Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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. . . frosh week wasn't all orientation . . . mind. Hopkins, one of the boats against the current, refused to sell out. VVhich brings it to 1949. And a new era. And a new mood. And a new president. 1949 meant Bronk. he man who had cost the tipsters money in the spring and summer of 1949, seemed himself another addition to the ever- Dean Cox ...two ojices now . . . education's new linger-man. Through it all, Hopkins kept its unruflied way, perhaps hectic beneath the surface, but firm in its insistence that the mind and its cultivation were neither the playthings of the stock exchange nor the products of dollars and cents. Goodenow, Ames, Bowman-names which reflected the light of professional and academic competency and accomplishment rather than political aflluencyg names which meant, whatever varying traits might char- acterize their owners, that the proper pursuit of the university founded by Johns Hopkins was, should, and would be the things of the 111 . . . Tom gives the 'word . . . ffl 'gy

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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

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Dean Kowwenhoven . . . School of Engineering . . . changing Hopkins myth. What his eventual place in the history of the University would be was yet, in the spring of '49, a question only the Levering bums were willing to answer, but general consensus among undergraduates had already carried him far along the road to pop- ularity, a feat-which, in many students' eyes, meant the battle was half won. The hand- shake, the warm interest in the curious stu- dent's problems, the kind words which were made the more impressive by their obvious sincerity-all made Detlev Wtilf Bronk Four- O with traditionally indifferent Joe Colleges at an early date. In many ways, the history of Bronk's ca- reer led many to think of him as inevitably on the road to Hopkins. Born in New York in 1897, the son of a divinity student who was at the time of his son's birth working on his doc- torate, Bronk seemed from his childhood to have been cast in the mold associated with the graduate university. Schooled at Swarthmore and Michigan Cwhere he received his doctorate in 1926j, he had been an assistant power engi- neer even before receiving his bachelor's, had taught physics at Pennsylvania before begin- ning graduate studies. Every step listed in Who's Who seemed the tryout for a bigger job later on. An ensign in the Naval Air Corps in 1918, he was to become Coordinator of Air Research for the Air Surgeon's Office, Head- quarters A.A.F., in the second war. An under- graduate at Swarthmore, he was to return in 1926 as associate professor and later Dean of men. His days of instructing there behind him, he was to return to Pennsylvania in 1929 as Johnson Professor of Biophysics. QThe alert if occasionally incautious Hopkins News-Lek ter scooped the held in '48 by finding the short- est definition of Bronk's chief interest. Said Dean Cox in a News-Letter interview: Bio- physics is the description of biological phe- -112