JAC Volume 21 Issue 3

Perhaps no movement in American education remains more riddled with contradiction than the junior college movement, the birth and rapid spread of two-year colleges during the early twentieth century. Junior colleges welcomed the working class and provided affordable education at convenient locations (see Cohen and Brawer; Dougherty; Ratcliff). The new and democratic institutions largely failed to deliver on their promise of transferring students to four-year colleges and universities, however, and instead created a low prestige campus where guidance counselors and vocational programs micromanaged the ambitions of blue-collar students (see Brint and Karabel; Clark; Karabel; Shor). Despite these rich contradictions, scholars in rhetoric and composition have largely overlooked the junior college movement as a site for historical narrative.

Those interested in the gatekeeping functions of higher education—the ways colleges and universities transmit hegemonic values to students, and the problematic allegiance between education and corporate America—have much to learn from the history of the two-year college. I am suggesting, first, that historians of rhetoric and composition turn their attention to sites of contradiction, diversity, and class conflict—sites such as the junior college movement. Second, I am proposing that we create historical narratives that vigilantly ascribe agency to the individuals and collectives who hold the cultural power to shape institutions and movements. I want us to be not only "archivists with an attitude" but also archivists with a consciousness.¹

The junior college movement, spearheaded by elite scholars of education, coincided with philosophical movements such as scientization and education for social efficiency. The term elite denotes the affiliation of these scholars with exclusive and prestigious institutions, and it denotes their attitude of superiority over the student-worker, who was becoming ethnically diverse and agitated by poor working conditions. Junior college movement leaders saw students as undisciplined bodies who needed to be taught taste and to assume their positions within industrial capitalism. Movement leaders sought to construct individuals who saw themselves not as part of a collective but rather as solely responsible for any success or failure the future might hold. Through disciplinary devices such as assessment, junior college students learned the meritocratic cultural myths of individualism and capitalism. In this paper, I analyze archival materials such as curriculum guides and other published accounts written by the founders and supporters of early junior colleges in the attempt to redirect the gaze of historians of rhetoric and composition away from familiar, homogenous institutions such as Harvard and toward domains where class conflict played itself out among various agents.

The Junior College Movement Defined

The first two-year college opened in Joliet, Illinois, in 1901, and the movement enjoyed rapid growth during the 1920s and 1930s (Dougherty 115, 118). Enrollment during those years jumped from 8,102 to 149,854 (Brint and Karabel 23). Many competing narratives explain why the two-year college came into existence and became so popular. Two-year college historian James Ratcliff identifies seven factors that influenced the college's birth: community support, desire among universities to imitate the German research model, a restructuring of education at the turn of the century, the professionalization of teacher education, the vocational education movement, the rise of community-based education, and demands for public access to education (4). Ratcliff offers a useful starting point for analyzing the convergence of educational trends, socio-economic realities, and cries for the democratization that led to the advent of the junior college. Since the individual "streams" in Ratcliff's list overlap and contradict one another, they typify the importance of contextualizing a moment fraught with competing social factors and complex characters. The problem with Ratcliff and other historians of the movement is that they fail to ascribe agency to movement leaders. Ratcliff's second stream—involving the imitation of the German research model—places agency with the university. A pointed critique would recognize the elitist ideology of individuals at the universities.

Articulating precisely why the junior college movement began was just as difficult during the early movement as it is now. In The Junior-College Movement, published in 1925, Leonard Koos, a University of Minnesota professor of education and a leader in the movement, explains that there were four types of junior colleges: the public junior college, the state junior college, the private junior college, and the lower-division junior college (4_10). Koos' categories, like Ratcliff's streams, overlap. According to Koos, public junior colleges were most often affiliated with high schools and thus were considered secondary institutions. State junior colleges, says Koos, had the further designation of being affiliated with normal schools or teachers' colleges (5, 6). Private junior colleges received no public funding due to the fact that most had religious affiliations. The lower-division junior college referred to an institution where the first two years of university course work could be completed (9, 10). In reality, lower-division course work was completed at all four types of junior college. Still, this early schema is helpful for beginning to explicate the goals and purposes behind the movement.

Those goals and purposes underscore a service to the elitism that has always characterized education in the United States. Critics have begun to expose this problematic aspect of the movement. Kevin Dougherty has shown that throughout the history of the two-year college about seventy-five percent of the student body has wanted to pursue a four-year degree but only a fraction of that number actually has. He explains that the two-year college has served consistently to decrease student goals (19_21). "Many baccalaureate aspirants," he writes, "are seduced away from their initial ambitions" (187). The seduction that Dougherty describes was deliberate. In 1929, Grayson Kefhauver wrote, "It is especially desirable to challenge the thinking of over-ambitious students of average ability looking forward to entering the socially preferred professions. Their choice is frequently made largely upon the basis of the social prestige of the occupation with little concern about personal capabilities." Kefhauver sought to combat the notion that less-prepared students can hope to succeed in certain walks of life. He goes on to say, "There is a fallacy accepted somewhat generally by the populace, and approved occasionally by an educator, that all `normal' individuals can succeed in any field of work if they apply themselves assiduously" (106, 107). Kefhauver's ideology is typical of the reductive view of junior college students that movement leaders had.

Junior colleges were born out of the desire to cleanse higher education. In a pointed critique, Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel argue that leaders of prestigious American universities hoped to purge their institutions of the masses, only the most worthy of whom could later transfer to four-year research universities. They hoped that such a purge would allow them to imitate the German research model and, by extension, transform universities into centers of research and discovery (24). This patriotic endeavor would facilitate America's competitive role on the global stage. Although, as Brint and Karabel show, the earliest two-year colleges were founded as transfer institutions, leadership in the American Association of Junior Colleges soon began to develop and market "an ideology of vocationalism" (37). Conservative leaders of the movement manufactured a plan that, as Brint and Karabel put it, "included a conception of the potential training markets open to the community colleges, the formulation of a `counterideology' to combat the prevailing academic ideology, and the promotion of intelligence testing and guidance counseling in the junior colleges as means of channeling students into occupational programs" (37_38). I seek to extend the critical-historical narrative begun by Dougherty and Brint and Karabel as well as by Ira Shor and John Frye. Specifically, I wish to show that leaders of the junior college movement deliberately used a rhetoric of middle-class efficiency and individuality to construct a passive underclass.

Junior College as Panopticon

Mass education taught passivity, lawfulness, and allegiance to the myth of the American dream by telling students that they were attending school and behaving appropriately in order to earn the privilege of a career. These lessons in careerism, civics, and conformity illustrate Althusser's notion of the ideological state apparatus. Althusser argues that education is the most powerful tool of the state due to "the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation" in the school setting (146). As Althusser might say, students at the new two-year institutions learned both "a certain amount of `know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology" and "the ruling ideology in its pure state" in service to the false promise of upward mobility (147). Foucault might call the lessons learned by the junior college student "docility-utility" (137). In 1928, W.W. Charters described the importance of discipline in shaping the young student with desirable values: "for only through pain, be it physical or mental, will he desert bad practices" (Teaching 231). Discipline in every sense of the word occupied a fundamental role in the formation of the junior college.

Thus, the junior college monitored the potentially subversive. This process is perhaps most visible in the excessive testing on the two-year campus. Walter Eells, one of the most important figures in the junior college movement, reported that San José College administered no fewer than sixteen psychological, personality, and aptitude tests to its entering students in 1930: the Thorndike Intelligence Test, the Moss Social Intelligence Test, the MacQuarrie Mechanical Aptitude Test, the Iowa Mathematics Aptitude Test, the Iowa Chemistry Aptitude Test, the Allport-Ascendance-Submission Test, the Seashore Musical Test of Memory, the New Stanford Achievement Test, the Staffelbach Geography Test, the Courtis Geography Test, the Ayres Handwriting Scale, the Columbia Research Bureau History Test, the Staffelbach Arithmetic Test, the Whipple College Reading Test, and the Almack Civics Test (322). Excessive assessment at the junior colleges can be seen as an attempt to "capitalize" on individual abilities and personalities. Educators looking to facilitate the efficient functioning of society created numerous inventories during this era to determine what an individual ought to do (Holt 77). The examination, writes Foucault, is a key instrument of the "normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish" (184). Through such testing, junior college students were qualified as "junior"—that is, lower in prestige than "regular" college students. They were often classified as remedial and bound for the blue-collar workforce or the new paraprofessions. And they were punished by a system that sought to transform them ideologically, but not materially, into middle-class subjects. Foucault writes of the cultural imperative among elitists to institute what he calls their "military dream of society." He writes, "Its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility" (169). Docility becomes difficult to transcend after such an assault.

Testing allowed the junior college to construct students as individuals with agency and personal responsibility, thereby diverting attention from systemic corruption as a root cause of injustice. Members of the working class were told they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they performed well on their assessments. Anyone who failed to succeed bore culpability for that failure. To make sure that the individual felt inadequate, leaders of the movement tested students, put them in remedial classrooms, slotted them into specific careers, and advised them of their shortcomings. As Karabel states, two-year schools "lend affirmation to the merit principle which, while facilitating individual upward mobility, diverts attention from underlying questions of distributive justice" (524). Karabel underscores how working-class colleges bowed to capitalism. I use a Marxist definition of "working class" to denote those who must sell their labor. Connecting a traditional Marxist notion of "working class" to Foucault is instructive. Not only do members of the working-class student body of the two-year college bear the burden of labor, they also bear the burden of disciplinary mechanisms that enforce strict adherence to the Enlightenment notion of the individual.

College leaders also furthered the myth that education equals upward mobility. Not only does the individual, burdened and disciplined with skills tests and personality inventories, bear responsibility for success, the individual gains the opportunity to participate in a "classless" society. Leaders of the movement convinced members of the working class that they needed diplomas and degrees in order to succeed. The distribution of wealth did not change, but companies had the training of their future employees subsidized by taxes and tuition. Companies could then choose from a buyer's market, a well-trained population all the more ready to serve after having sacrificed several years without a good job (Shor). Junior college leaders sought to flood the market with countless skilled job candidates willing to work for less. It should be no surprise that the junior colleges facilitated unchecked capitalism and generally served corporate interests. After all, corporate America was represented on the governing boards and funding bodies (see Karabel 543_44).

Instilling a Middle-Class Ethos

Junior colleges, though they maintained the unequal distribution of jobs
and wealth, also sought to homogenize the cultural ethos of the student body. Early two-year colleges discouraged class consciousness and the awareness of class division. Leaders promulgated bourgeois thought and ideology, which served, as Georg Lukács observed, as "an apologia for
the existing order." Lukács explains that dominant culture instills "false consciousness" in the working class—that is, an inability to apprehend the systematic nature of material inequity and a belief in a classless society. The corrective is "class consciousness," which serves a "practical, historical function" in that it prompts collective contemplation and potential revolutionary action (Lukács 48, 52). In 1909, Ellwood Cubberley illustrated education's role in the construction of false consciousness when he referred to the responsibility of junior colleges to instill "into all a social and political consciousness that will lead to unity amid diversity" (55). Eells went so far as to say that the junior college ought to train the new student in the "maintenance of a cheerfulness of manner and a happy outlook on life" (338). The values that would help students obtain that happiness include initiative, responsibility, cooperation, and self-reliance (619). Cubberley argued explicitly against class consciousness and collective action. He wrote, "Through all the complicated machinery of the school, some way must be found to awaken a social consciousness as opposed to class consciousness, to bring out the important social and civic lessons, to point out our social and civic needs, and to teach our young people how to live better and to make better use of their leisure time" (65_66). Movement leaders feared class consciousness and the collective action that could potentially spring from radical contemplation. Cubberley and other educators therefore taught students the value of leisure time and thereby instilled in them the bourgeois ideology that the privileged individual has a fundamental right to enjoy recreational pursuits. Additionally, movement leaders glamourized the notion of the bourgeois subject through seemingly innocuous and neutral "skills" such as thinking "independently" (Denworth, "Indoctrination" 163). Junior college leaders wanted members of the working class to be their own atomized bodies, subjectified and isolated.

Junior colleges integrated these values into their curricula.² Davenport explains that by teaching laborers not only to do better work but also to dream, to love art, and to free their minds, they will thereby make the industrial product better (98). An influential report issued by the Carnegie Foundation in the mid-1930s articulated the importance of fostering a middle-class ethos among junior college students, a population that junior college movement leaders thought was most in need of individuality. According to the Foundation's report, "Certain aspects of civilized life, highly valued in cultured social living, which are omitted or subordinated in the ordinary academic curriculum, will be added or made important" at the two-year college (qtd. in Denworth, "Education" 55). The report differentiates between the needs of the university student, who already knew middle-class values, and the junior college student, still in need of disciplining. Denworth summed up the Carnegie report in a 1937 editorial in the Junior College Journal and called on teachers to bring a sense of refinement to their unwashed, working-class student body. As early as 1909, Cubberley called on junior college teachers to instill the values of "obedience, proper demeanor, respect, courtesy, honesty, fidelity, and virtue" (17). Twenty years later, Eells praised Compton Junior College, whose orientation included a unit on "the marks of college men and women" (326). Also in 1929, Franklin Bobbitt asserted the most important part of the junior college's general education curriculum was preparation in how to act "cultured" and "cultivated." Bobbitt wrote, "To be a good citizen and to help make democracy a success, one must pursue the ways of civilized living" (16). Likewise, Charters identified the middle-class values—the traits that squelch class consciousness and foster individuality that were deemed essential by the faculty at Stephens College: "The key traits were accuracy, adaptability, ambition, love of beauty, balance, broad-mindedness, courage, courtesy, chastity, cheerfulness, dependability, healthfulness, high-mindedness, honesty, in-dividuality, initiative, leadership, loyalty, patriotism, poise, scholarliness, service, sincerity, spirituality, sociability, and tact" (Teaching 46). He explained that values-laden education seeks out desirable "social traits" in the tradition of Ben Franklin's list of thirteen virtues (49_51). Junior college leaders established curricula that sought to instill traits that would reproduce the ideology of capitalism.

In the literature of the junior college movement, there existed an urgency to transform cultural consumption among students. Denworth, for example, denounced "cheap literature" and common sporting events. "We shall emphasize wholesome sports," Denworth stated, singling out riding, golf, and tennis and denouncing baseball ("Education" 56). Irvin Coyle told junior college teachers that they should concern themselves with "remedying defects in reading and composition, teaching better use of leisure, teaching the enjoyment of art and music . . . teaching etiquette and good taste" (20). The implication is that the institution obscures and tries to destroy any unique, working-class character in the student body. Coyle argued,

Convinced he had an intimate knowledge of working-class students, Coyle concerned himself not with civic literacy but with literacy as the means to taste. The rhetoric of the Junior College Journal influenced the literature produced by individual colleges during the era. One college catalogue printed the following statement: "Since the printed page is one of the mightiest forces for good or ill in the life of the reader, students are asked to read only that which ennobles and uplifts, and to abstain from reading `frivolous, exciting tales,' `story magazines,' and other forms of questionable literature" (qtd. in Eells 586). Movement leaders considered popular culture unworthy of study and morally "questionable." Cultural literacy became an imperative for students.

Maintaining a Blue-Collar Workforce

The same movement leaders who attempted to achieve cultural homogeneity also sought to maintain social divisions materially. Koos says the transfer function of the junior college is written about widely in junior college catalogues—texts read by students, potential students, and the parents of students—but rarely in the professional literature (19). Leadership of the movement advanced the terminal function of the junior college even though most parents and students supported the transfer function (Frye 1_2, 85). Although they believed ideologically in the terminal function, leaders saw the transfer function as a marketing tool,
a way to promise the working-class student more than they intended to deliver. In 1924, the influential American Association of Junior Colleges (AAJC) defined the junior college as an institution offering transferable "courses usually offered in the first two years of the four-year colleges" (qtd. in Gleazer 17). Still, in the professional literature, prominent members of the AAJC insisted that the primary purpose of the two-year school was to provide the terminal degree. The professional literature contains elaborate descriptions of new semiprofessions that required only two years of preparation and therefore were, according to Koos, an appropriate domain of the junior college. Koos singled out commerce, industry, agriculture, and home economics as the broad categories under which more specific trades such as technical chemistry, auto mechanics, and secretarial arts would fall (122_23). Professions, in contrast, required the four-year degree or beyond. The creation of the "semiprofession" further served to obscure class division, and the rhetoric of the junior college movement suggested that since semiprofessions existed between artisan trades and professions, semiprofessional workers were therefore "middle" class, not working class (see Frye 59). Movement leaders identified blue- and pink-collar jobs as semiprofessions and thereby obscured the existence of a working class. Clearly, a class that does not exist could not disrupt the status quo.

Leaders sought to legitimate the semiprofessions so as to maintain a superstructure of jobs and to manufacture a superstructure of institutions. Eells praised the prominence of programs in which students split their time between courses and work (204). Two-year institutions thus put students into specific jobs and provided industry with relatively cheap labor. Of course, most working-class students were already headed for these jobs, but the two-year college, as a kind of assembly line producing worker-citizens, assumed the role of facilitator for the particular industries that the workers would serve. Still, Eells was quick to suggest that it was the students who were most served. "A combination" he wrote, "of skill, technical knowledge, and good citizenship or social understanding is needed for success in a vocation" (205). Even though industry received trained workers, Eells argued that it was the students who benefitted.

Students most often attended the junior college because they wanted to prepare for university work. Eells presented this data in 1931, citing a study of 3,058 junior college students in California. The most common reason for attending the two-year college was to acquire transferable credits (218). A 1929 study found that ninety percent of junior college students intended to study at four-year schools (Eells 250). Eells, toeing AAJC party line, found these figures troubling, pointing out that the economy did not need so many professionals. Unafraid of nebulous figures, he said that less than ten percent of the population needed a degree (289). So Eells encouraged his junior college colleagues to consider ways to make the terminal courses more appealing: "The stigma must be removed. The inferiority complex too often attached to them must be changed" (310). Some two-year schools, notably Los Angeles Junior College, set up both transfer and terminal curricula. While a greater number of students chose transfer courses, both types of curricula sent students to universities with equally low frequency (Frye 115). Eells wanted to protect the selectivity of the four-year university, especially in light of the imperative to imitate the research paradigm. The motives of movement leaders, writes Frye, "had less to do with spreading collegiate education than promoting the emergent university as a bastion of selection" (5). Little data exists on how many students did successfully transfer to universities (Eaton 34).

Movement leaders presumed to understand the working class. Cubberley said that members of the "industrial classes" were not only "illiterate" in their ignorance of standard dialect but that they lacked "any real conception of the meaning of democratic life" (56). Koos praised the smaller class sizes at junior colleges, where teachers could exercise more influence so as to advance "the social control of the individual in small groups." He claimed that the new student body was less mature, and he praised student access to "continuing home influences during immaturity and affording attention to the individual student in the junior colleges in ways not possible in other higher institutions" (23, 166). Koos saw the university as a "disorganizing social environment," one that working-class students could not handle (167). Furthermore, Koos assumed that the diversity of ideologies at universities would threaten the junior college student. Those with no allegiance to the mythology of classlessness could unravel the social fabric, and so the junior college served as a more conservative domain, a place less threatening than the university and a place to obscure class difference. Universities were permitted to offer ideological alternatives because raising the consciousness of the privileged is safe. Providing critical education to the less elite is dangerous. Koos wrote, "In these days of large and mounting enrollments in colleges and universities, with the accompanying increase in hazard for the socially immature in attendance, it is imperative that some adequate agency of conservation be instituted." He explained that the junior college was "clearly better designed than are our typical higher institutions to provide for those who should not or cannot go on" (188, 315). Eells and Koos agreed about the need to provide guidance. Eells said that the commuter population of the two-year college needed to stay because of a need for discipline, thus reinforcing the notion that junior college students are immature, though older than university students. For the junior college students who had to be away from home, Eells explained, they receive more "careful dormitory supervision" than the university students, particularly female students (206).

Rhetorics of Social Efficiency and Civics

As elite educators influenced by German, French, and Italian trends in scholarship and thought, leaders of the junior college movement were no doubt informed of the European science of work. Rabinbach explains that a dominant metaphor among late nineteenth-century European intellectuals was the body as motor. Both the body and the motor convert energy into work and thereby increase labor-capital (2). Scientists thus began to study work and efficiency, conducting experiments, for example, to judge how long the work day ought to be (2, 5). Such scholarship was easily put in the service of the capitalist economy as a means to increase output. There was a movement among scientists to diagnose low work ethic as a pathology. No longer was work ethic religious; instead, it became a physiological state. On the domestic front, meanwhile, Taylorism was taking hold. Taylorism and "scientific management" involved eliminating waste through standardization and routinization of tasks (Rabinbach 166, 239). Social efficiency as used by David Snedden and other educators meant turning students into workers (see Drost). Taylorism and the science of work influenced the drives to teach more efficiently and to foster efficiency among students. The 1920s in particular saw schools integrate management theories into the curriculum (Holt 73). This was particularly true in the two-year college, which served laborers in greater numbers than did the universities. Efficiency through education became a means to increase labor output. Educators at the turn of the century, notably those involved in the
junior college movement, feared unrest. Given technological and indus-trial change and new radical movements, educators saw all around them numerous "threats to social stability," according to Frye (16). To teach efficiency was to "shape the individual to predetermined social characteristics" (Drost 3). "Social education," for educators such as Snedden who were interested in efficiency, meant "`the effective control of native propensities and instincts' of the individual `so as to produce the habits, appreciations, knowledges, and ideals' that would make him a worthwhile member of society" (Drost 83). Civic education was the means to increasing social efficiency. As Mara Holt has shown, efficiency pedagogies served as foils to Dewey's progressive conception of education (74). Although efficiency advocates cite progressive educators in their literature, social-efficiency-through-civic-education often took the form of anti-progressivism (Frye 31). Vocationalism and civics were part of an attempt to advance a conservative program in efficiency. Leonard Hancock in 1934 provided a dramatic example of what Frye calls the "social control" aspect of social efficiency movements in arguing that a good junior college experience can even convert communists into good citizens (225-26).

Issues of class were at the heart of the fear of social unrest that was common among college leaders. As Howard Zinn demonstrates, by the turn of the twentieth century, nothing "could disguise the troubles of the [capitalist] system" (316). In the first ten years of the century, radicals such as William Foster garnered national attention, mobilizing steel workers, miners, meat packers, and farmers on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the far-left faction of the American Socialists (Barrett 310). Media coverage of labor unrest, especially IWW strikes, shaped popular opinion, giving the left a violent reputation (Zinn 323). The IWW, influenced by Dewey, intended to wage war on capitalism (Dubofsky 74, 66; Zinn 324). The left used a rhetoric of solidarity, class consciousness, and collectivity (Dubofsky 72). In the 1920s, increasingly radical organizations such as the Trade Union Educational League and the Red International of Labor Unions began to make waves (Barrett 311). The values of leftist labor organizers stood in stark contrast to the junior college's doctrine of ideological discipline. Foster, a prominent American communist, and numerous IWW leaders represented Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals," the thinkers that come from a particular class and lead and represent the interests of that class. These public intellectuals preached social change. Labor organizing during these radical years often consisted of an egalitarian vision of education wherein proletariat taught proletariat (Dubofsky 74). The junior college movement was reactionary to the burgeoning labor movement of the early twentieth century. Junior colleges represented a top-down form of education in which members of the privileged classes taught their dominant values to the proletariat. Leaders saw their institutions as a corrective to the radicalism that threatened society.

As the economy and the ethnic make-up of the nation changed at the turn of the century, education leaders saw a need for an overhaul of educational structures. The University of Illinois' Eugene Davenport called for a "scheme of education that aims at a higher efficiency of all classes of people," one that makes work "more effective and more profitable." Since workers served the economy and educational institutions have the potential to make workers more efficient, he reasoned, the worker-citizen is "public property." If citizens take advantage of free education, they have the obligation to serve the greater economic good of society (11, 12). He wrote, "The only safety for us now is in the education of all classes to common ideals of individual efficiency and public service along needful lines with common standards of citizenship" (16). Just as Davenport sought to create cultural and civic uniformity, Cubberley sang the praises of industrialism and technology and fought to restructure education to better serve the economy. Cubberley was an astute rhetorician who fancied himself a philosopher of educational trends and histories and who saw industrialization as progress. In 1909 he praised the "inventive genius" of the industrial revolution, during which "Yankee ingenuity manifested itself in every direction" (6). He felt that education was at a crossroads and would have to maintain productivity. Schools, particularly institutions like the junior college, would have to help the working class articulate shared goals, according to Cubberley. Industrial capitalism had lifted America, he wrote, "to a higher plane of material comfort and industrial welfare"; now schools would have to seize the opportunity to advance homogenous values (5).

Maintaining homogeneity was irksome for Cubberley because of the influx of non-Anglo immigrants. For Cubberley, a unified cultural ethos was easier to maintain through much of the nineteenth century when most immigrants were northern and western Europeans, who he saw as having "initiative," "self-reliance," "respect for law," and other traits useful to the state (12_14). However, in the late nineteenth century, immigration trends shifted. In 1909, he wrote, "These southern and eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the north Europeans who preceded them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order, and government, their coming has served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civic life" (15). Cubberley saw the two-year college as a domain where homogeneity could be fostered. His xenophobic rhetoric led to a bourgeois program in which the junior college disciplined its student body and resulted in curricular features such as eugenics and marriage courses. He was explicit about his desire to use schools such as junior colleges as a locus to wage cultural war: "Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race, and to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order" (15).

Leaders used terms such as "social intelligence" and "social competence" (the ability to meet and respond to societal demands) to identify the deficiencies of students. Irvin Coyle wrestled in 1938 with these concepts and concluded that students could be taught to function at more productive levels at the junior college. For Cubberley, the increased efficiency could lead to the sustained viability of the United States. He cited with pride the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War as evidence of our nation's powerful presence in major events but warned that "the great battles of the world in the future are to be commercial rather than military" (49). Clearly, in his view, efficient social actors facilitated dual powers of the military and the economy. No wonder educational leaders like Cubberley wanted to teach the masses. Efficient worker-subjects could help America maintain its economy and assert a strong presence in global affairs. Educating the working class at the growing number of junior colleges quickly became a patriotic endeavor.

By relegating members of the working class to an institution where they could become proper patriots, universities could likewise advance the cause of efficiency. The university would not have to remediate or offer as many lower-division units. Leaders such as Koos saw remediation as "repetition." Cutting remediation, in his view, could allow the university to become a center for the knowledge construction that could advance the military, scientific, and economic power of the nation (258, 206). President James of the University of Illinois expressed this sentiment in his 1905 inauguration. He suggested that the university "ought not to be engaged in secondary work at all, and by secondary work I mean work which is necessary as a preliminary preparation for the pursuit of special professional, that is, scientific, study" (qtd. in Eells 46). William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, supported two-year colleges because they meant the "amputation of the lower limbs" of the university, which could raise standards. Harper advocated "cutting off the head" of less-elite four-year schools and making them junior colleges (qtd. in Eells 48, 59).

Junior colleges were clearly part of a scheme to preserve the elitism of the university system in the U.S. As a case in point, the Universities of Michigan and Illinois tried to outsource lower-division courses (Cohen and Brawer 6_7; Eells 45_46). Also noteworthy in this context is the recommendation in 1907 by Stanford President David Starr Jordan that the first two years of course work be abolished (see Eells 48). Reflecting on this position in 1929, Jordan wrote, "With the rapid increase in the number of excellent junior colleges [Stanford] ought no longer to have to dissipate her best strength in preparing young students for their true university work. The day has now arrived when, like most of the universities of Europe, [Stanford] should stand above the ordinary routine of the college" (qtd. in Eells 49). The Stanford proposal failed to eliminate the lower-division curriculum because of concern that the plan was financially unsound (see Frye 45_46). Harper, Jordan, and other presidents imagined their universities, now freed of lower-division classes, aiding industry and technology. Meanwhile, two-year colleges could manufacture the efficient subjects that were necessary to keep those industries functioning at a lucrative pace.

The Rhetorics of Scientization and Eugenics

The leaders of the junior college movement wanted to transform all disciplines into sciences. As Denworth put it in 1937, "We shall endeavor further to inculcate a scientific attitude toward civilization" ("Education" 56). Denworth and her colleagues felt it important to articulate a rational understanding of the world. Education scholars advanced a positivist paradigm and suggested that teachers ought to teach scientific method in all classes. This ideology informed the structure of institutions. Scientization of knowledge reinforced the notion that schools at various levels could know what students needed. Junior college leaders, for example, observed what they perceived to be the values and activities that would help society. This inquiry wore the guise of objective (empirical) study. Surveys, for example, of what skills workers needed and analysis of crime statistics could easily justify the importance of vocational education and a civic schooling that taught adherence to law and order. Davenport argued in 1909 that unrest led to high divorce rates and concluded that schools ought to keep "girls" busy with vocational, useful tasks such as typing that would occupy their time and thereby lower the divorce rate (24). It was impossible to challenge this reasoning when it was backed with "proof."

Movement leaders never considered the ideological nature of their conclusions; rather, they were convinced of the truth of their studies. They reasoned that a great deal of crime in industrialized communities meant that blue-collar workers, particularly immigrants, did not know how to behave. Junior colleges commonly taught courses in eugenics, the scientific study of "good birthing," so that students could decide who to marry. Denworth praised the value of "the simple essentials of courses in eugenics and euthenics, the family and its relationships" ("Education" 56). Good breeding had a racial meaning for Cubberley and other xenophobic leaders. The movement was in keeping with the science of work. Rabinbach explains that liberals and capitalists, in inventing a "detailed scientific program for transforming and deploying human labor power," attempted to "transcend class conflict and substitute scientific neutrality" (8). Instead of contemplating and critiquing the system that produced fatigue and conflict, movement leaders advanced the scientific notion of labor. "Scientists," Rabinbach writes, "attempted to reduce labor to a purely instrumental, or technical act, which lent itself to the rigors of physiological experiment and social science" (123).

Schooling itself was becoming scientized. Curricula and pedagogical methods, for example, were becoming standardized. Learning how to teach became a science with an empirical methodology (Cubberley 40_43). Charters claimed that he wrote his curriculum guide because of "the prestige of systematic knowledge," and he devoted a large amount of the book to an analysis of precisely what moral lessons students need (Curriculum 12). In his later text, he stated, "The pedagogical mind abhors unsystematized material." He argued that methods of moral education should be systematized in the same way that they are in a field like botany. Charters wrote, "The method which produces the best results in the shortest time with the greatest degree of simplicity of operation is the more desirable; and this desirability is determined by measurement" (Teaching 45, 321). He underscored the value scholars and educators placed on measuring with "scientific" precision the efficiency of various pedagogical methods.

Teaching methodologies were not adequate vehicles, however, for this ideology-laden goal of education, so the disciplines of school psychology and counseling were invented; both became especially dominant forces at junior colleges, where guidance retained prominence and power (see Clark). According to Cubberley, during the late nineteenth century, "Character-building was erected as a definite aim in education. Psychology became the guiding science of the school" (43). School psychology at the junior college was mainly concerned with the elimination of traits that disciplinarians saw as chaotic. No wonder an institution so concerned with testing and diagnosis became an institution that valued eugenics. The same tests that measured intelligence and personality were used to justify racial and gender superiority (see Gould; Rabinbach). Davenport's great fear was "a whole people gorging themselves with a mass of knowledge that has no application to the lives they are to live, for this will breed in the end dissatisfaction and anarchy." He argued that schools needed to teach the "the tramps of the country" or else face social unrest, and he went on to say that the country must "preserve a homogenous people" (28, 75). When all of life is reduced to "scientific" data, dominant ideologies inevitably unleash projects to homogenize. Thanks to efficiency and science, junior colleges tried to create a homogenous ethos in service to capital.

Building a New Consciousness

Elitist movements within higher education are not phenomena of the past. The huge California State and City University of New York systems have witnessed recent attacks on the place of "basic studies" courses at four-year colleges. Conservative ideologues armed with compelling rhetoric and ample finances assail higher education from state legislatures, in op-ed pages, and even from the seats of our undergraduate classrooms. Like leaders of the junior college movement, contemporary elitists want higher education to serve corporate interests. They want more assessment so that students can take "personal responsibility" and so that instructors can be held accountable in quantified ways. Witness the two major presidential candidates in the recent election whose discussions of education centered on high-tech job skills and the demand for an increase in standardized tests.

Rhetoricians within English departments can better shape their institutions and society if they can situate problematic aspects of higher education within a historical context. Our institutional memory is too narrow; we can't afford to ignore the archives of non-elite, working-class institutions in favor of ivy leagues and research universities. Widening our institutional memory to remember the stories of lower-prestige schools requires a class consciousness and a return to the archive. There are, for example, few good documentary histories of the two-year college. So with diligence we must search and re-search. Such a consciousness also requires that we attend to issues of agency. If instructors are to be held accountable, so too should the institutional and political agents who shape educational movements with less-than-democratic ideals. Scholars interested in the politics of education have already begun to analyze and critique institutions; now it is time to build the consciousness necessary to apply those critiques to diverse places like two-year colleges.