Humanologist

Virgil M. Hancher grew up on an Iowa farm, went from the State University of Iowa to Oxford for his M.A., and eventually turned himself into a successful Chicago lawyer. But today at 55, Hancher is renowned neither as farmer nor lawyer: he is one of the top state university presidents in the U.S.

In twelve years, the State University of Iowa (enrollment: 7,200) has come to know him as a friendly, bookish man who rises at 6:45, spends the next ten hours hurrying about his campus, charging purposefully into all sorts of projects. But he is also a familiar figure far beyond his own 700 acres. Last week, when the American Council on Education wanted someone to head a new committee to study Government scientific research grants to universities ($100-150 million a year), it could think of no abler man than Virgil Hancher.

More Practitioners. In a way, it was an odd choice, for Hancher's own interests are anything but scientific. "We teach," says he, "and as a university always will teach the physical sciences . . . But our unique concentration of power focuses upon those things which concern men and women as men and "women." Hancher calls these things "humanology," and in the last twelve years Iowa has seen quite a bit of that.

Even before the famed Harvard Report (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945), Hancher was busy remodeling his curriculum, slashing away the hodgepodge of vocational courses in favor of a broad and solid liberal arts program ("What our cultural life needs today is more general practitioners"). He strengthened Iowa's flourishing school of fine arts, started a library where undergraduates for the first time could browse at will. Though he never neglected his budget (he tripled his appropriation to more than $10,000,000), or his plant (he established a full-fledged college of nursing, built a communications center, a hospital-school for handicapped children), Hancher hammered at other things. Even the university's research program--from its studies in psychiatry to its project in geriatrics--came under the head of humanology. "It is more than a problem of statistics," says Hancher. "It is a problem of human kindness."

Calmness & Assurance. Over the years, Iowa and its ten colleges have climbed to high rank in the Midwest. More important, the university, under Hancher, is one of the boldest crusaders against the vocationalism that plagues U.S. state universities. "Somewhere," Hancher tells his students, "the art of contemplation has been lost...An occasional mystic or band of mystics have preserved the art . . . They possess an integrity, a calm and assurance, a wholeness of mind and body that is a kind of holiness. This wholeness, this holiness, I crave for you."

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