Truman College in Uptown. Photo: Snowman304, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Harry S Truman College is turning 70 this fall, and the man running it has been at the Wilson Avenue campus long enough to be part of its story himself.
Shawn Jackson took over Truman in May 2017, named on the very first day of Juan Salgado’s tenure as chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago. He came in on an interim basis, DNAinfo reported at the time, and is still president nine years later.
“Harry S Truman College has spent 70 incredible years of opening doors of opportunity for our students through education,” Jackson said in an anniversary release published by Uptown Update in October. “With our students at the center of our mission, Truman promises to remain a beacon of accessibility and academic excellence—for the decades to come.”
A CPS lifer
Jackson came to City Colleges from Chicago Public Schools, where he spent about 15 years as a teacher, assistant principal, principal and district administrator. His last CPS job was chief of leadership and learning, where he worked on district-wide efforts like CPS’s Parent University and its personalized learning push, according to his Truman biography.
Before that he was principal of Spencer Technology Academy on the West Side, and earlier a science teacher. At Spencer, he led the writing of a multimillion-dollar technology grant that went to only five of Chicago’s 600 public schools, and started a parent university and a community technology center at the school.
He holds a Ph.D. in administration and supervision from Loyola University Chicago, a master’s from St. Xavier University and a bachelor’s in education from Northeastern Illinois University, a few miles up the road. He still teaches part time at Loyola’s School of Education. His dissertation on the CPS desegregation consent decree won a dissertation with distinction award in 2010.
When Salgado picked him, part of the reasoning was Truman’s role in training teachers. Jackson “himself serves as a role model in our effort to build a diverse pipeline of educators into Chicago classrooms,” Salgado said in 2017.
Seventy years, three addresses
Truman started in 1956 as a two-year evening college operating out of Amundsen High School on Foster Avenue, launched because North Siders wanted a nearby option for higher education. It outgrew that space within a few years. In 1961 it moved into a former elementary school on Wilson Avenue and became Mayfair College.
The move to its current home at 1145 W. Wilson Ave. came in 1976. The main building was designed by John Moutoussamy, the first Black architect to design a high-rise in Chicago, and the school was renamed for President Truman, a supporter of public and community colleges.
The college’s own history is frank about the cost of that move. Building the campus meant tearing down apartment buildings and displacing families, including members of Uptown’s Native American community. In the decades since, the college has tried to rebuild those ties through programs like the Institute of Native American Development and the Red Path Theatre.
The campus added the Larry McKeon Student Services Building, with its 1,100-space parking structure, in 2010. In 2014 City Colleges made Truman its hub for education, human and natural sciences.
What Truman is now
Today the college enrolls students from more than 100 countries who speak more than 90 languages, which tracks with the neighborhood around it. Its English language classes are where a lot of those students start.
The anniversary materials point to graduates like Kana Nagai, who started at Truman learning English, moved through its transfer program and went on to earn a doctorate. She is now a senior research associate at Illinois Tech, working on GPS and navigation research supported by NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. “City Colleges always showed me the next opportunity,” she said.
For Uptown, Truman is also simply a big neighbor. Its buildings, its parking structure and its students shape the stretch of Wilson between Racine and the Red Line, and the campus produced Pegasus Theatre Chicago, which went on to win a string of Jeff Awards.
Registration for winter and spring sessions is open now on the City Colleges website.
Ruth Kaminski is the editor of The Uptown Ledger and covers neighborhood institutions and housing.
