NAME(S) ON TILE:                 DR. JOHN GABBERT BOWMAN

DONOR NAME(S):                   UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

NATIONALITY ROOMS PROGRAM

Born Davenport, Iowa, April 18, 1877.  President of Iowa State University at age 34.  First Director of the American College of Surgeons, 1915-1921.  As Chancellor (1921), was determined to make the University of Pittsburgh an outstanding institution which would inspire youth to seek higher education.  Conceived of an innovative high tower whose Gothic architecture would symbolize enduring values.

Garnering the support of Andrew and Richard Mellon and Pittsburgh corporations, he mounted a landmark $10,000,000 fundraising campaign using pioneer techniques, e.g., ninety-seven thousand school children contributed 10 cents to buy a brick in the new building.

Despite formidable Trustee and community opposition to the tall building, and funding problems during the Great Depression, he completed a 42-story Gothic tower known as the Cathedral of Learning, in 1938.  He brought the University through seven years of depression without incurring a debt.

He, together with Ruth Crawford Mitchell, initiated the Nationality Rooms Program

in 1926.  Nineteen classrooms portraying a nation’s heritage were designed and funded by Pittsburgh’s ethnic communities and built in the Cathedral of Learning.

Through Bowman’s initiative, the stadium, Presbyterian Hospital, Eye and Ear Hospital, and Falk Clinic were built.  In 1937-38 Stephen Collins Foster Memorial, Heinz Memorial Chapel and the first four Nationality Rooms were completed.

During the 1930s, his tenure was marred by problems with athletics, and issues of academic freedom and faculty tenure.  The latter resulted in the University being blacklisted by the AAUP until 1947.  During World War II, 1943-45, he turned the Cathedral of Learning into a facility which housed, fed and trained thousands of army specialists.  He retired in 1945 with the title President Honorarius.