Reviews
Professor Hawkins' scholarship is beautiful, his style is clear, his ideas are exciting, and the work has perspective and breadth.
Dr. Hawkins... has brought real art to his work so that the men, their ideas and their varying skills are portrayed with the insight that one hopes for from novelists and biographers. The result is an engrossing book. There is not a dull chapter in it.
This history of the early years of the Johns Hopkins University is much more than the story of the establishment and development of one of the most distinguished institutions of higher education in the United States. The book deals with a period of re-thinking and re-assessment in higher education... Many of the fundamental problems of educational principle... were tackled at this stage of the University's history and the book deals fully with the questions of conscience and of politics which were involved in their solution.