Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

Page 18 text:

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

Page 17 text:

. . . 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

Page 19 text:

nomena in terms of physical principles. It is using the methods of physics on the subject, biology. Long-winded pundits from the Sun and Board of Trustees gasped at that one.j It was in the field of Biophysics, of course, that Bronk attained his wide professional rep- utation. As professor at Pennsylvania, as director of the Eldridge Reeves Foundation for Medical Physics, and later on as professor of physiology at Cornell Med, his name had grown in affluence in this new field. But at the same time Cagain the paradoxb, Bronk was striving for a coordination of the sciences with one another, and attempting to find for his students a rapprochement between the spe- cialized fields of physical investigation and the broader, more parabolical implications of the liberal and classical arts. So great a reputation had he made for himself in the latter activity in fact, that newspapers and magazines singled out that particular facet of his educational philosophy for underlined comment at the time of his appointment as Hopkins' new president. The Evening Sun observed that, He thinks the University, with its emphasis 131 Dean Hawkins . . . School of Business . . . on graduate study, is the place for him to con- tinue his efforts to coordinate the sciences and link them with .the needs of the people. And Hopkins undergraduates, however, chilled by the importance attached by the new president to university work at the graduate level, could at least be assured that the notable advances made under Isaiah Bowman toward a broad- ening of the collegiate curriculum, whatever the field, would be continued. And in Bronk the biophysicist they would also find a man who, unlike most literature students, had also digested Coleridge's metaphysics, and who was as likely to discuss his college-editing days with Drew Pearson as the need for a new cyclotron.