heyday, it was an incredible blessing and challenge to Occidental Society. Now it has turned into a methodology for rewarding mediocrity and elevating devious pseudo-do-gooders to pointless clerical positions that can, and God willing will, be replaced by well-crafted LLMs. This is the reality of modern governance: we need the leaders, we need their advisors, we need the overseers, but the rest of it can and should be automated. The concept of a government bureaucratic employee, people that sit in booths, people that sit at windows, people that judge applications for their merits and correctitude, are dodo birds, and we don't need to wait for them to disappear before we declare them conceptually extinct⁵.

The goal of the ivy league + public university system is to isolate the cream of the crop to be thought leaders, icons, celebrities , and judges, to groom the upper echelon to be their chosen instruments, and to shunt the rest into clerical positions intended to buttress the academic entertainment complex and the permanent bureaucratic oligarchy that maintains it. This is a terrible structure and the sooner it goes away, the sooner we can get back to being the dominant socioculture on the planet. Hillsdale and a handful of other institutions have already done the hardest part, hefted the heaviest load, and made the terribly challenging strides. We are merely following in their footsteps, brightening up the landscaping, and consolidating the gained territory. 

With software doing the make work jobs, we kill two goliaths with one stone: If USG wants a patronage system, they will have to build it out of men that actually make and do things in fields that actually serve a purpose; and we eviscerate probably 80% of the natural pathways for corruption, both explicit and implicit. We no longer need degree mills, pseudo-religious peer review, rubber stamp certification, or pointless academic onanism. If someone is sacrificing the time and wealth to participate in the academy, they need to be fulfilled, and we as a society need to be better off for it. What is the point of a thesis project that tells us nothing new, contributes nothing to the development of the field, or even gets read by more than a handful of stuffy former strivers?

So, the two wings of the Clever Name Community College has a few methods to achieve three main goals: To restore the academy from the travesty it became from the invasion and takeover by the Managerial Elite; to resume the development and expansion of neutral progress, specifically within the realm of the academic; and to cultivate cultural DNA for occidental men in the two distinct, and currently separated, categories of academics and application. Put simply, the Clever Name Community College will be composed of the School of Theory and the School of Practice.

This is the first installment of a three part essay. The subsequent parts have been written⁶ and will be released soon. Most of what I write here is, by necessity and default, one-way transmission. It is my sincere hope that this extended essay is found by the Right Men so the Right Process can get moving in the Right Direction.

1. If you finish this essay, and agree with at least some of what I lay out, AND know someone who can help a wandering scholar like myself, please send them my way.

2. I am still on the hunt for a clever name.

3. Monetarily, sure. But more critically, profitable for the scholar and the instructor, depending on what they are collaborating on.

4. They can, and will, also profit from shared ventures, as they should, but I have personally no time for the “sigma grindset jeet-til-ya-skeet” gay bullshit endemic in the finance bro sphere.

5. Total Clerical Death

6. More or less; one more, t’other less.