A Brief History Of The Chemistry Department

by

Carl H. Snyder, Professor of Chemistry Emeritus


Current segment: 1932-1945 -- The Department Survives and Expands; The Prewar and Wartime Department To return to the Chemistry Department home page, please click the atom:

1932-1945

The Department Survives and Expands

In August, 1932, Walter O. Walker replaced Otto Sieplein as the (entire) chemistry department. Walker had received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He came to the university from A. O. Smith Co. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, joining the faculty as Assistant Professor of Chemistry and head of the department. Earlier he had taught at William Jewel College, his alma mater.

During his first year Walker reorganized and tightened the curriculum, removing the Chem 3,4 sequence (Inorganic Chemistry for students without high school chemistry) and replacing the old Chem 12 (the second semester of Calculations of Chemistry) with a new Chem 12, Biochemistry (renamed Physiological Chemistry in 1933 and again to other titles in later years). As the department's offering in the late afternoon and evening sections, he replaced Sieplein's Modern Chemistry with the Chem 1,2 sequence (the standard inorganic course for students who had taken high school chemistry).

In 1933 Walker, now in his second year, rose in rank to full professor. Moreover the department doubled in size with the arrival of Evan T. Lindstrom as Instructor in Chemistry. Lindstrom had earned his B.S. from the University of Miami in 1930 and then gone on to graduate study in physics at the University of Florida. With an additional faculty member, Walker was able to expand the curriculum to a variety and level of courses that reflected the department's continuing growth.

For the following academic year, 1934-35, the course codes changed to the three-digit format now used. Organic Chemistry, for example, switched from the original Chem 5,6 to the still current 201,202. (In most other cases current three-digit course numbers are no longer the same as they were for the equivalent 1934 courses. Also, the departmental designation is now CHM rather than the original Chem.) These and other changes produced a curriculum resembling that of a modern undergraduate chemistry department.


The 1934-35 Chemistry Curriculum
101,102  General Inorganic Chemistry
103  Advanced Inorganic Chemistry
110  Qualitative Analysis
120  Laboratory Technique
201,202  Organic Chemistry
210  Physiological Chemistry
301,302  Quantitative Analysis
303  Quantitative Analysis (Special Methods)
304  Commercial Laboratory Practices
401,402  Physical Chemistry

In his last year as head of the chemistry department, 1935-36, Walker reinstated Modern Chemistry as Chem 320, "Designed to acquaint the student with current developments in Chemistry." He also moved the department in the direction of research, as Sieplein had promised in the first Bulletin. Walker added Chem 410, 411 and 412 to the curriculum, with each titled Problems In Chemistry and each described as "Introduction to Chemical research methods. Registration subject to consent of instructor."

Walter O. Walker left the department in 1936 for an industrial position in Wisconsin, but he maintained contact with the university and returned in 1950 to teach chemistry and to supervise research. He retired in 1961.

With Walker's departure Elmer V. Hjort became the third head of the department . Born in Iowa, Hjort received his B.S. from William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa. From 1920-1936 he taught chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, advancing from instructor to associate professor. Hjort received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1923.

In striking parallel to the events that brought Otto Sieplein to the university ten years earlier, the poor health of Hjort's daughter induced his family to move from Pittsburgh to Bradenton, Florida. As an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Hjort contacted the University of Miami about a possible faculty position. President Ashe welcomed him as warmly as he had welcomed Sieplein a decade earlier. But Ashe also warned Hjort about the university's shaky financial status. Ashe wrote to Hjort:

Probably both Dr. Weidlin and Dr. Bowman [University of Pittsburgh administrators who had ties to Ashe] have told you that this place is not yet financed and we have had a rather grizzly fight to get the place established. The salaries are pretty meager. All of our men are interested in what the University may become rather than what it is at the present time.

Hjort joined the department in the fall of 1936, on leave from the University of Pittsburgh. Both the 1936-37 and 1937-38 UM Bulletins list him as a Visiting Professor of Chemistry, and also show both Walker and Lindstrom as faculty members, with their established ranks. (Walker's name then disappears from the Bulletin until his return in 1950.) In 1938-39 Hjort became a full member of the faculty; the term "Visiting" had been removed from his title.

Schultz's second UM CHEM newsletter carries a verbal snapshot of Hjort and his colleague Lindstrom. In describing an imagined stroll along a corridor on the first floor of the Anastasia Building, Schultz has us pass

an office in which we might see the tall, lanky form of E. J. Hjort, in seersucker trousers, white shirt and bow tie; or E. T. Lindstrom, stocky, solid, whose ever-lit cigar adds to the gloom and smell of the corridor . . . .

After nine years in the chemistry department, Hjort's academic and administrative qualities led to his appointment as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (the forerunner of the College of Arts and Sciences) on July 1, 1945. In November of the following year he was named dean of the newly acquired South Campus, the former Richmond Naval Air Base. The following month he died from what was described as a cerebral accident.

Hjort's tenure as head of the department brought few changes to the curriculum. From his arrival to his appointment as dean (1936-1945):

Both the department and the university grew substantially from their beginnings to the end of Hjort's tenure as head of the department, which coincided with the end of World War II. Scattered bits of data, described below, reflect their progress.


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The Prewar and Wartime Department

The University of Miami opened in 1926 with 372 day students and an additional 339 evening students. (By the beginning of World War II total enrollment doubled, fed by a strong increase in day students that overwhelmed a small drop in evening enrollment.) The 1927 Ibis, the first issue of the yearbook, lists 18 faculty in the entire College of Liberal Arts, and describes a total 185 students: 144 freshmen, 20 sophomores, 17 juniors, and 4 seniors. (There may have been more whose names or photographs were omitted; upperclass students were transfers.) Of all these students only eight were described as premedical or predental and presumably would have been enrolled in chemistry courses.

In 1937 Hjort reported his teaching load as 451 student- credit-hours, including a total of 49 students distributed among four lecture and two laboratory courses. With a total of 18 chemistry courses listed in the university bulletin, Lindstrom had a heavier teaching load.

In the second issue of UM CHEM, Schultz provides a glimpse of the department as World War II began:

Memos from Professor Hjort to President Ashe in the period 1938- 40 presented a variety of needs: chemical reference works such as Beilstein, American Chemical Society approval of the University professional chemistry curriculum, applied research on local natural products such as citrus fruits and tree gums. . . . In 1940, on the eve of World War II, Dr. Hjort and Mr. Lindstrom taught between them 19 chemistry courses per year, including two new courses, CHM 95 and CHM 96, The Chemistry of Daily Life. Each year E. V. Hjort taught general, organic, and analytical chemistry; E. T. Lindstrom taught general, analytical, and physical chemistry. Twenty four chemistry credit hours with grades above "D" were required of the chemistry major, and the University had an enrollment of 1,384 regular students, 57% of whom were from the Miami area.

The net increase of one chemistry course, from the 18 departmental courses reported by Hjort in 1937 to the 19 noted in Schultz's prewar summary, resulted from the addition of Chem 95 and 96 by Hjort in 1940 and the deletion of the third course of Walker's 1935 research sequence, Chem 412.

Aside from the elimination of the Chem 95,96 sequence and the promotion of Lindstrom to Assistant Professor, both of which took place in the 1943-44 academic year, no major changes occurred in the department during World War II.

Current segment: 1932-1945 -- The Department Survives and Expands; The Prewar and Wartime Department To return to the Chemistry Department home page, please click the atom: