This new president didn't promise to bring a new puppy along when his family moves into the official residence, and his overall message was more of continuity than change.
And yet there was a now-familiar sense of a generational shift yesterday when the Johns Hopkins University introduced its new president, Ronald J. Daniels, a youthful 49-year-old and the father of four teenagers. He is believed to be the first Hopkins head in recent memory who will bring children to live at Nichols House, the presidential abode on the Homewood campus.
Maybe I'm just overly obsessed with first families these days, what with a particularly intriguing one moving into that White House down the way from here. But something about moving a family into Nichols House, I think, immediately gives Daniels a unique vantage point from which to view not just the campus but the city.
With children in tow, it's harder to live solely within the comfort zone of a college campus. They have to go to school somewhere, for one thing, and surely their activities and friendships and lives necessarily would expand beyond the campus. (While Steven Muller, four presidents ago, had two preteen daughters when he became Hopkins president in 1972, he and his wife decided to raise them in the "less public setting" of Timonium, according to an article in Johns Hopkins Magazine.)
It's said so often as to be a cliche, but the divide between Baltimore and its august local institution has always seemed particularly vast, even by the usual town-and-gown standards. I sense it wasn't always that way, but something that happened as Baltimore and Hopkins moved in different directions - the city grew poorer and blacker, the school grew bigger, richer and more worldly. You hear it in the grumblings of neighborhoods where the ever-expanding Hopkins empire has squeezed out some longtime residents; you hear it from city kids, no matter how bright, who sense they wouldn't feel at home at this school despite its proximity to their own neighborhoods.
And yet it's the largest employer in town and the premier local educational institution. We're obviously in this together.
So I was struck, pleasantly, by how one of the first subjects Daniels raised yesterday was what he called "the inextricable ties" between Hopkins and its surrounding city. He made special mention of the Baltimore Scholars program, which offers free tuition to any city public school graduate who can make it through the rigorous acceptance process and get into Hopkins. The program, which will graduate its first class this spring, is credited with greatly increasing the number of local African-American students on campus.
