Education: Editing a University

The University of Oklahoma has changed presidents almost as often as the State changed Governors, and for the same reason—politics. One of its few professors of distinction, the late Vernon Louis Parrington, was fired in 1908 for smoking cigarets. He later won a Pulitzer prize in history (for Main Currents in American Thought).

Last year Oklahoma made Joseph August Brandt, 41, a red-haired newspaperman, its president. Even Brandt’s opponents admit that the results have been extraordinary.

Big, bony Joe Brandt, who has been a Rhodes Scholar, city editor of the Tulsa Tribune, director of Oklahoma’s and later Princeton’s University Press, breezed into his new job with one big if unoriginal idea: the university should be a place where people learned to think. Said he: “It’s time to discover a Harvard in the Middle West.”

First thing Prexy Brandt did was to liquidate some ivy-covered traditions. His wife, an ex-newspaperwoman herself, cut out the reception line at the “White House” (home of Oklahoma’s presidents). Joe invited groups of honor students to join him in the “White House” game room, where they ate wieners and hashed over the state of the world. He strode around the campus hatless and with a pipe in his mouth, worked in his shirtsleeves, installed a typewriter at his desk on which to bat out ideas. Undergraduates soon began to cry “Hello, Joe” when they passed his house at night. He abolished fraternity rush week and undergraduate car-driving (because of the war), made short shrift of flunkers.

Then he attacked the catalogue of courses. Most State university presidents agree that the worst handicap to education in their universities is the curriculum, a Sears, Roebuck affair that makes little connected sense. Inveighing against this “trade-school” trend in U.S. higher education, President Brandt launched a plan (like the Hutchins plan at the University of Chicago) whereby every Oklahoma undergraduate must complete a two-year course of liberal education before he is allowed to specialize.

To give his facultymen more time for “creative thought,” Brandt rotated department chairmanships among them; they soon began to turn out more original research. He went to the Legislature, breezily asked for $452,000 to raise professors’ salaries and build an industrial research laboratory. A legislator drawled: “Well, President Brandt . . .” “Call me Joe,” flashed Joe. He got the $452,000.

By last week Oklahoma, like other universities, had been hit by the draining of its men into war service (17% of its 6,000 students), but rode on a crest of Brandtian optimism. Thanks to Brandt who helped get a naval base and aviation school established at Norman, the University town, University and Town were booming.

President Brandt pooh-poohs the idea that liberal education will be a casualty of World War II, says confidently: “There will be no place in the world after the war for gentlemen in the old European sense of men trained merely in Greek and in Latin, but there will always be a place for the gentlemanly intellect.”