A couple days ago, I decided to swing by the Roscommon campus of Kirtland Community College, one of the 28 public community colleges in Michigan, to check out my old stomping grounds. Like many people who grew up in or near Roscommon, I have some significant personal history with KCC, an outpost of higher learning nestled in the thick jack pine woods, triangulated between Roscommon and Grayling and St. Helen as a rural oasis of academic possibilities. Thanks largely to my step-father Tom Dale, a KCC professor for three decades, I attended classes at KCC for three semesters when it was clear that I wasn't emotionally or financially developed enough to attend Michigan State University, giving me a jump into my time at Central Michigan University. And starting as a 25-year-old Master's student, I taught Intro Psych at KCC from the summer of '96 to the spring of '98, so I wouldn't have my job at North Central Michigan College were it not for my time at KCC.
My memories of Kirtland are many, and they span decades. As a young child, I was attacked by Canadian geese along the front pond until my mother, a KCC student, swatted them away with a fly swatter. I sang songs by Earth, Wind, & Fire in the Performing Arts Auditorium as a high school student, and I ran lights for shows in that same auditorium when I became a KCC student, I played Donkey Kong and ping-pong in the Student Center, often when I should have been in class, I gazed intently at the sample box of psychoactive drugs outside of the Library, and I sat in an office next to my stepfather while reading about David Bowie via Netscape Navigator on a Mac. I walked out of a fetal pig dissection and licked my gloved (but clean) fingers in full view of the incoming students just to get a reaction. I groaned as the older bearded guy in the Nazi swastika t-shirt told me he couldn't wait to take my Intro Psych class next semester. I pulled a dead turkey from the grill of my then-girlfriend's car with her windshield ice scraper. And like many others who spent time at Kirtland, there are even more tales to tell.
Here are a few shots of the now-abandoned Roscommon campus today:
The Student Center and Library buildings have been razed, and the Auditorium and Academic buildings have been closed and left to nature. There is now an 18-hole disc golf course on the campus grounds, and the east side of campus held the ringing sounds of gunfire from the shooting range. The Roscommon campus is currently for sale with an asking price of $6.4M, if you're interested.
The KCC of the Now has a main campus just south of Grayling, off 4 Mile Road on I-75, and it is expanding and growing at that location at this very moment. It also has a secondary campus in Gaylord next to the High School, in a building that used to house a few classes from NCMC. And whereas NCMC has spent about $7.4M in some physical renovations, KCC has an investment of over $20M. Not everyone is happy with the abandonment of the Roscommon campus, of course, but one look at the sparkling new Grayling campus -- soon to have a Biggby Coffee location, for fuck's sake -- tells you all you need to know about priorities and intentions for foundational higher education above the tree line.
Given that the demographic trends indicate 20% less high school students in ten years, and given that students have shown a clear preference for OL products rather than F2F experiences, should colleges like KCC and NCMC be doubling down on physical spaces to begin with? And given that KCC went to voters just a few years ago and assured them that their tax dollars would help renovate the Roscommon campus, should those taxpayers be a bit cross when that proved to not be the case? And more selfishly, will I still have a job at NCMC, or will we be absorbed by KCC at some point in the future, or will both colleges be consigned to the dust bin of history?
My hope is that young people will be able to visit the new Grayling KCC campus, framed by the industrial effluent of the Weyerhaeuser plant on one side and the squalling big rigs of the truck stop on the other, and have the same sense of wonder and expectancy that I had as a youth wandering around the leafy green Roscommon KCC campus. As a lower-middle-class kid, I saw Kirtland as a path to something else and something better, and if we hope to have rural communities like Roscommon and Grayling continue to exist in the future, kids need to translate those feelings to attendance and advancement and enrichment of those communities. Otherwise, the towns will end up ghostly and overgrown, with only echoes of what once was and shall never be again. But at least we'll get more disc golf out of the deal.
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