25

The American Council on
Education and an Introduction
to International Associations

I have always been a believer in a cooperative effort by educational institutions in presenting their case to the public and in the study and solution of their problems. For that reason I early began to participate in the work of the American Council on Education (ACE), attending its meetings and interesting myself in its activities. The ACE seemed to me to be of unusual importance because it was the one and only organization so constituted that it could theoretically speak for the whole of American higher education. Its membership was all-inclusive: public and private, land grant and separated state universities, small and large institutions from every section of the nation—east, west, north, and south. In addition to the participation of many major colleges and universities as institutional members, it had constituent affiliated bodies such as the Association of American Colleges, the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, the National Association of State Universities, and many others.

The contacts between American higher education and the federal government have been numerous and complicated; they grow increasingly so with the passage of years. But in wartime, these contacts were even more numerous with even more complicated consequences. The impetus for the organization of the ACE came out of the problems that the universities experienced in dealing with the government during World War I. An ad hoc group composed of delegates from eight national organizations concerned with higher education and headed by Samuel P. Capen from the U.S. Bureau of Education was responsible for the formation of the Emergency Council on Education in January, 1918.¹ The stated objective was “to place the resources of the educational institutions of our country more completely at the disposal of the national government and its departments. . . .” In reality, it was organized as an instrumentality to help the institutions deal collectively with the government when it was impossible for them to do so individually. The council’s first chairman was Donald J. Cowling, president of Carleton College. When the organization was renamed the American Council on Education in July, Cowling was given the added title of president of the council.

The organizational structure of the ACE consists of a board elected from the membership, a president who is the executive officer, and a chairman of the council and the board, elected annually. When I was active in the ACE, an executive committee of eight members carried on the work for the most part between meetings of the full board and meetings of the membership. Membership meetings were held once a year. The first full-time executive officer of the ACE was Samuel Paul Capen, who gave the organization excellent leadership through its formative years and then resigned to become chancellor of the University of Buffalo. He was succeeded by Charles R. Mann and later, in 1934, by George F. Zook, who had been for a year U.S. Commissioner of Education in the Roosevelt administration. Zook was an experienced man, a man of vigor and imagination, a builder in the best sense of the word. Some called him an “empire builder,” but they did so largely in admiration rather than in criticism. He believed in the mission of higher education, and he believed in the ability of the ACE to advance the welfare of institutions of higher education as a matter of national interest. He gave the ACE adroit, effective, and imaginative leadership. He was a man of enormous energy, wholly dedicated to this work, to which he devoted himself unsparingly.

As the United States moved into World War II, the need for the ACE was again highlighted. The federal government and the armed forces had great need for the resources of the universities, and the multiplicity of relationships and problems that arose as a result nearly defied description. The ACE attempted to meet the challenge with strength and courage. Much of the work of its response and a great deal of the delicate, difficult negotiations with committees and bureaus over policies fell to the lot of the ACE’S Committee on the Relationships of Higher Education to the Federal Government. I joined the committee at its formation in 1943 and gave its work high priority on my schedule, attempting always to be present for its meetings and to assist in addition at congressional hearings and in calls made by the committee on federal departments. The committee had an executive officer, Francis “Frank” J. Brown, who was experienced in the Washington scene and knew his way in and out of the intricacies of the halls of Congress and the federal bureaus and departments. He served with this and successor committees until his death in 1959.

The work of the committee took a considerable amount of time because it dealt with a multiplicity of crucial issues such as the draft policies about to be promulgated, the housing of wartime trainees on the campuses, and—at the conclusion of hostilities—the distribution of wartime surplus facilities for the housing of veterans. It dealt also with questions concerning the amount of reimbursement to be paid by the federal government for services to be rendered by a university—the old indirect-cost problem that is still one of the important issues between universities and the federal government—and other issues of paramount importance. Zook frequently attended the meetings of this committee because it dealt with vitally significant policy questions for the ACE, and I became acquainted with him there and in other activities around the office.

In 1943, conscious of the fact that all Americans had to do extra work, I had begun service in the State Department, spending about four days a week in Washington and the remaining days in Bloomington carrying on the work of Indiana University. It was a strenuous schedule, but it did mean that I was in Washington during the effective part of the week and was therefore readily available for meetings, conferences, and other activities of the ACE. The ACE office was located at 744 Jackson Place, less than a halfblock from my office in the old State, War, and Navy Building. I suppose it was due to Zook’s influence that I was elected chairman of the ACE for the fiscal year of 1944–45. I was surprised and gratified to be selected for this responsibility, representing as it did perhaps the top elective position among the national organizations in American higher education, that is, organizations that consisted of institutional and constituent memberships. I shall speak later of the National Education Association, the other great body, which represented individuals. I also assume that I was elected so early in my career in part because of the shortage of manpower and as I happened to be on the scene. In any event, I served as chairman that year and remained on the executive committee, as was the custom for chairmen, during the following three years until 1948.

The work of the ACE was expanding so rapidly during this period that Zook and others began to feel that it was necessary to find new and larger quarters. I was made chairman of a building committee. We thought that we might try to build a building large enough to rent quarters to the constituent bodies, so that the whole of the organizational structure of American higher education could be in one location. There was no room in the headquarters on Jackson Place for the affiliated bodies. When we investigated the possibility of building, the cost seemed prohibitive at the time. But we discovered we could buy an elegant apartment building that had been occupied by Andrew Mellon as his residence in Washington and by several of his friends. This was a well-designed limestone building at 1785 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. It was large enough to furnish not only greatly enlarged quarters for the ACE, but also good quarters for most of the principal affiliated organizations such as the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, the American Association of University Professors, and later the Association of American Colleges. I felt that there would be great advantage in having so much of higher education in one spot, promoting communication between the various bodies and also making it easier for the government to know where to seek educational representatives. The arrangement also made it easier to convene committees consisting of representatives from all the constituent bodies. Experience proved this to be a wise move—financially feasible and useful in furthering the ACE’S work. As a result, when, after many years of use, the building became outgrown, it furnished the example and the equity, along with a foundation grant, to build the present large, modern headquarters in Washington.

As I have mentioned, my Latin America trip in 1941 had stimulated my interest in the field of international and intercultural education, which was further whetted by my wartime work in the State Department. It was therefore logical that I accepted the chairmanship of the ACE’S Committee on International Education and Cultural Relations when it was organized in 1944. From that time on, to the late 1950s, I chaired a variety of ACE committees concerned with international education such as the Commission on Occupied Areas (1949–51), the Commission on Exchange of Information on International Cultural Relations (1952–53), and the Commission on Education and International Affairs (1952–57). My service to these in a way complemented my own personal activities abroad, which I have related elsewhere.

During the period 1943–45, George Zook began to think about the nature of the structure of international educational activity in the postwar period. Following World War I, the League of Nations had provided for international educational affairs by creating the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, based in Paris and dominated by the French. This committee dealt not at all with the day-to-day problems of education throughout the world, but rather furnished a gathering point for intellectuals to speak with each other—for Einstein to speak to Einstein, it was sometimes sarcastically said. But the substantive problems of education were ignored: the classroom problems and the problems of teachers and of organizational structures of education throughout the world. Zook was determined to see that this pattern was not repeated, but of course the French were equally determined, for reasons of prestige, to see that it was continued in whatever form of international organization succeeded the League of Nations.

Part of Zook’s strategy was to make sure that the voice of education would be heard at the conference in San Francisco that would create the post-World War II international machinery that came to be called the United Nations. Some forty-odd voluntary American organizations were invited to have observers at the UN conference at San Francisco. Technically, they were observers from organizations with an interest in the form of the structure for the UN; they were advisory to the United States delegation. The San Francisco Conference ran for two months. I was asked by Zook to represent the ACE for the first month, and he replaced me for the second month, allowing me to return to Bloomington. Fortunately, the National Education Association (NEA) had the same view concerning the form of postwar international education as Zook, and so the two great bodies—the ACE, representing institutions, and the NEA, representing the teachers of the country—could join forces. William G. Carr attended for the NEA, and he and I maintained close working relationships. Fortunately, I got along well with the NEA leadership, but sometimes Zook and the powerful head of the NEA, Willard Givens, an honored Indiana University graduate, had some tensions.

The UN charter made provision for a democratic, broadly based organization in education, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the framework for its organizational structure was created at a London conference by international representatives the following year. It was a thoroughly democratic organization, representative of all nations, and fulfilled a great part of Zook’s dream. Another part of his dream was also realized: a democratic, all-encompassing organization of universities throughout the world, devoted to dealing with institutional problems rather than to debating purely intellectual and scholarly problems. The UNESCO charter made it possible to create the International Association of Universities (IAU) whose structure was planned at an organizing conference at Nice in 1950. I was expected to be an active member of that conference, but it was impossible for me to get away just at the time that the meeting was held. Instead, Indiana University was represented by Wendell W. Wright, dean of the School of Education, who was an excellent representative. The first regular general assembly of IAU, which I attended, was held in 1955 at Istanbul, and the assemblies have been held quinquennially ever since. I have attended each of them. For ten years I served as a member of the governing board of IAU, five years of that time as its vice chairman. The IAU furnished me one of the most exciting, informative, and useful resources in international education of my lifetime. From it I received an insight into comparative education that I could have obtained in no other way—knowledge of systems and personalities on an international scale. The IAU was able to attract an unusual man, H. M. Roger Keyes, an Oxford don, to be its general secretary. Urbane, adept, and effective, Keyes has been invaluable in furthering the IAU. He is as well a cherished friend.

The San Francisco Conference was exciting and interesting. As Bill Carr and I were friends and had similar interests to represent, we were happy to be assigned a room together in the well-located Hotel Sir Francis Drake. My letters home revealed my impressions at the time:

I missed the opening session yesterday, but it was very brief. Today’s session, which I did attend, was longer—Stettinius, Soong, Molotov, and Eden all spoke. The setting in the opera house is impressive, and the surrounding buildings are all handsome. It is easy to see why this site was selected.

It appears that we consultants are to be busy. Moreover, we are being shown every consideration. My seat is on the main floor of the opera house immediately behind the seats of the official delegates. [April 27, 1945]

San Francisco is lovely just now—flowers everywhere. The rhododendrons are especially brilliant. . . . I have never seen such roses.

I have a beautiful view of the ocean. The big bridges and ships are very plain. [May 7, 1945]

The weeks spent in San Francisco were lively and stimulating; there were many meetings to attend, presentations to be made, and personages to be cultivated. Younger leaders from all over the world were present. It gave one a rare opportunity to make foreign acquaintances, which in my case have lasted through the years and have been renewed from time to time in my travels throughout the world or during visits of these foreign friends to the United States. Many of them were connected with educational institutions in one way or another, and for that reason they were of special interest to me. The U.S. delegation was chaired by Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., and consisted of Senators Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and Thomas Connally of Texas; Congressmen Sol Bloom of New York and Charles A. Eaton of New Jersey; Commander Harold E. Stassen, Assistant Chief of Staff of the United States Navy; Dean Virginia C. Gildersleeve of Barnard College; and Cordell Hull, who later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the formation of the United Nations. All of the observers from the forty-two American organizations that had been invited to send representatives to the conference were regularly briefed on national developments by members of the U.S. delegation. Virginia Gildersleeve frequently fulfilled this role for the organizational delegates. Her reports were informative, helpful, and interesting. She was hospitable to the ideas that those of us representing educational institutions had to offer, and these briefing sessions furnished a channel of communication between the consultants and the official American delegates who were representing the ideas of Americans generally in the international sessions.

My own interest was heightened by the fact that an Indiana University colleague, Ed Buehrig, who was on leave to serve in the State Department, and Walter Laves, whom I had come to know in Washington from our various contacts while he was with the Bureau of the Budget and I was on temporary assignment with the State Department, were actively involved with the American delegation. Walter later became a member of the international secretariat of UNESCO as deputy director general and still later joined the faculty of Indiana University as chairman of the government department. San Francisco has a deserved reputation as a colorful city. It was thought to be an ideal setting for such an international conference since it is a cosmopolitan city, a seaport looking out to Asia, and also has deep cultural ties with Europe, especially France. There were many social affairs hosted by citizens of San Francisco who are noted for their social graces. There were gala concerts and other entertainments as well as receptions, cocktail parties, and dinners. The plenary sessions were held in the then newly constructed civic opera house. It accommodated adequately these plenary sessions in more or less the same kind of arrangement and format that was later provided in the great council chamber of the UN building in New York. As the time approached for George Zook to take my place, I wrote home, “I leave here on the 11th. Should arrive in Bloomington on the following Monday night but may remain hidden until the middle of the week” [May 7, 1945]. I have frequently used this “in hiding” device to catch up on my work after a long absence from the office.

At the final plenary session, the United Nations charter was approved and the United Nations organization was formally launched, subject to adoption by the individual nations. A decade later, in 1955, to commemorate the signing of the document and the creation of the UN, a great celebration, to which I was invited, was held in San Francisco.

Something happened on that occasion that I shall always remember. The group returning for the anniversary met again in the civic opera house to hear speeches by the leading figures in the organization’s formation, and the concluding speech was by the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. I was seated near the front of the hall where I could look up directly at the speaker. When President Eisenhower came onto the stage and stepped up to the podium, I was shocked by the appearance of his face. The skin seemed tightly drawn over the cheekbones, and he had a look that I had come to associate with people suffering from extreme hypertension. I had served on committees with Eisenhower when he was president of Columbia University and so had had close-up views of his face, but since he had been in the White House I had seen him only in newspaper photos and on television. The more I looked at him the more I sensed that he was unwell, even on the brink of some kind of disaster. I returned the next day to Bloomington and on the following Tuesday hosted a luncheon for Robert Murphy, then deputy under secretary of state, who had come out from Washington to speak at what was then an annual Indiana University conference on foreign policy. As I had known Murphy well when we were together on Clay’s staff and had kept in contact with him through other connections in the meantime, I felt free to mention to him my impression of President Eisenhower’s health. “Bob,” I went on, “you see the president close up frequently. Is there any basis for my apprehension?” He looked startled for a moment and said, “Why, I don’t think so. I see him regularly at the cabinet meetings and I saw him this past week. I haven’t observed any change in his appearance. Of course it could be that I see him so frequently I wouldn’t notice a change, but I really think he is in fine shape.” The fact of the matter is that President Eisenhower in the following September went for a few days to Denver, his wife’s old home where he liked to visit and play golf, and there he had his first heart attack, a major one of which I had had the eerie premonition.

The emphasis in my career on international activities was furthered by Indiana University’s early entrance into the technical-assistance field, which grew in part out of some of the personal friendships that developed at the San Francisco Conference with educational leaders from the Third World. When it came time for us to begin a massive technical-assistance program, we already had an acquaintanceship with the leading figures in many of the areas in which we were later invited to work. As a result of such experiences, I have had a continuing interest both personal and professional in those areas and have helped the university participate in many technical-assistance projects (see chapter 16).

Following the organization of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference, there was held some months later in London a preparatory meeting to organize the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) along the lines that George Zook and others in the ACE had hoped and worked for back in the early 1940s and at San Francisco. Through the ACE I became involved in an early activity of UNESCO, and other assignments followed for which some background is necessary. UNESCO was created as one of the specialized agencies of the UN; its basic philosophy is expressed in the stirring preamble to its Constitution, which declares in part:

That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed;

That ignorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause . . . of that suspicion and mistrust between peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war;

. . . that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.

For these reasons, the States Parties to this Constitution are agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives . . . .

UNESCO’s program was to be carried out under seven broad headings: education, natural sciences, social sciences, cultural activities, exchange of persons, mass communications, and relief services. The constitution made provision for a governing body, called the general conference and composed of representatives of member states appointed by their governments in consultation with national commissions, which were supposed to be established in most of the countries. The United States has a national commission for UNESCO on which I served from 1951 to 1955, representing the ACE. Walter Laves was chairman of this commission during two years of my term, and I served as his vice chairman from 1953 to 1954.

For the recently conquered countries there were peculiar problems in establishing national commissions and, as a result, special committees to advise the director general were set up: one for Germany, one for Japan, and perhaps others. I was named a member of the expert committee for Germany and made a number of trips to Paris, the headquarters of UNESCO, during 1949–50 as a member of the UNESCO Committee on German Questions. The special problems in Germany arose from the fact that Germany was an occupied country and, until the reestablishment of a national government, UNESCO had to operate through occupation authorities, who did not agree among themselves. Our committee dealt with many thorny questions, which I will not attempt to describe here, but one concrete result of its work was the establishment of three centers, or institutes, in Germany: the International Institute for Education at Hamburg, the International Institute for Social Sciences at Cologne (Laves was on its board, 1951–60), and the International Institute for Youth at Gauting near Munich. The International Institute for Education had for its purpose to encourage German educators to question the basic concepts and aims of education in Germany, to make them aware of the constructive results of such questioning in other countries, and to serve as a clearing house for information on educational problems. The institute was instructed to study recent educational developments and methods and their possible adaptation to the German situation.

An international board was created to govern each of the institutes. I served as a member of the board of the Institute for Education from 1951 to 1957. Its office was in Hamburg and its director general was Walther Merck, a delightful and distinguished professor of pedagogy at Hamburg University who gave the work of the board excellent direction. He was an extremely well informed man with a broad comprehension of education, not only in Germany but elsewhere in the world as well—a master of the science of comparative education. We at Indiana University later had the privilege of having him as a visitor on our Bloomington campus. Service on the board of the Hamburg Institute was a rewarding experience. My membership lasted six years and involved two trips a year to Hamburg to meet with the director and the other board members. It was a widely representative board of imaginative and well-informed men and women. Service with this group gave me an unusual opportunity to keep in touch with what was happening in German education, to trace the evolution of some of the recommendations we had made during the Occupation, and to learn what was being developed through our recommendations. I found it always a delight to be in Hamburg—that old Hanseatic city in its colorful setting—to enjoy its excellent hotels, its superb restaurants, and the good fellowship and camaraderie of my fellow board members.

My international interests inevitably caused me to affiliate with and participate in the affairs of many collateral types of organizations dealing with the problems of international relations such as the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. Moreover, I have become convinced that, as a result of advances in communication and transportation, our world has indeed grown small and its political and economic survival depends upon a high degree of international, political, cultural, and economic cooperation. I little realized when I became active in the American Council on Education that it would lead indirectly to extending my horizons worldwide.

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1. See Charles C. Dobbins, ed., American Council on Education: Leadership and Chronology, 1918–1968 (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1968), p. 3.