Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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vanced learning in early twentieth-century America, while it poured out the great schol- ars and teachers of the future to the universi- ties the nation over which were learning to follow its example, its medical school, re- sounding With the names of Osler and VVelch, Halsted and Kelly, gained the fame which the public has ever since associated with Johns Hopkins. C You go to Johns Hopkins, the average Hopkins undergraduate is asked at least fifty times annually. Then Where do you expect to practice? D Actually, of course, . . . Miss Davis had registration problems too . . . the brilliant trail-blazing being publicized at the medical school and hospital was being quietly consolidated and strengthened with the more critically important research of the University. The glamour of the surface was being underwritten by the scholars. The foundations were being found secure. Even its fame as a graduate school eluded the traditional fulfillment. Scholars from abroad learned early in the century to rhapso- dize over the Hopkins, yet at home it con- tinued to be no more than a name, a place, a . . . Ilffeyer and Vandercook made some eyes widen . . . 915

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life-had to be swallowed, with the solemn admission of all concerned that, by Jingo, they'd done it again. There was no predicting what Hopkins was going to do next. ooking back, one had to admit that it'd always been like that, Hopkins the paradox, Hopkins the exception. Even in its genesis, there had been that elusive but deh- nite trend away from the way one did it. In the midst of clamors that the German model just wouldn't go, Daniel Gilman had fulfilled the dreams of a Baltimore merchant and set up the first really Hrst-rate graduate school in America. And its early years, spent in buildings which were deemed less important than the actiyities which were going on within them, seemed quietly contradictory to the reputation which was gathering about The johns Hopkins. . . . new boss atwork . .. Its growth, its transitions, its crises fol- lowed the same path-patternless except for their lack of pattern, unpredictable because they 'were setting their own tradition. VVhile the graduate school quietly gathered about it the great names of Remsen and Royce, while it continued to be the one great center of acl- -18

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medical school, a hospital. In Heidelburg, you heard of it, in Prague, at the Sorbonne, and how about Peiping?-but you were lucky if they even knew about the med school down the commercial trend was growing among American colleges-the insistence that the university was big business with a capital B, that its position as an influence in the twen- F Bowman and Shafer . . . new jobs all found . . . in East Podunk. Hopkins was still that sort of place. And still, grow and expand with the times as it could and did, it insisted on its unique place in American education. As the century grew older, and the country less the tiny, simple nation it had been a century earlier, tieth-century community was more to be determined by its corporate profits than its doctorate theses. A new kind of college presi- dent, attuned to the times, began to emerge: paunchy, jovial often, a man of kid-gloves and the right connections, a quick man with the checkbook and fountain pen-for all to see: . . . wheels at play . . . my 110