Talk:Malcolm X Shabazz High School

The Early Days: Newark Junior College

By the start of this century, one of the institutions expected of any large city that aspired to metropolitan status was a local university. City leaders in New York City had met this expectation through the conversion of Columbia College into Columbia University, just as Philadelphia benefited from the transformation of the College of Philadelphia into the University of Pennsylvania. While lacking an 18th century college on which to build, Chicago was able to secure its university with the aid of Rockerfellar's millions. Atlanta, once described as an educational "desert," secured Emory University with the aid of the Coca-Cola fortune. But not every large, early twentieth century city with metropolitan aspirations had a liberal arts college near at hand to convert into a university or a philanthropist willing to put forward the millions required for a first-rate, municipal university. One such city -- New Jersey's Newark -- found itself trapped in just this dilemma. Although first settled in the seventeenth century and a major industrial center by the mid-nineteenth century, until the very end of the 19th century Newark had been far too deeply divided along ethnic, economic, and cultural lines, to foster the development of those cultural institutions, and especially a college or university, found in every other American city of comparable size.

While a relatively latecomer to civic development, between 1900 and 1920, both Newark's public and private sectors moved with a remarkable dispatch to transform what had been, as late as 1890, a city "on the edge of chaos" into a model of the modern, progressive metropolis. Before 1900 Newark had been best known for its Southern sympathies during the Civil War, for its virtually unregulated industry, its unpaved streets and unguarded rail crossings, polluted water, and overcrowded schools. But building on the success of mayor Joseph Haynes's remarkable success in bringing pure water to their city in 1892, Newark's civic leaders of the early twentieth century moved with an incredible dispatch to see "[r]ambling three or four-story brick buildings [give] way to tall, slim giants of granite or limestone" (Cunningham, 232.) In short order, Newark replaced its Civil War-era city hall with a domed marble edifice in 1906, added an equally impressive court house in 1907, and then complemented the pair with an imposing public library. These structures were followed in 1910 by Newark's first skyscraper, the sixteen-story home to the Fireman's Insurance Company, followed just two years later by the twelve-story Kinney Building. Newark's continued development as the major urban center for northern New Jersey was assured by its proximity to New York City, its control of a major port, excellent rail service, and the nearby construction of major oil refineries and chemical plants.

But in one area -- higher education -- Newark was slow to progress. Like Detroit and other large cities that emerged in the decades after the Civil War, Newark lacked a proximate college to convert into a university capable of preparing the skilled professionals needed to manage its expanding commercial economy, its growing school system, and its increasingly complex public services. However, unlike Atlanta, Newark was not an "educational desert," being home to a number of well-regarded private technical institutes and colleges of law and pharmacy. However, no institution located within the city offered a standard baccalaureate program, and the city's professional schools were, following the national trend, increasingly demanding a minimum of two years of basic undergraduate work as prerequisite to admission. In the absence of a proximate college, graduates of Newark's growing system of public high schools found themselves effectively barred from attending any of their own city's professional schools without first spending two years away from home at one of their region's private colleges. Newark's high school graduates did not even have the option, as did their counterparts in Philadelphia, of attending a tuition-free state university for the requisite two-years of college study. Without ready access to at least the first two years of a conventional college education, those Newark high school graduates unable or unwilling to relocate for two years of undergraduate work at a private college faced the very real prospect of being excluded from Newark's emerging managerial class at a time of rapid growth and expanding opportunities.

By 1900, both Newark's school commissioners and its nationally-prominent school superintendent, David Corson, were well aware that their city was failing its youth and diminishing the future prospects of their city by failing to provide at least the rudiments of a higher education, and during the first two decades of this century these leaders proved remarkably creative in using existing local institutions in finding new approaches to correct this deficiency. Initially, these efforts had a decidedly ad hoc quality, reflecting a tendency to address immediate civic needs with little thought to long-term consequences. But within just twenty years, David Corson very nearly succeeded in uniting his city's hodgepodge of schooling institutions -- both public and private -- into a single, vertically integrated and comprehensive urban school system, extending from kindergarten through professional school. Yet what set Corson's vision apart was not not so much its reach -- Detroit's public schools achieved a comparable degree of vertical integration -- but that it relied upon a public junior college as its linchpin.

The Newark school system's first major step in this system-building process came at the opening of the twentieth century. At the time, Newark school officials were concerned that any city high school teacher who wished to take an advanced course was required to travel across the Hudson to either New York or Columbia Universities. Such travel, these officials noted, came at considerable personal cost and inconvenience and likely reduced the number of teachers who pursued additional education. In 1906, Newark's school officials moved to correct this situation by contracting with New York University to offer a small number of courses in Newark. The program was apparently well received by Newark teachers, with professors from Columbia joining the Newark program in 1907. By 1910, management of the program required the appointment of a full-time administrator, which in turn led to the program's incorporation as the Newark Institute of Arts and Sciences.

Corson and other Newark school officials knew full well that their Institute was not itself a college, for it lacked the legal authority to award a baccalaureate. But they did see the Institute as the nucleus of a municipal university. In his 1917-1918 school report, Corson outlined his vision for the Institute and its role in bringing about a fully articulated schooling system in Newark. As represented by Carson, the Institute would provide a framework through which a number of the city's professional schools -- the New Jersey College of Law, the Newark Technical School, and the College of Pharmacy -- could be federated and then articulated with the public schools. But Carson also knew that the long term success of this federation would depend upon the addition of a third institution. In keeping with the national trend, Newark's professional schools now required their applicants to present between one and two years of a traditional undergraduate education for admission. The Institute, because it did not offer conventional undergraduate coursework, was unable to provide this essential bridge between Newark's public high schools and its professional schools. As Corson realized, Newark required a junior college to bridge this gap.

It was within the context of an evolving city-wide school system that Newark's school commissioners authorized the establishment of Newark Junior College in the Fall of 1918. Opened at the city's South Side High School, the junior college was established according to Corson "without university initiative or encouragement," instead being designed to serve two ends, one strategic and the other immediate. In time, the junior college was to be "a stimulus which will eventually cause the development of a university in Newark," bringing "the city nearer the goal, namely that of being a great educational center." But from the very start, the junior college was to provide a bridge between the city's increasingly comprehensive high schools and, at the apex of the city's educational system, an array of professional schools. As represented by Corson, Newark was to offer its residents an entirely practical school system, designed to prepare the professionals and skilled workers required by Newark's rapidly expanding industrial and commercial enterprises. The development of a full-fledged university, with an undergraduate college offering the baccalaureate, may have been the ultimate goal, but the immediate needs of a growing urban center had to be met first.

For both Corson and his school board, Newark Junior College was conceived from the outset as a means to achieve a number of specific objectives particular to Newark. Its organizers never viewed the institution as an end in itself or as part of some larger national movement intended to "democratize" higher education. Strategically, their junior college was to serve as the linchpin of a fully integrated and comprehensive schooling system, encompassing elementary through professional education. More immediately, the junior college not only could provide the school system's growing number of postgraduates with the opportunity to acquire transferable credit prior to entering a traditional college, it could assist other graduates in securing the courses for admission to one of the city's many professional schools without having to leave home.

Ironically, it was also the parochial nature of Newark Junior College that led to its early closure. Full realization of Corson's vision depended on the relocation of the junior college from its original home at Newark's South Side High School to its own, more adequate facility. From Corson's perspective, only when the junior college was fully separated from the high school and permitted to develop a distinctively collegiate climate could it begin to be taken seriously as the nucleus of a true municipal university. But the cost of this move, estimated at $175,000 for the facility alone, was apparently too great for Newark's voters. In 1922, the voters turned out the old board of school commissioners, which had supported Corson's plan, and elected commissioners with little interest in system-building. At their first meeting, the new commissioners brought any discussion of a separate junior college building to an abrupt end by closing the junior college, effectively precluding the development of a municipal university in New Jersey's largest city. <ref> [[1]], Corson, David. "Report of the Superintendent." In The Sixty-First and Sixty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Education of Newark, New Jersey, Newark, NJ, 1918., Corson, David. "Report of the Superintendent." In Combined Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education of Newark, New Jersey, Newark, 1920, Cunningham, John T. Newark. The New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, NJ, 1966., McKelvey, Blake. The Urbanization of America: 1860-1915. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963., Sammartino, Peter. A History of Higher Education in New Jersey. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1978 Acessed March 2 2009 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.127.69.90 (talk) 00:27, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Clinton visit 1999

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/nyregion/in-newark-and-hartford-clinton-says-cities-are-untapped-markets.html?searchResultPosition=6 Djflem (talk) 21:39, 20 January 2024 (UTC)