Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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Zylzere wad a campud loo, if you ever noticed it . eanwhile, somewhere along the line that had led from Howard St. to Home- wood and from Gilman to Bronk, something had been changing at Hopkins. Where aca- demicians the World round had once raved about its leadership, Hopkins was now looked on as a school living on its laurels. Newspaper- men like john Gunther, once warmly partisan i er N f?Z'i-if fi?--e ei?

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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.

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to the Hopkins distinction, now referred to its graceful decline. And the word got around Cyou got it, too, if you ever left Baltimorel, that Hopkins was on the skids, that it no longer rated the accolades once so warmly accorded it. One of the reasons was, of course, that the isolation under which the Hopkins star had its inception had since been lost. Universities the country over, catching the Hopkins idea, had joined the movement it had initiated. Hop- kins Was no longer alone in its insistence on the value of graduate scholarship-and its distinction lost some of the clarity given by an isolated position. It wasn't, in fact, that Hopkins had declined-the others had come up to it. But there was something else. During the Hurry of the twentieth century, the fact was overlooked that, where Hopkins had once been the pole of a paradox, it had now become a 151 paradox within itself. An inner dialectic had replaced an outer, more easily defined position. And it Was this inner paradox that might easily prove the one great problem facing Hop- kins, and now in 1949, Bronk. For Hopkins, which had once scorned the non-scholarly, which might well have once said, Go anywhere you like and we'll respect you, but don't come here looking for anything but hard academic work, was now producing un-Faust as well as Faust, college-joes as well as spooks, lacrosse players as well as slide-rule mechanics. Wliat did it mean? For one thing, it meant that Hopkins was trying to make both scholars and well-balanced men. Like the state uni- versities, it took the extroverts and poured them into ready-made survey courses, upon emerging from which, one was Lol a Bachelor of Arts, a Deke, a clean-cut kid and a peachy dancer. But at the same time like the old Hopkins, it still gathered to itself the spooks and exceptions, tossed them into the stacks-and if they came out at the end of