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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

The Pursuit of Excellence: Abraham Flexnerand His Views on Learning in Higher Education
Sachiko IWABUCHI *INTRODUCTION
Abraham Flexner, one of the most inﬂuential educational critics inearly twentieth-century America, faithfully believed in excellence. Excellence epitomized his views on education. “Throughout my life,”
Flexner wrote in his autobiography, “I have pursued excellence.”1 For
Flexner, excellence meant more than surpassing skills, eminence, anddignity; excellence meant intellectual rather than mere mental training.
It also connoted honor and spirituality rather than mercantilism andmaterialism. For Flexner an aristocracy of excellence is “the truest formof democracy.”2
The topic of excellence has become conspicuous in the discussions ofuniversity reform in Japan. The Twenty-First Century Centers of Excellence (COE) Program was established based on the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s report “A Policy for
the Structural Reform of National Universities,” under which a new
funding mechanism has been implemented to subsidize the formation ofresearch bases.3 Although the goal of the COEs is to promote excellent
research results, some scholars have argued that the proposed program
could drive researchers to commercially successful projects in order to
Copyright © 2004 Sachiko Iwabuchi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Ph. D. Candidate, Hokkaido University

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secure sources of funding. “It will be very dangerous,” says Tadamitsu
Kishimoto, president of Osaka University, “if this competition [among
universities] is only geared towards fashionable science such as information technology, nanotechnology or proteomics.”4 Flexner, the great
advocate of excellence, saw this danger as real and hoped to keep it atbay. One of his major reasons for creating for the Institute for Advanced
Study [IAS] was to make the institute immune from commercialism.
The current university reform also entails another debate: introductionof American-style professional schools in Japan. The question is morethan how to organize law schools. It involves what to teach to whom andwhat should be the aim of professional education. Law schools are considered to be professional schools, because they aim to train and educate
those who prepare to practice law as professionals. Business schools arealso considered to be professional schools, but what differentiates business schools from the graduate schools of economics, or normal schools
from graduate schools of education? Around the turn of the last century, the reformers of higher education in the United States faced the samequestions. Among them, Flexner was the most notable ﬁgure, remembered particularly for his provocative analysis of medical education
when the research aspect of medicine was neglected. The Flexner Report
is known to have revolutionalized American medical education. His
fame and reputation as an educational critic gave him a chance to create
his ideal institution of learning, the IAS, which is often remembered forAlbert Einstein’s professorship.
While Flexner is well-known in the United States as an educational
critic, less is known in Japan about Flexner and his ideal for higher education.5 Makoto Saito has pointed out that the creation of the IAS is symbolically signiﬁcant in the American tradition within which practicalknowledge receives respect. Although “useful knowledge” was respected in the United States from the beginning, it always meant more thanlearning practical skills. In the later period, Jacksonian Democracy andthe rise of the mercantile class encouraged educators to make education
more relevant to everyday life, and the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862
prepared the university for its service function. Yet the value of usefulness and its place in education were always contentious.6 During his
ninety-two years of life, Flexner experienced America’s ﬁrst research
university as a student at Johns Hopkins, reconstructed professional education, and witnessed the loss of culture as one of the goals of higher
education. An examination of Flexner’s ideal for the university and professional schools allows us to understand the evolution of higher educa-

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tion in the United States and to evaluate the current Japanese educational
reform.
I ABRAHAM FLEXNER: FROM THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
TO THE CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF TEACHING
The story of Abraham Flexner’s life reveals some key points in understanding his ideal of higher education. Flexner was born on November
13, 1866, to a German Jewish couple in Louisville, Kentucky. Among
his eight siblings, Simon Flexner became a bacteriologist and pathologist and later became the director at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research, while Bernard Flexner became an active Zionist attorney inthe 1930s. Simon’s connection to the Rockefellers solidiﬁed Abraham
Flexner’s tie to the philanthropist, though Flexner’s independent merit
as an inﬂuential educational critic should not be underestimated.7 Another brother, Jacob, saved money to send Flexner to the Johns Hopkins
University when their father’s itinerant merchant business failed. Jacob’s
choice to send Flexner to Johns Hopkins was critical in so many ways
in molding his ideal for a modern university.8
Because of the ﬁnancial strain, Flexner spent only two years at theJohns Hopkins University.9 Despite the short duration of his study, somevery fundamental characteristics of his educational ideas were nurtured
there. First and foremost, Flexner admired the ﬁrst president of Johns
Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman. “I think,” Flexner wrote, “it is a modest
claim to say that the founding of the Johns Hopkins University by President Gilman was the starting point of higher education, in the modern
sense of the term, in the United States.”10 Flexner openly admitted his
respect for the ﬁrst president of Johns Hopkins: “Those who know something of my work long after the Gilman’s day, at the Carnegie Foundation, the General Education Board, and the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, will recognize Gilman’s inﬂuence in all I have doneor tried to do.”11 In the introduction to Flexner’s Universities, former
University of California President Clark Kerr wonders if Flexner’s idealization of Gilman and Johns Hopkins had limited Flexner’s views on
the aims of the university. Yet the creation of Johns Hopkins was revolutionary because it was proof of the success of university reformers whowanted to transplant the Germanic approach to science and scholarshipto the United States. With the donor’s support, Gilman built a modern,
research-oriented university in 1876.
Some background is needed to understand the importance of the Johns

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Hopkins University in the 1870s. According to Laurence Veysey, after
the Civil War, university reformers acknowledged the importance of science as a subject and tried to import research as a modern method ofteaching.12 While a traditional college emphasized mental discipline as
one of the purposes of education, some reformers like Gilman, who received a post-university education in Europe, wanted to transform colleges into universities. Flexner explains Gilman’s vision of university:
To Mr. Gilman’s mind, a university was primarily a graduate school, and a
graduate school was the congenial home of the ablest scholars and students
that could be assembled. The Johns Hopkins “was founded upon the idea ofa university as distinct from a college.”13

The Johns Hopkins University had an undergraduate program, but it was
intended to be a supplement to the focus on research. In this researchoriented academic environment Flexner gained ﬁrst-hand experience ofthe modern university.
Gilman’s radical hiring policies also inﬂuenced Flexner. Unlike othercolleges that had hired professors from the ranks of their graduates, herecruited professors regardless of age, religion, or race. Furthermore,
Gilman’s practice of encouraging scholars to pursue their own interests
resonates with Flexner’s advocacy of laissez-faire scholarship he developed at the IAS. Flexner describes Gilman’s contribution as follows:
He [Gilman] convinced the country of the importance of untrammeled research in every ﬁeld of intellectual interest and activity. He exercised no pressure to produce and to print. . . , though he realized the importance of scholarly
and scientiﬁc journals and shortly proceeded to found and subsidize them.
He cared only for what was really ﬁrst-rate, and having assembled ﬁrst-rate
minds he let them alone. He knew that high intellectual ability has its own
idiosyncrasies, and he lived happily in an atmosphere where idiosyncrasy
was sacred.14

This belief that great scholarship requires absolute freedom was the coreof Flexner’s plans for the Institute for Advanced Study.
In 1886, after two years at Johns Hopkins, Flexner came back to hishometown and taught classics at Louisville High School. His salary at
Louisville High was more than nominal, yet the need to alleviate the family’s ﬁnancial burden and his wish to organize a curriculum according
to the students’ age and capabilities made him take the opportunity to
run his own preparatory school. His school, known in Louisville as “Mr.
Flexner’s School,” successfully sent its students to well-known univer-Iwabuchi Sachiko(p139)6/2 04.7.18 11:55 AM ページ 143

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sities, including Charles W. Eliot’s Harvard. Encouraged by Eliot,
Flexner published an article “Freshman at Nineteen” in The Educational
Review, which was “then probably the country’s foremost educational
periodical.”15
Flexner’s life as a classics teacher and a preparatory school principal
was not glamorous, compared with his later fame. Yet the anecdotes fromthis time recorded in his autobiography illuminate some of his basic values. For instance, Flexner quit Louisville High partly because runninghis own school gave him more money, but also because he could teachwhat he considered the best for the students. Flexner attributed the problems of American higher education to the low quality of secondary education, where uniformity and rigid rules effaced individuality. Flexner,
who had experience teaching diverse students in a uniform way, wishedto create an ideal school that “operated without rules, without examinations, without records, and without reports.”16 At his own school Flexner
practiced a laissez-faire approach based on his conviction that if the students are mature enough, they would do their work. Later we will see
how Flexner’s faith in deregulation endured, particularly at the Institutefor Advanced Study.
II

THE PROBLEMS OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN FLEXNER’S VIEW,
1908–1930

Mr. Flexner’s School was a success in terms of its ﬁnances and in thenumber of graduates it sent to the established universities. Despite thesuccess and the recognition from Eliot of Harvard, Flexner became more
and more dissatisﬁed with running a preparatory school. After ﬁfteen
years, Flexner decided to close his school and attend graduate school at
Harvard before going to Europe to make a career in education. At
Harvard Flexner took experimental psychology and philosophy courses. Although he did not enjoy all his courses, he used his experience asa graduate student to criticize American higher education. In 1908, after
two years’ sojourn in Europe, he published The American College.
Although The American College did not receive favorable reviews,
Flexner, having heard of a project involving medical education reformrun by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching[CFAT], contacted President Ira Remsen of the Johns Hopkins University and asked Remsen for a letter of introduction to Henry S. Pritchett,president of the CFAT.17 Flexner’s foresight and his effort to participate

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in medical education reform turned out well. The Flexner Report, ofﬁcially Bulletin Number Four, is remembered as a cornerstone in the history of medical education in the United States.18
The impact of the Flexner Report was tremendous. The Report,
Flexner wrote in his autobiography, “produced an immediate and profound sensation, ‘making’ as we say nowadays, ‘the front page.’ ” Almost a half-century after its publication, on Flexner’s ninetieth birthday,“deans from every medical school in America came to the WaldorfAstoria Hotel in New York, together with the nation’s top cabinet ofﬁcials, to hail him as the man who made ‘the greatest single contribution’in the history of the teaching of medical school.”19 Although Flexner had
no knowledge of medicine, his reputation as the author of the Flexner
Report gave him a chance to visit Europe and conduct research on medical education and helped the medical profession to reestablish its professional status. On his return to the United States, John Rockefeller, Jr.
asked Flexner to join his family’s philanthropic organization, the General Education Board [GEB]. Flexner worked for the GEB from 1913 to
1928. In 1928, two years before the foundation of the Institute forAdvanced Study, Flexner left New York for All Souls College at Oxford,
where he spent one year as a Rhodes Trust Memorial Lecturer and developed the ideas for his upcoming book Universities: American, English,
German.20
During the years between his ﬁrst book The American College (1908)
and Universities (1930), Flexner wrote six books and a few dozen articles.21 His tone and focus changed over the two decades, yet Flexner’s
general account of his ideal post-secondary institution can be summarized as follows: American college students were, compared to their
German counterpart, “ﬂighty, superﬁcial and immature, lacking, as aclass, concentration, seriousness and thoroughness.” This does not meanthat American college students were intellectually incapable. Rather, theproblem arose from several sources. First of all, American high school
does not prepare students for college. High school was, Flexner argues,“too elementary, too broken up, and too miscellaneous to constitute formost students anything more than an elementary education.”22 In addition to the low quality of secondary education, American high school
tried to satisfy different students’ needs. The high school used to be asieve separating the most capable students from the rest, but in a democracy this kind of selection faces objections if it is seen as elitist. As aresult, American colleges were crowded with students who are “intel-

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lectually considered, an unselected and untrained body of attractive boys
and girls.”23
The large number of students enrolled in college without taking an examination raises issues in areas such as curriculum and administration.
While democracy rallied against differentiation, Flexner contends, thecollege itself was eager to satisfy the democratic demand by offering
non-intellectual courses. American universities have “thoughtlessly andexcessively catered to ﬂeeting, transient, and immediate demands; they
have mistaken the relative importance to civilization of things and ideas;
they have failed and they are, in my opinion,” Flexner wrote, “more andmore failing to distinguish between ripples and waves.”24 What makes
things worse, he argued, the free elective system, which was introduced
to modernize the traditional ﬁxed curriculum by giving equal importanceto non-traditional branches of learning, atomizes knowledge and ruins
the wholesomeness of college education.25 Although Flexner was adamantly opposed to some traditional college supporters’ argument thatcollege education should devote itself to building a well-rounded character with the ﬁxed curriculum, he saw the elective system as both chaotic and detrimental to the desirable college curriculum.
Flexner’s opposition to the enrollment of a large number of immature,unselected students to college or to the university hinged on his criticism
of the large university administration. Throughout his life, Flexnerstrongly believed that the expansion of the university would inevitably
destroy the organic entity of the university and would require professional administrators, who would run the university like a business. On
the matters of the university’s size and the administration’s harmfulness,
Flexner’s words were particularly harsh: “For bigness, intellectual or
spiritual, is almost necessarily fatal to real greatness; it involves thedevising and operating of machinery in which the ﬁnest values areinevitably lost. Size is not democratic; only quality is democratic.”26 He
continues,
A genuine university is an organism, characterized by highness and deﬁniteness of aim, unity of spirit and purpose. But it is quite obvious that theinstitutions which we have used for purposes of illustration—the best that we
possess—are not organisms: they are merely administrative aggregations, sovaried, so manifold, so complex that administration itself is reduced to budgeting, student accounting, advertising, etc. Such aggregations, even thoughcalled universities, simply do not possess scientiﬁc or educational policy,
embodied in some appropriate form.27

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Flexner believed that administrative organizations came to exist as a necessary evil. With the advent of an increasingly complex apparatus andcompartmentalization, the universities lost their ﬂexibility.28 Flexnerargues, “So rapid has been their [universities’] expansion that they havenot taken time to survey critically many of the new activities which they
have so lightly taken on.”29
The new activities in the university that Flexner was condemning were
the service activities undertaken to satisfy the demand of the public tomake college education directly “practical.” The notion of practicalknowledge was related to the ideal of “useful knowledge,” which is “thebelief that mastery of science would make farmers and artisans more productive.”30 Although the word “useful” invokes a disdain for bookishknowledge, “useful knowledge” was never the same as vocational training.31 Yet, facing a challenge posed by the rise of correspondence schools
and the popularity of corporate schools, universities had to compete withthose other forms of educational opportunities in order to grow. The students’ tuition was critical for universities to modernize their facilities
and to hire and retain qualiﬁed faculty. Therefore universities gradually
implemented both summer schools to certify teachers and vocational
training in university extension programs.
However, the question of whether utility should play a role in the modern university curriculum had been always contentious. In 1895, when
university reform was still nascent, Nicolas M. Butler of Columbia
University tried to differentiate vocational knowledge and useful knowledge by “utilities higher and utilities lower.”32 Such a strong advocate oftechnical training in the university as Calvin M. Woodward of
Washington University was careful to modify Ezra Cornell’s insistence
on being a useful university with his remark that the university “was aplace where everything useful in a high and broad sense may be taught.”33
Yet, Flexner saw no virtue in either service activities or adult education.
Adult education and university extension “destroyed the very conception of the university as an institution of learning.”34 “American universities,” Flexner argues,
call themselves service institutions or public service institutions, and as suchthey go into the market place and do a thriving business with the mob. They
advertise their shoddy wares in newspapers and periodicals. . . . Many of theactivities carried on by numerous universities are little short of dishonest; but
the business goes on, because it pays—for that and for no other reason.35

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The service activities were “cheap and trashy innovations,” and in
Flexner’s view, nothing but “higher activities of predominantly intellectual and cultural character” should constitute the ﬁeld of the university—these and these higher activities alone.36
Despite Flexner’s denunciation, all of the service activities were notnecessarily infatuated with the lure of proﬁt-making. In 1892 president
William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago started a summer
session and created an extension division that administered lectures andcorrespondence courses.37 Like other original promoters of university
extension, Harper originally expected summer schools to provide thepublic with a chance to get a liberal education.38 The New School for
Social Research, founded in 1919, was not a typical type of university
in its structure and scope, yet the New School intellectuals were disgusted with the established universities, where a business-driven boardof trustees was usually in control. Strongly inﬂuenced by John Dewey,
the New School emphasized the relevance of liberal education to contemporary issues.39
Like the early university extension advocates, Flexner never approvedof vocational training in the university. “Practical training,” he writes,“that is, the ability to do different things without profoundly understanding the process therein involved—does not belong to the university.”40
For this reason, Flexner dismissed the emerging claim to make theBusiness School a professional school while he approved of the study of
economics as a graduate level of work. This might lead one to ponder
whether the medical school’s basic aim was to train physicians. Before
we examine Flexner’s deﬁnition of professional schools, we shall lookat Flexner’s contribution to medical education with his authorship ofFlexner Report.
III FLEXNER REPORT IN MEDICAL EDUCATION
AND FLEXNER’S VIEWS ON PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLSThe conditions surrounding medical education in the late nineteenth
century were far from current practice. According to Paul Starr, students
came to professional schools with minimal preparation; young applicants without high school diplomas could easily ﬁnd admission to study
medicine; students followed medical courses in any order they pleased;
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original research; and students learned medicine through apprenticeship.41 The public demand for doctors accelerated the production ofuntrained medical practitioners. Thus, when Flexner took on the surveys
of medical schools, there was a pressing concern that the medical doctors thoroughly trained.42
The Flexner Report proposed four major steps to improve the qualityof medical education in North America. First, medical schools should beproperly equipped. Second, only academically qualiﬁed students should
be admitted to medical schools. Third, research should be a higher priority. And last, the number of medical schools should be reduced to only
31 from the existing 155 schools.43 As a consequence of the Flexner Report, “nearly half the medical schools then existing had to close down,”
though not as many as the author of the report expected.44
The Flexner Report endorsed what Pritchett and the American Medical Association [AMA] and its Council on Medical Education wanted
to produce: fewer but highly trained doctors at fully equipped modern
medical schools.45 What Flexner endorsed and hoped to realize in medical education reﬂected his consistent views on higher education in general. For instance, Flexner required medical school professors to be
full-time, which was a stricter requirement than what the AMA originally wished to realize. In fact, when Flexner worked for the General
Education Board, he made full-time appointments a condition for grants,
which aroused resentment among the medical schools.46 Nevertheless,Flexner believed that full-time appointments were indispensable for
medical schools to be truly educational: providing full-time salaries
would keep professors away from private practice. Without ﬁnancial
concerns, full-time professors would concentrate on research and teaching. Full-time appointments also enabled the reconstruction of medical
schools, which had been “money-making in spirit and object.”47
Flexner’s insistence on providing time and stability for scholars and his
belief that higher education is incompatible with business practice wereamong many principles that remained consistent throughout his writingson education.48
Flexner denied business schools’ claim to be as professional as medicine and law because their knowledge was about mercenary matters andtheir education was basically a form of training. When newly createdbranches of knowledge such as journalism, library science, and social
work claimed that they were professional schools, Flexner deﬁned professions as those that are learned, “because they have their roots deep inIwabuchi Sachiko(p139)6/2 04.7.18 11:55 AM ページ 149

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cultural and idealistic soil,” and they “derive their essential characterfrom intelligence.” Professions’ purposes are primarily “objective, intellectual and altruistic.” A profession is, therefore, “an order, a caste, notalways in fact free from selﬁsh aims, but in its ideals at least devoted tothe promotion of larger and nobler ends than the satisfaction of individual ambitions.”49 Professional schools that should be part of the university, in Flexner’s opinion, had to be educational, cultural, and intellectualin character and quality. Flexner excluded certain disciplines such as
journalism, business, home economics, and library science from his listof professions based on his six criteria. Flexner’s dismissal of journalism and social work as unprofessional certainly invited criticism. Moreover, Flexner contradicted himself when he dismissed the potential forthese new branches of knowledge to form new disciplines that were as
consistent with Flexner’s vision of the university as were law and medicine. Presenting these new disciplines as professional schools appeared
to Flexner as nothing but the university’s act of selling-out to lure students.
Flexner’s argument for professional schools as altruistic in purpose
and intellectual in character would face a challenge when Progressive
advocates of popular education saw the university as an ideal vehicle for
their efforts to change society. During the Progressive era, many universities sponsored agricultural extension, public health, and parent education.50 Each ﬁeld involved research and provided for the public good.
Yet, while Progressive reformers like John Dewey saw education as ameans of redressing social evils, Flexner believed that scholars should
contribute to society not by correcting but by investigating problems.
Flexner called for an institute where “scholars and scientists may regard
the world and its phenomena as their laboratory, without being carried
off in the maelstrom.”51 A haven, where the gifted few pursue knowledge for its own sake secluded from the secular world, was the ideal
Flexner envisioned for the Institute for Advanced Study.52
IV

FLEXNER AS THE FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF
THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY AT PRINCETON
In 1930, soon after Flexner returned from Oxford, the prominent
Jewish department store owner Louis Bamberger and his sister Felix
Fuld sought Flexner’s advice on the use of their fortune. Bamberger and
Fuld wanted to create a Jewish dental school near their home state, NewIwabuchi Sachiko(p139)6/2 04.7.18 11:55 AM ページ 150

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Jersey. Their choice of Flexner must have resulted from Flexner’s reputation as the expert on medical education and his work at the GEB.
Flexner saw a chance to use the donors’ gift to realize his dream to create an institute similar to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Researchwhere his brother Simon had been a director since its opening.
Abraham Flexner persuaded the donors to modify their initial plan andsuggested they create “a genuine seat of learning.”53 It would be a place
where “[s]ympathy, helpfulness, mutual respect, and conﬁdence, informal talk in shifting groups involving director, professors, and members
are alone requisite to create an atmosphere free of tension, attractive tomen of higher attainments and to students of unusual ability,” in short,Johns Hopkins in the 1880s.54 The donors approved Flexner’s proposal
with the condition that Flexner would preside over the Institute as
Director. In 1930, at the age of sixty-four, Flexner started making another mark in higher education.
Combining his writings before 1930 gives us an image of what Flexner
had hoped to realize for the structure of the Institute for Advanced Study.
The Institute, Flexner wrote,
ought to be small and plastic; it should be a haven where scholars and scientists could regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory; without being carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate; it should be simple,
comfortable, quiet without being monastic or remote; it should be afraid of
no issue; yet it should be under no pressure from any side which might tend
to force its scholars to be prejudiced either for or against any particular solution of the problems under study; and it should provide the facilities, the tranquility, and the time requisite to fundamental inquiry into the unknown. Its
scholars should enjoy complete intellectual liberty and be absolutely freefrom administrative responsibilities or concerns.55

By providing the above environment for men of higher attainments andstudents of unusual ability, Flexner intended to create an educational
utopia in Princeton.
Flexner’s vision for creating a post-graduate institute illuminates several fundamental requisites for the structure. “American universities
were developing,” Flexner writes, “so that seekers after a Ph.D. could
obtain admirable opportunities; but nowhere did there exist the untrammeled facilities for easy-going and informal work between men who had
passed the Ph.D. degree stage, had given promise of unusual ability, andwho needed now the informal contact with masters which had charac-Iwabuchi Sachiko(p139)6/2 04.7.18 11:55 AM ページ 151

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terized the German universities during their golden days.”56 In Universities, Flexner also outlined his design:
Progress might be greatly assisted by the outright creation of a school or institute of higher learning, a university in the post-graduate sense of the word.
It should be a free society of scholars—free, because mature persons, animated by intellectual purposes, must be left to pursue their own ends in theirown way. Administration should be slight and inexpensive. Scholars and scientists should participate in its government; the president should come downfrom his pedestal. The term “organization” should be banned. The institution
should be open to persons, competent and cultivated, who do not need andwould abhor spoon-feeding—be they college graduates or not. It should furnish simple surroundings—books, laboratories, and above all, tranquility—
absence of distraction either by worldly concerns or by parental responsibility
for an immature student body. Provision should be made for the amenities oflife in the institution and in the private life of the staff. It need not be complete or symmetrical: if a chair could not be admirably ﬁlled, it should be left
vacant. There exists in America no university in this sense—no institution,
no seat of learning devoted to higher teaching and research.57

This is the heart of Flexner’s plan for the Institute; further explorationof several points in the above statement will help us not only understandthe problems Flexner experienced at the Institute for Advanced Study,
but also see his fundamental goals for higher education.
First of all, structurally, Flexner ﬁrmly believed that the smaller thesize of an institution, the better the quality of education. His support forsmall size can be traced back to his own experience at the Johns Hopkins
University.58 His criticism of large educational institutions was related
to his hostility toward administrative organizations at universities. Because the universities admitted too many students, Flexner believed,
administrative organizations came to exist as a necessary evil. With acomplex apparatus and compartmentalization, the universities lost their
ﬂexibility.59
Secondly, he insisted on the maturity of students and scholars for a
post-doctoral institution. Like the structural requirements for the recommended institute, Flexner insisted on maturity and seriousness inlearning. For Flexner, maturity was associated with dedication and individual initiative, which he thought inherent in the exceptionally talented,
and were essential for allowing those gifted to pursue their own interests
at their own will. The mere fact that a scholar held a Ph.D. degree did
not assure Flexner that the scholar would be sufﬁciently mature for his

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post-doctoral institute. Students and scholars at the institute had to bemature enough to know their purpose and to have a zeal to learn.
Thirdly, Flexner wanted the Institute to be shielded from the outside
world. The proposed Institute was to be a utopia, a haven, a paradise for
eminent scholars who were freed from outside concerns and had nosocial and political responsibilities for their studies. Flexner’s advocacyof freedom from outside concerns had two sides: his contempt for theinﬂuence of proﬁt-making in academia and his idealization of academia
as an ivory tower without responsibility for its product. Flexner persistently scorned the proﬁt-making spirit in the universities. He believedthat the drive for wealth inherent in business was “inimical to the purpose” of higher education because it would drag science and scholarship“into the market place.”60 The school of economics at the IAS was created upon this principle. Flexner’s memo recommended gathering agroup of economists who could work, “ﬁnancially independent, unhurried, and disinterested, in closest possible contact with the phenomenaof business and government and at this level endeavoring to understandthe novel phenomena taking place before our eyes.”61 Flexner’s approvalof economists and their “disinterested” and “noble” research also explains his disapproval of business schools and their popularity.62
Isolating scholars from worldly affairs in society was the critical difference between Flexner and John Dewey. Dewey envisioned creatinga democratic society by teaching individuals the wholesomeness ofsocial interaction. Because of his emphasis on responsible citizenship,
Dewey focused more on universal elementary education than on higher
education. While Flexner shared opinions about elementary educationand its reform with Dewey, the two differed on the role that higher education should play in society. For Dewey, the university should be directly responsible for social issues. The disadvantages of higher institutions
in his time were “the unfavorable connotation of ‘academic,’ the suggestion of living in the past rather than the present, in the cloister rather
than the world, in a region of abstraction rather than of practice.”63 While
Dewey and others saw the scholar’s involvement in society for the public good, Flexner thought that if the advancement of knowledge shouldbe accountable, it could be obtained only as a result of pursuing purely
academic interest.
Flexner’s idealization of “impractical knowledge” was crystallized in
his article “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.”64 This article, originally prepared for the General Educational Board, exempliﬁes theIwabuchi Sachiko(p139)6/2 04.7.18 11:55 AM ページ 153

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fundamental ideal of the Institute. “Institutions of learning should be
devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deﬂected byconsiderations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are tocontribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become
the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.”65 Necessity was,according to Flexner, not always requisite or desirable for great invention, and the ultimate role of the university was to protect academia froma utility-oriented spirit.66
While Flexner recognized that political, social, and economic issues
are worth contemplating, he was determined to isolate the IAS and to
make it a haven. Higher education, Flexner declared, “must shelter anddevelop thinkers, experimenters, inventors, teachers, and students, who,
without responsibility for action, will explore the phenomena of social
life and endeavour to understand them.”67 Through isolation Flexnerintended to provide scholars with a safe and quiet place for contemplation. However, his rigid enforcement of conﬁning scholars inside an
academic utopia brought him into a severe conﬂict with the faculty, particularly with Einstein, whom Flexner managed to recruit from Nazi
Germany. The difference in opinions between Einstein and Flexner
eventually, although indirectly, forced Flexner out of the Institute.
In October 1939, Flexner retired from the directorship at the Institute,reportedly because of his declining health. Actually, Flexner was forced
to leave. Flexner’s imposition of seclusion on the faculty at the Institutetriggered strong criticism against his style of management. Two years
after his retirement Flexner published his ﬁrst autobiography, I Remember: The Autobiography of Abraham Flexner. The section on the IAS
reveals his disillusionment with laissez-faire scholarship in his idyll.
Most university professors sincerely think that they desire to devote their
entire energy and attention to their several subjects; many complain—often
justly—of excessive routine; but there are times when complaint is a coverfor sterility, staleness, or unhappiness of one kind or another. . . . The Institutewas conceived as a paradise for scholars and such it really is. But not all
men—not all gifted men—know how to live in paradise. The earth is theirproper habitation, and upon the earth, such as it is, most of them do the bestof which they are capable.68

Flexner might have felt betrayed and disappointed with the Institute, but
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academy that forced him out. It is an irony that a promoter of laissezfaire scholarship like Flexner importuned the scholars at the Institute toabide the structure he constructed for higher learning. After Flexner leftthe Institute, the demand to support the war effort increased. To his dismay, most scholars at the Institute cooperated. John von Neumann’scontrivance of a high-speed computing device changed not only thecourse of the war, but many aspects of our lives.
V

ABRAHAM FLEXNER AND HIS VIEWS ON HIGHER LEARNINGIN AMERICA

Flexner’s deﬁnition of the university is clear: it is a haven wheremature scholars with clear purposes are devoted to preserving and interpreting knowledge and ideas, to searching for the truth, and to training
their disciples. There could not be many universities, not only because
only a few would choose to go through such vigorous training of themind, but also because mature and capable minds would not be so abundant.69 While the universities should be kept for the few able scholars
with the serious zeal to learn, Flexner contends, American colleges
instead lowered their gates, accepting ill-prepared students in order tosocialize them.70 Making the situation worse, in the wake of the demand
to democratize education, colleges themselves had become willing tocater to their customers’ whim. American universities had “simultaneously and needlessly cheapened, vulgarized, and mechanized themselves.”71 Mass higher education in terms of enrollment and organization
is inconceivable and undesirable, an oxymoron in Flexner’s lexicon.
Flexner openly endorsed sorting out students based upon their native
capacity.72 For Flexner, the German Gymnasium was an embodiment of
his ideal educational system. In the German system “[a]t the close of theelementary school, various paths open out; they lead in different directions; they invite different kinds of persons,” whereas in American secondary education “all are shepherded on one broad highway—the highschool, the college, the university—each trying, and of course, failing—
to act as a comprehensive institution. Germany accepts diversity ofcapacity and aim and is trying to provide for it appropriately.”73 “Thehigh school [in America] used to be a sieve of a certain kind,” Flexnerlaments. “But American democracy objects to sieves.”74 Yet, according
to Flexner’s logic, America needed sieves all the more, because in a society where “social conditions which bear strongly toward mental andIwabuchi Sachiko(p139)6/2 04.7.18 11:55 AM ページ 155

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moral sameness, intellectual inequality must be prized and sought, if
democracy is to be lifted above the dead level of mediocrity.”75 American
education suffered indiscrimination, the lack of a systematic form of
selection.
It is no surprise to see that Flexner attacks mediocrity in the light of
his high respect for excellence. For Flexner excellence meant more thanjust to exceed the average. Excellence meant something rare, extraordinary, and cultured. “Throughout my life,” Flexner writes, “I have pursued excellence. I have believed and practiced the doctrine of the ‘saving
power of the remnant’ as Matthew Arnold had expounded it in his
discourse on ‘Numbers,’ included in the volume of his American address. . . . In general, however, I realized early the impossibility of
combining a tender regard for mediocrity with a real enthusiasm forlearning.”76 Responding to a possible criticism that making higher
education for the gifted few was aristocratic, Flexner defended his expectation that universities be a place of cultured men. Flexner wanted
American higher education to be accountable for civilization. The pursuit of culture, not “ad hoc training for a simple job,” should be the real
purpose of the university.77 Flexner’s advocacy of culture constitutes thebasis of his ideal for the university comprised of disinterested intellectuals who are devoted to the pursuit of the truth.
Flexner’s ideal of higher education is aristocratic in the sense that the
purpose of the university is to do research for its own sake without considering applications to the secular world. It is aristocratic because he
did not believe that most people would have the desire or capacity tocontribute to civilization. To control the quality of higher education,
Flexner suggested elevating matriculation requirements. When Flexner
anticipated that a college education was “about to become optional for
all who have somehow contrived to acquire a speciﬁed number of highschool credits,”78 he was right. Unlike antebellum America where getting a degree of Bachelor of Arts comprised “something of an educational aristocracy,” higher education had become widely available.79
Flexner was critical of the tendency for more and more students to cometo the university to obtain a degree rather than to pursue knowledge forits own sake. Yet Flexner was not anti-democratic; he did not oppose thepopular hunger for culture and knowledge. The problem, he thought, wasthat he did not see the university as the best place to meet the populardemand. He also was not aristocratic , in the elitist sense of the word,
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regardless of age, religion, or race at the time when anti-Semitism wasin its full strength and quota systems kept the number of Jewish
American students limited.80 If one deﬁnes aristocratic education as one
that operates to maintain the social order in which people were robbedof their promotion by merit, then Flexner never endorsed such an educational system.81
Neither did Flexner see the need to further promote democracy inAmerica by making higher education more widely available to the pubic.
America was already democratic in Flexner’s view. His own life—amodest upbringing as a son of Jewish immigrants, yet becoming a
distributor of the great American philanthropists’ wealth—proved that
America is a democratic country with fair opportunities. Unlike Dewey
and the New School scholars, Flexner did not see the need to democratize higher education. Rather, he sanctiﬁed the pursuit of truth. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was the purpose of higher education
for Flexner.
Flexner’s endeavor to create the IAS illustrates the problems he saw
in higher education and in the evolution of the research-oriented university in America. The rise of professional schools, the popular demand
for the university’s social accountability, and the danger of commercialism were all expressed in Flexner’s thought. “Universities differ indifferent countries,” wrote Flexner. It would be “absurd to expect themto conform to a single pattern. Moreover, as a matter of history, they havechanged profoundly—and commonly in the direction of the social evolution of which they are part.”82 Even if Flexner was right in principle,
the subsequent development of higher learning in America is relevant
for those studying the development of Japanese education. Furthermore,
Flexner’s criticism of this development and the responses to this criticism may shed some light on the current debate over university reformin Japan. Should the Centers of Excellence program appreciate theimportance of basic science, humanities, and social sciences, whose
contribution to civilization is not always direct and apparent? Should
Japanese law schools aim to become university law schools where thegoal is conceived from the standpoint of education, or should they simply become legal training schools where the main purpose is conceived
from the standpoint of training? The desirability of transplanting
Flexner’s ideal to Japan’s soil may be of interest to the later generations.

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NOTES
1

Abraham Flexner, Abraham Flexner: An Autobiography (New York, 1960; revised
edition), 45.
2Ibid., 67.
3“21st Century COE Program” in Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JSPS]
Quarterly no. 1 (Summer 2002), available at http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-quart/
01_summer/05.html. Last accessed on January 25, 2004.
4
David Cyranosky, “Independence Days,” Nature, vol. 419 (2002), 876. Also see,
Asako Saegusa, “Japanese Institutes Wary of Increased Autonomy,” Nature, vol. 395(1998), 211.
5
Makoto Saito, Amerika to wa nanika (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1995); Kayoko Watanabe,“A Study on A. Flexner’s Idea on Higher Education: The Relation between Professionalization and Research Function of Higher Education,” Studies in the History of
Education, vol. 31 (1988), 112–24. While this article was being written, Thomas Neville
Bonner published a monograph on Flexner. Thomas Neville Bonner, Iconoclast:Abraham Flexner and A Life in Learning (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002). Bonner’s book lists nine dissertations and theses on Flexner.
Ibid., 357. Flexner has been mentioned in numerous articles both in medical educationand social work, yet Bonner’s Iconoclast is the ﬁrst book to discuss Flexner and his legacies in higher education.
6
For the evolution of higher education in the late eighteenth century, see Laurence
R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago and London: Universityof Chicago Press, 1965). Joseph Kett’s The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difﬁculties
treats adult education from the revolutionary period to the present. It explores the development of informal adult education, but it also illustrates what educators in formal institutions opposed. Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difﬁculties: From
Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1994).
7
Bernard’s involvement in the Zionist movement is intriguing when we consider
Abraham Flexner’s confrontation with Einstein at the IAS over the rescue of the Jewish
scholars.
8
Flexner, Autobiography. Flexner published two autobiographies. An Autobiography
was a revised and updated version of his earlier autobiography, I Remember: The
Autobiography of Abraham Flexner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940).
9
Helen Horowitz describes Flexner’s college life as an example of the outsider atcampus. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century
to the Present (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 62–63.
10
Flexner, Autobiography, 28–29. Flexner’s admiration led him to write a biographyof Gilman titled Daniel Coit Gilman, Creator of the American Type of University (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946).
11
Ibid.
12
Veysey, Emergence, passim.
13
Abraham Flexner, “Failings of Our Graduate Schools,” Atlantic Monthly, 149(1932), 441. For the evolution of the role of research in American universities, see Roger
L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities,
1900–1940 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For the history of
the Johns Hopkins University, see Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns
Hopkins University (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960).
14
Flexner, Autobiography, 29.

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SACHIKO IWABUCHI

Ronald Frank Movrich, Before the Gate of Excellence: Abraham Flexner and
Education, 1866–1918 (Unpublished dissertation, University of California at Berkeley,1981), 88.
16Flexner, I Remember, 75.
17
It is likely that Abraham Flexner found about CFAT’s project from his brother
Simon, who at that time had already been the director of the Rockefeller Institute for
Medical Research. Flexner, Autobiography, 71. See also, Movrich, Before the Gate, 87.
18
Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Reportto the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching (New York, 1910; reprint edition, 1972), xvii. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching still lists
and makes the Flexner Report available at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/index.htm, last accessed on January 25, 2004.
19
Thomas Bonner, “Searching for Abraham Flexner,” Academic Medicine, vol. 73,
no. 2 (1998), 161.
20
Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (London, Oxford, andNew York: Oxford University Press, 1930, reprint edition with a new introduction by
Clark Kerr, 1968).
21
Bonner’s Iconoclast includes the published writings of Flexner. Bonner, Iconoclast,
359–60.
22
Flexner, Universities, 49.
23
Ibid., 67–68.
24
Ibid., 44.
25
Flexner, American College: A Criticism (New York, 1908), Chapter IV; Abraham
Flexner, A Modern College and a Modern School (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
Page and Company, 1923), 44.
26
Abraham Flexner, “The University in American Life,” Atlantic Monthly, 149 (May1932), 622.
27
Flexner, Universities, 178–79.
28
Flexner, Autobiography, 237; Flexner, “A Freshman at Nineteen,” Educational
Review 18 (November 1899), 355.
29
Flexner, “American Life,” 621.
30
Kett, Pursuit, xv.
31
Ibid., 230.
32
N. M. Butler, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?” Educational Review X (1895),
16 in Veysey, Emergence, 68.
33
C. M. Woodward, “The Change of Front in Education,” Science, XIV (1901), 476,
in ibid., 71.
34
Flexner, Universities, 339.
35
Flexner, “Life,” 627.
36
Ibid., 621.
37
Kett, Pursuit, 185.
38
Kett, Pursuit, 284; Geiger, Advance, 17. According to Kett, by the mid-1890s “interest in extension had waned at all of the midwestern university save the University of
Chicago,” and after 1905 vocational courses dominated extension offerings. See, Kett,Pursuit, 187.
39
Ibid., 331–69.
40
Flexner, “American Life,” 621.
41
Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982),
114; Julia A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 27.

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159

Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical
Education (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 181.
43
Flexner, Medical Education, passim.; Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 177–78.
44
The Washington Post, B2, 22 September 1959.
45
For Pritchett’s belief in experts and his role in utilizing foundations’ funds for the
public good, see, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Private Power for the Public Good: A
History of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
46
Starr, Social Transformation, 123.
47
Flexner, Medical Education, 7. The same idea appears in his Autobiography, 77.
48
As for the development of the school of business in the late nineteenth century, see,Kett, Pursuit, 269–77. According to Kett, educators and the philanthropists, who had
witnessed the changing ﬁnancial and business practices, hoped to elevate the knowledgeof business to highly intellectual education with a curriculum that would teach commercial and industrial leaders “a broader outlook and a keen awareness of their public
responsibilities.” Ibid., 270.
49
Flexner, Universities, 29–30. Flexner’s article “Is Social Work a Profession?” presents the six criteria of a profession. Professions (1) involve essentially intellectual operations with large individual responsibility, (2) derive their raw materials from scienceand learning, (3) work up this material to a practical and deﬁnite end, (4) possess an educationally communicable technique, (5) tend to self-organization, and (6) are becoming
increasingly altruistic in motivation. Abraham Flexner, “Is Social Work a Profession?,”School and Society, vol. I, No. 26 (1915), 904. See also, Watanabe, “Study on A.
Flexner’s Idea.”
50
Kett, Pursuit, 293–330.
51“Conﬁdential Memorandum to the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study,”
September 26, 1931, in Laura Smith Porter, From Intellectual Sanctuary to Social
Responsibility: The Founding of the Institute for Advanced Study, 1930–1933 (Unpublished dissertation, Princeton University, 1988), 156–57.
52
Flexner thought that there were not many who could pursue knowledge for its own
sake, but among the gifted few, he did not see any difference between men and women.
See, Bonner, Iconoclast, 119–20.
53
Flexner, Autobiography, 239.
54
Ibid., 240. This image recreates the atmosphere of Athens in the Symposium introduced in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1987). Flexner, who studied classics at Johns Hopkins, defended himself
against the criticism that his idea of the modern university neglects the importance of
the knowledge of classics. Flexner never devalued classics. Nevertheless, Flexner did
not expect classics to be a mending thread for American college students, whom Bloom
considered suffering from relativism and losing the Western cultural tradition.
55
Flexner, Autobiography, 236–37.
56
Flexner, Autobiography, 232–33.
57
Flexner, Universities, 217–18.
58
Movrich says that there were 115 other students in Flexner’s class. Movrich, Before
the Gate, 35. There was no class at Johns Hopkins in a traditional sense. Thus, technically speaking, 115 students were enrolled the same year as Flexner.
59
Flexner, Autobiography, 237; Flexner, “Freshman,” 355.
60
Flexner, Autobiography, 237.
61
“Conﬁdential Memorandum to the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study,”
September 26, 1931, in Porter, Sanctuary, 155.

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Flexner, Universities, passim., particularly, 162–72. “Modern business does not satisfy the criteria of a profession; it is shrewd, energetic, and clever, rather than intellectual in character; it aims—and under our present social organization must aim—at its
own advantage, rather than at noble purpose within itself.” Ibid., 164.
63
John Dewey, “The Educational Situation,” in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Middle
Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press,
1976), vol. 1, 301. See also, Kett, Pursuit, 297.
64
Flexner, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Harper’s Magazine (October,1939), 544–52.
65
Ibid., 545.
66
Flexner also explains his choice of mathematics as the ﬁrst school to establish at
IAS as follows. “It [mathematics] has uses, to be sure, as all the higher activities of thehuman mind have uses, if the word use is broadly and deeply understood. But its devotees are singularly unconcerned with use, most of all with immediate use, and this stateof mind and spirit, it seemed to me, ought to dominate the new institute. Nothing is more
likely to defeat itself, nothing is on the whole less productive in the long run than immediacy in the realm of research, reﬂection, and contemplation.” Flexner, Autobiography,
243–44.
67
Flexner, Universities, 10.
68
Flexner, I Remember, 396–97. I owe this information to Frances Blanshard’s
Aydelotte biography. Blanshard’s book is about the life of Frank Aydelotte, but its
Chapter 15 is about the creation of and the conﬂicts at the Institute for Advanced Study.
I owe this ﬁnding to Makoto Saito’s Amerika to wa nani ka, especially Chapter IX.
Flexner’s later autobiography extensively revised the section on the IAS. His recollection of his role and evaluation of the Institute are more generous.
69
Flexner deﬁnes research as “a quiet, painstaking effort on the part of an individual
himself, not through someone hired by him, through intellectual coöperation is, ofcourse, not barred, an effort, I say, to reach the truth, the severest that the human mind
with all available apparatus and resources, is capable of making at the moment.” Flexner,
Universities, 126.
70
Flexner points to students’ motive for going to college, making personal connections in order to get ahead, as one reason for the low quality of American college education. Ibid., 68–72. Flexner ascribes the immaturity of American college students tothe deﬁciencies in the pedagogical intelligence: “[T]he American college is deﬁcient,and unnecessarily deﬁcient, alike in earnestness and in pedagogical intelligence; that inconsequence our college students are, and for the most part, emerge, ﬂighty, superﬁcial
and immature, lacking, as a class, concentration, seriousness and thoroughness.”
Flexner, The American College, 11. Flexner attacks the elective system of Americancollege, assuming that students are not mature enough “to ﬁnd their way to best advantage in this rich tangle [of all branches of learning].” Flexner, Modern College andModern School, 44.
71
Flexner, Universities, 44.
72
Flexner rejected the validity of aptitude test. Abraham Flexner, Brown University
Papers XV: The Prepared Mind Address Before the Graduate Convocation, Brown
University June 19, 1938 (Reprinted from School and Society, June 26, 1937, vol. 45,
no. 1174), 4. See also, Flexner, Modern College, xv–vi. With regard to the invention of
meritocracy and how it ascended to its position in contemporary American education,
see Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
73
Flexner, Universities, 310–11.

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161

Ibid., 47.
Flexner, “Freshman,” 356.
76
Flexner, Autobiography, 45. For the dissemination of Arnoldian culture among the
public and its inﬂuence in the development in education, see Kett, Pursuit.
77
Flexner, Universities, 39 and 63.
78
Flexner, Modern College, 1.
79Veysey, Emergence, 6.
80John Higham, Send These To Me: Jews and Other Immigrants In Urban America(New York: Atheneum, 1975), 159–62; Porter, Sanctuary, 360.
81
Abraham Flexner, “Aristocratic and Democratic Education,” Atlantic Monthly, 108(September 1911), 386–95.
82
Flexner, Universities, 4.
75