Joseph Clifton Brown, president of State Teachers College at St. Cloud, Minnesota, was the board’s choice to become NISTC’s third president.

Described as an excellent speaker with an unbridled enthusiasm for trying new things, Brown was immediately popular with students, faculty and townspeople. He started biweekly faculty meetings that sound somewhat like a modern book club: members were assigned books and essays to read, while each had to take a turn at leading the discussion on same. Sometimes those conversations centered on new approaches to teaching; other times Brown would ask the faculty to take up broader topics, such as ‘What are the other teachers colleges doing that DeKalb ought to do?’

President Brown recognized that the post-WWI students were still struggling with a lack of enthusiasm for extracurricular activities. This he attempted to remedy by helping students organize new clubs to enliven their time at NISTC. He personally helped organize pep clubs and the selection of cheerleaders, and successfully sought admission to the “Little Nineteen” (IIAC) athletic conference.

Two other major initiatives are attributed to Joseph C. Brown: First, he sought to raise academic standards by tightening up admission requirements. High school graduates needed to rank in the top two-thirds of their graduating classes in order to gain admittance to NISTC, and for the first time, they had to pass standardized tests.

The second initiative led by President Brown was creation of incentives to attract and keep strong faculty. To that end, Brown convinced his board to create an emeritus program for retired faculty; create policies to allow for leaves of absence for faculty to continue their education; and finally, create a classification system that put all faculty into four different ranks, complete with a salary schedule that provided for annual increments.

All of Brown’s initiatives were undertaken with a larger goal in mind: To achieve accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Universities, and to have NISTC students accepted without the need for additional coursework into the master’s programs of such prestigious institutions as the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Columbia.

Brown accomplished a great deal in a short period of time, but after a mere two years at NISTC, he was lured away by the offer of a much larger salary as the superintendent of schools in Pelham, New York, one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country.

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