The Ford Boys (pdf) - Wisconsin Alumni Association

These institutions were less concerned with the draft than
with the idea of changing education, and many of them dropped
the gender requirement.
to be nothing more than a vast holding
company. The Revenue Act of 1950, with
its threat of public scrutiny, gave the
Ford Foundation incentive to spend its
cash much more freely.
In January 1951, the Ford Foundation
appointed a new associate director,
Robert Hutchins, who created within the
foundation a Fund for the Advancement
of Education. The deans saw in Hutchins
their deliverance. As the former chancellor
of the University of Chicago, he was
not only one of their own, he was an educational
iconoclast. He was highly critical
of American schools and had pushed
Chicago to take on more underage students.
The deans applied to Hutchins, and
the Fund for the Advancement of Education
pledged $1.2 million to pay for the
Pre-Induction Scholarship Experiment.
Weeding Out the Twerps
The experiment the deans designed was
relatively straightforward. The schools
were to recruit some two hundred high
school students a year, then match them
with “comparison groups” of students —
eighteen-year-old freshmen with similar
test scores and economic backgrounds.
The institutions would follow each
group’s academic development and social
adjustment, and then submit their observations
to the Fund for the Advancement
of Education.
The UW chose its prospective Ford
Boys based on a variety of criteria. First
of all, applicants had to be males of the
proper age (no older than sixteen years
and six months on September 15, 1951).
They had to have the permission of their
parents and principals and meet certain
academic requirements, such as being in
the top 10 percent of their high school
class and scoring well on the College
Entrance Examination Board, forerunner
of the SAT. Then, because none of
the schools wanted to end up with, as
one of the deans put it, “a bunch of
bright young twerps,” the students had
to show evidence of social development,
including interest in non-scholastic activities
and a letter demonstrating their
maturity.
The program sparked immediate
interest. Two thousand high-school students
applied, and in the first year, the
UW took in fifty-two, including Dolven
and Israel. But it wasn’t just students who
wanted in — other colleges did, too. By
summer, the Fund had expanded its Early
Admission Experiment to include eight
more schools of varying size, location, and
character. There would be Ford students
at the public Universities of Utah and
Louisville, the private liberal arts colleges
of Shimer, Oberlin, and Lafayette, the allwomen’s
Goucher College, and the historically
African-American Fisk and
Morehouse Colleges. These institutions
were less concerned with the draft than
with the idea of changing education,
and many of them dropped the gender
requirement. In 1953, the UW followed
suit, adding Ford Girls to its mix.
In 1951, only one of the UW’s Ford
Boys came from Wisconsin. The bulk of
them — twenty-nine — came from New
York, eight from the Bronx High School
of Science. “The main thing that has
made the Ford program a success,”
wrote David Rothman ’54, MA’55, a
member of that first class, “is that all the
geniuses have been put next to each
other. This knocks the ego out of some
of the guys and promotes a rather fierce
competition.”
But if ferocity and a cosmopolitan
flavor aided the program, they also created
some of its biggest challenges. It
would be up to one UW professor to
make sure the Ford Boys received more
benefit than pain.
The Invaluable Mr. Chips
“If you want to understand the Ford program,
there are two things you need to
know,” says Charles Stephenson ’55.
“Herbert Howe and ILS.”
Youth carried less stigma for the Ford Girls
than it did for the Boys. Here, Trubek chats
with fellow Fordie Paul Friedman ’55.
Howe MA’41, PhD’48, a professor of
classics, was one of the most junior members
of the UW faculty in 1951, and ILS,
or Integrated Liberal Studies, is an interdisciplinary
program that attempts to create
a small, liberal-arts college atmosphere
within the university. Both Howe and his
wife, Evelyn PhD’46, taught within ILS.
As the UW was collecting its Ford
Boys in the summer of 1951, Letters and
Science dean Mark Ingraham tapped
Howe to be the boys’ handler on campus.
Howe had previously been a
teacher at a preparatory school, and
Ingraham thought his experience might
help him relate to fifteen- and sixteenyear-old
boys.
“It was sort of an odd idea, really,”
says Louise Trubek ’57, one of the first
Ford Girls. Most of the experiment’s students
had gone to public schools on the
East or West Coast, and most of the UW
students they met had attended public
schools in the Midwest. Howe, she says,
who “had taught Latin and Greek to
prep school boys, was sort of a Mr.
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