Source
Fresno Public Schools, Annual Report, (Fresno,
California, 1916), 39.
Analysis
Until now, documents selected for inclusion on this website have been chosen
primarily for their historical significance. However, this document, published
by the Fresno (CA) public schools in 1916, has been included as much for its historiographical as its
historic importance.
First, with respect to its historical relevance to the development of the
public junior college, this single page excerpt from an approximately 50 page
report describing the various departments operating as part of the Fresno
city schools in 1916, is notable on two grounds. In toto, it
confirms that a local decision to establish a collegiate division, upward
extension program, or junior college (prior to 1930, public school districts
had yet to achieve a general consensus as to the proper nomenclature for
departments offering courses beyond the 12th grade) required, as a
necessary pre-condition, the agreement of a broad range of community interests
to make such a commitment of staff, facility, and fiscal resources. In the case
of Fresno, these interest groups
included potential students, their parents, and a local business community
supportive of a narrowly “practical” education. Contrary to the contention of
Radcliff and others that early junior college proponents were concerned with
educational equity and social justice, the Fresno
report provides no evidence to support this position. Parents, for example,
were perceived by the report’s authors as concerned primarily by the moral
risks to which their children would have been exposed by attendance at a
distant university, to which a proximate junior college represented a viable
alternative. In the case of students, the report offers no clear reason as to
why they would have preferred attendance at a local junior college, but the
report’s authors were apparently aware that some students, while facing no
financial or familial barriers to relocation, nevertheless would continue their
education only if they were not required to relocate. Similarly, the report
fails to explain why a “practical” education might enjoy particular support
within the Fresno community, although, based on similar reports published by
other school districts, one can speculate that small businesses within Fresno’s
emerging service sector may have regarded such collegiate divisions as a means
to secure a steady supply of adequately prepared employees schooled at public
expense. Importantly, despite assertions made in secondary sources, such
primary sources as this report provide no evidence that early junior college
advocates were at all concerned with the goal of social equity or sought to use
this institution to divert otherwise able, but socially marginalized students
away from the baccalaureate and the economic and social advantages attached to
it. Indeed, given that the vast majority of high school graduates of this era
were from economically affluent families, neither argument appears to rest on a
sound factual footing.
The 1916 report’s second point of historical interest is its timing. Based
on McClaine’s report, we
are led to believe that the Fresno
district established a “junior college” in 1910. Given the community’s
increasing importance as a distribution and service center in California’s
prosperous, agriculturally-based Central Valley, a
proximate college, of whatever sort, would have been an appropriate civic goal
for such an aspiring community. Such an addition to the school system would not
only strengthen the skills of the local employment base but serve as evidence
to the “right” kind of families seeking to relocate to the region that Fresno
was a more enlightened and progressive community than its neighbors, who as yet
did not offer a comparable extent of proximate educational opportunity.
If, however, one accepts that Fresno’s
school system opened a junior college in 1910 as it announced, it would seem
reasonable to expect that the school district would no longer need to justify
this action some six years later. Rather, one would expect that, by 1916, it
would use its annual report to provide detailed evidence of the program’s most
notable attainments. Instead, the reader is provided with a minimal, and at
times seemingly confused, amount of just such information. Consider the
report’s third paragraph. Even such basic facts as the length of the division’s
program and the number of students who had successfully completed their studies
is nothing short of confused. Somewhere between five and eight students appear
to have graduated from a single year program and then transferred to unnamed
senior colleges. At the same time, the number completing a two year program is
given as either two or ten. Further, no attempt is made to categorize the
collegiate division’s students by age, gender, or major field of study, nor on
their success in achieving their academic goals upon transfer. And while
seemingly a small point, the 1916 report’s opening argument that a
locally-based program is inherently more “practical” than any program offered
by a distant university, makes no mention of either the agricultural or teacher
education programs specifically promised in the 1910 announcement. The reader
is left to wonder whether various unnamed factors had turned the junior college
described in 1910 into the far different collegiate division reflected in the
1916 report. Could it be that the district had as yet failed to win over
important civic interests in support of its curricular extension, and used the
1916 not as a report of the program’s status as much as an opportunity to
restate its case for the program?
If the Fresno collegiate division had yet to gain broad local support by
1916, as seems the case, additional research in the primary sources of the
school district is clearly called for if we are to understand why the Fresno
district’s foray into collegiate-level coursework failed to secure it place
after some six years. One possibility specific to the situation in California’s
Central Valley, is that there may have yet remained some
in the Fresno community who
harbored a desire to establish or attract a “real” college to their city, and
had no intention of undermining their community’s competitive position should
such an opportunity present itself. While the documentary evidence requires
further examination, a chronology of events surrounding the development of
higher education in California
does suggest that the state’s oldest private college, the University of the
Pacific, was on the verge of relocating from San Jose
to the Central Valley at this time. Although it
eventually chose to move from San Jose to Stockton in 1923, in 1916 there would
have remained the possibility that Fresno could have bested Stockton in a
competition for Pacific and, in the process, acquired a “real” college and the
civic prestige that followed, while avoiding the substantial increase in
property taxes that came with a public junior college.
That local advocates of a junior college for Fresno
may have been more concerned with answering those who favored a more
traditional college is reinforced by the fact that the report’s authors used
virtually their entire report to emphasize those advantages offered by a local
junior college, rather than provide a status report of the school district’s
“collegiate division.” Consider, for example, the report’s contention that the
collegiate division benefited, albeit indirectly, the entire district’s
curriculum because the collegiate division’s courses were primarily taught by
department heads. Typically, these teachers -- assumed by the report’s authors
to be the most experienced and best prepared of district faculty -- would then
be better equipped by their experience with advanced students for their work
with students in the lower grades. Similarly, we are told that the collegiate
division required an expansion of the library and additional science
laboratories – both of which would then be available to all students. These are
interesting points, although the second did not require the addition of the
collegiate division, only a board decision to expend the funds needed for the
improvements. But a close reading of the
Fresno document raises some unavoidable
concerns as to the validity of this entire cluster of arguments. First, if we
accept that Fresno’s junior college
opened in 1910 in conjunction with the most favorable reading of the report’s
third paragraph, at no point in its six years would Fresno’s
collegiate division have likely enrolled more than five or six students at any
given time. Unless these students were co-mingled with juniors and seniors in
the same classes, differentiated only by being assigned more challenging
material (a strategy then frequently employed in the small towns of Iowa and
Oklahoma to lessen the direct cost of their small junior colleges), it seems it
would have been far more advantageous to the greatest number of students if
these teachers were assigned exclusively to the district’s high school program.
In so doing, the district would have employed its most pedagogically skilled
faculty to motivate a greater percentage of its high school students to persist
in school at least through the attainment of the diploma.[i]
A second reason advanced in support of the Fresno
collegiate division focused on an aspect of formal schooling that is no longer
consider particularly relevant. The report clearly views one of the strongest
rationales for the collegiate division to be the proper moral development of
the district’s graduates. The report’s authors, aware that many high school
graduates at this time were only 16, assumed that the risk of university
enrollment immediately after high school completion was simply too great for their
morally conservative parents to consider. In the view of these authors,
attending Fresno’s collegiate division for even a single year beyond high
school graduation gave these parents additional time to oversee their
children’s moral development before sending them off to a distant university,
possibly Stanford – with its notorious student shanty town – or to the
University of California, located immediately adjacent to the moral cesspool
that was then Telegraph Hill.
In short, this section of Fresno’s
1916 annual school report seems far more of an apologia for a prospective junior college than an
assessment of the progress and pitfalls of an established, six-year old
department. Not only is the data provided on student performance minimal,
failing to provide even the number of students enrolled and graduated by year
or the outcome of their subsequent transfer, it completely ignores the cost,
both direct and indirect, of operating a college department for a relative
handful of students. The report’s authors appear unconcerned that expenditures
on a small collegiate division might have been more effectively used to meet
the costs of other programs and services of direct benefit to the far larger
number of high school students.
Yet, of even greater value, is the light the
document sheds on certain historiographical issues,
especially as they pertain to the validity of certain “settled questions” with
respect to early junior college history. In the case of Fresno,
it is widely assumed that the district’s junior college began operation in
1910. No less a source than Koos affirms this view.
But the tone and content of the district’s 1916 report on the status argues for
a more thorough examination of additional primary sources to confirm the
opening date of Fresno’s junior
college as a structured, separate and distinct program of collegiate studies
leading to some form of formal recognition. Contrasting the 1910 statement with
the 1916 report (where, for example, the first envisions a separate
administrative unit within the district organization, while the latter refers
to the collegiate division as the “fifth and sixth year” of its secondary
program – an apparent retreat from the autonomy of the unit envisioned by the
1910 statement), suggests the strong possibility that junior college historians
have been too willing to accept at face value the statements found in such
secondary sources as Koos without also verifying
these assertions through a review of the available primary sources. In the case
of Joliet, for example, we know from the articles of Adams, J. Stanley Brown’s
assistant, that neither Brown nor any member of his staff or faculty ever once
employed the phrase “junior college” within the Joliet community prior to
Brown’s departure for the presidency of Northern Illinois Normal in 1913.
Brown’s reluctance to use this phrase, or to allow its use by others, may have
had nothing to do with academic issues, but everything to do with local
politics and tax rates. If we are to believe Adams,
Brown was concerned that Joliet’s
taxpayers would rebel against paying a higher local rate for a collegiate
program at a time when many voters still regarded as programs as a state, not
local, responsibility. The view that higher education was a state
responsibility may well have also been present in Fresno,
and even after six years those holding this position may yet not been won over.
It is possible, as will be discussed in more detail below, that such school
districts as Joliet, Goshen
and Fresno did not move quickly in
response to some strong local advocacy to establish and expand their junior
colleges. Rather, they may have required two or three years to resolve various
policy conflicts (such as the charging of tuition or securing university
acceptance of the credits they awarded with the need for further testing by the
university). Nor was the resolution of these conflicts consistent across
districts, or entirely within the hands of the school districts. Goshen,
for example, chose to charge tuition of even its in-district students – a
decision that likely reduced opposition to the junior college from among local
taxpayers, which nevertheless contributed to its short life. By 1913, a
Mennonite college, charging approximately the same tuition, had opened near Goshen.
Given the large Mennonite community in and around Goshen,
this college not only enjoyed a large, natural base of support, but it also
undermined local support for a tax-payer supported public junior college in Goshen.
By 1914, there is no evidence that Goshen’s
public junior college was still in operation, and the superintendent that had
been among its chief advocates had resigned. In contrast, the Fresno
district announced in 1910 that it would not charge in-district students
tuition, but that it would impose tuition on out-of-district students --
despite the fact that tuition of any sort was clearly unconstitutional in California.
Had, as in the case of Goshen,
out-of-district students had the choice to attend a proximate college rather
than the Fresno collegiate division,
the Fresno experiment would likely
have failed as well. But when the University
of Pacific decided to re-locate to Stockton,
in the absence of a proximate alternative Fresno’s
junior college began to grow without the threat of competition. In summary,
historians with an interest in the junior college and its early development
must cease to rely all but exclusively upon such secondary sources as the
writings of Koos and Eells,
as if they were free of error or significant omissions, and return to the
practice of what Himmelfarb terms “old history.” This
would require scholars to base their arguments first and foremost upon primary
sources, (for example, some record that students actually withdrew from
Goshen’s public junior college to attend the Mennonite college or receipts for
tuition paid by out-of-district students in Fresno) despite the difficulty for
the practicing historian in locating and validating such sources.
A second historiographical
point of interest is the presumption of many historians of a rather simplistic
view of the shape and direction of institutional development with respect to
the junior college. As found in Wattenbarger, the
history of the junior college is characterized as a straight-forward tale of
steady growth and increasing acceptance by the larger academic community. A
comparison of the two Fresno
documents, however, casts doubt on this assumption that warrants further
inquiry. It would appear, in the case of the Fresno
district, that what was initially presented as a separate
and distinct organizational entity was downgraded into a component of the
district’s secondary program. One finds in 1916, for example, that the
collegiate division is characterized as the “fifth and sixth year of the High
School.” Moreover, its faculty has not yet been separated from the high school’s, nor does it appear to operate under the
supervision of its own administrative staff. The situation in Fresno at this
point would seem to have more in common with the current practice in which high
school faculty teach college-level advanced placement courses, than the
practice of the 1920s and 30s, when, through the influence of accreditation
standards and the adoption of state enabling legislation, junior colleges would
begin to operate with greater autonomy within their sponsoring school
districts.
In time, a distinct Fresno
Junior College would emerge,
although when this occurred is not yet clear. Indeed, what the currently
available evidence suggests is that the evolution of the early experiments with
high school-based collegiate education did not always follow a simple path of
steady, unopposed growth. Many, such as Goshen’s
junior college, experienced reversals of fortune and even failed to survive for
more than 10 years. It appears that some closed because they were simply too
expensive for local taxpayers to bear, while others simply failed to attract a
sufficient number of students to be cost effective. It will be through the
analysis of primary sources, often found only in small local libraries, that
will enable us to explain the reason not only for these failures, but why other
junior colleges, operating under approximately the same conditions, thrived.
Document
ANNUAL REPORT FRESNO
PUBLIC
SCHOOLS 39
Certain advantages are recognized as the
outgrowth of the extension of the course to include six years. By
bringing education closer the people and closer to local needs it is possible
to make the instruction more practical. Since the instruction in the fifth and
sixth years is all of college grade a superior quality of instruction is
required. The teachers doing this work are usually heads of departments. Most
of them teach classes below the fifth year and accordingly the work of the
lower years of the High School is strengthened. A larger and better library and
equipment of apparatus are required for the enlarged High School curriculum,
and this library and apparatus is available for use in all departments of the
High School and as a consequence the work of the lower years of the High School
are strengthened.
The chief gain is that of bringing to
the pupils the advantages the first two years of college work that they
otherwise either could or would not leave home to secure. A large number are
attending fifth and sixth years of the High School who otherwise could not be
in school if they were required to leave home to attend a University.
Of the graduates of the four year High
School course between a third and one-half undertake college work and more than
twice as many attend the Collegiate Division of the High School as attend
Universities.
Five entered Colleges or Universities
with advanced standing after having completed one year only of the Collegiate
Division, and ten after having completed the two years of the Collegiate
Division. Eight entered other educational institutions after having completed a
year only of the Collegiate Division, and two others after having unpleted both years of the course.
By bringing higher education to the pupils they are given the
added benefit of a continuation of their home life. The period of parental
advice and guardianship is continued longer and added protection is given to
the morals of the young at an age when it is not always hest for them to be
cast adrift in a big University environment without such protection.
The courses offered in the Collegiate Division are two years
each of Latin, English, German, French, and one year each of modern European
history, industrial and institutional history, economics, physics, analytical chemistry,
organic chemistry, psychology, sociology, plane and spherical trigonometry,
surveying, analytical geometry, descriptive geometry, calculus, lettering, and
biology.
Contributor: R. P. Pedersen
Last Updated: November 18,
2006
Return Home