Here is a Navy letter with a brief account of my first visit to Northwestern University

Oct. 19, 1945

Hello,

   This time my shift ran from midnight to eight – and it’s now pretty near its end – pretty near light. Yesterday I hitched down to Evanston to see the Northwestern University – a huge place. After looking around for quite a while, I met a senior in sociology who showed me around the campus. She turned out to be a Methodist Minister’s daughter who also took me to dinner at her house. Her father used to be connected to Cornell, but now works with Northwestern. I hope that he’ll be able to answer some college questions I have.

   The girl is a very ardent socialist & took me to a meeting where [there was] a very interesting speech on The British Labor Party. Then I went back, and just made it to stand my shift here.

   A little after midnight, we went to the kitchen to eat chow, where we were served on plates, and were actually asked what kinds of eggs we want, a very un-Navy thing.

   (To your list, please add one small, black pocket comb – since I lost the other one.)

   With not much more news, except that I hope to see Parsifal in Chicago with a Met cast Saturday, this shall be.

                                    Solong

                                                      Rudy

   This was my first visit to Northwestern University which is quite close to the Great Lakes Naval establishment. I recall a second visit some days later, to a Hillel getogether with a talk by the philosophy professor, Paul Arthur Schilpp who much later came to be known to me as the founder and first editor of the Library of Living Philosophers, a useful series in which a number of philosophers comment on different aspects of the chosen philosopher’s work, who then writes a “Reply to my Critics.”

   But Schilpp’s volumes are certainly not he most important way in which I am connected to Northwestern, because in 1973, about twenty-eight years after those visits, I was appointed dean of Northwestern’s College of Arts and Sciences and served in that role for thirteen years.

   It’s worth talking briefly about Northwestern University during the years between those visits and my showing up there to be dean. NU came up on several occasions during my search for a college—an attractive institution at the edge of a vital city with a great symphony orchestra. But more than once I as told not to bother applying, since as a Jew, not to mention one from New York, the odds were not great that I’d be admitted. Years later, when I became an academic, I found out that this was not idle gossip.

   I was teaching at Vassar and chairing its philosophy department when I became a candidate for the Northwestern deanship and then found out, in outline, what had been going on there. It’s not that the university was anti-Semitic—there were plenty of Jewish faculty members—it was the head of Admissions (of students) who was anti-Semitic and acted in conformity with his beliefs.

   I should interject that often universities are not very conscientious in supervising the administrators of its various departments, so I don’t know how aware the academic administrators were of those leanings of the admissions officer. But at some point they found out and Robert Strotz, then dean of the College, and Raymond Mack, a sociology professor who headed a policy institute led the effort to rectify that situation. Bob Strotz and Ray Mack also played important roles during the “unrest” of the sixties. By the time I came to Northwestern, Bob was its president and Ray the provost; they were the ones who hired me. Our deal was sealed at a restaurant outside the dry zone of Evanston, with Bob and Ray each downing two Martinis, while I had one, followed by a beer. That lunch was repeated every few weeks for some years. I outlasted them in office, however.

   As it turned out, I was the first NU Jewish dean, indeed, the first Jewish administrator above department chairman. But change was very much in the works: the three presidents that followed Strotz were—and are—Jewish. While Strotz and Mack were not the most creative university administrators, they deserve high praise for turning around an institution that had been quite out of sync with the times. And as for me, Bob and Ray gave me the best job I ever had.

Your comments, positive or negative, are much appreciated.

For your convenience and mine use the email method, the last item in the column on  the right.