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Early Public Junior Colleges
A Resource for
Graduate Students and Researchers
THIS SITE IS UNDERGOING A
MAJOR REVISION.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.
THE IMPROVEMENTS,
ADDITIONS,
AND CORRECTIONS
WILL MAKE IT
WORTH THE WAIT.
This site contains a
range of unpublished primary sources that describe the organization,
governance, curriculum, funding, and student culture of early public junior
colleges. In addition, commentary is included with each source
document to provide the reader with a greater appreciation of the
social and political milieu in which junior colleges operated before
1940.
Thanks to Terry Tollefson,
the site now includes a complete copy of George Zooks
report of the 1920 St. Louis
meeting at which the AAJC was organized. What is of particular
interest is that Zook not only included
each paper presented at St. Louis, but transcribed the often
contentious discussions among attendees following each presentation. Zook’s thoroughness has made possible an
appreciation of the breadth of opinion
among the junior college’s first generation of leaders as to
the institution’s appropriate social role up to the outbreak of
World War II. Further, Zook’s report
reveals that he had called the meeting in the hope that conference
attendees would adopt his proposal to establish a national
association of two-year colleges, both public and private, with the
primary function of accrediting, and thus standardizing, junior
colleges. However, those attending the conference would have nothing
to do with Zook’s proposal. Rather,
they opted to establish an advocacy organization to enhance the
public's understanding of this new sector of American higher
education. This organization came to be known as the
American Association of Junior Colleges.
To
go directly to the meeting transcript, click here:
¡
Other Additions:
There has
been an extensive revision in the commentary on Colorado's 1937
junior college act.
The act is notable for its inclusion of several progressive
provisions, not found in the enabling legislation of other states.
The most notable of these, found in the act's last section,
stipulated that any public junior college work with the appropriate
state agencies to assist physically-challenged students in securing
employment. This may be the first instance in which a state assigned
junior colleges to assist a specific, marginalized constituency in
gaining access to the economic mainstream,
As part of the effort to
continually expand the type of documents represented on this website,
Kansas' Fort
Scott Community College
has contributed a rare copy of the 1927 edition of the Maroon, the college's student
annual. This
document can be found within a new folder -- Student Documents
– listed on the left of this page. When accessing this file, be
aware that it is in a searchable .pdf
format and, given its length, can take considerable time to download.
Please be patient, as the document is well worth the wait. Most
importantly, the Maroon
provides an extraordinary insight into the interests and social
status of students who attended what was, at the time, one of the
most prominent junior colleges in Kansas. Importantly, little in the
annual suggests that the junior college’s students were economically
or socially disadvantaged. Rather, the annual suggests that they were
typical of those who attended most colleges in the 1920s --
conservative in their beliefs (the YMCA was the college’s
largest and most influential student organization, while Sesame, a
social service organization, was the largest organization for the
college’s women students). A review of the pictures of the
students also suggests that they were, if not affluent, at least
aware of, and able to afford the cost of adopting the dress and hair
styles popular among the era’s socially-prominent.
Coming Developments
Currently,
post cards from the early 20th century, depicting the large high
schools that also housed early junior colleges, are being gathered to
provide a better appreciation of the scale of the first public junior
colleges. In a remarkable
number of instances, a community’s decision to establish a
junior college followed shortly after it had completed construction
of a large high school facility (as in the cases of Joliet, IL, and
Rochester, MN). The
relationship, if any, between school construction and a
community’s decision to establish a junior college is one that
should be examined in some depth. Is it possible (and there is some
evidence to support this position) that school boards, faced with
large, under-utilized high school buildings, sought to maximize use
of these expensive buildings by instituting junior colleges, adult
education programs and what, at the time, were known as
“Americanization” programs for recent immigrants?
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