• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

BOOK SEVEN M\\\\\\\\II\\\\\\\\II\\I\\IIU1\\UI\\II\\UI\\II\\\IIII\\\IIU\\UlIIIIIIUlIUI\\IUlII\\IUI\\\\II\\\\\\\\\\\\\\IUUlIIUI\I\IU\I\\II\1\\\I\\\I\I\\\I\\\\I\I\IIU\\UI\\\\\I\\lUlII\lI\lII\\\lII\\II\\\\I Ford Fisher of Men r Scholarship Meets a Challenge ERTUNATELY for Minnesota a man stood ready to step into Coff. man's place, one who was completely in sympathy with his predeces­ sor's ideas. Guy Stanton Ford saw the university through a time of trial and challenge, when the country was being drawn into a second world war, never losing either the historian's broad view of human ex­ perience or the civilized man's deep insight into principle. Ford's service to the university already had been long and expert. In 1913 when he came to Minnesota as dean of the Graduate School he had had to deal with only 175 students. A decade and a half later the total number of individuals enrolled in its programs during the calen­ dar year had risen to 2164. In 1938 when Ford ended his deanship to become president the comparable enrollment figure was 3299. In a re­ cent year the total number of individuals registered in the Graduate School for fall, winter, spring, and two summer sessions reached 5676. During Ford's time the university itself had grown tremendously but while its figures increased five times over, those of the Graduate School were multiplied by thirty. So startling a change in outlook must be accounted for by a change in administrative policy. To the Graduate School Ford brought a phi­ losophy that transformed it from a unit with only a nominal existence into one of the most effective in the university. Two central tenets sup­ ported his new program. There was first the strong conviction that the school owed to its individual student the help of a genuinely distin­ guished graduate faculty. And there was, second, the equally strong belief that the school, in order to justify its existence, owed to society such returns, in the way of scientific discovery, as only large coopera­ tive programs of research could produce. 377 THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA From the moment of Vincent's arrival the attitude toward the Grad­ uate School had been transformed. No longer was it required to be a kind of bargain basement of scholarship where a dubious prestige was sold at no cost to the merchandiser. Rather it was required to be the university's department of most valuable wares. With the arrival of Ford the new attitude was put into full opera­ tion. President and dean worked together in perfect amity as they trav­ eled back and forth across the country (and the world) in search of good teachers who were also first-rate investigators. Vincent's final comment on the work of his intimate collaborator contained the tribute that it was Ford who first "began to advocate cooperation in investi­ gation which later came to be recognized as a characteristic activity at Minnesota." Large numbers of students, as witnesses to success in the graduate enterprise, seemed to Ford to be of questionable value. Everywhere in the country he observed a tendency to prolong the period of a college teacher's training as competition for good posts became more and more keen. He found it tragic that the advanced degree should have been allowed to degenerate into a mere fetish for the protection of academic security. Teachers who were failing at their tasks could not hope to work miracles of rebirth by acquiring Ph.D.'s. To guard such appli­ cants against their own vain hopes he insisted that standards of admis­ sion to the Graduate School be kept high. To two items of his faith as scholar Ford was devoted throughout his career, and faith was supported by energy that partook almost of the character of religious zeal. It was his philosophy that a responsible executive must have a special sense of where good teachers were hidden and track them down the labyrinthine ways like an academic hound of heaven. "I have no patience," he once wrote, "with a college president who through a series of years neglects the opportunity to build up a faculty that can tum out alumni who will establish their institution's credit in the eyes of the educational world. ... Let your faculty have freedom. It pays to gamble on getting worthwhile men." Such teachers were not, he believed, always to be found in the large schools. There might well be a particular virtue of the mind in scholars who had managed to "survive residence in a monohippic jerry-built in­ stitution called a college." (Ford's coined word, mOllohippic, delighted him and he used it frequently.) 378 SCHOLARSHIP MEETS A CHALLENGE He was equally impatient with snobbery in regard to "purity" in scientific investigation. He rebuked "stiff-necked arts faculties" and "narrow" defenders of professional training for failure to adapt them­ selves to new conditions. "Let us concern ourselves," he wrote, "more with the spirit and qualifications of the men who as teachers and stu­ dents undertake research and less with the subject matter of their in­ quiry. One of the best young geneticists I know is concerned with hens and roosters. If you would exclude such men from your graduate fac­ ulty you would have excluded Pasteur." What mattered was the care and advancement of the creative im­ pulse; artificial barriers against its progress went down as fast as Ford could discover them. Through three administrations - Vincent's, Coffman's, and his own - this tireless "fisher of men" was forever whispering in the ear of one department head or another that there was a promising young teacher or research investigator at Illinois, or at Chicago, or at Harvard. He took the trouble to know more about them than the numbers of their degrees or publications. For his faculty must understand the discipline of the classroom too. He did not want the kind whose words "fell mouthed and maimed on the far side of the desk." The fact that he was forever in demand to serve on national boards and committees helped rather than hindered Ford's work as administra­ tor at Minnesota. As he moved from a session of the American Histori­ cal Association to one of the Association of American Universities and so on to a meeting of the advisory board of the Guggenheim Founda­ tion, he always kept an alert eye upon the men of ideas in all these fields. Early in his career as dean he had had a leave of absence to go to Washington, during World War I, to head the Division of Civic and Educational Publications of the Committee on Public Information. It became the fixed habit of the outside world to demand his help in any crisis and his Roman profile was seen at the head of many a conference table where educational problems were under discussion. Such respon­ sibilities took him to Europe as well. In 1924 he went to Germany as special investigator for the Laura Spelman Foundation to determine what might be done to repair war damage to the German mind through contributions to its libraries. He served frequently on committees to name Rhodes scholars and Guggenheim fellows. By all these activities 379 THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA Minnesota profited in the end through Ford's intimate knowledge of the manpower of the academic world. The flexibility and adaptability to new conditions that Ford asked of the university as a whole he undertook to demonstrate in his conduct of the Graduate School's internal affairs. For the benefit of candidates for the master's degree "who had no vivid interest in research" he de­ vised an alternative to the established program that required the pro­ duction of a thesis. Plan B emphasized course work covering a broader area and proved to be particularly well suited to the needs of high school teachers. They liked the new program because it permitted them to devote themselves to the advanced study of the fields they must cover in the classroom without ~emanding what was, for them, an irrelevant kind of specialization. Standards were stiffened, rather than relaxed, because candidates had to be in residence at the university for more sessions than Plan A required. Also in protection of its standards the Graduate School adopted the principle that colleges offering programs that covered five years (with an advanced degree in prospect) must be content with a special desig­ nation such as "master of business administration" rather than master of arts or master of science. Flexibility was never, in Ford's vocabu­ lary, synonymous with indulgence. Just as Ford had found that it "paid" to "gamble on worthwhile men," he found that it paid to gamble on worthwhile projects. The caution that had made the early regents insist that the Graduate School must cost nothing might have proved to be an expensive kind of econ­ omy if Ford had not promptly and resolutely reversed the policy. Having brought together distinguished graduate faculties in medicine, agriculture, history, political science, business administration, he helped to create at Minnesota the reputation that in its colleges and depart­ ments large-scale cooperative experiments could thrive. Because he was held in high esteem by all the national foundations for the support of higher education, Ford was able to channel their funds into Minnesota budgets. One of the university's experiments was maintained for a decade with outside funds which Ford had attracted because he himself had the reputation of making adventures justify themselves in profitable results.

Load more

  247

Copy Link