Johns Hopkins appointed Bowman president in 1935, apparently at the urging of Frank B. Jewett, the president of Bell Labs, then known for refusing to hire Jews. He promptly began driving Jewish faculty away and preventing the university from hiring more. In 1941, Bowman fired Eric F. Goldman, a Hopkins Ph.D. who had just received a unanimous-reappointment vote from the history department. When the department chair asked Bowman to explain the reason for Goldman’s dismissal, he replied, “There are already too many Jews at Johns Hopkins.” The eminent historian Charles Beard resigned in protest. Princeton hired Goldman, who became a renowned author, teacher, and public intellectual.
Bowman did not have to directly dismiss Jewish faculty to accomplish his goal of fewer Jews at Hopkins. He also created an institutional environment where Jewish scholars felt unwelcome. After Nazi Germany began its purge of Jewish scholars in the early 1930s, Bowman’s predecessor hired James Franck, a Nobel laureate in physics, from Göttingen University. Three years into Bowman’s presidency, Franck decamped for the University of Chicago because, as Franck later said in an interview, “Bowman made life very difficult for Jewish faculty.” Bowman’s actions after Franck announced he was leaving indicate just how difficult. Bowman told Franck that he “acted un-American in making the move,” and made it known that Franck was leaving because Chicago offered “better financial arrangements,” a hint of the antisemitic canard that Jews were greedy. Franck was “astonished and humiliated” and demanded an apology, which never came.
Similarly alienated was the molecular biologist Tracy Sonneborn, who in 1939 was on track to be the new head of zoology at Hopkins. But Bowman told Sonneborn he would not allow it because Sonneborn, as a Jew, would be subject to “irresistible pressures” to hire other Jews, and that would in turn cause non-Jews to depart. Bowman insisted Sonneborn’s hiring would “ruin the department.” Sonneborn ultimately took a position at Indiana University.
In 1947, Bowman sabotaged what likely would have been an impressive Hopkins hire when the department of political economy unanimously recommended that the university lure Simon Kuznets from the University of Pennsylvania. After asking someone if Kuznets was “you know, a Jewy Jew,” Bowman then offered him a salary much lower than he had been promised. Kuznets later said that Bowman’s offer had kept him from moving. Hopkins eventually landed Kuznets, a few years after Bowman’s death. He later went on to win the 1971 Nobel Prize in Economics.