Community Colleges, as contemporary educational institutions, are best understood by elucidating their legitimacy needs in a technological society. The nature of a technological society has been most clearly articulated in the work of Jacques Ellul. The growth of the technological society is inextricably tied to a vision of reality centered upon the empirical world and its manipulation by humans. This capacity to manipulate becomes so compelling that reality is virtually ex hausted of anything that cannot be objectively verified and subject (...) to manipulation. Within this framework, precise quantitative measures and manipulation be come the sole form of legitimacy. The community college is caught in this predicament and in compliance mutates into a pseudo-laboratory of interventions on its objects. The proposed trajectory of said institutions is one that is incapable of providing the fertile soil for the development of character or the discovery of meaning. (shrink)