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| Affiliation | Independent |
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| Name | George F. "Fred" Zook |
| Address |
Akron, Ohio , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
April 22, 1885
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| Died | August 17, 1951
(66 years)
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| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Nov 12, 2024 03:53am |
| Tags |
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| Info | George Zook, a native of Fort Scott, Kansas, was an individual of considerable influence in American higher education during the first half of this century. Serving as one of the first specialists in higher education for the US Bureau of Education, then as president of the University of Akron, and finally as the president of the American Council on Education, Zook was a forceful advocate for greater efficiency in what was, at the beginning of this century, a highly fragmented and standard less system of postsecondary education. As the Bureau's higher education specialist, Zook undertook surveys of the state of higher education in several states, including Oregon and Arkansas (referred to in the text below), which he used as platforms to argue for either the outright closure or consolidation of what he regarded as the excessive number of small, isolated private colleges in those states. Zook was also an advocate of institutional standardization -- what is today known as accreditation -- and took such steps as encouraged the organization of the American Association of Junior Colleges (AAJC) in the hope that it would assume the role of national accreditator of this rapidly growing sector. While the member institutions of the AACJ rejected Zook's call for them to take up this role, the regional accrediting associations, such as the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, did take up this responsibility with considerable success, particularly with regard to public two-year colleges, a group of highly parochial institutions that would likely not have so quickly adopted remarkably uniform standards for admissions, faculty qualifications and curriculum absent the influence of the regional associations.
The presentation by Zook reproduced below, and given while he was president of the University of Akron, is noteworthy because it summarizes the view of the junior college and its purposes shared by many university professors and administrators, federal officials, and other school leaders who were not junior college practitioners during this era.
Indeed, it is important that readers keep in mind that Zook's views, like those of Walter C. Eells, Leonard Koos and Doak Cambpell, now appear to have had enjoyed far wider acceptance than was, in fact, the case, because of the control this relatively small and elite group of men exercised over the school journals, conferences and graduate programs of the day. When local records are closely examined, it becomes very apparent that local junior college advocates, including school superintendents, principals, Chamber of Commerce members, parents and newspaper editors, viewed the junior college in a very different light. For some, the junior college was a means to keep young people at home, and away from what was perceived by many early 20th century parents as large, impersonal and morally threatening universities. For others, most notably civic boosters, a local junior college was the only viable alternative to a traditional college at a time when religious denominations -- the traditional sponsors of such colleges -- were hard pressed simply to maintain the institutions that they had established in the 19th century. And still others, principally merchants, saw a local college as a means of attracting business to main street. For these local boosters, establishment of a local junior college was not meant to resolve some perceived failing in the fundamental structure of American education, or to free universities of lower classmen, or even promote instruction in the so-called "semi-professions." It was a pragmatic solution to immediate concerns and a vehicle for advancing local interests that such communities as Kilgore, Texas, and San Mateo, California, could readily implement without unacceptable cost to local taxpayers.
For Zook, the chief beneficiary of a junor college is not its sponsoring community, but the university. It is a means of freeing American universities of the burden of providing that "cultural" education that young people should have obtained through their secondary schooling, just as it is a mechanism for sorting out those students whose talents and interests would not be well served, in Zook's opinion at least, by a university education. The expansion of the junior college, as conceived by Zook, would provide young people with access to "semi-professional" curricula for which the four-year high school is ill-equipped to offer and which would be inappropriate for a university or traditional college. It is one of the unexamined ironies of late twentieth century American higher education that many four-year colleges and universities are, in the pursuit of enrollments, embracing programs in such fields as health care, business, and communications that Zook would have certainly classified as "semi-professional."
A second point to note in Zook's comments is his discussion of the problem faced by many American cities in providing their residents with access to higher education, and the potential of the junior college to at least partially ameliorate that need. Indeed, a number of junior colleges were established for just this reason and proved remarkably successful (see Kansas City Junior College.) But a number of considerations worked against the establishment of public junior colleges in urban centers, or, once established, their continuation so that the success of a Kansas City Junior College should not be viewed as the norm. One early failure was Newark Junior College, which failed to win local support for the costs associated with the need to provide it with its own facility, contributing to the defeat of supportive school board members, while advocates of the junior college in both Philadelphia and Baltimore met with continuing resistence to their proposals to bring the junior college to their cities. While it is easy to condemn those who blocked attempts to organize urban junior colleges in the pre-1940 era as elitist, a fairer assessment of their position would take into account their belief (particularly strong in Philadelphia and San Francisco) that a city's first obligation was to provide universal access to a high school education before it attempted to offer some college education to what was, at the time, the small minority of youth who graduated from high school. Given their limited resources, the school boards in these communities simply chose to invest in expanding their secondary schools rather than experiment with the junior college to the benefit of a very small minority. It was certainly true that, at Zook argues below, establishing additional junior colleges, particularly in urban centers, would have increased the number of young Americans going on to college, and that such a development would have been in the national interest. But urban school boards did not have infinite resources at their disposal, and state aid was, at best, nominal, and they had no real choice but to limit the extent of their school program to the level of taxation local voters were willing to bear, as the school board of Newark, New Jersey, learned at its cost in 1921.
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