THE UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGO ffl RECORDNovember 29, 1977 ISSN 0362-4706 An Official Publication Volume XI, Number 7CONTENTS145 EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY: AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONSIXTH REPORT— Margaret Fallers151 REVISIONS IN THE UNIVERSITY'S PATENT POLICY— D. Gale Johnsonand William B. Cannon153 TO THE ENTERING STUDENTS^ Jonathan Z. SmithMEMORIAL TRIBUTES: HARRY G. JOHNSON156 — Edward Shils161 — Larry A. SjaastadTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOFOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER©Copyright 1977 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO RECORDSIXTH REPORTEQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY:AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONAugust, 1977I. IntroductionThis is the sixth published report for The University of Chicago on "Equal Employment Opportunity: Affirmative Action." The report summarizes statistical information concerning allemployees of the University; in addition, it summarizes significant actions and developments inthe University's continuing program of affirmative action. The affirmative action program is, ofcourse, congruent with and in harmony with theUniversity's long-established practice of equalemployment opportunity without respect to race,religion, color, sex, or national origin.Since the last report,* the University's obligations as a recipient of federal grants and contractshave been modified to some extent, particularly intheir reporting format. Universities and collegesnow report statistical information biennially inEEO-6 (a format especially designed for universities and colleges), rather than, as formerly, inEEO-1 format. The University submitted for1975, its first EEO-6 report at the scheduled timeof April 1976. Major changes in the collection andprocessing of data were necessary to comply withthe EEO-6 report format; during the last twoyears these changes have required extensivework.In January 1977, a full-time affirmative actionofficer was appointed to continue and expand thework on equal employment opportunity andaffirmative action which had previously been* Previous reports are available in the Record. Cf. Vol.Ill, 9; Vol. VI, 1, 5; Vol. VII, 8; and Vol. VIII, 6. done by an affirmative action officer who alsohad various other responsibilities. The affirmativeaction officer reports to the provost on mattersconcerned with faculty and to the vice-presidentfor business and finance on matters concernedwith other staff. The affirmative action officer isassisted by a part-time assistant affirmative action officer and other staff. The affirmative action office is also able to call upon the resourcesof other administrative units for assistance; forexample, the Personnel Office and the Computation Center.II. Summary of Statistical Data for Universityas a WholeThis section of the report provides statistical information concerning all employees of the University. It is of interest that although the numberof employees at the University has decreasedover the last six years, the percentages of womenand minorities have continued at almost the samelevels; so, in the overall University, cutbackshave not meant decreased percentages of womenor minorities. (See Table 1).As seen in Table 2, for both women and minoritiesthe percentages are higher at the Universitythan are those reported for the Chicago StandardMetropolitan Statistical Area (SMS A). It is notpossible this year, as in the past reports, to compare job categories as reported to the government,with the job categories reported by the Department of Labor for the Chicago Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, due to the change fromthe EEO-1 format to the EEO-6 format. The145EEO-6 reporting categories do not correspond tothose of the SMSA, as those of EEO-1 did; thegovernment has not issued aggregate data forhigher education.However, comparison of the University's 1975EEO-6 categories with the 1976 EEO-6 categoriesshows an increase in 1976 in the numbers of bothwomen and minorities in most categories. The on University Women (1970); and in other University reports. The Shils' Report speaks to manyaspects of criteria for appointment, and includesthis statement: 'There must be no considerationof sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment, promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff/'TABLE 1Minority and Female Employees (1971-76)June1971 June1972 June1973 June1974 October1975 October1976Women 4,89954.8% 5,07656.1% 4,93255.4% 4,90055.5% 4,55255.3% 4,60255.0%Minority 3,30937.0% 3,42537.8% 3,39038.1% 3,40038.5% 3,11037.8% 3,19038.1%Total Employees 8,935 9,056 8,908 8,827 8,228 8,375categories used are: executive/administrative/managerial (E/A/M); faculty; professionalnonfaculty; secretarial/clerical; technical/para-professional; skilled crafts; and service/maintenance. (See Table 3).These first three tables are made more complicated by the fact that through the reporting periodof 1973, "persons having origins in the IndianSub-continent" were counted as Asians, notwhite. From 1974 through 1976, this same groupwas required to be classified as white. Currentregulations will require that in the 1977 report, all"persons having origins in the Indian Subcontinent" are to be reported as Asians. It can beseen that these changes alter totals counted asminority.III. FacultyA. General. The University, over the years, hashad a policy of equal employment opportunitiesand its implementation of the policy has beenclear in the varied and cosmopolitan compositionof its faculty. The policy was very clearly spelledout in the Report of the Committee on the Criteriaof Academic Appointment (known as the "Shils'Report") in 1970*; in the Report of the Committee"Record, Vol. IV, 6. (pp. 3-4). This reinforced what had been the practice of the University. There is no doubt, however, that the campus generally, and the deansand department chairmen in particular, have become more sensitive to the need to take positivesteps to identify and contact the widest possiblepool of candidates when searching for faculty.Deans and department chairmen are now wellaware of their responsibilities in this area.The Affirmative Action Office considers it oneof its responsibilities to keep deans and department chairmen abreast of new HEW guidelines.Each department was asked, in January 1977,TABLE 2Minority and Female Employees(Comparison with Department of Lab or Statistics)June1975 June1976 Standard MetroStatistical Area —1975 Chicago*WomenMinority 55.3%37.8% 55.0%38.1% 38.8%34.0%* Latest year for which figures are available.146TABLE 3Comparison of EEO-6 Reports — 1975-76October 1, 1975 October 1, 1976Total Women Minority Total Women MinorityE/A/M 375 84 31 384 86 31Faculty 1,020 106 69 1,026 113 68Professional 2,344 1,319 611 2,439 1,350 626Secretarial/Clerical 2,259 1,948 890 2,277 1,958 974Tech/Para-professional 636 384 365 671 407 386Skilled Crafts 287 7 41 311 19 46Serv/Maintenance 1,307 704 1,103 1,267 670 1,059to submit a written report giving new appointments, promotions, and terminations of facultyand staff. Following receipt of the reports, at therecommendation of the provost, the affirmativeaction officer, in some instances with the associate provost, visited deans and departmentchairmen to review the reports. During these conferences particular emphasis was placed on departmental committee structures for the appointment and review process; departmental efforts toconsider the largest possible pool of qualified candidates; and the importance of departmental records both to fulfill University policy and to comply with HEW requirements. In some departments improvement in record-keeping is calledfor, particularly records of those candidates considered during the early part of the selection process and those eliminated early. Most departments have good records of candidates seriouslyconsidered and of those appointed.To date the meetings with the following deansand department chairmen have been held (in orderof the meetings):Deans: HumanitiesSocial SciencesPhysical SciencesBiological SciencesDivinity SchoolGraduate School of BusinessLaw SchoolChairmen: EnglishRomance LanguagesMusicArtPolitical ScienceBehavioral SciencesPhysicsEducation PathologyAnesthesiologyObstetrics and GynecologyNeurologyZoller Dental ClinicSurgeryRadiologyPediatricsOpthalmologyPsychiatryMedicineChemistryStatisticsOther meetings will be held in the near future; it isplanned to have meetings with all departments.The meetings are an ongoing part of the Universi-ty's equal employment opportunity program.They serve an important function in the processwhereby those immediately responsible are keptinformed of the latest policy decisions in the fieldof equal opportunity employment, and wherebythey can seek assistance from the Affirmative Action Office.It is clear that the nature of the disciplines; thesize of departments; the traditional structure ofparticular professional organizations — local, national, and international; the form of publicationsof different disciplines; the organization of professional meetings; and many other factors affect themethods and procedures various departments useto search for candidates for faculty appointment.Each department is encouraged to examine, discuss, and record the procedures which it uses andwhich are most suitable for its situation in fulfilling recruitment processes.Committee on University Women. There is anofficial Committee on University Women. Thecommittee, which is concerned with matters related to women on the campus, met several times147this year. Its chairman reports to the Council, theelected representative group of the University faculty Senate.Salaries. All University faculty salaries are reviewed every year. Consideration is given to besure that differences in compensation are basedon judgment of scholastic and teaching performance.B. StatisticsAs is well-known, the University, like most universities, is not expanding its number offaculty — thus reducing the opportunities foraffirmative action. As a matter of fact, between1973 and 1976, there was an overall decrease inthe total number of faculty.At the same time, although the overall size ofthe faculty has decreased, the number of womenhas increased, and the number of minorities has remained almost the same. Clearly this means thatthe percentage of each has increased. (SeeTable 4).C. DepartmentsEvery academic department of the University, atthe request of the provost, submitted a report tothe Affirmative Action Office, describing new appointments, promotions, and terminations of faculty. Because such reports had not been requested for the year before, these reports wereseen as setting a new baseline for departmentalreports. Both in the communications from theprovost and in the conferences held with deansand department chairmen, departments have beenput on notice that in the year ahead, reports againwill be requested. These will be expected to include more detailed description of departmentalprocedures used in the search for and appoint-TABLE 4Full-Time FacultyJune 1973 June 1974Total Female Minority** Total Female Minority**Professor 515 16 25 517 17 24Associate Professor 230 18 10 242 27 12Assistant Professor 322 44 25 289 49 24Instructor 86 18 11 69 10 7Total 1,153* 96 71 1,117* 103 67TABLE 4 ContinuedOctober 1975 October 1976Total Female Minority** Total Female Minority**428240288641,020* 11265316106 211524969 450223293601,026* 11265917113 221525668*These totals reflect the figures on faculty prepared for the EEO reports. Actually, the total number offaculty has decreased less than these figures indicate. In 1975 the EEO-1 report was replaced by theEEO-6 report and as a result a number of faculty, especially senior faculty, were required to be reported inan administrative category, not as faculty.**It must be noted in the minority categories that in 1973, "those persons having origins in the IndianSub-continent" were required to be counted as minority, and in 1974-76, they were required to be countedas white.148ment of faculty, and more detailed description ofthe records being kept by departments of searchesmade for faculty, as well as projections for thefuture.IV. StaffA. ReportsThe University, over the years, has had a policyof equal employment opportunities and has beencommitted to consideration for and employmentof persons without respect to race, religion, color,sex, or national origin. The affirmative action program is congruent with this policy which has beenpolicy since the original charter. Both work towardfair employment practices at all times.As well as every academic department, everynonacademic department was required to submita report of its staff and of its new employees andof promotions and terminations. These reportshave been reviewed in the Affirmative ActionOffice, and, where appropriate, suggestions foractions have been made.B. Personnel OfficeThe former director of personnel acceptedanother position within the University and the assistant director of personnel was promoted to director. His staff has been enlarged to include anew manager of classification and compensation.An essential part of the affirmative action program is a well-documented job classification andjob description program. No job description program is ever complete and the Personnel Officeworks continuously on it. Good job descriptionsmake possible fair consideration of applicants andcurrent employees for particular jobs.The Personnel Office has expanded its job posting program. Jobs are posted in a timely manner.When the program was started, it was for nonunion clerical and technical employees; it has nowbeen expanded to include many of the professional positions.C. Education and TrainingDuring this last year, the department of educationand training of the Hospitals and Clinics has continued its programs, classes, and courses, whichare open campus-wide.In 1977/78, the announced curriculum is:I. Basic Educationa. GED Programb. English as a Second LanguageII. Clerical Traininga. Typing Ib. Typing II c. Appropriation Ledger Classesd. Telephone Skills Seminare. Medical Records SeminarIII. Career Developmenta. Nursing Ladder1. Licensed Practical Nurse Program2. LPN to RN ProgramIV. Continuing Educationa. College CoursesV. Management and OrganizationalDevelopmenta. Management Developmentb. Nursing Leadership Seminarsc. Time Management Seminarsd . Campus- wide Management DevelopmentVI. Special Programsa. Cooperative Health Study Programfor High School Studentsb. Human Relations Trainingc. Communications Trainingd. Preretirement Planning Programe. Preceptorship Program for High SchoolSeniors and College FreshmenVII. Servicesa. Consultation on planning, developing,and evaluation of training programs.D. ApprenticeshipThe University conducts some apprenticeshipprograms which make possible on-job training opportunities. This year, there were twenty-fourpeople, all University of Chicago employees, inapprenticeship programs in engineering, painting,printing, and bindery work. Of these, eight wereminority group members and seven were women;of the eight minority group members, seven weremale.E. Staff Advisory Committee on EmploymentThe Staff Advisory Committee on Employment, agroup of twelve or so representatives from variousparts of the University, was formed in 1972 by thevice-president for business and finance to adviseher on staff employment matters. The presentvice-president for business and finance has metwith the committee this year to discuss matters ofaffirmative action. The committee will continue tomeet.V. Other DevelopmentsA. HandicappedThis is the first affirmative action report whichrefers to the new regulations about employment ofthe handicapped. For that reason, slightly extended emphasis is given here.149Needless to say, over the years the Universityhas had many handicapped employees and students; accommodations of various kinds have beenmade to make possible their work and study in thebest possible circumstances. At this time, federalregulations are requiring further consideration ofthe matter of employment of the handicapped. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibitsdiscrimination against qualified handicapped persons in all federally assisted programs and activities. The Secretary of HEW, Joseph A.Califano, Jr., signed the regulations implementingSection 504, on April 28, 1977.Secretary Califano' s transmittal letter indicatesthe spirit in which the law is being viewed:These regulations represent a new era of civil rights inour nation. They provide the government and theinstitutions it funds with an exciting and importantopportunity to bring millions of handicapped personsinto the mainstream of American life. These regulations will work fundamental changes in manyfacets of American life. In many cases dramaticchanges in the action and attitudes of institutions andindividuals who are recipients of HEW funds arecalled for. The final regulations translate the broad,uncompromising statutory command of section 504into specific rules that vindicate the rights of handicapped citizens and deal sensibly with recipients offederal funds who will be subject to significant newregulations.The University on March 31, 1977 codified itspolicy with respect to the handicapped:The University of ChicagoAffirmative Action Plans for Handicapped PersonsPolicy:It is the policy of the University to employ, and givefair treatment to, qualified handicapped persons, and,where feasible, to make reasonable accommodationto a person's handicap.Dissemination of the Policy:The Affirmative Action Officer will be responsible forcoordinating the dissemination of this policy to allemployees; applicants; labor organizations withwhich the University has collective bargainingagreements; contractors with whom it does business;and other appropriate people.Implementation and Review:All departments and units of the University shouldtake affirmative action in furtherance of this policy.The implementation of this policy will be reviewedfrom time to time following the same procedures asthose used in other affirmative action programs. Appropriate committees and staff have begun systematic studies to ensure implementation of theadopted policy.B. PurchasingThe University continues its efforts to increase thebusiness which it does with minority suppliers. Allpurchasing agents are aware of the need for continuing efforts. More successful and more stablecontacts are increasingly being made. Quarterlyreports are submitted by each of the four mainpurchasing and contracting departments summarizing their business with minority businesses.These reports will be reported on in the nextAffirmative Action Report.As part of this commitment and effort, the University again this year participated in the ChicagoBusiness Opportunity Fair (10th Annual). The fairis sponsored by many of the largest firms inChicago and is an effort to bring together buyerswho need qualified suppliers and minoritysuppliers seeking to increase their contacts.During the two days of the fair, May 13 and 14,nine University staff members who do purchasingfor the University interviewed suppliers and madesuggestions to them of suitable buyer contacts oncampus. This group interviewed fifty-eightsuppliers and recommended twenty-four buyerson campus who might be contacted.The management of the fair plans to do afollow-up study during the course of the year to tryto determine to what extent these interviews andcontacts led to increased minority suppliers' business.VI. ConclusionThe Affirmative Action Office will continue towork in the year ahead to help with the University's fair employment practices commitment. Theaffirmative action officer would be glad to hearfrom anyone who would like to know more aboutthe University's affirmative action program.Margaret Fallen (Mrs. Lloyd A.) is the AffirmativeAction Officer.150REVISIONS IN THE UNIVERSITY'SPATENT POLICYBy D. GALE JOHNSON and WILLIAM B. CANNONOn March 7, 1977, the University Trustees approved a revision of Statute 21 entitled "PatentPolicy, etc.," which is quoted below.The revision of the statute concluded a study ofthe University's patent policies that was begun inNovember 1975, when a faculty committee on patents that had reviewed several exceptions to thepatent policy over several years was reconstitutedto review the experience of the recent past andrecommend changes in the policy. The committee, consisting of Chairman Richard A. Posnerand members Robert Haselkorn, Richard L.Landau, Norman H. Nachtrieb, and Milton B.Singer, issued its report in the spring of 1976,proposing the change in Statute 21. This recommendation was approved by the Committee of theCouncil on October 26, 1976, and by the Councilitself on January 11, 1977.The new patent statute clarifies that all patentable inventions resulting from research or otherwork at the University, or with the aid of itsfacilities or funds administered by it, are the property of the University. The University determinesto whom the patents shall be assigned, i.e.,whether to the University itself, the sponsor ofthe work, or an outside patent management firm.Such determinations will necessarily take into account any prior arrangements reached with outside sponsors. The University intends to licenseor assign each patentable invention in such a wayas to assure benefits to the University, the public,and returns to the inventors. Procedures for handling inventions under the policy are to be developed and administered under the direction ofthe president.Under the new policy, the University encourages the development of inventions made by itsfaculty and staff in order that the new ideas maybe brought to the benefit of the public. The policystatement retains the traditional academic viewthat research done primarily in anticipation ofprofit is incompatible with the aims of the University. It is not the objective of academic research toproduce inventions; but when they do arise, theyshould be reviewed by competent personnel whocan facilitate the transfer of useful inventions toindustry under arrangements that are beneficial tothe public and recognize the contribution of theinventor and the institution. Several steps have been taken to implement thenew statute:1 . After several years of experience in dealingwith University Patents, Inc., a patent management firm that specializes in handling patents developed at universities, the Universityhas entered into an agreement with that organization to screen all inventions arising at theUniversity. UPI has a staff of personnel experienced in patent licensing and they have provided competent and timely review of each disclosure submitted to them. The company hasaccepted several inventions for patenting andlicensing, notably the solar collector patents.The arrangements with UPI provide that theyassume all costs of providing technical reviewof the invention; investigating the prior art (including existing patents); determining patentability; exploring the potential commercial market; engaging patent counsel to file patent applications (and paying all filing and counselfees); locating manufacturing organizations interested in the invention; negotiating and administering licensing agreements; and collecting royalties. As remuneration for these services, UPI retains 40 percent of royalties paidon any University patents they handle. Normally, it is expected that if UPI determines that aninvention is patentable and potentially marketable, it will ask for and be assigned the invention under the agreement, but there is provisionfor exceptional cases to be handled by othermeans.2. Much University work is sponsored by thegovernment and other organizations under restrictions regarding the patenting of inventions.The terms usually permit the University to obtain waivers from the sponsor allowing inventions to be patented by the University on acase-by-case basis. Based on the new patentpolicy, the University has now applied for anInstitutional Patent Agreement from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Ifgranted, the Institutional Patent Agreement willgive the University the authority to patent allinventions arising under HEW without the needfor individual waivers, with certain restrictionsto assure their development for the public151good. Similar arrangement will be sought wherefeasible with other agencies.3. A standard form of disclosure for inventionshas been developed and will be made availablethrough departments to all University facultyand staff members who make inventions in thecourse of their research activities. The formwill be used to fulfill invention disclosure requirements of grants and contracts. It will alsobe used by UPI for their screening.4. Patent coordination will be handled throughthe Office of the Vice-President for Businessand Finance, which will: arrange with theOffice of Sponsored Programs for reporting inventions to sponsors, submit inventions forscreening to UPI, and coordinate the University 'sadministration of patent matters. An inventorwill submit a patent disclosure to his or herchairman or director for preliminary review andtransmittal to the Office of the Vice-Presidentfor Business and Finance. The department'spreliminary review will be for the purpose ofconfirming information known to the department chairman regarding sponsorship for workand any other pertinent facts.5. Since sponsors of research and organizations that engage academic personnel as consultants frequently seek to acquire patentrights, it is important to review any new commitments regarding patents against thebackground of this policy and any existing patent agreements to avoid potential conflicts. Ofcourse, the provisions of sponsoring or consulting agreements should also be reviewed to assure that they do not inhibit the right and obligation to publish the results of academic research.6. The general plan for distribution of royaltiesreceived from patents is that 25 percent of thenet royalties received by the University will bepaid to the inventor (or divided among the inventors) and the balance divided between thegeneral University and the inventor's Division.The portion for the Division will be applied toDivisional research activities as determined bythe dean, in consultation with the inventor andappropriate chairman or director.7. The officers, in conjunction with the Counciland Trustees, will review activities under thenew policy and procedures, including the agreement with UPI, from time to time to assure that they are serving the best interests of theUniversity.AppendixStatute 21. Patent Policy, etc.a) The basic policies of The University of Chicagoinclude complete freedom of research and the unrestricted dissemination of information. Research doneprimarily in anticipation of profit is incompatiblewith the aims of the University. The University recognizes that in the course of its research activities,ideas or processes may be developed from whichpatents should be obtained for the benefit and protection of the public interest. It reserves the right,through contract or otherwise, to make appropriatedisposition of patents based upon work done withinits laboratories or with the aid of its facilities.b) Every patentable invention or discovery that results from research or other activities carried out atthe University, or with the aid of its facilities orfunds administered by it, shall be the property of theUniversity and shall be assigned, as determined bythe University, to the University, to an organizationsponsoring the activities, or to an outside organization deemed capable of administering patents. TheUniversity, acting directly or through a patent management firm, shall endeavor to license or assign thepatent in such a manner as to assure the greatestbenefits to the University and the public, and provide a return to the inventor. The inventor and hisDean or other administrative head shall be consultedand kept informed of the arrangements. The conditions for the disposition of patent rights shall be consistent with (1) the basic policies of the University;(2) the terms of sponsorship of activities that led tothe invention; and (3) the requirements of law andprofessional ethics. Where the University does notwish to direct assignment of the invention or discovery, and the conditions of sponsorship so permit, theinventor may be allowed to retain ownership andpatent the invention on his own, but in any event thenormal processes of academic publication will beutilized for the benefit of the scholarly and generalpublic. Procedures to implement the foregoing shallbe developed and administered under the directionof the President.c) The University will not permit its name or namesof members of its staff to be used in advertising.Revised March 7, 1977D. Gale Johnson is Provost of the Universityand the Eliakim Hastings Moore DistinguishedService Professor in the Department of Economics and in the College; William B. Cannon isVice-President for Business and Finance, Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, and Member of the Committee on Public Policy Studies .152TO THE ENTERING STUDENTSBy JONATHAN Z. SMITHSeptember 18, 1977It is my happy task, this afternoon, to be one ofthe first to welcome you to the College of TheUniversity of Chicago.Poets have always fully exercised their licensewhen writing about the Academy and the world ofhigher education. Scores have echoed WilliamButler Yeats' scorn for our sometimes pedantry:Bald heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love's despair. . . .All shuffle there; all cough in ink;All wear the carpet with their shoes;All think what other people think. . . .Others join W. H. Auden in satirizing our sometimes snobbish rebellions. To quote one passagefrom what he terms a new academic decalogue:Thou shalt not answer questionnairesOr quizzes upon world affairs,Nor with complianceTake any test. Thou shalt not sitWith statisticians nor commitA Social Science.Thou shalt not be on friendly termsWith guys in advertising firms,Nor speak with suchAs read the Bible for its prose.Nor, above all make love to thoseWho wash too much.Thou shalt not live within thy means,Nor on plain water and raw greens.(He would have to rewrite that line for today'sstudents !)If thou must choose,Between the chances, choose the odd;Read the New Yorker; trust in God;And take short views.But while each has found his mark, most of what Iunderstand a college to be has been missed.Perhaps this is because so much of what we do isso prosaic.This afternoon I should like to celebrate this quality of being prosaic, because I fear that in thenext days and weeks, as we try together to become more mature, more worthy of trust; as wetry together to learn how to reason more clearly,to care more deeply, and value moreintelligently, we may run the risk of losing sightof some very simple things. Sometime betweenthe required placement tests and the beer andthe first readings in Aristotle, we may forget tokeep asking ourselves, "Why are we here?""What is this 'here' at which we are?"Each of you, I am certain, has heard what avery special place this particular College is. Eachof you, I am sure, has conferred this quality ofbeing special upon yourself, and admired the prescience of our admissions process in so readilyrecognizing it in you. It is true — neither you nor Iwould be here today if it were not — and yet truthis often a mixed blessing. There is, after all, but athin line separating the unique from the bizarre,the special from the freak. And so, while I congratulate you on your varied achievements andexcellencies, I congratulate our admissions process on the fact that you all look so blessedlyhealthy and normal. And I should like to introduce you to the normal world in which we live.Normality relies on being taken for granted. Ifone dwells too long on the normal course ofthings, one runs the risk of being a bore. It is thepeculiar advantage of the newcomer and visitor tobe surprised, to find fascinating another's norms.I hope that both parents and new students utilizethis advantage to its fullest degree. I encourageyou to act like tourists snapping countless pictures of other people going about their ordinarydaily routines which seem so exotic.But I should warn you that the normality thatwe have here cannot be taken for granted. It takescare and nurture and discretion and mutual respect and commitment and time and money andlabor and humor to preserve.In the few minutes that I have this afternoon, Ishall neither present a full ethnography nor acomplete travelogue. The best I can do is presenta few snapshots from my mental album, a sort ofshow-and-tell which is the common methodologyof the tourist, the anthropologist, and my four-year-old son in the nursery school across thestreet.Let me begin with an aerial photograph, some-153thing that is surprisingly difficult to obtain due tothe remarkable number of fine old trees thatflourish in this allegedly blighted urban campusand neighborhood. We do live in the midst of alarge city and we have taken all reasonable andsensible care and precautions, from security tobus services, to make certain that the advantagesof a rich and exciting metropolis remain safelyaccessible to us. But the trees and lawns signalsomething else. We are, in many ways, a smalltown and we revel in it.If you had an aerial photograph (or, for thatmatter, if you would examine the map at the backof your orientation booklet), you would see thatour topography is that of Middletown, U.S.A. , despite our omnipresent imitation Gothic. GeorgeBeadle, one of our past presidents, tends his cornfields on the outskirts of Fifty-fifth Street alongwith other student and faculty farmers. (AlthoughI must tell you that with that perversity for whichacademicians are so well known, he is attemptingto de-breed hybrid corn, to recover its originalwild form. Thus , the more pathetic and blighted hiscorn looks, the less each plant produces, the happier he is.) At our other border, Sixtieth Street,our area is zoned for light industry: the LawSchool, the Industrial Relations Center and thelike. Either the Divinity School or RegensteinLibrary (I waver from day to day in my assessment) stands as our church in the center of thevillage green. If you will stay with the map for amoment, you will quickly see what is our singlemost astonishing fact, and one that we take utterlyfor granted. We are remarkably compact. Ourcampus core is eight square blocks. It will nottake you ten minutes to cross our campus fromany direction — even on a balmy fall or spring daywhen you will have to dodge frisbies on high andthe by-products of canine digestive tractsbelow — save for the fact that it is inconceivablethat you will not run into someone you know, aneighbor if you please, and stop and gossip.The fact that I can speak of neighbors is anothersurprising fact that we take for granted, more surprising in an academic institution than that wegossip — for in academia we have raised gossip toa high art, we call it a seminar. For, as in anysmall town, most of us live in close proximity, inwalking distance, to where we work. The majorityof our 2,000 College students, 6,000 graduate students, and some 90 percent of our faculty live inHyde Park, in this neighborhood. And while thishas had an incalculable effect on ourcurriculum — this proximity being more responsible for our ability to work at general, cross- disciplinary education and research than any educational philosophy or course design — it signalssomething even more interesting and important(although again taken for granted) about us than isusually conveyed by saying that we are not acommuter college.My father-in-law tells me that one of the mosttraumatic experiences of his life was in third gradein public school in Brooklyn when he saw, for thefirst time, one of his instructors come out of themen's room. He didn't know teachers did that\Such naive idolatry, fostered in some institutionswhere the professor is a dim figure on a stage infront of a large lecture hall, or a disembodiedvoice on a loud speaker or video screen insulatedfrom his students by layers of teaching assistants,is impossible here because of our closely livedproximity. The student who has worked with meon a difficult text in class in the morning (and it isone hint of our normal kind of intimacy, of therespect in which we hold each other, that we worktogether on primary texts rather than smear yellow magic marker over predigested textbooks)sees me thumping melons in the market in theafternoon. In the evening students can see meholding hands with my wife at the movies, as Ihave seen them do at least as much with theircompanions. I have watched them mature as theyhave watched my two children grow; and some ofthem have taken the time and interest to havesome little part in my children's growth, as I,hopefully, have had some part in that of my students. We allow each other to be normal, to be allthe things we are because we see each other inmost of the roles and situations in which we ordinarily live. And this contributes inestimably to atruly humane education.I could go on in this vein and describe othersorts of things which are so normal that we takethem for granted. But you will be able to see themfar better than I. Indeed, about some I have abemused resignation. I have just returned from atrip to New York City at which I met the education editors of the various newspapers and weeklynews magazines. I found myself saying that themost newsworthy thing about our College is thatwe have such difficulty making news. To take justthe last several months as reported in the NewYork Times'. Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth continue to get follow-up stories about the effects oftheir going coeducational. We have been coeducational from our founding. Harvard has had anumber of features about its attempt to restorefull-time faculty to teaching in the college, itsabandoning of the heavy use of teaching assistants154and graduate teaching fellows, its reconsiderationof a return to required courses in general education rather than its present potpourri which requires the student to integrate that which the faculty cannot, etc. We have never abandoned general education and our courses have always beentaught by regular faculty, largely in small seminars. Indeed, that is one of the miracles that wetake for granted: that there is a thriving Collegehere at all in the midst of a vital graduate researchinstitution of such distinction. But you shouldknow, for all the problems it sometimes creates,that we have no separate College faculty. Our faculty is the faculty of the University. And there isno one who has to teach in the College becausetheir livelihood depends on it. Every course youwill take is staffed by a faculty member who haschosen to be there. Finally, although this isperhaps of more bittersweet interest to me than toyou, Columbia has received massive publicity because after nearly two years of unsuccessfulsearching it has finally found someone willing tobecome dean of its college.You will have detected that I have been givingyou your first assignment: take some time, walkaround, get some naive first impressions of us.For these things that I have been describing assurprising things that we take for granted, aboveall our topography, our compactness with its con-commitant intimacy and gossip, line out our intellectual and curricular map as well.My remarks this afternoon are not intended todwell on such matters. We will have an orgy ofcurricular discussion on Tuesday surrounding theAims of Education Address. But a few things canbe noted. Indeed, I would propose the followingthree tests that you might apply to your coursesand experiences in the months ahead.First, you should not find that your courses areintroductions, are surveys. You are not here tolearn to be able to regurgitate a sentence on everything. You are free, you are required to be incomplete and selective. Each thing you learn youlearn not because it is there, but because it connects in an interesting way with something else,because it is an example of something that is fundamental. A true College course is not a part ofsome sequence, it is an entity and an end in itself.Both the student and the professor have acceptedthe challenge of achieving something within theallotted thirty hours of classroom time and withstudents who may never again take a course inthat area. It is this challenge, variously answered,that attracts each one of us to teach in the College,that provides for the faculty an acid test of the results and value of their more specific research.What shall I teach a week from Tuesday in mycourse, designed primarily for freshmen andsophomores, entitled "Religion in Western Civilization?" What shall I do in thirty hours? Whatshall we accomplish with students for whom thisis a one-shot only course on my subject matter? IfI go chronological, if I seek to include everything of importance since the third millennium, Iwill have less than ten minutes a century. If one ofyou has to go to the men's or ladies' room, youstand in grave danger of missing the Reformation!Rather I must find texts and examples that willconnect with things you already know; examplesthat are so basic that you can apply them to newthings you will encounter as you go on; examplesthat are capable of bearing the burden of beinggeneral. So we will not begin chronologically, orwith a survey of the teachings of each religioustradition, or with summaries of their scriptures.Rather we will reflect on the fact that every Western religion had its birth within a city. We willthink about the relationship of religious life tourban life.I have used the words "think" and "reflect,"and that is my second test. For you will not, except when occasion requires, be lectured at, butrather we will work together. We will talk in aseminar because a prime goal of a collegiate education is training in the art of bringing a privateperception into the realm of public discourse, theresponsibilities of being public, the skills of clarityin oral and written expression, the requirementsfor giving reasons, and the rules for civil debate.This latter term, "public," gives rise to my thirdand final test. What you learn, what we discuss,by virtue of the requirement that it have a publicdimension, must have social value. I say this withsome trepidation for I do not wish to be misunderstood as awakening the old bogeyman of instant relevance. But we are not committed, as aCollege, to liberal education in order to producebetter doctors or graduate students (although suchmay be the happy by-products). We labor at whatwe do in the hope of producing better citizens: toproduce individuals who know not only thatthings are often more complex than they may firstappear but also that, therefore, interpretative decisions must be made, and that such decisions entail real consequences for which one must takeresponsibility; individuals who have been encouraged to refuse to flee from responsibility by thedodge of disclaiming expertise, and who standunder a solemn covenant to apply the basics thatthey know to each new fact and experience.155Everything that I have just said may be subsumed under the fundamental test: is it interesting? For as the Argentinian novelist and poet,Borges, reminds us in a lapidary sentence thatought to become the motto of every institution ofhigher education: "Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting; hypotheses may not." It isto such a challenge that I am privileged to inviteyou today. In its pursuit, I trust neither of us willfail the other.We have now come to a traditional moment inthis day's proceedings as the students leave thisplace to join in their College house's receptions,and parents leave to cross the street to Ida Noyesfor theirs. For with my welcome to all of youcomes a symbolic parting. Now parents go oneway; students another. I wish you each well inyour separate paths.Jonathan Z. Smith is Dean of the College,William Benton Professor of Religion and HumanSciences in the College, and Professor in theDivinity School and in the Division of the Humanities.A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE:HARRY G. JOHNSON,1923-1977By Edward ShiisI.Once on a walk in the Cotswolds during the war,R. H. Tawney suddenly said to me, "Shils, haveyou ever pressed a mole in your hand?" I said thatI had never done so. He told me that if I were todo so, I would be surprised by its strength. "It isall muscle." I recalled Tawney 's words not longafter I first met Harry Johnson. He seemed to beintellectually "all muscle." Physically too he gavean impression of tremendous power under easyself-control. He was about five feet ten inches tall,broad, thick-chested, inclined towards a solidplumpness. He had the most remarkable, large,sparkling black eyes, darkly ruddy cheeks, shining black hair. A matter-of-factness, a dry Canadian melodiousness of speech without flourishesor dramatic emphases was as characteristic of hisconversation as it was of his writings. He did not pause when he spoke. There were no hems andhaws. He spoke as he wrote, steadily, in long sentences, always grammatically correct and coherent, reaching out through numerous subordinateclauses to bring in relevant but not usually perceived aspects of the subject, and to reveal connections which are seldom noticed, while neverlosing sight of his main theme.He always gave the impression of possessing aserene and powerful intellectual and physical vitality which permeated everything he did or said.There were no hollow or dead spaces any morethan there were empty sentences in what hewrote. There was also none of that excess ofenergy which is wasted in twisting paper clips,moving things around pointlessly, speaking without saying anything. All this energy was masteredand applied to the production of something tangible whether it was the sharpening of a pupil's dissertation, commenting on a seminar paper, assessing a paper submitted to a journal, delivering alecture, writing a paper, or carving woodenfigurines at seminars and conferences and duringconversations in which his attention was neverdiverted from the main issue. In conversation orin discussion, he noticed all that others said andresponded justly and in sequence to every significant point. Even in the time of his plumpnesswhich for a period passed into stoutness, therewas never anything sluggish or pulpy about him.When for a time his figure was at its maximum, heevoked my recollection of Babe Ruth, the famousbaseball player, whose large girth never impededhis speed, grace or power in batting, running, orfielding.There was no contentless conviviality or smalltalk in Harry Johnson's conversation. He neverspoke for the pleasure of speaking or to fill in theblank moments of a conversation. It is not that hewas given to silences; on the contrary, he couldtalk for hours. All that he said, however, had apoint and it was not an isolated point; it was alsopart of an elaborate analysis resounding withovertones of new perspectives. He was not a Benthamite calculator of a felicific optimum, but whenhe considered any problem, he had a way of tracing out ramifications of costs and benefits whichno one else I have ever met possessed to such adegree.It is not that he spent all his extraordinaryenergy and intelligence in discussing economicsand university affairs. He would sometimes talkor write about some of the things which make upthe substance of the gossip of others, but when he156spoke about such things, often very vividly, theywere discussed entirely without malice, orSchadenfreude, or predictions of disaster, but always in a way which traced out causes and consequences and which saw implications. When in aseries of articles in Encounter and in a paper entitled "The Shadow of Keynes: Cambridge in the1950s" he wrote about the teaching and study ofeconomics at Cambridge, or when he touched, inpassing, on the same activities at Yale andChicago, he was not gossiping. He was trying tounderstand and explain why distinguished talentswent astray in pursuit of economic truths. As hewrote me in his last note in February about thepaper on economics in Cambridge in the 1950s, "Iam really after something complex — what causesthe decay of academic excellence." When he discussed the "Keynesian revolution" and the"monetarist counterrevolution," his aim was tounderstand and explain the zigzagging course ofthe growth of economic knowledge, and the significance of external social conditions and internalprofessional relationships in the improvement andretardation of economic analysis.Matter-of-factness and evenness was in hisvoice and written style but it was a matter-of-factness which exhibited the simultaneity and in-terconnectedness of events which only a personwith a subtle and sympathetic intelligence coulddiscern.Harry Johnson seemed to work under the principle which his much older fellow-Kingsman hadput into the maxim: "Only connect!" But inHarry Johnson's application of the rule, the connections he made were those which linked scattered events together, in all sorts of remote,roundabout, self-annulling, and self-accentuatingways. He brought together these intricate connections with speed and rigor; he articulated evidenceand assertion at a speedy and even pace. The con-secutiveness of his thoughts was as marked in hisspoken discourse as it was in his writings. He didit all unceasingly.He worked unceasingly. He did not confinehimself to working out his own ideas; he believedin the collaborative nature of intellectual progressand he took seriously the work of all other writersin his field, young and old, past and contemporary. He read the literature of economics omnivor-ously and remembered it in all its details. Heknew its history as well as its current state. Ineverything he wrote as an economist, he regardedhimself as a continuator and improver and aboveall as a colleague. He did not only read extraordi narily widely, attentively, and retentively ineconomic theory: he also covered the statisticalliterature. He was as empirical as he was theoretical. He was sensitive to minute analytical differences but saw them in the perspective of thelarger field of economics. That is why he was ideally fitted to write a history of economic thought.As far as I know he did not intend to do so; butmany of his writings, by their meticulous appreciation of the steps by which economic analysis hasprogressed, are fragments of such a history andone of the highest order.Harry Johnson was not an antiquarian. He wasnot like Piero Sraffa, a person to whom the historyof economic thought was a subject to be savouredfor its own capacity to give intellectual pleasure.Nor was he in the least externally inclined towards piety, towards the past because of its past-ness. He wanted economics to be a science and inorder for it to become such, it was necessary toappreciate what had already been accomplished.He accepted that economics had to progress byimproving on what had been done previously.That required unremitting study of the entire literature of economics, but it was not enough. It alsorequired the study of the evidence. Fortunatelythe strength, speed, and capaciousness of hismind allowed him to do this. This was not enoughfor him either. He wanted those around him towrite and publish and to discuss what they weredoing straightforwardly but without acrimony.His colleagues and pupils at Chicago were prolificin their production of papers and books, and intense and forthcoming in discussion. This was oneof the grounds of his satisfaction in his last decadeand a half here.As one of the Chicago economists in what hecalled the "theoretical missionary movement,"which extended economic analysis to race relations, family life, and education, Harry Johnsonreached into the consideration of universities andthe organization of learning. He did not study theliterature of these subjects as he studied the literature of economics where he seemed to have readeverything, old and new, and to remember thedetails of the most intricate arguments and ofout-of-the-way statistics. But without reading somuch of the disordered literature on the history ofuniversities, and the history and administration ofscientific research, he went to the heart of thematter, tracing preconditions and ramifications atmany removes from the topic first considered andthen bringing them back again to the main topic.The result of his belief in the Tightness of the157task which he had accepted — to improveeconomics and to spread its light — was a list ofwritings unequalled by his contemporaries and byfew economists of the past. He wrote about 525articles and about twenty books, and every one ofthem was as tough and solid as he himself was.Harry Johnson was a "missionary" in another,somewhat more traditional sense. The goal of theprogress of economics in academic study, andsupression of pride and prejudice in economic policy laid upon him the obligation to travel to innumerable conferences and to teach in many universities. He did not go to conferences in Pakistanor Japan, or wherever else, in order to have hisfare paid so that he could go sight-seeing. He wentto conferences to learn from the best and theyoungest of his colleagues, to question themabout what they had written and to correct theirerrors, and to bring them into the procession ofeconomists who were contributing to the progressof their subject. After he was well settled inChicago, he accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics so that the light couldshine over larger areas. After he left the School,and after his first stroke, he accepted a professorship at the Institut des hautes etudes inter-nationales at the University of Geneva. He accepted visiting professorships at various universities, he conducted summer schools so that hecould shepherd the flock of economists onto theright — but not at all strait — path.II.My own relations with Harry Johnson were at themargin of his unceasing labours in economics. Ifirst met him not long after he came to The University of Chicago towards the end of the 1950s.He had come from Manchester where, althoughwe had not overlapped in time, we had manycommon acquaintances. We also had a commonattraction to England. He was at first not entirelyat home at The University of Chicago, where therough and tumble of discussion in the economicsdepartment, inherited from the time of FrankKnight and Jacob Viner and carried on morecourteously and relentlessly by Milton Friedmanand with jocularity by George Stigler, was notquite what he liked. He was thinking of throwingup his post at The University of Chicago and accepting a very attractive invitation to The JohnsHopkins University. He wanted my advice; I triedto persuade him to stand his ground and to give asgood as he got. He soon demonstrated his masteryof that kind of intense give-and-take and enjoyedit. So much so that he came to regard it as one of the merits of the department where "economics isreally taken seriously."At The University of Chicago, my connectionswith him were mainly through his participation inthe Committee for the Comparative Study of NewNations, his advice and written contributions toMinerva, and his activity as a member of theCommittee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment. In all these settings, he was a patient expositor of the principles of the "theoretical missionary movement" of economic analysis and aself-confident, scornful exponent of the view thata university department in which everyone wasnot hard at work in rigorous research and intensive teaching was contemptible.Harry Johnson's contact with the Committeeon New Nations came about in the following way:A little after my first conversation with Harry,Lloyd Fallers, who was one of the co-founders ofthe committee and who seemed to know everyonein the University, suggested that Harry would bea valuable member of the committee. I respondedat once and very positively because I appreciatedHarry's unsentimental attitude towards the problems of the new states and his censure of self-defeating "planning," and because I thought thatthe benign atmosphere which had been generatedin the submarine-like rooms of the committee atthe bottom of Foster Hall would compensate himfor the sometimes excessively sharp debates inthe Department of Economics and make The University of Chicago more pleasing to him.I was right. He accepted with eagerness andthat was a wonderful thing for all of us. Year afteryear he came regularly to our weekly seminars.He would come in quietly, sliding his substantialbulk through the crowded reading room where weusually had coffee before settling down to business; he sometimes stood with us for a while, notspeaking, but looking on gravely. Sometimes hewent directly into the seminar room and began tocarve while waiting for the proceedings to begin.In the seminar, he extended his ideas abouttariffs and economic nationalism to the study ofthe historical origins of nationalistic and collec-tivistic economic policies in the poor — mainly recently colonial — countries. The economicnationalism which he censured in his nativeCanada, he censured no less stringently when itwas practiced in poorer countries. He was no lesssevere in his criticism of the "economic planning" in these countries. As he wrote in his appreciation of Professor Peter Bauer in Encounterand as he said in his lecture at the University ofGhana, the price of these policies was paid by the158poor, i.e., the peasantry, and the beneficiaries ofthese policies were university graduates in thecivil service and the universities. This was an underlying theme of his thought and he made it repeatedly in his visits to poor countries and in hisdiscourses to academic social scientists in theUnited States and Great Britain. The members ofthe Committee on the Comparative Study of NewNations were among the first to receive these ideasas he elaborated them around the central theme.He taught us much that we had not known before and above all taught some of the members ofthe committee who took the then common protective attitude towards the new states. Above all, heexemplified, week in and week out, his talent fortracing interconnections. He organized the seminar during one term and from it produced a bookwhich at that time was unusual in its sympatheticrealism and in its application of the powerfultechniques of economic analysis to a field whichwas then dominated by social scientists andeconomists who thought that compassion required that they set aside the hardheadedness onwhich they ordinarily prided themselves.Very soon after I founded Minerva in 1961 Idiscovered that Harry Johnson's "missionary"work had also reached into its territory. He hadwritten a very trenchant, almost too tough-minded memorandum for the United StatesHouse of Representatives Committee on Scienceand Astronautics which I reprinted in the Reportsand Documents section of Minerva. I used thereafter to send him papers which I had decided topublish, asking him to write a comment in theform of a letter to the editor. He did this about ahalf dozen times, and each of his comments,which came back to me almost at once, was justas painstaking in its exposition of where the author had gone wrong and of what the right solutionwas, as a paper for a major conference or a leading learned journal. Even his briefest note bore hisdistinctive intellectual signature. He was so helpful that I invited him to join the board of advisoryeditors of Minerva and he soon became one of mymost active, faithful, and solicitous associates.His generosity toward younger, less well-knowncolleagues and his loyalty to Minerva brought meinto contact with a number of excellent scholarsof whose work I would otherwise have been ignorant and who subsequently helped me to develop one of the distinctive features of Minerva ofwhich I am most pleased — namely, the analysis ofcertain aspects of the support of science and ofhigher education in the light of economic theory.His economic analysis of the "brain drain" and of scientific research, on graduate education andon the functions of universities were all works ofgreat originality. The discussion of the "braindrain" was transformed by his cool, matter-of-fact dispersal of the mixture of resentment,nationalism, and sentimentality which had prevailed until he went into the matter. His writingson science policy and research, on the organization of graduate studies in economics, and on universities more generally, may well have a similarinfluence; they certainly should. Even as theystand, they show what is gained when a great logical power and the fundamental theorems ofeconomic analysis are combined with a dispassionate and ample knowledge of facts and areapplied to the study of a particular topic. Just before he died, he sent me a paper on the study ofeconomics at Cambridge in the 1950s. It was asuperb sociological and economic analysis of intellectual fertility and decline. He wished to present it to an audience at The University ofChicago and I began to make preparations for itspresentation at a seminar, to be followed by a dinner and then a long evening's discussion on thecauses of decline from excellence and how toavoid it. This was increasingly on his mind, as aresult of his experiences and reflections on Cambridge and his concern about the 1980s atChicago. Unfortunately, that seminar will neverbe held, but the paper is being published in Minerva. It will be more than a monument to his clarifying presence in its pages; it will testify to his courage and affection.With all his travels, his illness, and his torrentialoutpouring of papers and books on monetary policy and international economic relations, he always had an indulgent moment for Minerva. Heeven tolerated my rejection of some of his offerings and my thoroughgoing rewriting of many ofthose I accepted. I often thought his sentences toolong and I cut them into two or three. I also usedto eliminate the touches of asperity which sometimes entered when Harry castigated inexcusableor self-serving errors. I recall once when I sawhim at the foot of the staircase which joined thefourth and fifth floors of the Social Science Research Building at The University of Chicago. Hewas standing with his secretary and I had justgiven him back, for his inspection, one of his excellent papers which I had rewritten in the margins and between the lines of every page. Helooked at his secretary with an amused smile,which suggested that he thought it just that he, thecritic who swept through the manuscripts ofothers with an iron broom, should have the same159thing done to his own manuscripts. He said to hissecretary: "If I am to be published in Minerva, Ihave to allow my papers to be rewritten."By the time the Committee on the Criteria ofAcademic Appointment was brought together in1971, it was clear to me that Harry Johnson wasone of the relatively small group of scholars andscientists who knew what a university should beand who was not afraid to say what he knew. Thiswas a time when minds, even serious and able andotherwise mature minds, were still addled by theevents of the last half decade. I do not remembernow whether it was President Levi or I whosuggested that Harry Johnson should be amember. Whoever it was, the choice was an important one for the committee and the University.There was a lot of work involved in membership in it since it met nearly every week, andHarry Johnson never missed a meeting when hewas in Chicago. Universities were still shakingfrom the troublesome events of the past fewyears, although The University of Chicago hadkept a cooler head than any other, and my committee began with a few uncertainties. HarryJohnson did not share these; he patiently and irresistibly argued down every suggestion whichwould contradict the idea that the University mustnot be diverted from its obligation to the moststringent intellectual training, and the most exigent application to the tasks of reliable and fundamental discovery. After we got under way, anew draft was presented almost every week.Harry Johnson's copies were always the first tocome back to me with copious remarks, criticaland unfailingly alert to slovenly formulations andoversights, and very suggestive of better reformulations. Even when he was in London, his annotations invariably came back by return of post,which was not so long in those days as it is now.Once, his comments were put in terms which Iwould not accept. I reprimanded him sharply andonce again was given the indulgence granted to anincorrigible favorite. By this time, he had becomea member of The University of Chicago family.Even though he was away for about half of eachyear, The University of Chicago and of course theDepartment of Economics held him by an unbreakable bond of almost organic firmness.III.My meetings with Harry Johnson were almost always on occasions provided by our commonacademic concerns. Sometimes we met for dinner at his home or mine. In the course of them I wasable to see both those things which were constantand those which were growing in him.What was constant was the flawless lucidity ofhis mind, his extraordinary rapidity of thought,and the justice of his comprehension, the austereand elevated conception which he had of the university teacher's obligations and the economist'scalling, his capacity to pursue complex chains ofreasoning, and his incomparable industry, assiduity, and efficiency. He disliked pomposity and pretence; he disliked the claims of educated civil servants and academic social scientists that a societywhich they dominated would be made better bythe very fact of their determination of its policies.He took the responsibility of a teacher ofeconomics as unqualified. One never put a question or a task to him to which one did not receive awritten reply in a very short time, very cogent andsuccinct and as brief as the problem permitted andas long as it required.What grew in him was the indomitability of hiswill. When he had been in good health, there wasno journey which he would not undertake to deliver a paper or to participate in a seminar and toleave behind a few home-truths about economictheory and economic policy.As he acquired more students he became evenmore devoted to them than he had been before.Increasing fame and widely dispersed obligationsdid not divert his attention from his students. Hespent more time with them when he had less of itto spend. He required from his students that theybe as serious about economics as he was and aswilling to work as hard at it. In terms when he wasaway from The University of Chicago, he mightsometimes pass through Chicago for a day on aflight from London to Pakistan with a stop in Singapore or some other far-off corner of the earth;he would gather his students around him for mostof that day to review and criticise their work andto give them new directions and stimuli. WhenHarry Johnson and his pupils went to the facultyclub for a drink before dinner, there still was noaimless camaraderie. It was all about some finepoints of international economics or monetarypolicy. Then he would be off.After his stroke it was hardly any different, except that he could not drink alcohol. He had in thepast been capable of drinking large quantities ofwine and whiskey and practically never showedany ill effects in his thought or speech. When, notso long before his first stroke, he was ordered tostop drinking alcohol, he stopped at once and to-160tally, just as he had stopped smoking cigarettesand had taken to wood carving.Whatever he did, he did unremittingly andthoroughly. It must have been more difficult forhim after the first stroke since he had to walk witha stick, and he never fully recovered the use of hisleft hand. But the stroke could not stop him. Evenhis carving did not stop; his left hand not beingquite strong enough for him to hold the wood withit while he carved with his right hand, he had asmall vise attached to his desk so he could get onwith his carving while speaking with students andcolleagues.Within a week of the stroke which befell him inVenice in October 1973, when he lay in bed in theOspedale Civile Reuniti in the Campo SS.Giovanni e Paolo with his left side paralyzed,scarcely able to speak but still able to smile, hewas already back at economics. There was a pileof new books on economics by his bedside and awriting pad and a pencil at his right hand. He said,with a diffident smile, as if craving my understanding and speaking with difficulty, "I still have towork." Within a few weeks, although still veryhandicapped in his movements, he was again writing articles and comments. In a fairly short time,the flow of papers and books took up where it leftoff. Not much later, his travels began again. Whenhe resigned from the London School ofEconomics, although I regretted the atmospherein which it occurred, I thought to myself: "NowHarry will take life a little more easily and hewon't dash about quite so much." That was awrong prediction. He was soon off to Japan, theFiji Islands, Pakistan, etc., etc. He seemed to betravelling as much as ever and he smiled wanlybut proudly when I chided him for it.Why did he do it? Of course he was proud of hisreputation as an economist of great intellectualpowers and voluminous bibliography. He was delighted when his accomplishments were recognized; he took pleasure in the honours which hehad received and he liked the attention given tohim in all those places of the world which he visited. He was especially pleased by thereverent — and uncomfortable — attention whichhe was accorded in his native Canada.It was certainly not vanity which caused him toput in so many hours, days, weeks, and years inteaching so many students so thoroughly and patiently and in working so painstakingly over suchmasses of economic literature, reports, anddocuments in order to write those numerous papers and books which could not have been written without hard and unrelentingly thorough work.Harry Johnson believed that some men might bepersuaded to behave more reasonably in the conduct of their economic affairs. That is why he believed in economic analysis. He did not, however,think that economic improvement should be thebe-all and end-all of human existence. Insofar,however, as it is sought, serious economicanalysis is an indispensable condition of effectiveaction. He thought that intellectual integrity in thediscussion of public policy would be impossiblewithout the mastery and advancement ofeconomic analysis. He thought economics was ascience with exigent claims of its own as an intellectual discipline and with no less strong claims onthe conduct of politicians, civil servants,businessmen, and journalists. He himself heededthose claims and he thought that other academicsshould do so too. He gave his life to their service.Edward Shils is Distinguished Service Professorin the Department of Sociology and in the Committee on Social Thought.A MEMORIAL TRIBUTEHARRY G. JOHNSON,1923-1977By Larry A. SjaastadHarry Gordon Johnson died in Geneva on May 9at the age of fifty-three, after an illness of threemonths. At the time of his death he was theCharles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professorof Economics at The University of Chicago andProfessor of Economics at the (Geneva) GraduateInstitute of International Studies, where he taughtduring winter quarters. From 1966 until 1974 hewas also professor of economics at the LondonSchool of Economics, spending spring and summer at Chicago and the remainder of the year inLondon.Mr. Johnson was born in Toronto and maintained his Canadian citizenship. He earned hisfirst bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto in 1943 at the age of twenty, and his secondat Cambridge University three years later; in theinterim he not only taught for a year at Xavier161University (Nova Scotia) but also served with theCanadian army in England during the final year ofWorld War II. Returning to North America, hequickly earned two M.A. degrees in economics,first at Toronto (1947) and then Harvard (1948).But Cambridge had deeply influenced him, and hewas soon drawn back to England where he was toremain for a decade. After several years as Lecturer and Fellow at Cambridge, he joined the University of Manchester as professor of economicsin 1956, where he remained until accepting a professorship in the Department of Economics at TheUniversity of Chicago in 1959. His connectionwith Chicago was maintained until his death.His writing, which was to become phenomenalin both content and volume, began to flourish during his second sojourn in England; his first publication, which corrected an error in Ricardo'stheory of rent, had appeared in 1948. By the timehe took his Ph.D. at Harvard ten years later, hehad more than fifty scientific articles in print, andthe pace of his output was to accelerate continually. At the time of his death, less than twenty yearsafter receiving his doctorate, the number of hispublished scientific papers had multiplied tenfold, about half of which appeared since 1970. Amere listing of his 522 scientific papers runs morepages (thirty-three) than do most journal articles.In addition, he wrote a large number of papersthat he viewed as journalism, and authored over150 signed and unsigned reviews. Fortunately,many of these papers have been collected intoseveral of his twenty volumes, and into some ofthe even larger number of the books that heedited. Never before has the economics profession witnessed such an outpouring of consistentlyhigh-quality work.Although Johnson did most of his professionalwork while at Chicago, he was already establishedas one of the leading intellects in economics at thetime that he joined our faculty in 1959. During hisyears in England his primary concern was thetheory of international trade, but he had also developed a reputation as a remarkably competenteditor, first with the Review of Economic Studiesand later as chief editor of The ManchesterSchool. Shortly after coming to Chicago he assumed the editorship of the Journal of PoliticalEconomy where his enormous energy, encyclopedic knowledge of economic theory and traditions, and uncanny ability to fit almost any paperinto its appropriate niche in the literature, propelled the Journal of Political Economy into the position of one of the top-ranking journals Ofeconomics. For that alone he would be long re membered; indeed, Max Corden has characterized him as the best editor since John MaynardKeynes.During his early years at Chicago, Johnson'scontinuing interest in international trade led toboth important innovations and bold extensions ofthe theory, particularly with respect to the consequences of tariff protection and interrelationships between trade, economic growth, and development. His theorizing was never idle, butrather was directed towards important practicalproblems or policy issues. His work on "effective" protection, for example, was to have a profound impact on the approach to tariff policy in anumber of countries.His interest in international trade, which heconsidered to be the queen of the economics discipline, broadened to the economics of international relations in general, and he became increasingly concerned with national and internationalaspects of monetary economics. It was at the timethat he left Manchester for Chicago that he wrotea paper on the monetary approach to the balanceof payments that foreshadowed a major innovation in that area. Although it was to take the betterpart of a decade for Johnson (and others) to complete the development and immense implicationsof the new approach, the main outlines of whatfinally emerged can be clearly traced to his 1958seminal paper.While this is not the place to attempt an evaluation of Johnson's work — indeed, a forthcomingissue of the Journal of Political Economy will bedevoted to that — it should be noted that althoughhe is best known for his contributions to monetaryand international economics, his writing spannedvirtually all of economics and was becoming increasingly involved with the interrelationships between economics and other disciplines, and withan interpretation of the evolution of economicthought. He devoted considerable energy to anunderstanding of the Keynesian revolution, andwhat he termed the monetarist counterrevolution.He remained an admirer of Keynes (but less so ofKeynesians) despite the fact that his outlook became more and more monetarist during his lateryears. But he was also forward looking; at thetime of his death he was deeply involved in thecontemporary issues of technology transfers andthe North- South debate.Johnson's singular mastery of every nook andcranny of economic theory and tradition, coupledwith his impressive command of the English language, have resulted in a written Legacy of unprecedented proportions. No tribute to the man can162speak as eloquently as does the written recorditself. But no attempt at a tribute would be complete without a recognition of other qualities ofthe man. He was deeply committed to whatevercause, however minor, that he might join. Henever attended a conference at which he did notwork, and work hard, towards a successful conclusion. He never took a student's paper lightly,and with a few incisive comments was able tosteer a budding research topic towards more fertile ground. Despite his frequent and sometimesprolonged absences from Chicago, his first orderof business upon returning was to churn out a setof comments and criticisms on papers developedin the International Economics Workshop duringhis absence. He was a devoted and highly responsible faculty member, continuously attempting tofind that precious stuff that maintains the intellectual quality of an academic institution. Many willalso remember him as the unshakeable patron ofthe underdog, forever seeking opportunities to aidsome distant, minor institution, or meritorious butunrecognized student or colleague, wherever hemight be. Harry Johnson was also an internationalist; theworld was his concern, his audience, his sustenance. For at least ten years his prime concernhad been the deterioration of the internationalmonetary system, and how it might be reconstituted. He knew the world well from his legendarytravels, and he had friends and admirerseverywhere. He was also an outspoken critic ofwhatever he did not like wherever and wheneverhe found it. He was offended by nationalism, particularly that of his native Canada, and by nationalpolicies aimed at limiting free movement ofpeople. He mourned the decline of the economicsprofession in England, but found the problem intractable.Chicago has been privileged to be home toHarry Johnson for most of his professional life.We and others shall miss his humility as much ashis brilliance.Larry A. Sjaastad is a Professor in the Department of Economics.THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO RECORDVICE PRESIDENT FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRSRoom 200, Administration Building¦- o zT* X om £ c ?3D P • ¦a?> -co §,POSTAAID,0,ILLITNO.J O2 2 D S-». O m s.¦*• T- 5*co 3'