Abraham Flexner

Educator

• Born: November 13, 1866
• Birthplace: Louisville, Kentucky
• Died: September 21, 1959
• Place of death: Falls Church, Virginia

American educator

Successfully blending scholarship and administrative ability with reformist zeal, Flexner was responsible for major transformations of American elementary, secondary, medical, and postgraduate education. Also, he was the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, an institute for scholars that allows for dedicated research and scholarship without teaching responsibilities.

Areas of achievement Education, scholarship

Early Life

Abraham Flexner was the son of Jewish immigrants, Esther Abraham Flexner and Moritz Flexner, who were successful Louisville hat merchants. The depression of 1873 destroyed their business, however, and reduced the family to poverty. The Flexners, however, placed great importance on schooling and did whatever they could to ensure that Abraham, as well as his brothers and sisters, received an education.

In 1884, Flexner entered Johns Hopkins University with the assistance of a thousand-dollar loan from his oldest brother, Jacob. He majored in the study of ancient Greece and Rome, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1886. After graduation, Flexner returned to his hometown, where he taught for four years at the local high school. Recognizing a need to educate wealthy but unruly youths, he founded an academy that prepared them for college through brief but intensive work. His unorthodox teaching methods included the absence of rules, examinations, records, and reports. The success of Flexner’s graduates brought him to the attention of president Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, which led to an article in The Atlantic Monthly describing his methods, entitled “The Preparatory School.”

At the urging of his wife, Flexner left Louisville the following year for graduate work in psychology at Harvard. After receiving his master’s degree, he traveled overseas to study comparative education at the University of Berlin. He was convinced by his experiences at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Berlin that American institutions of higher education should restructure themselves along the lines of the German university. In 1908, Flexner published The American College: A Criticism, a critique of the nation’s colleges that called for more attention to scholarship and less attention to extracurricular activities. This book was the turning point in his career.

Life’s Work

Flexner’s book attracted the attention of Henry S. Pritchett, a former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The foundation was about to begin a major evaluation of medical education in the United States and Canada, and Pritchett commissioned Flexner to undertake the study. Undertaking his duties with a seemingly boundless energy and attention to detail, Flexner visited each of the 155 American and Canadian medical schools then in operation and described each in detail.

The results of his research were published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910, under the title Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Using the minimum criteria by which European medical schools were allowed to operate, Flexner found that 75 percent of their American counterparts would be closed. He described many teaching hospitals as outdated and unsanitary; some he called death traps. Most medical schools, Flexner charged, existed solely for the profit of their owners. Any unqualified student could gain admission to them and be graduated if the tuition was paid. Even reputable medical schools often lacked the most rudimentary facilities. Flexner recommended that no less than 120 of the medical schools included in his study be closed.

Flexner’s study became front-page news. Two years later, he completed another study, entitled Medical Education in Europe (1912). Together, the two works established his reputation as the world’s foremost authority on medical education. In 1913, largely as a result of these two studies, Flexner was hired by the General Education Board, a philanthropic foundation established by millionaire John D. Rockefeller to improve education in the United States. Beginning as assistant secretary, he advanced to become head of its Division of Studies and Medical Education. While working at the board, he authored and coauthored several reports, including Prostitution in Europe (1914), Public Education in Maryland (1916), The Gary Schools (1918), and Public Education in Delaware (1919). He also awarded grants to stimulate humanistic research and is credited with playing a major role in founding the Lincoln School, which is remembered as the crowning achievement of the Progressive Era’s education movement.

Despite the diversity of his interests while at the General Education Board, Flexner remained interested in the improvement of medical education. In addition to the publication of a 1925 report, Medical Education: A Comparative Study, he devoted attention to the development of full-time, basic science research faculties at medical schools. Before his retirement from the board in 1928, Flexner disbursed fifty million dollars to medical schools.

A photograph of the beardless, balding, and bespectacled Flexner taken during his mature years shows a face of a man seemingly tailor-made for the role of a Progressive Era intellectual, with a high forehead, furrowed brow, and imperious countenance. By this time, Flexner was in great demand as a lecturer abroad. He traveled to England, where he presented the Rhodes Trust memorial lectures in 1927, and was the 1928 Taylor lecturer at Oxford University. The following year, he lectured before the Foundation Universitaire in Belgium. In 1930, his Rhodes lectures were published in revised and expanded form as Universities: American, English, German, in which he restated his belief in the superiority of German universities, especially in their emphasis on conceptual research and the graduate seminar.

The Great Depression and a lack of enthusiasm for his reforms among educators thwarted Flexner’s plans to direct American higher education along the lines of the German university. His ideas did find partial fulfillment, however, when he persuaded department-store magnate Louis Bamberger and his sister, Mrs. Fuld, to give five million dollars to establish the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As its first director, from 1930 to 1939, Flexner brought a small number of select scholars to the institute and gave them complete freedom, as well as virtually unlimited resources and personnel, to pursue conceptual research. An early fellow of the institute was Albert Einstein; the addition of other noted scholars, such as John von Neumann, in later years made it famous.

After leaving the institute, Flexner devoted his remaining years to writing. He wrote an autobiography, I Remember (1940); biographies of higher education leaders Henry S. Pritchett and Daniel Coit Gilman; and a historical-contemporary study of foundations, Funds and Foundations (1952). Flexner died September 21, 1959, in Falls Church, Virginia.

Significance

Over the course of his long public-service career, Flexner served as a catalyst for change in many areas of American education. He was responsible, perhaps to a greater degree than any other individual, for raising educational standards in United States and Canadian medical schools. The Lincoln School, which he helped found, exerted a profound influence on the subsequent history of American elementary and secondary education. Less successful, but no less important, were his efforts to raise scholarly standards in postgraduate education, as exemplified by the Institute for Advanced Study.

Flexner was able to accomplish so much because his own thinking and behavior were in harmony with that of most early twentieth century, Progressive Era Americans. He crusaded against waste and inefficiency, bringing to public attention, for example, the deplorable state of medical education in North America. Certainly, this sense of moral outrage was one key to his success. However, he also placed great faith in the power of science to remedy society’s ills not science in the narrow, physical sense, but the study of any problem according to scientific principles. Indeed, Flexner’s professional career was characterized by the painstaking collection and analysis of data about social problems.

This is not to say that Flexner was without his faults. His desire to generate public support for his reforms sometimes led him to dramatize and exaggerate the severity of social problems. Moreover, his lifelong conviction that efficiency and professional expertise were the only objective standards by which society could operate effectively reflected an antipathy toward democracy and a haughty elitism that devalued the role of the ordinary citizen in the decision-making process.

Certainly, no human being is perfect, and Flexner was, after all, only human; however, from his first efforts in Louisville, he had grasped a vision of excellence in education that he pursued throughout his professional life. For all of his faults, the vision was his, and he never lost it.

Bibliography

Batterson, Steve. Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study. Wellesley, Mass.: A. K. Peters, 2006. Chronicles the early years of the institute based in Princeton, New Jersey. Discusses Flexner’s establishment of the institution.

Bonner, Thomas Neville. Iconclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Intelligent, well-organized, and well-researched biography providing a balanced view of Flexner’s strengths and weaknesses as an educator.

Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. The best single history of the Progressive education movement. Provides a useful, though somewhat uncritical, discussion and analysis of Flexner’s frequently overlooked contribution to American school reform.

Flexner, Abraham. Abraham Flexner: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960. The revised edition of Flexner’s I Remember (1940). Somewhat self-serving, this firsthand account of Flexner’s life and work nevertheless remains indispensable. Most historians of medical and educational reform have drawn on the work.

Floden, Robert E. “Flexner, Accreditation, and Evaluation.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 2 (March/April, 1980): 35-46. A brief examination of Flexner’s Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Useful primarily for challenging the widely accepted notion that Flexner’s observations and conclusions were based on objective, scientific principles and method.

Hine, Darlene Clark. “The Anatomy of Failure: Medical Education Reform and the Leonard Medical School of Shaw University, 1882-1920.” Journal of Negro Education 54 (Fall, 1985): 512-525. Traces the history and failure of the Leonard Medical School, one of several black educational institutions given a negative rating by Flexner. Examines the responses.

King, David J. “The Psychological Training of Abraham Flexner, the Reformer of Medical Education.” Journal of Psychology 100 (September, 1978): 131-137. Examines the impact of Flexner’s graduate training on his later career as a reformer. The major intellectual influences of the field of psychology on Flexner’s thinking are discussed and related to his emphasis on the importance of basic science in medical education.

Parker, Franklin. “Ideas That Shaped American Schools.” Phi Delta Kappan 62 (January, 1981): 314-319. Superficial but useful discussion of ten books or series of books that represent major turning points in American educational thought through 1980. Useful primarily for placing Flexner within the larger context of reform in American education.

Rosen, George. The Structure of American Medical Practice, 1875-1941. Edited by Charles E. Rosenberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. This well-written book mentions Flexner only in passing, but it places his reforms within the context of the larger effort to restructure the medical profession in the early twentieth century United States.

Shryock, Richard Harrison. Medical Licensing in America, 1650-1965. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Well-documented study of efforts to regulate medical practice in the United States. It not only discusses the impact of Flexner’s reforms on this process but also provides a detailed account of the social and professional milieu in which he undertook his reform of medical education.

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