Land School

Recurrently many a scholar looks back wistfully at the early days of Johns Hopkins University. It was housed in some plain Baltimore buildings which people thought resembled a piano factory. But its President Daniel Coit Gilman sloganed: "Men, not bricks and mortar." In the early 1880's Abraham Flexner was a student there, while Dr. Richard Theodore Ely was busy founding its chair of economic science. Largely out of Dr. Flexner's enthusiasm for the Johns Hopkins method came the Institute for Advanced Study he is building in Princeton (TIME, March 27et ante). Out of Dr. Ely's came news last week that he--now an internationally famed economist-- would open a School of Land Economics in Manhattan next autumn. When Dr. Ely was 77, he took to wife one of his onetime students, Margaret Harm, and last year he became father of an 8-lb. boy. When that boy, William Brewster, goes to college he will doubtless study the Elementary Economics which his father wrote. But if the school which Dr. Ely was launching last week lives up to its founder's purposes, William Brewster Ely and his generation will also have a far better chance than college students of today to learn about the thing that has been Dr. Ely's intellectual passion for more than 50 years. Of his land school, Dr. Ely said last week: "It is something epoch-making." To understand what he meant it is necessary to have some conception of what land--Land whence taxes come, Land on which houses are built. Land which produces things--has meant to Dr. Ely. When he left Johns Hopkins in 1892, Dr. Ely went to the University of Wisconsin, practiced real estate, studied housing, organized an Institute for Economic Research. The main purpose of the Institute was to study what Dr. Ely calls the "dynamic problems" of the land; to find more of them. Dr. Ely moved it to Chicago in 1925. Last winter he brought it to New York which is, to him, "a laboratory for experiments on a large scale." In Radburn, N. J., he now lives in a model housing development which he planned for John D. Rockefeller Jr. Dr. Ely this spring in Manhattan held seminars in land economics, found enough interest in them to justify the school. For backing he went to Owen D. Young, John W. Davis. Frank O. Lowden. Philip A. Benson. Last week he had enough support to announce that the school would open next October. Dr. Ely plans to limit his enrolment to 300, mostly adult postgraduates. There were 600 applicants last week. The three year course with himself and other land experts in charge will cover land utilization, housing, planning, zoning, real property law, architecture, assessments and taxes, regionalism, public policy and social control. It will have two mottoes: the one Dr. Gilman gave Johns Hopkins and another one, its own: "Under all, the Land."

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