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CENTENNIAL SPOTLIGHT
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William Rainey Harper was the first president of the University of Chicago and a highly regarded educational leader when Joliet Junior College was founded. His name is generally linked with that of J. Stanley Brown (Superintendent of Joliet Township High School in 1901) whenever the origin of JJC is discussed. In fact, Harper is sometimes referred to as the "father of the junior college movement." Born in Ohio in 1856 of Scotch-Irish parents, William Rainey Harper entered Muskingum College at age 10. He graduated at 14 years of age and presented a speech in Hebrew as part of the graduation ceremony. Too young by his parents' standards to be sent off to graduate school, he worked in his father's store, taught a college course in Hebrew, and organized a community band during the next few years. At age 17 he entered Yale as a graduate student and received his Ph.D. before his nineteenth birthday. During the next several years Harper pursued a career in teaching that took him to colleges in Tennessee, Ohio, and Illinois. He became known as a gifted scholar, teacher, and administrator, and in1886 Yale offered the 30-year-old Harper an endowed professorship. Five years later, he was lured away from Yale by the offer of the presidency of the new University of Chicago. With the financial backing of John D. Rockefeller, Harper had nearly a free hand in building this new university. |
As president of the University of Chicago, Dr. Harper began implementing and promoting an educational plan that included the concept that the primary responsibility of a university is specialization and research and that the first two years of college are essentially preparatory. Other educators had earlier espoused this view, but Harper was in the ideal position to implement it. The first two years of study at Chicago were initially known as "junior college," because Harper did not believe that young college students possessed the maturity to do research-based "senior college" work. In fact, Harper and others suggested that the first two years of college were really an extension of high school and should become the responsibility of secondary schools. During the mid-1890s, Harper began holding conferences at the University of Chicago to which regional high schools were invited to consider ways to reorganize the nation's educational system. Superintendent J. Stanley Brown attended these meetings and shared Harper's view that high schools should offer the first two years of college. Although Brown actually developed the curriculum and implemented the two-year program in 1901 that became known as Joliet Junior College, he credited Harper with being the "man of vision" who popularized the concept and encouraged the educational innovation in Joliet. |
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