Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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four years, told them to scurry back, that the world outside didn't need them quite yet, that if they just finished that thesis, all would yet be well. Unlike most modern universities, Hopkins in '49 was playing both ends against the middle. No longer choosing sides in the great collegiate game, it took both at once. he undergraduates which the new Hopkins was trying to turn out-or Which, at any rate, under Isaiah Bowman, it had at- tempted to harmonize-might, in '49, be well Worth more than President Bronk's passing glance. The paradox of Hopkins seemed con- centrated in the extremes they manifested. 116

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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

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To begin with-and one would have to end it there too-they defied classiheation. There were few Brooks Brothers suits Calas, New Havenb, precious few crew-Cuts Cthe Prince- ton tiger gives a clull roarj, and Hopkins men disappoint all Harvard lovers by not carrying their books in green bags. There just clicln't seem to be a Hopkins look. l 171' J