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Dear Faculty, Students and Staff,
It is with a sense of profound sadness and loss that I am writing to share the news of the passing of Steven Muller, the 10th president of our university and a remarkable leader whose vision and determination enhanced dramatically the institution's national and global prominence.
President Emeritus Muller, who led the university from 1972 to 1990 and also served for about a decade as president of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, died Saturday with his wife, Jill McGovern, at his side. He was 85.
Dr. Muller joined Johns Hopkins as provost in 1971. He served in that position for just 10 months, however, before the Board of Trustees selected him in 1972 to lead the university. That same year, Dr. Muller was tapped to head the hospital, making him the first since Daniel Coit Gilman, the university's first president, to hold both presidencies. Dr. Muller relinquished the hospital post in 1983.
The university where we teach, learn, work and engage in scholarly endeavors simply would not exist in its current form had it not been for Steven Muller.
He created the affiliation with the Peabody Institute that led to that once financially troubled independent institution eventually becoming a strong and vital division of the university. His commitment to the arts and culture also resulted in the restoration and reopening of what are now Homewood Museum and Evergreen Museum and Library.
Dr. Muller was instrumental in bringing the Space Telescope Science Institute to Baltimore and the Homewood campus, ensuring that science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope would be controlled here and creating enormous collaborative opportunities for the university's own physics and astronomy faculty, which now includes two Nobel Prize winners. The institute's building, which bears Dr. Muller's name, stands across the street from the university's Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, also built during Dr. Muller's presidency.
President Muller, with prescient insight into China's future as a global power, ensured that Johns Hopkins would be an instrumental part of the conversation between that nation and our own, establishing the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. I am fortunate enough to have visited Nanjing and have seen for myself how that brave investment of both intellectual and financial capital has paid enormous dividends for all concerned.
On Dr. Muller's watch, the university also established the Krieger Mind-Brain Institute and academic centers for part-time students in Baltimore, in Montgomery County, Md., and at the Applied Physics Laboratory. Again, these decisions have proved time and again to have been wise and forward-thinking.
That foresight also led to the establishment -- as a standalone division of the university for the first time -- of the School of Nursing, now acknowledged a scant few decades later as the nation's best, and of the School of Engineering, which Dr. Muller broke out from the School of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Muller also was a leader in the expansion and modernization of what is now the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campus following Johns Hopkins' acquisition of the old City Hospitals from Baltimore City.
A skilled fundraiser, Dr. Muller financed much of the university's growth with dollars raised in two highly successful campaigns: the Hopkins Hundreds Campaign, which raised more than $109 million for the university and hospital between 1973 and 1976; and the Campaign for Johns Hopkins later in his tenure, which brought in more than $600 million, well exceeding its $450 million goal.
A man of both substance and impeccable style, Dr. Muller is credited with moving the university into a new era while preserving its tradition of leadership among research institutions. As many of you who knew him can attest, he was a no-nonsense leader who was more formal than informal. More bold than quiet. More personable than pushy.
A gifted writer and speaker and passionate advocate of the humanities, Dr. Muller was a specialist in comparative government and international relations. His many writings include a textbook on these subjects and numerous professional articles. He will forever be remembered for musing that "nobody ever died of English" while arguing very seriously for the need to support the humanities as vigorously as medicine and the life sciences.
Dr. Muller came to Johns Hopkins from Cornell University, where he was vice president for public affairs and before that director of the Cornell University Center for International Studies. He also held a tenured appointment as associate professor of government there.
He was born in Hamburg, Germany, and spent his teenage years in Los Angeles, where he won several roles in major Hollywood motion pictures. But education overtook acting and he enrolled in the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1948. In 1954, Dr. Muller earned a degree in politics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell.
During his time at Johns Hopkins and into his retirement, Dr. Muller sat on numerous boards and was a member of many scholarly and professional organizations and associations. After leaving office, he maintained offices at Evergreen and at SAIS, remaining involved in the Johns Hopkins community. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from a grateful university in 2000.
My deepest sympathies and, I am certain, those of the entire Johns Hopkins community, go to Dr. Muller's wife, Jill, and his two daughters, Julie Muller Mitchell and Elizabeth Muller Casparian, along with his five grandchildren.
Plans for a memorial service will be announced when they are available.
Sincerely,
Ronald J. Daniels, President
The Johns Hopkins University |
