Stuart “Bill” Leslie, a professor in the History of Science and Technology department, gave a presentation entitled, “The Hopkins That Might Have Been” during Alumni Weekend. The presentation discussed a few pivotal moments in Hopkins geographical, social, academic and athletic history that could have been different.
Leslie is an integral member of the Hopkins Retrospective initiative and is also writing a book on the history of the University, to be published in 2018. The goal of the Hopkins Retrospective initiative is to expand knowledge of the University’s origins and its evolution.
“Generally, historians, like athletes, try to shy away from the ‘Coulda, woulda, shoulda,’ and we try to write about the ‘What’ and ‘So what,’” Leslie said. “But in this case I thought it might be an interesting exercise to write about the things that didn’t happen.”
According to Leslie, one big ‘What if’ was whether or not to locate the University at its original property in the Clifton neighborhood of East Baltimore or at Homewood. A preliminary blueprint for a campus there had been drafted, but due to cost and the number of saloons and distilleries in the area, the University moved to Homewood.
“Think of how it would have changed the character of the Baltimore community,” Leslie said, referring to the potential campus move. “And how it could have provided that link between the hospital and the School of Medicine and the University that Hopkins had always imagined.”
According to Leslie, the University could have created a “biotechnology park,” much like Stanford’s 1951 Industrial Park, if the University had hired architect Frederick Law Olmsted to layout the campus. Olmsted had close ties to Baltimore and designed the campuses for University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. Currently the hospital is trying to expand toward Clifton close to the old campus location.
In 1948 the University was invited to attend the NCAA college football Tangerine Bowl and establish Hopkins athletics as D-I when the University of Chicago decided to leave the Big Ten.
“What if we had jumped in and taken U. Chicago’s place?” Leslie said.
Other proposals the University considered in the past include the establishment of a law school, the acquisition of the Brookings Institution and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs and the maintenance of the Chesapeake Bay Institute, a research center that the U.S. Navy launched with Hopkins in 1947 to study the bay’s environmental issues.
However, the area of greatest contention throughout the history of the University continued to be over undergraduate study opportunities.
The role of undergraduates at the University has been controversial since its foundation.
“What about a university without undergrads?” Leslie said. “It’s an idea we’ve been toying with from the very beginning. Hopkins has always had non-traditional ideas about undergraduate education.”
The University’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, believed that a university should only have graduate students. However, he was still concerned about underprepared applicants who might not have received a proper education as undergraduates. Originally students only had one to three years of undergraduate study, and the focus of the University was on research and graduate students.
By 1907, Hopkins had a traditional four-year system. However, after Frank Goodnow became the third University president, he wanted to cut the first two years of undergraduate education to satisfy faculty who wanted more funds, time and freedom from teaching undergraduates.
Angie Boyter, who received her masters degree in engineering from Hopkins in 1972, said that a big movement was started when she was an undergraduate at Goucher.
“The class of ’62 started H4U, Hopkins for the Undergraduates,” Boyter said. “It was a really big movement because the undergraduates felt underappreciated, and I think that was true.”
Angie Boyter’s husband, David Boyter, class of 1964, also remembers the event.
“[At] Hopkins in those days we were kind of ignored for the most part,” he said. “You were kind of on your own. But it’s beginning to change, especially for areas like bioengineering. The undergraduates there are doing graduate level work.”
Many sections of the University have changed since the 1960s. While Angie was studying at Goucher, a women’s school at the time, Hopkins did not admit any female undergraduates. Even so she was able to take a psycholinguistics course at Hopkins and later became involved in the Goucher-Hopkins square dancing group, the Gouchkin Hoppers, where she met David, who was studying physics at Hopkins. The two became friends. Then, David decided to ask her out.
“David and his friends were sitting around and he asked, ‘Who should I invite to the spring dance?’” Angie said. “One of his friends said, ‘Well why don’t you invite Angie?’ but then one of his other friends said, ‘Oh, she’d never go out with you.’ And that did it.”
“I said gimme that phone,” David recalled.
Angie said she was not that excited about the invitation but thought they would have a good time going as friends.
“It was the best first date I ever had,” Angie said.
David, who played in the band and fenced during his time at Hopkins, agreed.
“Hopkins changed our lives, no doubt about it,” he said. “You never know what little things are going to do.”
David and Angie had their first date on May 17, 1962 at the homecoming game and dance. Angie became even more familiar with the University when she and her friends came to the library in evenings to visit their boyfriends.
“There was none of this security,” Angie said. “You kind of just wandered throughout the whole area, not just the campus but the whole neighborhood, and you felt very safe at night.”
“A lot of the surrounding areas used to be solid middle class, nice working class homes,” David added.
In 1968, Angie started her graduate studies at Hopkins, and she remembers only one ladies restroom in the engineering building. That same year, riots caused by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. erupted. David and Angie had just bought a home in the suburbs but many of their friends who lived near the medical school left Baltimore and asked to stay with them.
“It was decades later before they started putting back together some of the buildings that were burned down,” David said. “It recovered, but Baltimore is still in a major decline.”
Angie and David remain politically involved in their local communities and serve on several boards and commissions. They still come to their five-year class reunions.
The same can be said for 2004 graduate neuroscience major Phuong Tran, who has come to alumni weekend since 2012.
“I heard about this [presentation] through a bunch of emails,” said Tran, who works in healthcare Information Technology at the University of Maryland and plans on coming back to Hopkins for graduate school to pursue a career in medical illustration. Tran spoke about his undergraduate experience at Hopkins.
“I enjoyed the freedom of thought and exploration. I have seen so much increased diversity in the student population each time I come back. I love Hopkins and thought this was a great chance to learn more about the history that could have been.”
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