17

Academic Ferment

In his history of Indiana University, Tom Clark told of the agony of the era. I remember more vividly the ecstasy of 1937–62.

Personal agony there was aplenty—the agony of shattering crises, of fourteen-hour days, of grinding drudgery with every minute scheduled and utilized and rarely a vacation, of disappointingly unrealized ambitions, of weariness beyond description. But these are dwarfed by the achievements of my talented, dedicated, and determined colleagues through nearly superhuman effort.

The years from 1937 to 1962 were filled with strenuous effort. Problems that almost defied solution had to be solved in order to make the adjustments required by the dislocations of World War II, the flood of returning veterans, the booms and recessions, and the military effort of the Korean War. The struggle to secure the necessary funds for operations and to expand the plant and facilities to meet what seemed to be inexhaustible needs was constant.

In addition during this period I undertook to be a good citizen by doing my share of civic activity at home and abroad from Bloomington to Bangkok, all of which demanded incessant travel around Indiana and from coast to coast in the United States, and innumerable crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific for meetings and missions in Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Nevertheless, administration had first claim upon my time as we attempted to take full advantage of all the opportunities opening up. Administrative activity per se, however, was not the most exciting aspect of the era.

There was abroad on the campus an extraordinary esprit de corps that engendered the courage to attempt the impossible in scholarly effort and achievement. Gradually we all became imbued with the belief that we could be the equal of any of our contemporaries and, in certain fields, could excel them. The inferiority complex that had plagued Indiana University until the 1930s was completely dissipated, and in area after area our distinguished academic teams boldly aspired to reach the top.

Early on, with Dean Payne’s help, a group of distinguished geneticists had come to join us—men such as Cleland, Sonneborn, Muller, Luria, Ebert, and others—and soon they had won for the university the top position in their field. Postdoctoral students from all over the world eagerly sought to work in their laboratories. Once on an Atlantic crossing I was with Warren Weaver, of the Rockefeller Foundation, who had been selecting outstanding young European scholars for postdoctoral fellowships in the United States. During the voyage we discussed on several occasions the difference between scientists in Europe and those in the United States. With great seriousness he told me that Indiana University was very troublesome to him. Startled, I asked why. Then with a smile he explained that all the brightest scholars in the biological field wanted to come to Indiana and that the Rockefeller Foundation naturally could not send them all to a single institution.

Under the leadership of Ralph Shriner and Frank Gucker, the chemistry research program blossomed and attracted scholars throughout the world. Department heads such as Moffat and Sutherland—later Mueller—were not only building their departments, but also were contributing sound, balanced, university wide faculty leadership. Mitchell, Langer, and Konopinski were pioneering in nuclear research, and under their aegis one of the early cyclotrons was built here. They drew research physicists and noted mathematicians to the university. Kinsey’s intrepid research in human sexual behavior is now universally recognized to be of epochal importance.

Languages, always a strong field at Indiana University, became even stronger by the addition of many new offerings. Interesting changes were taking place at the time, in part because of the development of area studies, but even more because of the impact of the National Defense Education Act and Indiana University’s campus-based military contingent of language specialists. Wartime emphasis on rapid language training aroused an interest in new methods, created a need for an array of “informants” with different native tongues, and prompted the formation of the Indiana Language Program to encourage language training in secondary schools.

In 1947, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, we began to develop our first area studies program, Russian Studies, and soon afterward the Department of Russian Studies was initiated with Michael Ginsburg at its head. After the mid-1950s, under the leadership of Robert Byrnes, the program quickly came to occupy one of the top two or three positions in this field in the country and amassed a library collection, the largest of its kind among American universities. In the mid-1950s a Ford Foundation grant spurred further development in language studies. East Asian Languages and Literatures became established here under Wu-chi Liu; Sebeok and his colleagues introduced such exotic newcomers as Uralic and Oriental Languages; and Slavic Studies became Slavic Languages and Literatures. From standard language offerings, we grew to a complement of thirty-six, and the resulting cosmopolitan infusion helped change forever the nature of our faculty body.

Meanwhile the Department of English enjoyed a remarkable flowering under the leadership of James Work, followed by William R. Parker, until my friends at Yale were quite ready to say to me without attempting to be flattering that they considered our department one of the most, if not the most, competitive departments in the United States. Side by side with the strengthened literary scholarship came a burst of creative writing by Samuel Yellen and William E. Wilson and their students, the social histories of Herbert Muller, the rise of the Writers’ Conference and the transfer of the Kenyon School of Letters to Indiana University, and the publication of a poetry series by the Indiana University Press. All stirred a lively interest in the creative field.

Beginning earlier but nonetheless closely allied to all of this growth was the burgeoning folklore field under the inspired leadership of Stith Thompson, whose name is known all over the world and whose disciples, Dorson and Sebeok, were to earn their own positions of scholarly renown. With the coming of the Voegelins the allied field of anthropology began to thrive, and these two disciplines have continued to go from strength to strength.

Newton Stallknecht brought a brilliant young scholar, Norwood Russell Hanson, to the campus. He was soon joined by Michael Scriven and in a brief time they formed a new department, the History and Logic of Science, since renamed the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science. In what seemed a remarkably short period, the university began to win an enviable reputation in this field and to attract attention not only in the United States but in England and the continent as well.

This omnipresent sense of heightening achievement or renaissance was aided and abetted by the rich influx of distinguished scholars from abroad during World War II and the period immediately following as a result of the upheaval in Europe or because the academic life in America seemed more attractive than in Europe, bringing us such brilliant additions as Hlavaty, Artin, Brendel, Haurowitz, Kaufmann, Netti, Hopf, Tomasic, Pounds, Apel, and Benes. This emigration of scholars to the United States enriched the whole of American higher education, but we at Indiana University were unusually fortunate in those who chose to come to us. Our existing faculty, among them the few much earlier emigres such as Agapito Rey, welcomed them cordially. These men and women from abroad added impressive scholarly repute and an exciting international dimension to our academic family.

Equipped with a new theater in a wing of the Auditorium, the inimitable Lee Norvelle and his talented colleagues made unusual strides in the field of drama. Given its independence from the English Department, Speech and Theatre grew in enrollment and student productions attracted an ever-widening audience. Lee was not only a dynamic administrator but also a good manager of money. Through his own initiative and with funds amassed from ticket receipts, he launched the Brown County Playhouse and later was able to add the Showboat Majestic as another outlet for the display of student talents. Because of their excellent training and the encouragement they received, alumni of the Speech and Theatre Department have had an enviable record of success in commercial theater, radio, and television. Too, students had the advantage of classes from one of the best known historians of drama, Hubert Heffner.

Astronomy made rapid strides with talented men such as Edmondson, Wrubel, and Cuffey. The department became a major producer of Ph.D.’s, made possible through the magnificent gift by Dr. Goethe Link of his excellent observatory located on a high, secluded hill between Bloomington and Indianapolis. It provided hitherto unavailable research facilities for graduate students in astronomy. This facility was later to be augmented by another research observatory constructed in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest. The department’s eminence was recognized by the invitations to sponsor and operate along with six other universities the great Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona financed by the National Science Foundation, and later the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory near La Serena, Chile. The group incorporated in 1957 as the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and was joined soon afterward by Yale and Princeton.¹

One of the exceptionally strong teaching and research departments was Government, now Political Science. With men such as Oliver Field, Ford Hall, Walter Laves, and Ed Buehrig providing leadership, the department attracted an increasing number of graduate students who subsequently received advanced degrees here. Among them was John W. Ryan, the future president of Indiana University.

Dynamic events were taking place in the School of Music. Wilfred Bain, building on the strong foundation created by deans Merrill and Sanders, was attracting to our faculty men and women of national and international distinction as scholars, teachers, and performers in their respective fields. Using the medium of opera, which Dean Bain believed was the most useful and comprehensive activity around which to build the applied music fields—orchestra, stage direction, voice, scene design, ballet, and so forth—and with the help of men and women such as Hoffman, Kuhlman, St. Leger, Lipton, Kaskas, Busch, Manski, and many other notables, he had developed within a relatively few years a school of international fame. He accomplished this through the rare spirit he was able to engender, not by an infusion of funds, for he was allocated much less money than he could have expected on the basis of the School of Music’s rapidly rising enrollment.

The School of Business under the unusually astute and tireless leadership of Dean Weimer and with the help of lieutenants such as Edwards and Mee was not only meeting the demands of a rapidly increasing enrollment and the claims of the business world for its services, but also was making the important transition from a mainly undergraduate business school to one predominantly graduate in emphasis, until in an amazingly short time it became second only to Harvard in the production of top quality D.B.A.’s.

It was an exciting period in the School of Law, too. Horack, Fuchs, Harper, Hall, Clifford, Wallace, Gavit, and others were meeting the problems of growth and at the same time updating the curriculum to train a generation of lawyers in tune with the new social order created by the revolutionary social and legislative changes of the Roosevelt New Deal. The law school faculty members were active university citizens as well, furnishing leadership for all-university committees and, in their professional capacities, providing public service initiatives in the state and nation.

The graphic and plastic arts had the great good fortune of having as their head Henry Hope, a man of extraordinary taste, vivid personality, and rare ability. A distinguished scholar in his specialty and an administrator with flair, he had the virtue of being able to make up his mind and to achieve great things with small resources. He developed a strong faculty with art historians such as Otto Brendel, Albert Elsen, and Ted Bowie, the sculptor Robert Laurent, the jewelry designer Alma Eikerman, and others.

The Library was growing apace under the leadership of Robert A. Miller, the university’s first professionally trained head librarian, and his able assistant, Cecil Byrd. We were giving priority to building the collections of books, journals, and manuscripts, and this policy was immeasurably enhanced by J. K. Lilly’s gift of his rare book collection, at the time said to be the greatest collection in private hands, which became the basis of the distinguished Lilly Library of rare books and special collections, now one of the notable scholarly manuscript and rare-book libraries in the United States. Lilly’s gift was the forerunner of major and significant additions to the Lilly Library.

During this same period under Dean VanNuys’s administration the medical school was making the transition from mainly a teaching and treatment center to a teaching, treatment, and research center, which necessitated not only a greatly expanded plant but, more importantly, a major shift from a largely part-time faculty to a geographical full-time clinical staff. VanNuys’s adroit leadership, guided and aided by the extraordinary wisdom of men such as Ritchey, Winters, Kohlstaedt, Irwin, Hickam, and others, made this transition, which was not without some serious difficulties, on the whole less painful than, to my knowledge, any similar transition was ever made in the United States. Problems there were, heartaches there were, but they were overcome in the process and left few permanent scars.

A like change was taking place in the dental school under the leadership of first Crawford and then of that extraordinary administrator and academic entrepreneur, Maynard Hine, who met the problems of growth, of developing quality rapidly, and of attracting postdoctoral fellows from all over the world so well that the school eventually was ranked among the first five dental schools in the United States in anybody’s rating. Since American dental schools are the best in the world, it had a similar rating internationally. While an international reputation attained in many subject areas may be little known outside the profession, even the man in the street recognized the usefulness of the development of Crest toothpaste by that genius, Joe Muhler, building on the basic work in chemistry upon which he, Nebergall, and Day collaborated.

The School of Education was blessed with a strong and experienced faculty who were highly respected by the teaching profession in the state. As a consequence they were called upon to make innumerable management studies and to perform a wide variety of public services for state and local units of government. The School of Education was one of the most active in the international technical-assistance field as well. Dean Smith had been a pioneer leader in international education at the elementary and secondary levels. Dean Wright followed in his footsteps and broadened the base of interest to include the university level as well. Technical-assistance programs staffed by the School of Education with men such as Porter and Jung and by Larson, Stevens, and Pett from the Audio-Visual Center spanned the globe. Few faculties could have been their equal in developing a comparative understanding of the various educational systems of the world.

This period of seething, fruitful ferment was brought about for the most part with small means. Never were our appropriations even close to our needs, but, as our faculty began to achieve national and international recognition, we attracted more funds from the outside that were essential for this developing process. But progress came primarily out of the daring, the courage, the determination of an inspired group of scholars. They knew they were as good as any in the world, and they set about to prove it by their research and writing and their acceptance of positions of national and international scholarly leadership. Soon national and international societies looked to Indiana University for men and women of achievement. An increasing number of our faculty members were elected to the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and similar prestigious societies abroad. The campus community was electrified when Herman Muller was named to receive a Noble Prize. We rejoiced when Hlavaty won acclaim for solving the Einstein equations on unified field theory, when Sonneborn won the Kimber Genetics Award, and when Haurowitz won the Paul Ehrlich Award.

Although quite a few persons have attributed the glow of the 1940s and 1950s to the addition of amenities and handsome buildings, I feel that the excitement year after year, so real that it was almost tangible, came from the inspired spirit of the members of the faculty as they successfully pursued their dream of making this a university of the very first rank. Throughout the period this explosive intellectual renaissance had the support of exceptionally capable, understanding, sympathetic trustees—men and women who knew what a university should be and readily perceived the prime claim on resources to be for intellectual and scientific achievement, who were willing to support this faculty effort in every way possible and to defend against all critics the transformation that was taking place. I doubt that a university has ever been more fortunate than we were to have had three such dedicated and knowledgeable board presidents as Ora Wildermuth, John Hastings, and Willis Hickam. The faculty effort was undergirded by the talent of what I believe to be the most amazing team of general administrative officers ever assembled—Briscoe, Biddle, Franklin, Collins, Merritt, Wright, Ashton, Braden, Bartley, Rich, Nelson, Kate Mueller, Shoemaker, Shaffer, Fraenkel, and Reed—and such other remarkable academic administrators as Payne, Cleland, Bain, Weimer, Gucker, Gavit, Hine, Irwin, and Thompson. Byrum Carter was a junior administrator during part of this time, giving an early indication of his later outstanding administrative service.

Similar periods of rapid change and renewal have been known to encounter stubborn alumni resistance. Just the opposite was our experience. First under the guidance of George “Dixie” Heighway and then of Claude Rich, the Indiana University alumni on the whole did not oppose the ferment but welcomed it, abetted it, and rejoiced with each new objective won.

It would be untruthful to allege that the students of the era had a revolutionary change of attitude toward scholarship, but they too were affected. The ordinary undergraduate began to take pride in the academic achievements of the faculty and in the university’s increasing stature. When Herman Muller spoke at an all-university convocation upon returning from Stockholm, where he had received the Nobel Prize, the auditorium was packed to the rafters with students. Of course, the returning veteran students, the G.I.’s, helped set a more mature tone for the campus. They were perhaps the most demanding and appreciative students in the university’s history, undergoing some real personal hardship with surprisingly little complaint. Candid and constructive in criticism, they were nevertheless quick to respond to opportunities to make their contribution to the advancement of the campus. During the period from 1945 on, the percentage of graduate and professional students was increasing, bringing a new stratum of cultural and intellectual concern. But all segments of the student body—undergraduate and graduate, veteran and nonveteran—contributed to the stimulating spirit of the campus.

The supporting staff, which responded magnificently, won praise for their services so essential to maximum efficiency and achievement in winning goals and reaching for aspirations. The building and grounds staff became imbued with a sense of pride in the beauty of the campus and found ways beyond the call of duty to make the campus a more beautiful place in which to live and learn.

How did it happen? I really do not know. Perhaps, as Shakespeare says in Julius Caesar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” But if I had to explain it, I would say simply that occasionally a group of superior men and women, dedicated to a common high purpose, come together and become inspired by that vision to achieve both individually and collectively to the utmost of their abilities. To have been a part of that community and that effort was a rich and rewarding experience, an experience that makes one realize the nobility of great human beings of integrity, talent, and generous spirit.

____________

1. The founding universities of AURA, in addition to Indiana, were California, Chicago, Harvard, Michigan, Ohio State, and Wisconsin.