Chancellor Emeritus Harvie Branscomb remembers the
Vanderbilt of yesteryear and offers advice for
tomorrow.
HARVIE BRANSCOMB was Vanderbilt's Chancellor from
1946 to 1963. During his tenure, the University moved
from a regional self-awareness to a national
orientation and developed in quality, resources, and
vision by a previously unimaginable speed and
determination. Recently, Mr. Branscomb spoke of the
changes he has seen at Vanderbilt to a group of
faculty members who have been in the college for a
short time. He is ninety-seven years old, but we knew
from experience as we considered calling him for a
presentation at the Center that his intelligence,
memory, sense of timing, and power of presence are
extraordinary. He holds a memory of Vanderbilt and a
sense for its future that are rare in their
combination. A talk by him would be an unusual
opportunity for insight into the University's recent
past as well as into its present life.
I called him last spring to see if he would consider
doing the program. After I explained my proposal he
said, "When do you want to have this event?" "In the
early fall," I told him. "Charles," he said, "I don't
even buy green bananas. I can't plan that far in the
future. Call me in September and we can talk about it
then." I took his expectation of talking in September
as a good omen, and when I called three months later,
he had thought about what he would say and was ready
to make plans—plans over a short time period that
would be about right, I thought, to allow bananas to
ripen.
It was a remarkable afternoon that was informed by a
range of experience, dedication, and passion that
gave us to know something about leadership and
education that we professionals can overlook. We
include here excerpts from both his formal remarks
and the discussion that followed.
Mr. Branscomb said to four of us who stayed after the
program that he expected this to be his last
presentation. As I recalled the intensity of his
words, his clarity of commitment, and his flawless
recall of lines from Euripides in answering a
question, I doubted that he was right. Or at least I
hoped that he was wrong. Justice seemed to me to
require a little more time and at least one more
moment like the one we just had.
—Charles E. Scott
I would like to say at the beginning that the changes
that have benefited Vanderbilt are due to the work
and dedication of many people and to social changes
that I shall mention. I have been asked to speak of
the significant changes that I have seen. I can
mention some of them, but I will not be able to give
proper credit to the individuals who have formed this
institution over the last forty-six years.
I don't think anyone can quite realize the extent of
the changes that have taken place in this institution
unless one had seen or known Vanderbilt as it was in
the 1940s. Let me see if I can paint a concise
picture of some of the features before we move on to
discuss changes that have taken place.
When I first arrived on the campus and saw its
limited character and the encroachment of the city on
the area, I gave some serious thought to the
possibility of moving the University, with the
exception of the Medical School, to some open area
ten or fifteen miles from the city, an idea that I
soon abandoned. The University was housed in three of
four structures that remained from the original days,
fine examples of Victorian Gothic, plus a number of
rather nondescript buildings which had been
constructed later for classrooms. We also had two
relatively new structures: the Joint University
Library, which had been built just before the
outbreak of the Second World War, and the Medical
School. In one respect the University was woefully
deficient. Neither Chancellor Garland nor Chancellor
Kirkland, influenced by German university models, had
really believed in dormitories. Chancellor Garland
made the statement that dormitories were "breeding
places of misbehavior" and that he preferred for
students to live "in the Christian homes surrounding
the campus." That principle was modified slightly by
the construction of one dormitory!
As far as finances were concerned, the University
which began with what appeared to be the magnificent
sum of a million dollars had failed to keep up in its
resources with the growth of knowledge, the growth
in the student body, and the changes in the demands
on universities. In 1946 the endowment for eight
schools and colleges totaled 28 million dollars, of
which 14 belonged to the Medical School and hospital.
Faculty salaries were shamefully low. The chairmen of
the departments in the Medical School received ten
thousand dollars a year, and full professors in the
College of Arts and Science enjoyed salaries of
around four thousand dollars.
The professional schools call for some special
comment. The Divinity School was nearly destroyed by
the separation from the Methodist church some thirty
years earlier. It had few students. Its building had
burned. The only reason, I am sure, that the School
had been continued was that a loyal Divinity School
faculty still remained with no jobs offered them by
the Methodist church. The Law School, manned chiefly
by local lawyers, had been closed during the war and
reopened in 1946, the year that I arrived. The
Medical School began with a great flourish. It had
the beginnings of a great institution, but the
inflation which followed the First World War had
reduced it to a point where it could no longer pay
for indigent patients, and paying patients did not
want students to practice their art upon them. The
hospital in 1946 was losing money steadily, and the
Medical School no longer had adequate funds for any
expansion or growth. It was in 1950, I believe, that
the Dean of the Medical School recommended formally
to me that the Medical School be abandoned and
closed. The Graduate School of Arts and Science
existed on paper and had brief spurts of development.
It had no funds of its own, however, no separate
faculty, and no status as an institution.
I'd like to mention also that when I arrived in 1946,
I was told that no black person had ever been on the
Vanderbilt campus, except in a domestic capacity. And
while I am confident this was an overstatement of the
facts, it did indicate the point of view of this
deeply Southern aristocratic University at that time.
Furthermore, due I think in large part to the failure
to develop dormitories and an attractive student
life, the undergraduate student body was rapidly
becoming local. In 1946, two thirds of the students
in the College were from the state of Tennessee, and
approximately one half were from Nashville and the
surrounding region. The rest of the student body was
limited almost entirely to our neighboring Southern
states.
This rather depressing picture was, however, only
part of the story. From its beginning Vanderbilt had
maintained high standards, both in the selection of
its faculty and in the admission of students. For the
first few decades of its history there were no rival
institutions in the South that had any claim to
distinction. Vanderbilt was able to attract the
better students from Florida to Texas, with the
result that the Vanderbilt Alumni in the 1940s was
unusually strong. It was on these foundations that
the subsequent growth was able to build.
The changes which have taken place since those years
nearly a half century ago are quite obvious. They
have been due to a number of factors—the changing
economy of the South, the growth of the institution
from a Southern college to a nationally recognized
university, the growth of the intellectual
inheritance, and finally to changes in the society
which we serve and which supports us.
The campus was able in the 1960s to acquire a good
deal of land. During this period the University
constructed fifteen or sixteen dormitories. The
Divinity School was moved back on the campus in
beautiful quarters to which was attached the
University Chapel. The Law School received new
quarters of its own with additions to its endowment,
and it became an outstanding school. The Engineering
School was given a new building of its own and an
annex. The Medical School, brought out of its
doldrums largely by the development of federal aid
for medical research and also by the growth of
medical insurance which provided indigent patients
who could pay their way, has exploded into a plant
almost the size of the rest of the campus. The union
with Peabody College, which had been discussed for
years, was finally achieved in the 1970s. The School
of Management was added to the University during this
period, and it has developed into a substantial and
well-recognized program.
The endowment funds, so meager at the beginning, have
grown at an almost unbelievable rate. l am now
advised that the figure is somewhere between $500 and
$700 million. Much of this, of course, belongs to the
respective schools and colleges.
Two other changes are important. During the 1950s,
Vanderbilt took the lead among private colleges and
universities in the South in admitting black
students, and by 1963 integration was legally
achieved for all parts of the University.
The second change may seem insignificant, but it was
more important than it may appear. I mentioned
earlier that for many years the University had only
one old dormitory for men, and more recently McTyeire
Hall was built for limited number of women. The
housing of other students had been taken over by the
fraternities, all of whom had off-campus houses.
These were old residences, a number of them dangerous
fire traps. Furthermore, the fraternities packed
these students into rooms—four in a room, some in
attics. The situation was really one that the
University could not continue.
I took on a fight with the fraternities to abandon
their houses and to move onto campus-students being
housed in University dormitories in accordance with
University responsibilities. This was a bitter fight.
The fraternities were strong, but the proposals
carried the day. The University was fair with the
fraternities in the handling of the financial
transfer, and we moved, therefore, from a dangerous
fraternity situation into one in which only a few
officers were allowed to live in each house in order
to assure its protection.
Now let's talk about some changes to the ethos and
character of the institution. Back in the '40s, the
administrative staff consisted of the Chancellor, the
Vice-Chancellor, the Business Manager, and the
secretary of the Alumni Association, whose chief duty
was to send out a postcard every Christmas asking for
money for the University. The development of a large
administrative staff since those years has been
absolutely necessary and very successful.
But there are some risks involved in the development
of a fairly substantial bureaucracy. The most
substantial risk is the possibility that the points
of view, the needs, and the aspirations of the people
of the rank and file will get weathered out as they
move up through the various levels of the
bureaucracy. Currently the administrative offices
have been careful to keep open several avenues of
communication, the two most important perhaps being
free discussions with the University Senate and the
annual speech made to the Board of Trust by a faculty
member on faculty concerns. But as institutions
become larger, this problem grows accordingly. I
mention this not because I think that it is a current
problem, but it is something for us to keep in mind.
It is important that the institution keep alert to
the need for some way of open and direct
communication between the schools and faculties and
the central administrative structure.
I mention a second change, the change in the sense of
community on the campus. Back in the '40s and '50s,
we were much smaller, and we made an effort to get
the faculty acquainted with one another. There was a
sense of belonging to the Institution as a whole.
Today, simply due to the growth in size and
complexity, much of that has faded. Today friendships
and the sense of strong unity belong to schools and
departments rather than to the University as a whole.
I don't think this can be avoided, and the
substitution of close associations and mutual support
within a lesser division of a large institution is
not bad. I would only suggest that we must not lose a
sense of intellectual unity in the University as a
whole. After all, universities is a basic conception
behind the institution.
The communal sense in these days seems to me to be
made of rather formalities established among
different parts of the institution. The development
of interdisciplinary programs and relationships has
become much more an official rather than an in formal
function, as perhaps it once was. This is something
to keep in mind: that we don't drift apart, each one
going his own way.
Another aspect of community is even more significant,
and this applies to the student body and to the
University body as a whole. Today we have set, I am
afraid, diversity as a primary objective. Diversity
is not the goal; it merely makes a contribution. The
goal is mutual understanding, respect, cooperation,
fellowship, and social solidarity. To be sure, a
university believes in and must maintain freedom of
opinion and divergence of views, but this divergence
and these differences must function within a complex
web of mutual respect and cooperation.
A third change which I think is of some concern to a
lot of us is the imbalance that has taken place in
the growth of the University. It's a very simple
fact: the society we live in is now concerned about
the economy and technology and science, and that's
where the money is. So, the biological and the
physical and the medical areas of the University have
been able to get the resources for development that
other parts of the University have not gotten. But
the economy doesn't exist by itself. It is dependent
on education, on wise political leadership, on social
and family stability, on social solidarity, on a
widespread, common-accepted sense of fairness and
justice. Knowledge is not in compartments but is an
interwoven web. We should keep to the fore the
concept of the unity of the University and a national
need for the unity of knowledge so that
administrators, corporations, and foundations will
begin to realize that there are other aspects of the
University that need equal support. I am confident
that this will come, but in current years we have
certainly seen an imbalance in growth. Some defense
of what in previous years has been the heart of the
University must not be forgotten.
I am going to stop at this point.
QUESTION: Will you entertain questions and
discussion?
HARVIE BRANSCOMB: Sure!
QUESTION: I have a question concerning the radical
increase in the size of our endowment. I can see that
you could get people who knew what the institution
was like in the 1950s to continue contributing. But
in order to grow as much as the institution has
grown, you had to find money.
BRANSCOMB: Oh yes.
QUESTION: How did you do that? How did you get the
endowment built?
BRANSCOMB: All right. I started out with the
observation that the Vanderbilt family had
established this University, it was named after the
Commodore, but none of the members of the Vanderbilt
family had ever taken a real interest in it aside
from a few contributions for equipment and some
buildings. Now I'm not going to tell you the whole
story—it would take a long time to do it—but I got
Mr. Harold Sterling Vanderbilt first to come and
visit us. His wife told me afterwards that he didn't
want to come at all! She told me that he said, "You
know, all that man wants is my money." And she said
that he had the check in his pocket that he was going
to give me. So he came here, invited to spend the
night.
When he first arrived, I took M. L. Vanderbilt for a
walk around the campus. He was quite surprised. He
didn't know it was that big a place. Then I showed
him all the portraits of the Vanderbilt family we had
hanging in Kirkland hall. I eventually took him into
my office, and I could see he braced himself for the
touch. I talked a little bit, and he said, finally,
"Well, all right, what can I do for you?" And I said,
"You can do two things. First, your cousin, Mr.
Frederick Vanderbilt, made us participants in his
will and gave us the largest contribution of a single
individual in the University's history—larger than
the Commodore's original million . . . and we don't
have his portrait. Could you borrow a portrait of Mr.
Frederick Vanderbilt, and let me have it copied?"
"Oh," he said, "I'll get that for you." I said,
"That's great." He said, "What else," now with a
different tone of voice. I replied, "Well, your
cousin Mrs. Twombly is a very generous woman." She
was a Vanderbilt heiress, somebody with lots of
Vanderbilt money. I said, "I thought she might want
to build Twombly Hall for the women here. I have
never met her. Now that you've been down here, and
you've met me and seen the campus, would you be
willing to write her a letter introducing me so I can
go talk to her about it?" And he did.
Of course, this was the only decent way that Mr.
Vanderbilt's visit could have been handled, since he
had come at my invitation and was my guest. But he
clearly expected something different, and the way he
was entertained laid the basis for a long and
fruitful friendship.
Two years later I got him to take a membership on the
Board of Trust, and subsequently, when the timing was
exactly right, I asked him to be Chairman of the
Board of Trust, and he accepted. Now, the fact was
that Mr. Vanderbilt was well known in all the
relevant circles in New York. Well, with him on the
board, I could get anyone I wanted on the Board of
Trust. We got the president of J.P. Morgan, the
president of Chase National Bank, the Vice-President
of The World Bank. We got all these guys on the Board
of Trust! So when I wanted to get some money, I would
write one of them and ask them, "Would you take me
over to Mr. so and so." That helped a lot!
In a thirty year period we also got off to a good
start with some foundations. The period after the
Second World War was a very good one for American
universities. The country had learned that we had to
find out about the rest of the countries in the
world. We didn't have people who could speak the
language of some of our allies! They realized that
universities not only taught language and culture,
but that they were the places re search on new
technology came from. It was the government that
began making contributions for research. And the
country as a whole began to feel like the
universities were very important. It was a good
period.
Then some things just happened serendipitously, just
fell out of the sky. You just had to be alert and
follow some of these things up. I read not long ago a
book of old Greek plays, one of which speaks of this
serendipity. Euripides' Medea ends with something
that I think applies to the growth of Vanderbilt. It
reads like this—I think I can quote it:
Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven
From whence to man strange dooms be given,
Past hope or fear.
And the end men looked for cometh not,
And a path there is where no man thought:
So Hath it fallen here.
Well, the path fell to us where no man expected it in
a half-dozen different happy occasions!
