Education: Boot for Bowman

• Share

Dr. John Gabbert Bowman, chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, is the highest-paid ($31,500) U. S. university president. He is also the bossiest. For 18 years he has ruled Pitt with an iron hand. Last week he came to the ominous pass that every dictator fears: his friends began to kick him around.

Lean, stiletto-nosed John Bowman was a shy, dreamy boy. At 7 he resolved: "I would be a poet. I would always feel beautiful inside and be large and kind and beneficial and be honored and do good." At Columbia University, where he went to teach English after graduation from University of Iowa, Dr. Bowman charmed Andrew Carnegie and Nicholas Murray Butler, who made him secretary of the Carnegie Foundation. In 1911, at 34, he went back to University of Iowa as its president, resolved to make it the "Athens of the West." But he failed to get along with the trustees, quit after two years, be came director of the American College of Surgeons (a hospital-improvement society). One day a Pittsburgh trustee, the late Alfred Reed Hamilton, heard him make a speech to Pittsburgh surgeons, exclaimed: "There's the next chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh."

Two things have made Chancellor Bow man one of the most talked-about U. S. educators: his football team and his (still unfinished) 42-story Cathedral of Learning, which he has been building these 18 years. To picture this cathedral to the architect, he played the Magic Fire Music from Die Walküre on a phonograph. "There you have it," he said. "Climax rising above climax." As Dr. Bowman's Cathedral rose, so did his highhandedness. He fired liberal teachers right and left; during the purge 25 walked the plank, 59 quit. When the American Association of University Professors blacklisted the university, Dr. Bowman snapped: "What of it?" He weathered an investigation by the Pennsylvania Legislature, which in 1935 threatened to cut off the university's life line of State aid (a fourth of Pitt's in come), but eventually let Dr. Bowman off with a mild bill permitting alumni to elect 15 of Pitt's 33 trustees.

All this failed to disturb Pitt's standpat trustees (including the late Andrew W. Mellon, Steelman Ernest Tener Weir*, Food-man Howard Heinz, Westinghouse Chair man Andrew Wells Robertson). But last spring the trustees were disturbed indeed when Football Coach John Bain ("Jock") Sutherland quit. Apparent reason for his resignation was a decision by Chancellor Bowman to purify Pitt athletics, but insiders knew that Jock had become fed up with Dr. Bowman. As Jock walked out, students staged a boisterous strike, proclaimed : "We've had enough of this dictatorship." Alumni began to demand that "Big John" and "Little John" (roly-poly Business Manager John Weber, John Bowman's right-hand man) resign. "At the request of Chancellor Bowman," the trustees hastily appointed a committee to investigate Dr. Bowman's administration.