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CENTENNIAL SPOTLIGHT
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J. Stanley Brown was superintendent of Joliet Township High School and was largely responsible for the origin of Joliet Junior College. Soon after his arrival in 1893, Brown began upgrading the high school curriculum to include science and math classes with college-level content. He then secured agreements with universities to award college credit or advanced standing to Joliet students who had taken these more rigorous courses. By 1900, students who had taken these challenging classes were being awarded up to a year of college credit by several universities, most notably the Universities of Illinois, Michigan, and Chicago. Meanwhile, at one of these universities, the University of Chicago, President William Rainey Harper had taken the lead among progressive educators in suggesting that the first two years of college were really lower level or "junior college" work and should be added to high schools. For several years, Harper held educational conferences at the University of Chicago to which regional high schools were invited to consider ways to reorganize and improve the nation's educational system. J. Stanley Brown was an active participant in these conferences and, like Harper, a proponent of extending the work of the high school to include the first two years of college. Since Joliet students were already taking selected classes for college credit, Brown's |
task was to expand the number of these classes into a program that would parallel the first two years of college. In 1901, six "postgraduate" students entered the two-year college-level program at Joliet Township High School. Though not officially known as Joliet Junior College until 1916, these half-dozen students were, indeed, the pioneer students at the nation's oldest public community college. J. Stanley Brown deserves recognition, first, for offering high school classes with college-level content as early as the mid-1890s, and, then, for developing additional classes and organizing them into a two-year college curriculum in 1901. Although he was undoubtedly influenced by the ideas and vision of William Rainey Harper, it was Superintendent J. Stanley Brown who introduced, nurtured, and shaped the educational innovation that became known as Joliet Junior College. |
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