Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning

Reviewed by Amy E. Wells

Thomas Neville Bonner.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Flexner's early life reads as American myth—a poor Jewish boy from a large Kentucky family who overcame deficits, taught himself, and worked hard to gain admission to and graduate from Johns Hopkins University. He taught Greek and Latin, opened a proprietary school for wealthy, troublesome boys, and eventually caught the attention of northeastern college presidents through his students' entrance exam scores. Dutifully, Flexner held off his ambitions and supported his mother and eight siblings until modest financial success allowed him to marry, liberate himself from the role of paterfamilias, and move to New York, where a new life began.

Flexner was hired to conduct a study of medical education that was funded by the Carnegie Foundation. The influential report of the study, published in 1910, allegedly hastened the decline of proprietary medical schools and the advance of university-affiliated, scientific study, and it brought Flexner to prominence within the field of foundation philanthropy. In 1912, he secured employment with the General Education Board, a Rockefeller foundation solely dedicated to the advance and support of American education. In his sixteen years there, Flexner dispensed more funds than any other program officer of his era.

In Bonner's capable hands, Flexner emerges as an interesting figure whose successes are combined with contradictions and shortcomings. In his desperation to prove himself and his ideas, Flexner truly failed to understand campus politics and work effectively with academic insiders. Three specific experiences, namely his decline within the Rockefeller hierarchy, his failed leadership at Howard University, and finally, his troubled administration of the Institute for Advanced Study, expose Flexner's shortcomings and illustrate this point.

Iconoclast sheds light on Rockefeller philanthropy, which Donald Fisher chronicled in his 1993 book Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences. Flexner takes his place in the Rockefeller annals with Beardsley Ruml, Sydnor Walker, and others associated with an incredible era of institution building. Foundations in this period provided endowments and "fluid" funds to select universities for the purpose of enhancing academic programs and research. Although program officers engaged in intricate negotiations, required institutions to raise matching funds, and monitored developments, these monies given as "blank checks" failed to produce immediate results.

Some of the grants Flexner made to university-affiliated medical schools followed this pattern. As an incentive to speed reform and enhance pedagogy, Flexner promised large gifts to institutions that implemented clinical teaching plans requiring faculty to give up lucrative practices or surrender profits in exchange for full-time placement at new, university-affiliated hospitals. Eventually this movement proved unsuccessful at many of the institutions that Flexner handpicked and funded, and his responsibilities and position within the Rockefeller hierarchy eroded as the failed implementation of his ambitious scheme exposed his dogmatism as well as the limitations of institution-building as a philanthropic style. Flexner departed from the General Education Board in 1928 in the face of foundation reorganization and reassignment.

Flexner also failed to lead effectively as director of the board of trustees at Howard University. When he became director in 1932, he inherited an internal skirmish about bookkeeping and financial management among board members, faculty, administrators, the president, and the president's cabinet. At first, Flexner's fiscal reforms and experience with philanthropists and congressional leaders soothed tensions, but ultimately his failure to mediate in-fighting and dispel rumors stirred a real "frenzy about the future of the university," and his resignation ensued.

Even while Flexner was reluctantly departing from Rockefeller philanthropy and failing at Howard, his lectures and scholarship celebrating the research tradition of German universities (published as Universities: American, English, German) attracted a gift to create the Institute for Advanced Study. As director of the institute, Flexner assembled a scholarly "dream team," including Albert Einstein, to conduct research in an idyllic environment at Princeton University. But Flexner's scholarly utopia nearly collapsed under his administration. He made the mistake of assuming that renowned scholars recruited to work on science alone—without the responsibility of doctoral students and committee meetings—would not care about institutional governance. Flexner's paternalistic style and inattentiveness to mounting concerns wore on his strong-willed superstar scholars, and growing faculty unrest, inspired by a lack of input in institutional decision making, concerns about pensions and parking, and the exceptionally anti-Semitic climate of Princeton, caused Flexner's departure.

In many ways, contemporary notions of pluralism, credentialing, and democracy make Flexner's life story difficult to digest. For example, as a Jew living in a virulent period of American anti-Semitism, Flexner wore his Jewish identity lightly until German hostilities toward Jewish scholars in German universities became intolerable. Even while working with displaced Jewish scholars recruited to his institute, he failed to respond adequately to complaints about Princeton's hostile climate. Though he enjoyed the status of an international "expert" in education and, as a foundation officer, promoted the advance towards university-affiliated professional education, Flexner himself earned only one two-year degree in his lifetime. Finally, as an American with a "bootstraps" mentality and often patronizing style, Flexner thrived in an elite world and his successful climb involved sponsorship, good luck, and unusual timing.

However, history demands accepting actors on their terms and not ours. Maybe Bonner is right and it is our good fortune that the "old schoolmaster" from Louisville rose to become higher education's critical conscience and that fate conspired to provide him the proverbial "carrot and stick" to monitor and move a nation.

Amy E. Wells is assistant professor of higher education at the University of New Orleans. Her area of research includes Rockefeller philanthropy to southern universities during the 1920s and 1930s.

 Printer-Friendly Page