Henry Townley Heald was an American civil engineer and educator. He served as a president of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), New York University, and the Ford Foundation.
Background
Henry Townley Heald was born on November 8, 1904 in Lincoln, Nebraska, United States. He was the son of Frederick de Forest Heald, a botanist, and Nellie Townley.
His father left his post at the University of Nebraska soon after Heald was born, moving his family first to Texas and then Pennsylvania as he conducted research into plant pathology for the Department of Agriculture. Finally, in 1915, the Heald family moved to Pullman, Washington, where Frederick accepted a teaching post at Washington State College and became the head of the Department of Plant Pathology in 1917.
Education
Heald's mother tutored him at home until he was ready for the ninth grade at Pullman High School. At Washington State College, Heald majored in civil engineering and worked during three summers for the U. S. Geological Survey. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1923 and took a job for one year as an assistant engineer on the construction of the McKay Dam for the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation at Pendleton, Oregon. He then enrolled at the University of Illinois, receiving his Master of Science in civil engineering in 1925.
Career
Starting from 1925, Heald designed bridges for the Illinois Central Railroad, then took a job as a structural engineer for the Chicago Board of Local Improvements. In September 1927, he accepted an assistant professorship of civil engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology, a small and financially struggling college on Chicago's South Side.
While teaching at the Armour Institute, Heald worked as an engineer for the Louisville Bridge and Iron Company during the summer of 1929, and for the Walter Bates Steel Company in 1930. In 1931, he was promoted to associate professor and assistant to the dean of Armour Institute, beginning a quick ascent from dean of freshmen in 1933, to professor and dean of the institute in 1934, to acting president in 1937.
In May 1938, he was formally elected president of Armour Institute. Managing a rejuvenation of the institution, Heald convinced sixty top industrialists to join the board of trustees and, in 1940, merged with Armour Lewis Institute, a foundering liberal arts school on Chicago's West Side, to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. He hired Mies van der Rohe to construct a new campus and in fourteen years expanded the school's area from seven to eighty-five acres, boosted its assets from $2 million to almost $17 million, and raised enrollment from seven hundred to seven thousand students.
Heald's influence spread to the city as a whole. He led a project to rebuild the slums surrounding the Illinois Institute of Technology, bringing together a staff of experts who drew up a plan for redevelopment that became a national model for urban renewal. In 1946, Heald headed a special committee of college presidents that cleaned up Chicago's politics-ridden public school system. In 1951, Heald was offered the chancellorship of New York University, the nation's largest private higher-education institute.
Although he had turned down lucrative jobs in private industry and a Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, he accepted the opportunity to restructure New York University. The university--with thirty-five thousand students spread over six campuses in Manhattan and the Bronx--lacked a coherent sense of purpose. Heald raised faculty salaries, tuition, and admissions standards while eliminating departmental duplication and bringing in $44 million in gifts. Less tangibly, he forged a belief in the future.
While at New York University, Heald chaired the Temporary Commission on Educational Finance, whose recommendations for the restructuring of New York State's aid to education were enacted by the legislature despite criticism. In June 1956, Heald called in his top staff and told them, "Gentlemen, they've offered me the presidency of the Ford Foundation and I don't see how anyone in education could turn it down. " Giving away $100 million per year, the Ford Foundation was the largest foundation in the United States. Under Heald's direction, it launched a program to help sixty-nine private colleges and universities become "regional and national centers of excellence"; encouraged team teaching, programmed instruction, and other educational innovations; designed a $40-million program for development of the arts; and fostered the growth of noncommercial television. Heald believed that the function of a foundation is "to discriminate, to pioneer, to show by example, to be prudent but not afraid, to be risky but not foolhardy, to explain fully. "
In December 1965, Heald retired from the foundation. He went on to work as a consultant facilitating the merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He died in Winter Park, Florida.
Achievements
Heald exercised a powerful influence on American educational, cultural, social and medical affairs and on private aid to developing nations. In the 44 years of his professional life, he rose from assistant professor of civil engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology to the presidencies of the Illinois Institute of Technology, New York University and the Ford Foundation.
He appeared on the cover of Time in 1957 for his work at the Ford Foundation. In 1959 he was awarded the Hoover Medal.
A scholarship at IIT is named after him.
Personality
Tall, lean and Lincolnesque in appearance, Heald had a single minded devotion to work. He worked ten hours a day in the office and many more at home. When Time ran a cover story on Heald the magazine described him as "a man who thrives on problems. His desk is clean, his decisions swift, his temper always even. "
Connections
On one of his visits home to Pullman, Heald was told by his younger sister about Muriel Starcher, a pretty girl in her sorority. Heald called her and took her to lunch. One week later he proposed. They were married on August 4, 1928; they had no children.
