Individuality at Iowa

Barring a so-so football record, the University of Iowa is a contented campus this fall. It has regents who value academic freedom, faculty and students hospitable to fresh ideas, ever-more-liberal financial support from the legislature. More important, the university has a tradition of wise, long-reigning presidents. Last week Iowa installed a new one, the first in 24 years.

From the start, the man seemed to match the office. Said Howard R. Bowen, 56, in his inaugural address: "The University of Iowa, located almost literally on the edge of a cornfield," must be "a place that is hospitable to the individual human being, that raises his aspirations. I hope we shall also seek individuality for the university itself."

Natural Habitat. Bowen's durable predecessor, Rhodes Scholar Virgil M. Hancher, has kept Iowa in the front rank of state universities. The Iowa City campus is home for some of the most adventuresome minds in science and the arts: Physicist James Van Allen, Psychologist Wendell Johnson, Printmaker Mauricio Lasansky, Paul Engle's famed Writers' Workshop. The library, medical and law schools are among the best in the U.S. But Hancher is a corporation lawyer by training and cautious by instinct. "He tended to protect what we already had," says one dean, "but I am more concerned about the future than today's needs." With Hancher approaching mandatory retirement at 68, the regents last year also began to think about the future. Screening more than 130 candidates, they finally chose Bowen, a specialist in economic theory, whom they found only 56 miles away, where he was president of Grinnell College.

For Bowen it was a homecoming. He got his doctorate from Iowa, taught there for seven years before becoming an expert in fiscal policy and the problems of small business for the New Deal. Then he worked as an economist for the Irving Trust Co. Over the next ten years he moved from the University of Illinois to Williams College as professor of economics and then to Grinnell in 1955. When Bowen arrived, the school was scratching for students; by the time he left they were fighting to get in. Grinnell won one of the first Ford Foundation matching grants and, under Bowen, spent $6,000,000 on construction, curriculum revision, faculty wage increases.

Another Oxford? Bowen has brought the same vitality to Iowa since his appointment last spring. Already in progress is $60 million worth of new construction, including a fine arts center designed by Harrison & Abramovitz. Planning for a big state university was surprisingly similar to the needs of Grinnell, Bowen discovered. "I just had to add another digit or two."

One key set of digits is the student body of 15,000, due to double in a decade. But Iowa's new president is determined that the school preserve quality amidst growth, even if it means reorganizing the university along the lines of Oxford's residential colleges. "While other institutions may take on a somewhat wider range of programs," he said last week, "I believe our future lies in a carefully restricted scope. Let us emphasize thoroughness and depth rather than versatility and range."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.