I mean no disrespect. It’s amazing, it’s wonderful, that WCC has grown both in students and in dominion over tiny Lander, WY. But over the last few years as the school has added building after building after building some of the negative impacts, or at least let’s call them side effects of this growth haven’t been fully recognized.

Take trying to find someone for instance. If we only had two or three dorms, Frassati Hall and one classroom building, it would be quick and easy. Find your guy, get what you need to get done done, and then find the next person. It would be so efficient and so effective, and when half of your time at the school is spent trying to find people anyway, you’d have time to get other things done, like devoting your full attention to dating or maybe throwing in a little howework once in a while.

That’s what WCC was like in its glorious heydays. Simple, nimble, and efficient, as was each of its students individually.

But now…

But now it seems we’re playing in the big leagues. Look at the number of buildings we have. Augur, Baldwin, Border, Frassati, St. Joseph, Knight’s Hall, twelve dormitories, several businesses, and growing. And growing! And all that spread all over town.

We pretty much have a campus and that campus is pretty much all of Lander, Wyoming once you add the new St. Josemaria’s near City Park, the ARC Center, Mt. Hope Cemetery and the new distillery soon to be staffed at least partially by students this coming year.

We actually, come to think of it, have one of the largest campuses of any school in the country. Maybe even make that in any country. Needless to say WCC, without people really realizing it, has become absolutely massive. We control much of the town. We’re no longer a startup. To Lander, to Wyoming, to the United States of America, we are the ESTABLISHMENT.

That’s a change. That’s not how we started. And yet we still, in many ways, act as if we were a little startup just getting going. We compare ourselves to Thomas Aquinas College, bemoaning our lack of a $15 million dollar athletic center and that moaning leads us to go off and buy five more buildings to compensate while setting up agreements for the use of ten more.

This disconnect is starting to affect the character of the whole school. By becoming established, by becoming settled, we feel comfortable, we feel safe, and most of all, we want to keep feeling that way. And so, after a slight delay, the school starts to Swerve its decisions to stay that way.

Maybe the technology policy makes it harder for someone to call home if for some reason a dorm phone doesn’t work. Someone proposes a solution… “Eureka” they say. “Why don’t we become like everyone else? Let’s temporarily drop the technology policy.”

Or, for another example, suppose its discovered that our demographics lean more heavily toward homeschoolers than say what someone might call a “peer school” say… Notre Dame. “Another easy solution” comes the cries of the keepers of the establishment. “Let’s copy whatever proposal they come up with. And hey, while we’re at it, let’s copy the University of Wyoming’s too.”

And so it has happened, and so it has happened…

And there’s more.

And I’m not going to get into it all. But you know. Something seems to have changed. Something, caused that is, by the fact that we now, without really even having realized it along the way, have so many buildings.

That we do so is not a bad thing alone. We’re blessed. But we can’t let these insidous effects of thinking wear us down from our mission of being TAC With Horses.

Don’t let us fall for simply being Notre Dame with Horses.

WCC is different. It’s supposed to be that way. And that’s why I and so many of you love it so much.

Let’s focus, or maybe refocus on who we are this year. Who we really are. Not who we think we have to be to attempt to please people who will probably never like us no matter what we do.

And having a lot of buildings does make it a little harder to find people, but that’s not really that big of a problem when you can have a full building just for foosball!

Thank you,

A message from Everett Polinski, James Green, Sophia Donaldson, Matthew White, and Jack Kaplan.

Also just for fun since I sort of started out with the topic of WCC buying up lots of buildings, what do you all think will be the school’s next target. A grocery store, a gas station, the police station? What do you think?

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