Word: hancher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Congratulations on your wonderful coverage of a wonderful university in your Sept. 6 issue. Alumni of the State University of Iowa are justifiably proud of its fine record as well as that of its president, Virgil Hancher, and it was with a tremendous thrill that we read your article...
...says President Hancher, the State University of Iowa has more than lived up to the hopes of its founders who knelt that day in 1847 to pray for wisdom. It has turned out governors (Archie Alexander of the Virgin Islands), senators (Bourke Hickenlooper), scholars (Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam), explorers (Vilhjalmur Stefansson), editors (Bruce and Beatrice Gould), and columnists (Marquis Childs); 34 of its alumni and former professors have become heads of other colleges and universities (e.g., George Stoddard, former president of the University of Illinois; H. K. Newburn. former president of the University of Oregon; T. R. McConnell, former...
Apparently they are beginning to destroy the profession's confidence in itself. For students and teachers alike, the new watchword seems to have become "caution," and, says President Virgil Hancher of the State University of Iowa, "Teachers were never meant to be cautious." To some extent, the caution is still something to joke about ("What, reading Communist literature again?" said a Princeton student, on spotting a classmate with the New Republic). But the jokes are not much more than a veneer. The academic motto for 1953 is fast becoming: "Don't say, don't write...
Even before the famed Harvard Report (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945), Hancher was busy remodeling his curriculum, slashing away the hodgepodge of vocational courses in favor of a broad and solid liberal arts program ("What our cultural life needs today is more general practitioners"). He strengthened Iowa's flourishing school of fine arts, started a library where undergraduates for the first time could browse at will. Though he never neglected his budget (he tripled his appropriation to more than $10,000,000), or his plant (he established a full-fledged college of nursing, built a communications center, a hospital-school...
Calmness & Assurance. Over the years, Iowa and its ten colleges have climbed to high rank in the Midwest. More important, the university, under Hancher, is one of the boldest crusaders against the vocationalism that plagues U.S. state universities. "Somewhere," Hancher tells his students, "the art of contemplation has been lost...An occasional mystic or band of mystics have preserved the art . . . They possess an integrity, a calm and assurance, a wholeness of mind and body that is a kind of holiness. This wholeness, this holiness, I crave...