DSU - TR Honors Leadership Program

Mead studied at Barnard College, where she met the great anthropologist Franz Boas, who became her mentor and her advisor when she attended graduate school at Columbia University, where she earned advanced degrees in psychology and anthropology. She was twenty-three years old when she first doctoral dissertation. The resulting book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was -- and remains -- a best-seller. She continued her research throughout her life in such locations as New Guinea, Samoa, Bali, and many other places, including contemporary North America. Mead's work is largely responsible for the treasures on view in the Museum's Hall of Pacific Peoples.

In addition to her work at the Museum, Margaret Mead taught, wrote more best-selling books, contributed a regular column to Redbook magazine, lectured, and was frequently interviewed on radio and television. A deeply committed activist, Mead often testified on social issues before the United States Congress and other government agencies. She hoped that through all of these efforts others would learn about themselves and work toward a more humane and socially responsible society. As she once said, "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples -- faraway peoples -- so that Americans might better understand themselves."

Mead's Legacy
Ongoing: The Library of Congressís American Memory Exhibit On-line The Library of Congressís on-line exhibit of selections from Margaret Meadís papers and the South Pacific Ethnographic Archives. The Mead collection, bequeathed to the Library in 1978, includes more than 50,000 field notes, photographs, recordings, and films which are being digitized to be put up on the Internet over the next year. ClickHERE to see a letter from Mead to her grandmother explaining why she has chosen to keep her maiden name.

b. April 22, 1904, New York City--d. Feb. 18, 1967, Princeton, N.J., U.S.), U.S. theoretical physicist and science administrator, noted as director of the Los Alamos laboratory during development of the atomic bomb (1943-45) and as director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1947-66). Accusations as to his loyalty and reliability as a security risk led to a government hearing that resulted in the loss of his security clearance and of his position as adviser to the highest echelons of the U.S. government. The case became a cause célèbre in the world of science because of its implications concerning political and moral issues relating to the role of scientists in government.

Oppenheimer was the son of a German immigrant who had made his fortune by importing textiles in New York City. During his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, Oppenheimer excelled in Latin, Greek, physics, and chemistry, published poetry, and studied Oriental philosophy. After graduating in 1925, he sailed for England to do research at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, which, under the leadership of Lord Rutherford, had an international reputation for its pioneering studies on atomic structure. At the Cavendish, Oppenheimer had the opportunity to collaborate with the British scientific community in its efforts to advance the cause of atomic research.

Max Born invited him to Göttingen University, where he met other prominent physicists, such as Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac, and where, in 1927, he received his doctorate. After short visits at science centres in Leiden and Zürich, he returned to the United States to teach physics at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.

In the 1920s the new quantum and relativity theories were engaging the attentions of science. That mass was equivalent to energy and that matter could be both wavelike and corpuscular carried implications seen only dimly at that time. Oppenheimer's early research was devoted in particular to energy processes of subatomic particles, including electrons, positrons, and cosmic rays. Since quantum theory had been proposed only a few years before, the university post provided him an excellent opportunity to devote his entire career to the exploration and dEvelopment of its full significance. In addition, he trained a whole generation of U.S. physicists, who were greatly affected by his qualities of leadership and intellectual independence.

The rise of Hitlerism in Germany stirred his first interest in politics. In 1936 he sided with the republic during the Civil War in Spain, where he became acquainted with Communist students. Although his father's death in 1937 left Oppenheimer a fortune that allowed him to subsidize anti-Fascist organizations, the tragic suffering inflicted by Stalin on Russian scientists led him to withdraw his associations with the Communist Party--in fact, he had never joined the party--and at the same time reinforced in him a liberal democratic philosophy.

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939, the physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned the U.S. government of the danger threatening all of humanity if the Nazis should be the first to make a nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer then began to seek a process for the separation of uranium-235 from natural uranium and to determine the critical mass of uranium required to make such a bomb. In August 1942 the U.S. Army was given the responsibility of organizing the efforts of British and U.S. physicists to seek a way to harness nuclear energy for military purposes, an effort that became known as the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was instructed to establish and administer a laboratory to carry out this assignment. In 1943 he chose the plateau of Los Alamos, near Santa Fe, N.M., where he had spent part of his childhood in a boarding school.

For reasons that have not been made clear, Oppenheimer in 1942 initiated discussions with military security agents that culminated with the implication that some of his friends and acquaintances were agents of the Soviet government. This led to the dismissal of a personal friend on the faculty at the University of California. In a 1954 security hearing he described his contribution to those discussions as "a tissue of lies."

The joint effort of outstanding scientists at Los Alamos culminated in the first nuclear explosion on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M., after the surrender of Germany. In October of the same year, Oppenheimer resigned his post. In 1947 he became head of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and served from 1947 until 1952 as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which in October 1949 opposed dEvelopment of the hydrogen bomb.

On Dec. 21, 1953, he was notified of a military security report unfavourable to him and was accused of having associated with Communists in the past, of delaying the naming of Soviet agents, and of opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb. A security hearing (hearing transcript) declared him not guilty of treason but ruled that he should not have access to military secrets. As a result, his contract as adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission was cancelled. The Federation of American Scientists immediately came to his defense with a protest against the trial. Oppenheimer was made the worldwide symbol of the scientist, who, while trying to resolve the moral problems that arise from scientific discovery, becomes the victim of a witch-hunt. He spent the last years of his life working out ideas on the relationship between science and society.

The Cold War having declined, President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963 formalized Oppenheimer's reinstatement by presenting him the Enrico Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission. He retired from Princeton in 1966 and died of throat cancer the following year.

Oppenheimer's philosophical ideas are expressed in his two books: Science and the Common Understanding (1954) and The Open Mind (1955). (Go Top)

Robert Maynard Hutchins

(b. Jan. 17, 1899, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.--d. May 17, 1977, Santa Barbara, Calif.), American educator, former chancellor of the University of Chicago and foundation president, who criticized over-specialization and sought to balance the college curriculum and to maintain the Western intellectual tradition. According to Hutchins, "the liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one, or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one. The liberal artislearns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can."
After attending Oberlin College in Ohio (1915-17), he served in the ambulance service of the U.S. and Italian armies during World War I. He was graduated from Yale University (A.B., 1921) and Yale Law School (LL.B., 1925), where he was named dean in 1927. Two years later, at the age of 30, he became president of the University of Chicago; he remained at Chicago until 1951, the last six years as chancellor. A controversial administrator, he attempted to reorganize the departments for undergraduate and graduate study at Chicago. His Chicago Plan for undergraduates encouraged liberal education at earlier ages and measured achievement by comprehensive examination, rather than by classroom time served. He introduced study of the Great Books. At the same time, Hutchins argued about the purposes of higher education, deploring undue emphasis on nonacademic pursuits (Chicago abandoned intercollegiate football in 1939) and criticizing the tendency toward specialization and vocationalism. The university abandoned most of his reforms, however, after his departure and returned to the educational practices of other major American universities.
Hutchins was active in forming the Committee to Frame a World Constitution (1945), led the Commission on Freedom of the Press (1946), and vigorously defended academic freedom, opposing faculty loyalty oaths in the 1950s. After serving as associate director of the Ford Foundation (from 1951), he became president of the Fund for the Republic (1954) and in 1959 founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Santa Barbara, Calif.) as the fund's main activity. The Center was an attempt to approach Hutchins' ideal of "a community of scholars" discussing a wide range of issues--individual freedom, international
order, ecological imperatives, the rights of minorities and of women, and the nature of the good life, among others.

From 1943 until his retirement in 1974 Hutchins was chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica and a director for Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. He was editor in chief of the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and coeditor, from 1961, with Mortimer J. Adler, of an annual, The Great Ideas Today.

Hutchins' views on education and public issues appeared in No Friendly Voice (1936), The Higher Learning in America (1936), Education for Freedom (1943), and others. Later books include The University of Utopia (1953) and The Learning Society (1968).

See also Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929-1950. (1991) and Innovation, Teaching, and Faculty Research
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Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut, May 23, 1875, the first of five children of Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Sr., and Katherine Mead Sloan. His father, a machinist by training, was then a partner in a small company importing coffee and tea. In 1885 the family moved to Brooklyn, where it was particularly active in the Methodist Church. (Young Alfred's maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister.) Alfred, Jr., excelled as a student both in public schools and at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute where he completed the college-preparatory course. After some delay in being admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which considered him too young when he first applied), he matriculated in 1892 and took a degree in electrical engineering in three years as the youngest member of his graduating class. Mr. Sloan began his working career as a draftsman in a small machine shop, the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company of Newark, New Jersey. At his urging, Hyatt was soon producing new antifriction bearings for automobiles. In 1898 he married Irene Jackson of Roxbury, Massachusetts. The next year, at age 24, he became the president of Hyatt, where he supervised all aspects of the company's business. Hyatt bearings became a standard in the automobile industry, and the company grew rapidly under his leadership. In 1916 the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company, together with a number of other manufacturers of automobile accessories, merged with the United Motors Corporation, of which Mr. Sloan became President. Two years later that company became part of the General Motors Corporation (itself established in 1908 as the General Motors Company), and Mr. Sloan was named Vice President in Charge of Accessories and a member of the Executive Committee.

He was elected President of General Motors in 1923, succeeding Pierre S. du Pont, who said of him on occasion: "The greater part of the successful development of the Corporation's operations and the building of a strong manufacturing and sales organization is due to Mr. Sloan. His election to the presidency is a natural and well-merited recognition of his untiring and able efforts and successful achievement." Mr. Sloan had developed by then his system of disciplined, professional management that provided for decentralized operations with coordinated centralized policy control. Applying it to General Motors, he set the Corporation on its course of industrial leadership. The next 23 years, with Mr. Sloan as Chief Executive Officer, were years of enormous expansion for the Corporation and of a steady increase in its share of the automobile market. (See the online museum)

In 1937 Mr. Sloan was elected Chairman of the Board of General Motors. He continued as Chief Executive Officer until 1946. When he resigned from the chairmanship in 1956, the General Motors Board said of him: "The Board of Directors has acceded to Mr. Sloan's wish to retire as Chairman. He has served the Corporation long and magnificently. His analysis and grasp of the problems of corporate management, his great vision and rare good judgment, laid the solid foundation which has made possible the growth and progress of General Motors over the years." Mr. Sloan was then named Honorary Chairman of the Board, a title he retained until his death on February 17, 1966. For many years he had devoted the largest share of his time and energy to philanthropic activities, both as a private donor to many causes and organizations and through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which he established in 1934.

Mr. Sloan, as a realist as well as a humanist and philanthropist, looked upon the Foundation as an extension of his own life and work. Although he recognized the inevitability of change that might dictate a different course, he expected the Foundation would "continue as an operating facility indefinitely into the future...to represent my accomplishments in this life." His accomplishments during his lifetime were of the highest order, and in themselves provide the most dramatic and lasting tribute to his extraordinary talent. Through the Foundation, his accomplishments have been extended and expanded.