INTRODUCTION

No facet of education in this country is more distinctly American than the junior college, whose origins can be traced to the period before the Civil War. This two-year institution emerged “…from different roots in different parts of the country.”¹ In New England the junior college evolved from the academy; in the south the private school was the seedbed for the junior college, and in Mississippi, in particular, the county agricultural high school was the foundation on which the public two-year college was built; and in California the public high school likewise gave much towards the development of the community junior college.²

In his book The Community Junior College, James W. Thornton, Jr., notes that there have been three phases in the development of the community college. In the first phase (1850–1920) the concept of a separate two-year college offering the first and second years of the baccalaureate program was laid down. The second phase (1920–1945) saw the concept of terminal and semi-professional education become prominent, beginning with the organization of the American Association of Junior Colleges. The third phase, since 1945, has, according to Thornton, emphasized service to the community’s adults.³

As early as 1852 LaSalle Junior College at Auburndale, Massachusetts, was offering the first two years of collegiate instruction. According to Tyrus Hillway, several two-year colleges for Negroes were established before the end of the century.⁴ It may be that they were two-year colleges more by accident than by design since their founders had apparently thought of them as replicas of the white, four-year liberal arts colleges. “Technically, the Negro colleges probably were the very first junior colleges operating in America.”⁵

It was not until about 1900 that the junior college movement began to move forward. In 1891 Decatur Baptist College in Texas was founded and eight years later was reorganized as a private junior college. It may well be the oldest private junior college in the United States. Five years after Decatur Baptist College was established, Lewis Institute was founded in Chicago as a two-year college. Later it became a four-year institution and joined the Armour Institute to form the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Hillway notes that “many American high schools began in the late nineteenth century to extend their offerings beyond the twelfth grade.”⁶ In a few instances, the plan to extend the high school resulted in the creation of separate junior colleges. In the northern Illinois city of Joliet, there was established in 1902 the first public junior college, one which has remained in continuous operation since its founding. Though it lacked the orientation of the modern community college, it was nevertheless a harbinger of it.

Two years before — in July 1900 — at a meeting of the National Education Association at Charleston, South Carolina, William Rainey Harper, the renowned president of the University of Chicago and frequently referred to as the “Father of the Junior College,” made the following interesting comment about the future of American higher education as he foresaw it:

Strong academies are needed side by side with the high schools of the State, just as strong colleges and universities, founded by private means are needed to work side by side with the universities of the State. While therefore 25 percent of the small colleges now conducted will survive, and will be all the stronger for the struggle through which they have passed, another 25 percent will yield to the inevitable, and one by one, take a place in the system of educational work, which, though in one sense lower, in a true sense higher. It is surely a higher thing to do honest and thorough work in a lower field than to fall short of such work in a higher. Another group of these small institutions will come to be known as junior colleges. I use the name “junior college,” for the lack of a better term, to cover the work of the freshman and sophomore years. . . . It is not until the end of the sophomore year that University methods of instruction may be employed to advantage. . . . There are at least 200 colleges in the United States in which this change would be desirable.⁷

In 1892, Harper separated the first two and the last two years of the University of Chicago’s undergraduate curriculum into the academic and university colleges. They remained separate until 1896 when they became known as the junior and senior colleges. Students who had completed the two-year junior college program received the Associate in Arts degree instead of the Bachelor of Arts reserved for the traditional four-year program.

By the First World War, the public junior college had a definite foothold in American higher education, and by 1923 there were between forty-five and fifty such institutions. These colleges were under the control and supervision of local boards of education and operated with the guidance of the various state universities. Chris A. DeYoung has observed that by 1926, 36,000 students were enrolled in both public and private junior colleges, a figure which by 1962, thirty-six years later, had ballooned to about one million.⁸ Today more than two million students are enrolled in 1,038 two-year colleges, California leading the states in the number of junior colleges with a total of ninety-one public institutions and five private.⁹

One of the most important events in the history of the junior college occurred fifty years ago — in 1920 — when a meeting of representatives from thirty-four junior colleges was held at Stevens College, Columbia, Missouri. The president of Stevens, James M. Wood, served as the chairman of this group which laid the foundation for the establishment of the American Association of Junior Colleges for the following February. In its half century of operation this organization has played a significant role in the development of junior colleges, both public and private.

Ten years after the establishment of the A.A.J.C., the North Carolina State Supreme Court set an important legal precedent when it held that the City of Asheville “had the right to tax itself to maintain a junior college out of funds set aside for the conduct of a public school.”¹⁰ Other states increasingly were going to take the cue from North Carolina concerning the use of public funds for junior college education.

By the outbreak of World War II, many public junior colleges had been established, particularly in the South and far West. None existed in Maryland, except for St. Mary’s Female Seminary which was considered a four-year “state” institution for women, comprising grades 11, 12, 13 and 14.¹¹ It is interesting to note, however, that the Maryland State Department of Education made plans in 1939 for establishing principles and standards dealing with instruction, curricula, laboratories and shops in the accreditation of junior colleges. By the mid-1930’s there were only five junior colleges in the state, and all of them were private, including St. Mary’s Female Seminary which did enjoy state aid, and had a total enrollment of only 326 students. It was not until after the War that steps were taken in Maryland towards the establishment of two-year public (county and city) institutions. In February 1946, Governor Herbert O’Conor appointed a Commission of Higher Education which, in turn, recommended to his successor, Governor William Preston Lane, Jr., that “some sweeping changes be made in the direction of junior colleges throughout the State.”¹² By the time the Commission had been appointed, thousands of veterans were on their way home to resume their civilian status. Many of these young men and women wanted a college education which the depression years before the War had either denied them or their older brothers and sisters. Public Laws 346 and 16 provided them with the necessary financial support to realize their academic ambitions. As a result, colleges and universities were soon bulging with large enrollments, causing a growing competition for admission among the recent high school graduates as well as the returning veterans.

It was against this background, during the year immediately following the end of World War II, that Montgomery Junior College was established in Bethesda, Maryland.

Footnotes

1. Mary Elizabeth Lander, Montgomery Junior College — A Case Study of Community Service (unpublished M.A. thesis, The George Washington University, 1957). Hereafter cited as Lander.

2. Jesse Parker Bogue, The Community College (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1950), p. 7.

3. James W. Thornton, Jr., The Community Junior College (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1956), p. 25.

4. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 36.

7. Walter Crosby Eells (ed.), American Junior Colleges, 1st ed., (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1940), pp. 14–15.

8. Chris A. DeYoung, American Education (New York: London; Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1960), p. 136.

9. Jack Gernhart, Assistant to the Executive Director, American Association of Junior Colleges, Washington, D.C., telephone interview with the author, 5 June 1970.

10. DeYoung, p. 138.

11. Higher Education in Maryland: A Report of a Survey by the American Council on Education with Recommendations of the Maryland Commission on Higher Education (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1947), p. 269.

12. Knights’ Quest, 27 March 1947. The Knights’ Quest was the student newspaper which commenced publication in the fall of 1946. During 1965–66, its name was changed to The Spur; and later the Takoma Park Campus established its own paper known as the Excalibur.