"It moves me so deeply," Daniels said of the effort.
For all his impressive credentials - from what his former colleagues at Penn and the University of Toronto say, Hopkins landed quite an academic and administrative star - Daniels remains rather touchingly awed by the power of education and its potential to elevate both individuals and society. He is just one generation removed from a time when higher education wasn't part of his family's world - he is the grandchild of Polish immigrants to Canada, and his father was one of the first in the family to get a college degree, at the University of Toronto, where Daniels himself earned his bachelor's and law degrees before getting a master of laws degree at Yale.
"It is a debt that I have never forgotten," he said.
Daniels didn't outline a specific mission or a set of priorities yesterday. Much of what will consume him at Hopkins already is in motion - the huge biotech park that is being built adjacent to the Hopkins medical campus, for one, and the worries at all universities about the effect of the economic downturn on their endowments. And the fact that the Hopkins trustees selected someone with notable fundraising prowess is perhaps a signal that such endeavors will play a big role during Daniel's tenure.
But first, he seemed most interested in learning more about both the campus and the city that he will inherit in March.
Yesterday was only his third visit to town, and he joked that he's been advised to catch up on the ouevres of Barry Levinson and John Waters (but the grittier, David Simon Wire series, not so much). Daniels, apparently a jazz fan and restaurant fancier, said he hoped Baltimoreans would take his family under their wings and point them to the spots they need to explore in town.
"It's something we look forward to doing as a family," he said.
As Daniels rushed off to speak to the various outposts of the Hopkins institutions, from Homewood to the Peabody to the medical campus, his wife, Joanne Rosen, and three of their children went to check out Nichols House, although they won't be moving in for a while. Rosen, a human-rights lawyer, said the family will commute between Philadelphia and Baltimore as the 16-year-old twins finish high school.
Daniels' predecessor, William R. Brody, was the first president to live in the house since 1971. The house was built in the 1950s as a way of luring Milton Eisenhower, the U.S. president's brother, to the school, according to the Hopkins Magazine article, and he used to turn the house's front light on to signal to students when they could drop in and chat.
Surely Daniels won't be expected to adopt this charming practice. But he did speak glowingly about how it was the random moments at his previous campuses - such as standing in line for coffee - that revealed for him the true "soul" of the school.
And, perhaps, the surrounding city as well. It is that intersection of a university and a community, Daniels said, where "magic happens."
