© 1997 Lawrence University Press
Milwaukee-Downer Under John B. Johnson, 1951-1964: An Institution Transformed
Lucia Briggs retired in 1951 and was succeeded in office by John B. Johnson. Holding a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, Johnson had had teaching and administrative experience at only one place, Park College in Parkville, Missouri, before coming to Milwaukee-Downer.
Between September 1946 and June 1951, he had risen from instructor to associate professor of political science at Park, had served as chair of its political science department and its social science division, and was academic dean-elect of the college at the time of his recruitment to Milwaukee-Downer. Although there was no apparent intention of attenuating Milwaukee-Downer tradition, Johnson's accession to the presidency did signal the college's readiness to be governed by a younger mind, in a different style.
When records of the administrations of Briggs and Johnson are considered together, they indeed present a study in contrasts. For example, the faculty rosters showed that a total of 18 men served at various times during Briggs' 30-year tenure, while a total of 53 men served during Johnson's 13-year administration. During a number of successive years under Briggs, specifically the period between 1924 and 1932, the faculty was composed entirely of women, and a majority of these were single and lived in residence at the college. During the Johnson years, by contrast, the number of men on the faculty increased in almost every year. Male faculty, of course, never lived in residence at Milwaukee-Downer, and in 1957 the Trustees voted to provide housing only for female faculty dormitory heads and staff engaged in custodial, food, and nursing services.
The foregoing was just one among many indicators of change that took place at Milwaukee-Downer during the Johnson years. Enrollment figures provide another striking example. Under Briggs, there was a steady increase in enrollment, peaking at 429 in 1927-28, leveling off to the low- to mid-300s during the Depression, and peaking again at 444 in 1946-47. During the Johnson period, by contrast, enrollment declined in almost every year, falling from a high of 278 in 1951-52 to a low of 176 in 1962-63. The decline was so serious that enrollment figures were not reported in the last three catalogues of the Johnson period, from 1960 through 1963.
Striking, too, were the student-teacher ratios under Briggs, as compared with Johnson. During the Briggs period the total number of faculty members never rose above 53, and that was with a student enrollment of around 360. Under Johnson, the size of the faculty reached its peak of 52 during the college's last year, when student enrollment was only 176.
As noted previously, Briggs was very careful with the dollar, and data in the files of the faculty indeed reveal that she rarely gave a teacher more than a $100 increase over the salary that person had earned during the previous year. Johnson, by contrast, gave much more generous increases, well illustrated by the case of Miss Frances W. Hadley in the English department. Hadley had begun her career at Milwaukee-Downer in the academic year 1922-23 with the rank of assistant professor, at a yearly salary of $1,600 plus "home," the latter representing the amount charged by the college for living quarters in the dormitory. While by 1932 Hadley had become a full professor, earning $2,600 a year plus "home," Briggs decreased her salary to $2,300 plus "home" in 1933 as an austerity measure and kept it at this lower figure through most of the Depression. When Briggs retired, in 1951, Hadley's salary was up to $3,700, having risen in $100 annual increments after 1944. Hadley's last contract, under Johnson, for the academic year 1958-59, set her salary at $7,050. During Johnson's tenure, between 1952 and 1959, Hadley's salary had increased on an average of $525 per year.
The contrasting styles of the two presidents provided yet another source of change. Their practices in hiring new faculty, for example, were very different indeed. Briggs handled the entire hiring process personally, from initiating inquiry about possible candidates from other schools and teacher agencies, to corresponding with the candidate, to personal interviews and formal offers of employment. When corresponding with a candidate's references, Briggs always asked a standard set of questions, making quite clear her criteria for the successful candidate: scholarship and personality; the "right kind of background," which "gives thoroughness"; ability to interest students; a saving sense of humor; ability to fit well into the closely integrated community of the small college; loyalty and spirit of cooperation; ability to work hard; and an outlook that was neither too radical nor too conservative. Briggs made it very clear that, if a particular candidate was hired, that person was expected to come to Milwaukee-Downer with the intention of staying longer than just one year, the standard length of the first contract.
In regard to hiring practices, Johnson's style was quite different. He did not, for example, collect letters of reference on applicants for teaching positions, so important to his predecessor. Also unlike her, Johnson involved his current faculty in the hiring process. Rather than conducting interviews with candidates personally, Johnson scheduled a series of interviews between the candidate and selected faculty members, both from inside the department that had the opening and from outside that department as well.
Perhaps the most important factor differenting Johnson from Briggs was Johnson's practice of hiring part-time, ad hoc faculty to teach one or two courses but clearly not to form any long-term relationship with the college.
Finally, Johnson's sources of faculty were located primarily in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, and in the Midwest, contrasting markedly with Briggs, who drew much of her faculty from the East.
Briggs engaged to some extent in educational innovation, introducing a degree program in occupational therapy in 1931, a Freshman Orientation program in 1932, and a Reading Period in 1933. But, in her 30 years at Milwaukee-Downer, she never came close to the number of innovations of the Johnson period.
Johnson, for example, kept systematic records on the activities of his faculty. He required faculty members to provide data indicating number of courses taught, number of teaching hours, and number of students enrolled in each class. He further required information about the graduate work faculty had completed and their participation in extracurricular activities. Like the data on faculty, data collected on students tended to be quantitative in nature. Thus, the dean's office under Johnson spent a lot of time graphing predicted student performance based on actual student achievement as determined by testing through the College Entrance Examination Board. Johnson also used student scores on the Board's Advanced Placement Tests to facilitate exemptions of individual students from the college's general requirements.
Although it actually was initiated by Briggs, Johnson placed much more emphasis upon the Reading Period and on opportunities for independent study, both considered educational innovations at the time. He also encouraged students to take advantage of the privilege, that he instituted, of auditing courses. Finally, he introduced an Early Decision Plan to attract talented applicants for admission and a Junior Year Abroad program to appeal to those who did not want to spend all four of their college years on the same campus.
It is thus clear that, under President Johnson, Milwaukee-Downer's essential character was transformed. At least part of the reason for this was that Johnson had a different notion than his predecessors about the mission of the women's college. It will be recalled that President Briggs, as President Sabin before her, upheld the ideology of the separate sphere, even though what students actually chose to do could be seen as indicating that they did not necessarily consider themselves bound by it. President Johnson, by contrast, offered no rhetoric in support of women's separate sphere. He saw the women's college as providing freedom for women from the perennial restrictions to which they were subject when in the company of men, thus allowing them access to all avenues of development. And he saw the women's college, in a somewhat novel way, as providing women the kind of social life that allowed them to circumvent marriage as undergraduates and, with it, the threat that it posed to their completion of college.
Not constrained by an ideology that confined women to certain identifiable female roles, Johnson unhesitatingly favored altering the Milwaukee-Downer curriculum such that it could better prepare women for specific careers in whatever fields were of interest to them. Faculty members in each subject area were expected to apprise themselves of students' vocational interests in their area, research these, and propose courses in the needed skills as additions to the requirements for the major. Meanwhile, the liberal arts curriculum also underwent revision, with an eye toward developing a common core of basic courses for the entire student body, thereby freeing time for students to do additional work in their major field.
Johnson's rhetoric thus gave the clear impression that he favored preparing women for whatever they wished to do, presumably even in areas that may have once been considered the exclusive preserve of men. In short, from the time Johnson ascended to the presidency, the ideology of Milwaukee-Downer appeared increasingly to be encompassed within a more modern brand of feminism. This would have boded well for the school had the women's movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s been underway when Johnson took office in 1951. Indeed, if Milwaukee-Downer under Johnson can really be viewed as potentially in tune with the coming women's movement, then Johnson must be credited with having been ahead of his time.
But the reality was that the prevalent ideology in American society during the 1950s, "the feminine mystique," was really just a version of the age-old theory that equality with men would lead to the destruction of home and family. This meant that, as long as Lucia Briggs was at the helm and Milwaukee-Downer's domestic ideology was in place, the school had whatever stability was derived from treading ideological waters that were consonant with those of the general society. The shift in ideology under Johnson, along with the substantive changes he made, weakened that stability.
What is now apparent, and may well also have been apparent at the time, is that the effect of Johnson's changes was the transformation of Milwaukee-Downer into a more typical Midwestern institution. His own prior educational experience had been only in the Midwest, and it is likely that his experience provided the model for Johnson's vision of what Milwaukee-Downer should become. But in making what he considered the appropriate changes, Johnson was also changing the essential character of the school. By increasing the male presence on campus and closing the residence halls to women faculty, the intimacy of what had been a female enclave was lost. By hiring part-time, ad hoc faculty, the long-standing tradition of faculty loyalty was greatly diminished. By focusing upon specific career training and by devising an interdisciplinary core curriculum, the traditional link between the liberal arts and the building of character was attenuated. By evaluating students on the basis of standardized test scores, at least some of the traditional responsiveness to the unique expression of the individual was lost. In sum, the effort to modernize Milwaukee-Downer, to make it more generically Midwestern, substantially altered the institution's historic character and constituted a major challenge to its longevity.
Threats to Milwaukee-Downer's survival came from other quarters as well. In the post-Second World War economy, for example, the college was being pressured by rapidly rising costs, without commensurate increases in its income. Apparently the general population was experiencing this pressure as well, because it became increasingly difficult for Milwaukee-Downer to recruit an adequate student enrollment. Further, the college was threatened by a strong movement during the 1950s to establish a four-year, degree-granting branch of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. This finally came to pass in 1956, and ultimately Milwaukee-Downer found itself unable to both compete with the state university's lower tuition charges and to withstand its determined efforts to acquire the Milwaukee-Downer campus.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee itself was becoming a city involved in the type of expansion that, if anything, further limited support for the college. The 1950s was an era of cultural development for the city, in which initiatives were taken toward projects like a performing arts center and an art museum. The people who involved themselves in these projects were also traditionally Milwaukee-Downer supporters, often members of the college's Board of Trustees. So it was that, during the Johnson period, the attention of some traditional supporters was diverted from the college, while others who remained attentive to the college's situation nevertheless placed the full weight of responsibility for improving it upon the shoulders of the president. And when, ultimately, the survival of Milwaukee-Downer as an independent entity ceased to be a realistic possibility, the college agreed to a consolidation with Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin.