Jacob Viner was 53 years old when he decided to leave the University of Chicago for Princeton. The letter transcribed below presents the personal and professional reasons for his resignation. Viner’s letter reveals the soft note of a late mid-life crisis motivating the move — no need for a new wife and fancy sports car, but rather the scholar sought retreat to an ivory-tower library, comfort from the families of his adult children and a significantly shorter commute to points East.
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Resignation Letter of Jacob Viner
COPY SENT TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH.
ORIGINAL TO MISS STROMWALL
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Chicago 37, Illinois
Department of Economics
January 24, 1946
Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins
Office of the Central Administration
Faculty Exchange
Dear Mr. Hutchins:
I am sorry to have to tell you that I am hereby resigning from the University of Chicago as of the end of this academic year to take a professorship at Princeton University. As I am to be at the London School of Economics from April to July, I am leaving the University in March, on leave without pay for the spring quarter.
The Princeton offer first came to me over a year ago, and I definitely declined it twice. It has been renewed and I now have definitely accepted it. For many reasons the offer had great attractions for me from the start, and I am sure that it was loyalty to Chicago which led me at first to decline it — as was true also in the case of Yale. I have been associated with the University of Chicago for 30 years, and the University has always treated me, both before and since your regime, with the utmost generosity. I have never in the thirty years had any cause to feel a personal grievance against you, or any other administrative officer, or any colleague. I am not leaving because of any dissatisfaction with the way the University has treated me, or with my colleagues, with you, or with any of your aides. I did disapprove at times of some aspects of what I thought to be your policy for the University. I still do on some points. But I had my full day in court; and my disapproval of some of your ideas — which it is not impossible that I misunderstood — never carried with it any lessening of my respect for yourself, or any ill-will toward you, and was always accompanied by enthusiastic approval of other of your educational ideas. I have been very happy about the way the new Council of the University has been operating, and if there were any criticism I would venture to offer of your behavior as its presiding officer, it would be that you have been too self-effacing and have not given as much leadership as the Council would welcome and would benefit from. I assure you that when I leave it will be with the friendliest feeling toward you and with strong affection for the University which I so cherish and which has dealt so kindly with me.
Why then am I leaving? A variety of factors have played their part. Most important, probably, is that our children, although born here, never took root in Chicago, that our daughter is already living in New York, and that our son, when he gets out of the Coast Guard, is sure of only one thing, that he will not live in Chicago. They have been pressing us very hard to move East, and what with their four years at eastern colleges, Arthur’s military service, and Ellen’s removal to New York, we have not been able to have the family together except for very short intervals over a period of some seven years. While we don’t expect them to live in Princeton, we do hope that we will at least have them frequently for week-end and vacation guests.
As for myself, as I get older, the physical aspects of the routines of teaching and of committees, of inadequate secretarial help, of a library physically difficult to use, and of frequent inescapable trips East, have grown progressively more burdensome to me. I know that as time goes on, these matters will become still more important to me. In the past ten years I have done what looks to me like a great deal of research, but most of it was done while I was on leave of absence from the University and I have put little of it into print. Even when I was in Washington, the secretarial and library privileges I had enabled me to do nearly as much of my personal research in my spare time as I could do in all my time while at the University.
It is not that the University imposed unfair burdens on me. Some of my heaviest chores were self-imposed. But at Chicago I did not want special privileges which equally-deserving colleagues did not have, and some of the things I wanted badly I would for this reason not have accepted at Chicago if they had been offered to me. At Princeton I come now, without obligations going beyond my contract, and with no reason for not accepting all the facilities voluntarily offered me. If after a while I should acquire Princeton loyalties which consume time and energy, I will at least have had a long spell during which I had been free to realize some of my ambitions as a scholar. I want to be able to get some of my accumulated research into shape for print, and if I don’t succeed, it will not be Princeton’s fault, provided it delivers on all the things I have been promised. These things are not financial: my salary will be the same at Princeton as here, and was not an issue. It’s all a matter of easy access to a library easy to use, light teaching load, no journal to edit, no burdensome eastern trips for committees, government advice, work on eastern library collections, etc., a secretary, a research assistant, a good office layout, and so forth. As I could not ask you to build a new library building for me, or to give me facilities that my colleagues could not get, or to transfer the University to the East, I thought it would be easier for all concerned if I did not let anyone here know about my negotiations.
I may be wrong in deciding that I will be happier and a more productive scholar at Princeton. No matter how well things go there, I know that I will always have a warm feeling for Chicago and a regret that I did not prove to be one of those rare creatures: a professor who passed all his working life at a single institution of which he was not a graduate. I will always be ready upon request to render any service to the University within my power, and I will carry out scrupulously my obligations to Chicago students who are working on theses under my direction or have any other claims upon me.
I hope it will be satisfactory to you if President Dodds announces my appointment on February 1st. I think it only fair to resign at once as a member of the Council and also as a member of the Social Science Research Committee where I would be participating in the making of decisions without staying to take the blame should there be any. I will continue on my other committees at your pleasure and the pleasure of their Chairmen until I leave.
I have never written an academic letter of resignation before. If there is any further action I need to take, I trust you will let me know. I am sending a copy of this letter to Dean Redfield, who has also deserved better of me.
Very sincerely yours,
/a/ Jacob Viner
JF-w
Source: University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center. Office of the President, Hutchins Administration Records 1892-1951. Box 73, Folder “Economics Department, 1946-1950”.
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Noted Economist Is Appointed To Princeton Staff
Princeton, Feb. 27. The appointment of Professor Jacob Viner, of the University of Chicago, internationally known as one of America’s most distinguished economists and editor of the “Journal of Political Economy,” to the faculty of Princeton University was announced today by President Harold W. Dodds. He will join the Princeton faculty next September.
“The addition of Professor Viner to the Department of Economics and Social institutions will contribute to the attractiveness of the university as a center of under graduate and post-graduate studies. President Dodds said. “He is distinguished as a professor and as an economist in the fields of international finance and trade. The program of our International Finance Section will benefit, but his usefulness to the university will not be limited to the activities of the section. He is a scholar whose Interests embrace the whole field of economics.”
Professor Viner, a native of Montreal, received his B.A. degree from McGill University in 1914; his M.A. from Harvard University in 1915, his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1922 and an LL.D. degree from Lawrence College in 1941.
He was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, 1916-17; special expert with the U.S. Tariff Commission, 1917-19, and the U.S. Shipping Board during part of 1918. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1919 as an assistant professor of economics, was appointed associate professor in 1923 and professor in 1925. Since 1940 he has been Morton Hull Distinguished Service Professor at that institution.
Meanwhile, he has served variously as visiting professor at the Institute Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva. Switzerland, 1930-31 and 1933-34 visiting professor at Yale University, 1942-43; special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, dur[ing] part of 1934; consulting expert to the U.S. Treasury, 1935-39; special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury during parts of 1939 and 1942; and consultant U.S. Department of State since 1943.
Professor Viner is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is a member and former president of the American Economical [sic] Association and the author of: “Dumping a Problem in International Trade”; “Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness”; “Studies in the Theory of International Trade”; and numerous articles on economic subjects.
Source: The Morning Call (Paterson, N.J.), February 28, 1946. Page 7.
Image Source: Jacob Viner (left); Theodore W. Schultz (right). University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-07483, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.