Johns Hopkins University

Date: Feb 23 2011
Major: History/Histories (art history/etc.) (This Major's Salary over time)
I went to the Hopkins in the 1970s as a concurrent BA-MA student in history. I eventually went to Berkeley for my PhD and ended up a full professor at the University of Virginia. It is remarkable how the comments of students in recent years sound like what Hopkins students said in the '70s. Most of the students I went with hated the place; if they good into Med school or a prestige doctoral program (or thought they would), they put on a positive happy face to outsiders. Life was a relentless academic grind. All the stuff about hard grading and vicious competition was true then too. I got a first-rate professional training. As an graduate student when I was already a sophomore, I had plenty of access to the history faculty and they were wonderful as people and scholars.

But the as a liberal arts education it was a disaster. Everyone was there to get in somewhere less—usually med school (70-80% of my class was pre-med). This destroyed the university as an intellectual environment. The natural science types were grade obsessed, often suicidal, and could talk about nothing but their homework and grades. The other 10 history majors were a real mixed bag. Thanks to God for some of the finest teacher scholars I have ever known.

The phrase "Hopkins is where fun went to die" was coined in the 70s there. We called the place the "hole above ground." Social life? What's that? It is hard to describe the liberation of arriving at Berkeley. People were interesting, intellectually alive, and fun. I guess I was prepared well by Hopkins but did it have to be so inhumane and brutal? The Ivy League Harvard and Yale types that I went to Berkeley grad school with were not as technically well prepared for doctoral work as I was, nor were people from non-big name state schools. But they all seemed to have enjoyed their undergraduate education. I have never quite forgiven the Hopkins for taking away the human part of four years of my youth. But, unlike my sophomore roommate who bailed and went to Columbia, I stayed. So I cannot blame Hopkins for that.