Background

Howard Rothmann was born on October 27, 1908, in Spokane, Washington, District of Columbia, United States; the son of Henry G. and Josephine (Menig) Bowen.

Howard lived with relatives and neighbors while his divorced mother traveled and earned a modest income demonstrating food products. No idle youth, he helped family members in timber mill kitchens, meat markets, and ranches and acquired a work ethic evident in his later life.

Education

In 1925 Bowen entered Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, United States. He received degree in economics. In 1929 he graduated from Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1933 Bowen returned to Washington State on an assistantship and obtained a Master of Arts degree in economics. Eager to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy degree and needing financial aid, he received a teaching fellowship at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, United States.

Career

Intellectual and cultural life in Iowa City in the early years of the New Deal was “wonderfully stimulating” to Bowen, and he realized that he was a “staunch liberal.” In 1935, he was appointed instructor in economics at the State University of Iowa and married Lois Schilling, a music graduate student. In 1937 Howard received a Social Science Research Council Fellowship to spend a year studying British grants-in-aid. He returned to Iowa refreshed professionally and ready to start his first book, Toward Social Economy.

In 1942 Bowen’s promising academic career was cut short, when he went to wartime Washington, D.C., United States, first at the Department of Commerce, then to Congress’s Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation as chief economist. In 1947 Bowen became dean of the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois. President George Stoddard, whom Bowen had known at Iowa, was attempting to energize a sluggish university, and Bowen’s task was to enliven the College of Commerce with young economists. “Old school” business professors resented the Keynesian views of the new faculty and sought support from conservative trustees, including football hero Harold “Red” Grange and newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune. Controversy raged, and Bowen and Stoddard were forced out.

In 1952 Bowen went to Williams College as professor of economics and found respite in his role as a faculty member and in his renewed interest in liberal arts education. His work ethic resulted in the publication of several books, including Social Responsibilities of the Businessman.

Bowen came back to Iowa when Grinnell College named him president, in 1955. Grinnell had just gone through a presidential and financial crisis, and Bowen quickly set about restoring morale and reviving the traditional mission of the college. That was evident in the title of his inaugural address, “A Free Mind,” something he thought was threatened by 1950s McCarthyism. Bowen said, “It is one of the special tasks of small liberal arts colleges like Grinnell to help keep this freedom alive.” He took national leadership in opposition to demands for “loyalty oaths” from students who needed federal loans. Faculty oriented, he increased salaries, hired new faculty, and shared the responsibility of governance. The endowment grew, modernist structures replaced old buildings, and Grinnell entered a prosperous and progressive era.

Success at Grinnell led to an unsolicited offer in 1964 from the Iowa Board of Regents to become president of the University of Iowa. The university had drifted, the faculty was dispirited, and Bowen again took on a task of revival and reform, raising the university to what one source calls “the highest level of excellence that it had yet achieved in the twentieth century.” Again Bowen shared responsibilities with an expanding faculty, placed a new emphasis on research, doubled the operating budgets, built buildings, recruited women and minority faculty and students, and reorganized administrative structures-not without struggles with entrenched deans and departments. Greater frustration for Bowen developed in 1968 and 1969 when student protests against the Viet- nam War and increasing demands for “Student Power” shattered his vision of a university as a “house of intellect.” Fatigued, he resigned in the spring of 1969.

Sixty years old but not ready to retire, Bowen accepted a position as chair of the economics department at Claremont Graduate School. He was soon asked to become chancellor of the Claremont Graduate Center, where he immersed himself in bold propos-als for programs in law and medicine that were dropped as a result of the depressed mood in higher education in the 1970s. In 1974 he returned to teaching and scholarly work, producing prize-winning books on higher education: The State of the Nation and the Agenda for Higher Education and American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled. Bowen died in 1989, survived by two sons, Geoffrey and Thomas.

Achievements

• Bowen was memorialized as “gentle in manner, yet firm in action... a model for an entire generation of college presidents.”
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Social Responsibilities of the Businessman 1953
  • Efficiency in Liberal Education 1971
  • Investment in Learning 1977
  • State of the Nation and the Agenda for Higher Education 1982
  • American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled 1986
  • Toward Social Economy 1948

Membership

• In 1949 Howard was a member of the United States Tax Mission.

  United States Tax Mission , Japan

• Howard was a member of the Government Committee of Economics and Social Trends of Iowa, in 1958.

  Government Committee of Economics and Social Trends of Iowa , United States

• In 1977 Howard was a member of the Western Economic Association.

  Western Economic Association , United States

• Howard was a chairman, from 1967 to 1969.

  Argonne Universities Association

• Trustee Grinnell College

  1975 - 1986

• Claremont University Center

  1980 - 1986

• Howard was president, in 1950.

  American Finance Association

• Howard was president, in 1975.

  American Association for Higher Education

• Howard was president, in 1977.

  Western Economic Association

• 

  In 1980 Howard was president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

  Association for the Study of Higher Education

• From 1961 to 1964 Howard was a member of the Federal Advisory Committee of Intergovernmental Relations.

  Federal Advisory Committee of Intergovernmental Relations

  1961 - 1964

• From 1964 to 1966 Howard was a chairman of the National Committee of Technology, Automation and Economics Progress.

  National Committee of Technology, Automation and Economics Progress

  1964 - 1966

• Since 1975 Howard was president of the American Association of Higher Education.

  American Association of Higher Education

• Howard was a fellow for study, from 1937 to 1938.

  Social Science Research Council

  1937 - 1938

Connections

Howard married Lois B. Schilling on August 24, 1935. They had two children, Peter Geoffrey, Thomas Gerard.

Father:

Henry G. Bowen

Mother:

Josephine (Menig) Bowen

Spouse:

Lois B. Schilling

Son:

Peter Geoffrey Bowen

Son:

Thomas Gerard Bowen

References

• The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.
  2008