Scholars Without Money

(See front cover)

In the paneled library of a huge, blue-shuttered Italianate villa on Baltimore's exclusive North Charles Street, ten grave, rich men sat down one evening this week for a long talk about money. Headed by Daniel Willard, and including among their absent members Walter Sherman Gifford and Newton Diehl Baker, their concern for the moment was not with the state of railroads, of telephones, of law or even of politics. As the Board of Trustees of Johns Hopkins University, it was their solemn duty to approve a plan of campaign which, when launched next week, will serve notice on the nation that its pioneer stronghold of creative scholarship is threatened not with extinction but with what is worse for the repository of a great tradition -- a slow, humiliating decline into lacklustre mediocrity.

Hypochondriacs could be reassured at once. The heritage of the Four Doctors,* whose famed portrait by John Singer Sargent is one of Hopkins' most treasured relics, was safe & sound. Separated from the rest of the University by three and a half miles of Baltimore streets, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is also set apart by its separate and adequate endowment. Its affiliate, Johns Hopkins Hospital, found itself short of ready cash last year (TIME, April 29), but its power and prestige were by no means at stake. It was Johns Hopkins' academic division, equally renowned and cherished in the scholars' world, which had come to a shocking crisis.

Men. The history of Johns Hopkins is a history, of great men. Its first was that Godfearing, champagne-loving moneygrubber, Johns Hopkins. His namesake University would give much this week to find another like him. Son of a Maryland tobacco planter whose Quaker precepts made him free his slaves and put his sons to work, Johns Hopkins got no schooling after he was 12. He started his fortune by exchanging groceries and farm products for raw Maryland whiskey, selling the whiskey as "Hopkins' Best." He increased it by shrewd business ventures and hard-fisted money-lending. Because his only love was a first cousin, he never married. He became president of a bank, a leader in insurance, shipping and warehousing, the largest individual stockholder of Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. But to the end of his life he never wore an overcoat, walked whenever he could save money by it, thought long before replacing a threadbare carpet in his home. When he died at the end of 1873, he left some $7,000,000, nearly his whole fortune, half to found a university and half for a hospital which would be free to all of Baltimore's poor.

In the years after he took his Yale degree in 1852, Daniel Coit Gilman seemed to his friends a young man of great promise who was floundering lamentably in his choice of a lifework. He was building better than they knew. All the time he was wandering over Europe, planning Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, teaching geography there, serving on New Haven's Board of Education, he was observing and thinking about Education. When he was called from a brief term as president of the University of California to create Johns Hopkins, his ideas were ripe.

The U. S. then had no first-rate graduate school. Would-be scholars had to prepare themselves at Oxford, Heidelberg or the Sorbonne. Bent on establishing a native centre of scholarship, Daniel Gilman decided that the first essential of a university is not buildings, sites or apparatus but men. For twelve months he scoured Europe and the U. S. for the ablest available scholars, caring not whether they had yet made their reputations. The results were historic. Before he died every one of those first faculty-men -- Remsen the chemist, Rowland the physicist, Sylvester the mathematician, Martin the biologist, Gildersleeve the classicist -- had made his own name great, that of Johns Hopkins greater. They and their colleagues founded the first U. S. learned journals in mathematics, chemistry, philology. Famed for their own researches, they attracted and trained such students as Woodrow Wilson, Josiah Royce, Walter Hines Page. With President Gilman always in the van, they set the pattern for U. S. graduate education, created a tradition of free and fruitful scholarship which remains unsurpassed. Wrote Philosopher Royce: "The beginning of the Johns Hopkins University was a dawn wherein ' 'twas bliss to be alive.' "

Money. Hopkins' first financial setback occurred in the 1890's when the bottom dropped out of B. & O. stock. It emerged from that disaster with its original endowment cut almost in half. Never greatly interested in its undergraduate college, and sending its graduates out to seek knowledge instead of money, it failed to accumulate rich patron-alumni. In 1926 an endowment campaign raised some $6,000,000, but most of it went by its donors' direction to the School of Medicine. When Depression set in, small annual deficits in the academic division became big ones.

The nation's other privately-endowed universities distinguished for graduate study -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago -- are with the exception of Columbia coming out of Depression with endowments appreciably greater than when they went in.* All have had income losses, all have had to pull in their belts a notch or two, but none has even approached a plight comparable with Johns Hopkins'. There faculty salaries have been cut 10%. Research has been cramped. Professorial chairs vacated by death or retirement have been left empty or filled by low-priced instructors. Still the academic division has kept going in the red at the rate of $200,000 to $250,000 per year. Engrossed in their private affairs, Hopkins' rich trustees knew better than anyone else that rich men were in no mood for philanthropy. Hopkins' financial affairs drifted from bad to worse until last year, with an accumulated deficit of $1,000,000, they reached a crisis.

Down at a mahogany table in Remsen Hall to ponder & discuss sat anxious trustees and administrators. First off, they decided to look financial facts, in the face. Book value of the University's stocks, bonds, mortgages and real estate was $30,812,575. Re-appraised at their market values as of June 30, 1935, these holdings emerged at $26,834,827. Almost every dollar of unrestricted funds was used to pay off the academic division's million-dollar debt. Of the remaining endowment, tied up by donors' instructions, $16,815,445 belonged to the School of Medicine. The School of Hygiene & Public Health, founded in 1918 by a $6,000,000 Rockefeller gift, was also in the clear. The School of Engineering could count on outside help, being the only Hopkins division to receive a state subsidy. But the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations, never having realized either the promise of scope or the promises of endowment of its boomtime founding, was a financial cripple. The Institute of Law had been wiped out by lack of funds. And the academic division was reduced to a starveling $4,320,824 -- less than the endowment of Mount Holyoke.

Prospects for money-raising were still far from bright, but trustees realized that it was soon or never. First, however, with old President Joseph Sweetman Ames nearing retirement, they faced the difficult job of finding in one person an executive who could raise the money to give Hopkins' tradition life and a scholar who could maintain that tradition to give the money purpose. Once again, as Hopkins' trustees had done in its crisis of birth, they turned to a Yale-trained geographer.

Trustee Gifford had been a Harvard classmate of the American Geographical Society's Director Isaiah Bowman. Trustee Baker had known him after the War as chief territorial expert of Woodrow Wilson's Peace Commission. Looking over his record, they found that dynamic, hard-driving Isaiah Bowman had been on the move from Canada to Michigan eight weeks after he was born in Waterloo, Ont., had been going places ever since. After schooling in the Ferris Institute at Big Rapids and the State Normal College at Ypsilanti, he had moved on to work his way through Harvard, passed 26 before he got his B.S. degree. Three years later he had his Ph. D. from Yale, was teaching geography there between field trips to South America. As head of the American Geographical Society since 1915, he had led in completing an Atlas of the Historical Geography of the U. S., a definitive study of Mexican land systems, an exhaustive survey of the upper Amazon and finally a great map of Hispanic America -- 102 sheets depicting everything from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn on a scale of 15.8 miles to the inch. His scientific career had been crowned in 1931 by the presidency of the International Geographical Union, in 1933 by the chairmanship of the National Research Council. Hopkins' trustees knew that such useful but unremunerative achievements as the American Geographical Society's were monuments to its director's ability to wangle fat sums from rich citizens as well as to his scientific zeal. Isaiah Bowman went to Johns Hopkins as president-elect last June.

Bowman's Hopkins. The University whose headship Geographer Bowman assumed was not the unique institution it had been when Geographer Gilman was leading it into unexplored fields of knowledge. Other universities, bigger, richer and older than Hopkins, had invaded its realm of higher scholarship, edged it off its throne by sheer weight of numbers. But something more than the enormous prestige of its past still kept Hopkins in the rank of the world's topflight universities. Its graduate departments, though outweighed in numbers by those of other institutions, were topnotch and functioning vigorously. And in one notable respect Hopkins could still lay reasonable claim to its once unchallenged supremacy.

In a Baltimore Sun article ominously titled "We Who Are About to Die," brilliant, outspoken Philosophy Professor George Boas last month discussed what the disappearance of Hopkins would mean to the world. "If the whole matter were to be summed up in a word," wrote he, "it would be the word 'freedom.' The Johns Hopkins University is not a perfect university, but in it there is the maximum of liberty. I have worked as student and as teacher at five important universities [Brown, Harvard, Columbia, University of California, Hopkins] and this is the only one I know where a teacher pursues his own way without snooping or criticism or a large burden of committee work, and where the students are judged not by conformity to a set of rules but by their individual attainments."

Faculty freedom at Hopkins means not only freedom of opinion (a Hopkins professor ran as Socialist candidate for Governor of Maryland in 1932) but also freedom from heavy teaching schedules and freedom to rove wherever scholarly curiosity may lead. The average Ph. D. is said to spend his time learning more & more about less & less until finally he knows everything about nothing. Hopkins professors think a scholar who stays in his own backyard a mental cripple. David Moore Robinson started out as a professor of Greek, drifted from eyework to spadework, won lasting fame by uncovering the buried City of Olynthus. Gilbert Chinard, professor of French, has done outstanding work in U. S. history (Honest John Adams, Jefferson, The Apostle of Americanism). Hopkins' second-in-command, blunt, bushy-browed Provost and Dean of the College Edward Wilber Berry, famed for his lack of an academic degree, began as a Hopkins professor of geology, invaded botany's province on the trail of fossil leaves, is now a foremost paleontologist.

Significantly, Hopkins' is the only U. S. graduate school without a dean. Lacking the imposing number of scholar-teachers marshaled by such institutions as Harvard and Columbia, it offers small classes and seminars, close contact between students and top-ranking professors. Of Ph. D.'s who earned stars for special distinction in the 1933 American Men of Science, Hopkins had produced 138, to 129 each for its closest competitors, Harvard and Chicago.

Its undergraduate College of Arts & Sciences has always been a sideshow at Hopkins, and the activities of the College's notoriously impotent football team hardly that. The student body is small, 473, serious-minded, mostly preprofessional, with no mind for such collegiate capers as hazing and freshman caps. Under much the same system introduced by President Hutchins at University of Chicago, a Hopkins collegian spends his first two years in broad cultural study, may then pursue a specialty to a Bachelor's Degree or shortcut a year by starting at once after his M. A. or Ph. D. Only Hopkins change which President Bowman has so far proposed is to give his undergraduates some contact with the scholar-professors who have heretofore confined themselves to graduate departments.

Hopkins salaries, ranging up to only $9,000, are lower than most. Well worth the difference to most of its faculty scholars are their freedom and prestige, plus their snugly satisfying communal life in the pleasant residential section off the trim, spacious, Georgian campus at Homewood, three miles north of Baltimore's business centre. Nonetheless President Bowman soon discovered in his University symptoms of the creeping paralysis caused by financial malnutrition, signs that the decline which Hopkins fears had already begun. Before he had been long in office, famed Experimental Psychologist Knight Dunlap departed after 19 years at Hopkins for University of California, where he had been promised more money for his work. Then versatile Professor Chinard announced that, at this academic year's end, he too would be off to California. There were persistent rumors that other facultymen, big and little, were planning a similar exodus.

There had also begun a slow infiltration of mediocrity into the graduate student body. Bigger and richer universities, primed with ample funds and numerous undergraduates whom they could pay their graduate fellows to teach, were outbidding it for the cream of the nation's annual scholarly crop. Only last spring Hopkins awarded fellowships to two promising students, before autumn saw them lured away by the promise of bigger subsidies at Harvard and Yale.

Hopkins' Bowman Called into immediate council, Hopkins facultymen found their new president a square-cut, energetic, conservatively handsome man who looked and acted far younger than his 57 years. He won their admiration at once by the thoroughness and courage with which he tackled Hopkins' troubles. On the human side, however, they found him harder to know, wondered for a time what was behind his courteous, smiling but aloof manner. They have now decided that it is chiefly an intense absorption in his job. After eight months, most of the strangeness between Baltimore and President Bowman has worn off, and his sincerity and honesty are universally conceded. But a remark still frequently heard around city and campus is: "He's a fine executive, but he'd be a hell of a man to go on a fishing trip with."

President Bowman beats his pretty debutante daughter Olive at ping-pong. He likes music and the theatre. He says he could not live a month without poetry. He has given up reading fiction because his own job is too exciting. He is troubled but not worried by insomnia, often lies in bed working over correspondence and plans from 2:30 a. m. to 6 a. m. Socially-minded, he and quiet, unassuming Mrs. Bowman entertain frequently in the huge, blue-shuttered house which the university rents for them. Stomach and throat trouble have stopped President Bowman's moderate drinking and smoking, but his guests sip wines and cocktails with his entire, anti-prohibitionist approval. He belongs to no church, preserves an inquiring and broadly tolerant attitude toward the universe and the New Deal.

Like most scientists, President Bowman is a cautious, methodical man. Like most scholars, he is inclined to be long-winded and metaphysical in conversation and public speech. His first Commemoration Day address, delivered during Hopkins' 60th anniversary celebration last month, was an unexceptionable statement of a first-class scholar-administrator's credo. Some Bowmanisms from it:

P: Freedom to think, to discover, and to report is more important than either Government or society itself.

P: Neither Divine grace nor worldly experience has given teachers a special power, all-embracing and conclusive, to "settle" the affairs of men. . . . No one among us has yet seen God.

P: A man who does not work for the improvement of society is not an educated man.

P: If you tell a scholar that mankind, for all the scholar's searching, never arrives at the ultimate goal of dreams, he will tell you that there are no ultimate goals, that the prize you seek is in the seeking.

P: We have to admit frankly that scholars will persist in trying to move the world.

At the outset of his speech, President Bowman declared: "If I were to recite financial facts and figures only, in this my first Commemoration Day address, it would ill sustain the hopes of the illustrious few who founded, and the devoted many who have carried forward, the work of the University. Again, if I were to speak of University purposes only, I fear that I would seem to you to be floating in a lofty stratosphere of dreams. I am driven by circumstances and conviction to do both, these things and to attempt the task of setting up a ladder between earth and sky."

That rhetorical job behind him, it becomes President Bowman's harder task next week to find and raise a golden ladder on which earth-stranded Hopkins scholars may climb and move securely in the thin, exciting stratosphere of knowledge. Its price is $10,750,000 -- $750,000 for the next three years, $10,000,000 for the future. When they left his house and went about their businesses this week, the ten Hopkins trustees had built the first rungs with a collective pledge of $75,000.

* Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's four original professors: William Osier, William Henry. Welch, William Stewart Halsted, Howard Atwood Kelly.

* 1929 1935

Yale $92,978,138 $128,827,068

Harvard 69,867,269 95,838,568

Princeton 20,044,831 26,929,810

Columbia 73,543,073 69,226,412

Chicago 50,889,403 59,478,903

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