III
THE YEARS OF CHANCELLOR DEANE W. MALOTT

Deane Waldo Malott, who succeeded Ernest Lindley as chancellor in 1939, was not only the first alumnus of the University of Kansas to become its chief executive officer, he was also the first to bring to this task experience in business and exposure to international aspects of American life, reinforced by several years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. His tenure at KU’s helm encompassed the war years and the half-decade after the war—a period when there was an increasing recognition across the nation of the significance of the emergence of the United States as a world power. Chancellor Malott approached these challenges with a perception and energy that earned him national recognition—and eventually a call to the presidency of an Ivy League university.

He first gained attention when, following the relocation of Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) from the west coast, university presidents there appealed to their colleagues at other universities to provide opportunities for students of Japanese ancestry affected by the deportation orders to continue their education. Malott was among the presidents who responded affirmatively. The Kansas Board of Regents, under pressure from the legislature, took the opposite view and barred such transfers. Malott lost this battle, but his posture brought him widespread approbation from presidents of major universities and in the national media.

Thus when the Institute of Pacific Relations (1) resumed its practice of inviting the Association of American Universities (AAU) to send three presidents as its representatives to the IPR’s annual meeting, Malott was a member of the delegation. The 1949 meeting was at Lucknow, India. There the three presidents were approached with a proposition that would result in the first major internationally oriented consortium in which the University of Kansas participated, the American Universities Field Staff (AUFS), later renamed Universities Field Staff International (UFSI). The University of Kansas not only became one of its founding members but was still actively participating when the organization discontinued its work forty years later.
The history of the AUFS goes back to the end of the First World War. The peace conferences to mark the Allied victory were held in several Paris suburbs, with each of the victorious powers represented at each of the four sites by a substantial delegation. Most of the American delegates were at a decided disadvantage, knowing little of European geography, even less history, and rarely any of the languages spoken in the area whose fate they were called upon to decide. There were only few exceptions, among them Charles R. Crane, a philanthropist friend of President Wilson and the head of Crane Plumbing Company, a major manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, and Walter Rogers, a former newspaperman whom Wilson had brought to Washington to work in the War Information Office. Crane and Rogers, long-time friends, shared hotel accommodations in Paris, which allowed them to talk candidly about the frequently displayed ignorance of the American negotiators. What was needed, Rogers proposed, was a program that would train specialists in areas that might become the focus of American interests in years to come. Crane agreed to support the venture, provided Rogers would be its director. Beginning in 1926, the Institute of World Affairs (IWA) each year selected four fellows who would be supported for three years, the first devoted to intensive language instruction (mostly at the London School of Oriental Languages), followed by two years of residence in the area of specialization, typically away from locations frequented by Americans and western Europeans. During this period each fellow wrote monthly letters (“IWA Reports”), which Rogers edited for distribution to contributors to donors and friends of the Institute. Rogers saw to it that the fellows were well placed after their fellowships, many of them with the Chicago Daily News, the newspaper that had employed him for a number of years.

When war engulfed the globe, the expertise the IWA fellows had acquired frequently proved useful. Thus Phillips Talbot, after two years in Kashmir, served on the staff of Lord Mountbatten, the Allied commander for South Asia. Albert Ravenholt had spent his fellowship years in a village deep in the interior of China and later became a close associate of Ramon Magsaysay, who led the Filipino government’s action against the Communist-supported rebels in northern Luzon and then became his country’s president. After the war these two spearheaded the fellows’ discussion of their future service.

Chancellor Malott and his two fellow presidents listened to the plan that Talbot and Ravenholt presented to them. Then, perhaps following the lead of Herman B Wells, the highly regarded president of Indiana University who was the senior member of the AAU delegation, Malott invited Talbot to come to Lawrence and give a lecture on recent developments on the Indian subcontinent. Following his presentation he would meet for lunch with a group of faculty members and tell them what he thought the proposed consortium could do for the University of Kansas. After listening to him, this group recommended that KU join, provided at least five other universities did the same. The condition was soon met and the first AUFS associate visited the Lawrence campus in the spring semester of 1951. Thereafter four came each year, until 1988 when the organization dissolved, mainly because most of their member institutions had developed foreign area expertise of their own.

It is worth noting here that the faculty members on whose recommendation Chancellor Malott committed KU to the AUFS consortium were, with one exception, all people who had joined the University of Kansas after 1945 (the present writer being one of them). There were twice as many students on the campus in 1948 than there had ever been before, so many that some were housed under the stadium, some in church basements downtown, and others in wartime housing near a former ammunition plant in De Soto, 16 miles east of Lawrence. In the depression years of the early 30’s the legislature had linked the number of authorized faculty positions to the number of students expected, thus forcing reduction of the number of teaching positions; now, with massive (and sudden) enrollment increases, the formula produced corresponding additions to the faculty. Like many of the students, many of the new teachers could only be housed in emergency facilities; a row of army surplus barracks located on the south side of the campus and labeled “Sunnyside.” The barracks have long gone, but the street still bears that name.

Not only did the newcomers outnumber the pre-war faulty, they were unburdened by the stresses and tribulations that had exhausted Chancellor Lindley and brought many of the faculty of the twenties and thirties to a state of resigned toleration. Malott (and Murphy after him) came to rely on the new arrivals to provide impetus and support for change in the university.

This was, of course, not unique. Every institution of higher learning in the country had the same or similar experiences, and in every college and university the presence of these younger elements in the faculty and of a substantial proportion of students with wartime military service experience abroad affected life in and out of the classroom.

In church-related colleges charitable or missionary work had always been encouraged. As the extent of destruction in the war zones and the subsequent distress of the populations became known, the main question for these colleges was how the students who desired to help in Europe could be transported to the Old World. A consortium, the Council on Student Travel (CST), was able to rent some wartime transport ships and began to carry students to Europe, mainly from colleges where luxury was largely absent and sometimes disdained. In the fifties, when air travel became feasible, CST shifted its emphasis to air charters. To aid student travelers abroad the organization established a field office in Paris, to be followed later by an office in Copenhagen and one in Tokyo. As student travel began to expand beyond Western Europe, CST enlarged its scope to the creation of learning opportunities in locations where it would be difficult or even impossible for the individual to find them (initially mainly in the Soviet Union). To reflect this change, CST adopted a new name, the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE). By that time the University of Kansas had long been a member; I served as a member of the board of CST/CIEE while this transformation took place. KU was among the first universities to send students to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with a CST program; KU provided the director and often also an additional faculty member for a program set up by CST/CIEE in Zagreb (then, Yugoslavia, now independent Slovenia).

The major impetus for the exchange of both students and faculty members between the United States and foreign countries was, without a doubt, the adoption by Congress of the proposal by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, himself a onetime Rhodes Scholar and a former president of the University of Arkansas. The concept was relatively simple: After the war the United States, rather than to incur the expense to bring home all its widely scattered supplies and equipment, had turned these properties over to the respective government, to be paid for at a later time. The Fulbright Act authorized the President to negotiate agreements with any of the countries qualifying under the act to repay their resultant obligations by placing funds in their own currency in “counterpart” accounts to be used for grants for the exchange of persons (more specifically, students and scholars). The Concise Dictionary of American History states that the Fulbright Act “originated the largest program in history consisting of international exchange grants made to individuals and thus helped demonstrate the value of such activities and broadening the community of interests among people.”

Although the Fulbright Act was signed in 1946 its implementation took time. The first students awarded scholarships went abroad in 1949: Among them was KU’s first Fulbright student, Virginia Joseph, of Whitewater, Kansas, who went to Paris to study political science.
Probably realizing the same concern with the larger world scene, Rotary in the United States revived and intensified a program of fellowships that it had first established in the aftermath of World War I. If Virginia Joseph’s hometown was small and remote, John Conard’s exceeded hers on both counts; Coolidge, Kansas, sits alongside US highway 56 (then 50) literally hugging the Colorado state line; in 1949 it had fewer than 200 inhabitants and was about to lose its post office. Rotary had, oddly enough, made no condition of foreign language competence, believing that Rotarians abroad would be of sufficient aid. Conard recruited the one and only student on campus from France to tutor him and his wife. Five years later he returned with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, earned while he worked for the European headquarters of the Marshall plan.

That KU soon became a national leader in its participation in the Fulbright exchange program was largely due to the commitment and energy of one person. John Anthony Burzle, always known as “Tony,” was among the faculty who joined KU after the war. A native of Munich, he was brought to KU to chair the German department, and to rebuild the department that was down to just one member, a young instructor.
But the teaching of German was not Burzle’s only qualification. While a student at the University of Munich he had worked part-time in the Auslandsamt (Office of foreign students) where he had met Dr. Ralph Major, a professor of medicine at the University of Kansas, who befriended him. He also met a young woman from Canada. He emigrated to Canada to marry Muriel and eventually came to the University of Kansas at Professor Major’s urging. (He had taught German at the University of Manitoba until 1945.) Toni Burzle remained a member of the KU Faculty until his retirement, in 1996.

There is only one word to describe Burzle: He was indefatigable. With the strong support of Dean John Nelson of the Graduate School, and working with fraternities, sororities and scholarship halls on campus, he soon built up a method that both supported students from abroad and integrated them into the campus culture. So successful was this scheme that it was widely emulated and became known nationally as “The Kansas Plan.”

To provide partners for educational exchanges, Burzle negotiated one- on-one student exchange programs with nearly twenty universities, mostly in West Germany, but also in England, France, Scotland and Switzerland. Some of these exchange arrangements operate to this date, and others have been added.
Burzle also originated an annual summer orientation program for foreign students newly arrived that the U.S. Department of State consistently supported from 1951 till 1977, and held up to others as a model. Only a few of these students were headed for continued study at the University of Kansas, but their first exposure to an American campus and its environment served to develop a group feeling that survived — nurtured, to be sure, by Tony’s annual Christmas letter, with which he enclosed news from members of the group. He likewise maintained contact with former Fulbright visitors—to and from KU, and took justifiable pride in the number of KU students he persuaded to make application for study opportunities abroad.

There were other, smaller initiatives from within the faculty. The dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Paul Lawson, returned from the annual meeting of Midwestern liberal arts deans, reported to the faculty that there was a movement at major universities to offer interdisciplinary majors focused on geographic areas; he thought that KU had sufficient offerings for an undergraduate major in Latin American Area Studies. It could be done without any additions to the faculty. A committee was duly appointed to study the matter, rendered a positive report and the new major was, equally duly, approved. The dean had, however, failed to determine with what frequency the courses he had culled from the catalog were being offered—and neither had the committee. Nor had anyone looked into the availability of books to go with the proposed program. Without books in the library, without the necessary courses, the first undergraduate area program did not have much of a future.

The library situation was no different for other non-European areas. Thomas R. Smith, who had joined the geography department the year before I had come to KU, wanted to teach a course in Far Eastern geography. I, having spent eighteen months on occupation duty in Japan, had proposed to teach a course on Far Eastern governments and politics. Our joint effort to assess what library holdings might be available revealed that there was not a single volume that was less than twenty years old. Knowing of Chancellor Malott’s affiliation with the Institute of Pacific Relations and inferring from this fact that he might be sympathetic to the introduction of some course work covering the Far East, we brought the matter to his attention and he made an allocation to the library of $2,500 for the purchase of social science books on the Far East. The director of the library begged off: he had a huge backlog of books in need of processing and, without added professional staff, he could do nothing to bring these books (let alone the additional ones that the Chancellor wanted him to buy) into circulation. The librarian outlasted the chancellor—the money for the Far Eastern books was not spent until KU had both a new chancellor and a new head librarian.

In 1950, a specialist in Russian history, Oswald P. Backus III, joined the history department, and in 1954 a specialist in modern Japanese history, George M. Beckmann, followed. Both quickly discovered what Tom Smith and I had already learned: If KU was to introduce its students to the non- Western world, the library would need a great deal of help. Fortunately, the new man in the Chancellor’s chair would be supportive of improved international perspectives as well as marked improvements in the university library system. The story of Franklin D. Murphy, KU class of 1936, and himself once an exchange student abroad, as chancellor deserves a chapter by itself.

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