Head on a Platter

One day last month Baltimore's Evening Sun delivered a fatherly lecture to Johns Hopkins University. The Hopkins had lately lost (mainly to richer institutions) many eminent men: Nobel Prize Physicist James Franck (to University of Chicago),

Psychologist Knight Dunlap (to University of California), French Professor Gilbert Chinard (to University of California, then to Princeton), Philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy (retired). The Sun was dismayed at the gaps they left in the traditionally brilliant Hopkins faculty. But it was shocked much more at a new resignation just announced by President Isaiah Bowman, who soon afterward left town for a vacation: that of famed Economist Broadus Mitchell.

Broadus Mitchell, 20 years on Johns Hopkins' faculty, was acknowledged an outstanding scholar on the South's economy and a popular teacher. To the Sun (which had itself quarreled with and been denounced by him), Dr. Mitchell had "stood for many years as a symbol of academic freedom" at Johns Hopkins. He ran for Governor of Maryland as a Socialist,* excoriated Marylanders for the lynching of a Negro, quarreled with Hopkins trustees, once went to Duke University to tell its co-eds that Benefactor James Buchanan Duke "was lacking in social insight."

Broadus Mitchell had long been a headache to President Bowman, who was campaigning for endowments to hold up the Hopkins' falling prestige. But after a violent quarrel with Dr. Mitchell, President Bowman once confided to students: "No mother hen is more solicitous of her chicks than I am of Broadus. Why, there are men downtown who would like to see his head on a platter."

How Dr. Mitchell's head finally got on the platter, neither President Bowman nor Dr. Mitchell had publicly explained by last week, when 150 bigwigs from the Hopkins faculty and Maryland's public life (including Johns Hopkins' famed Dr. Henry E. Sigerist, St. John's College's President Stringfellow Barr) gathered at a dinner to praise Dr. Mitchell, speak guardedly of "loss of tolerance" at the University. But to friends Broadus Mitchell explained privately: "The thing got to the pass where resignation was the only course. Bowman was too protesting about his tolerance--and then insulted and browbeat me on the campus."

* His running mate (for U. S. Senator) was Elisabeth Oilman, daughter of Johns Hopkins' first president, Daniel C. Oilman.

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