ABSTRACT
In celebrating 100 years of psychology at the University of Iowa, I address my remarks chiefly to the first 50 years before there was an infusion of new leadership through the arrival of Kenneth Spence with other newly employed faculty. He came as an associate professor in 1938, to be followed by John McGeoch as Professor and Department Head in 1939. McGeoch unfortunately had his career cut short by his premature death in 1942. My good friend Kurt Lewin, who had first charmed me at the International Congress at Yale in 1929, was about to arrive in the then Child Welfare Research Station, but he was also prominent in psychology generally. I should perhaps have included him in the title of my chapter because in one sense those of us from the outside saw the most dramatic new arrivals at the time to be McGeoch, Spence, and Lewin. Upon McGeoch’s death Spence began his many years of leadership. Lewin had been responsible for bringing Gustav Bergmann, a philosopher from Vienna, to help him formalize his topological psychology, but Bergmann found Spence’s theorizing more congenial. Robert Sears came to head Child Welfare in 1942 to serve until 1949, when he left for Harvard before coming to Stanford in 1953. Because those I have just mentioned belong to the second 50 years of psychology at the University of Iowa, I have little more to say about them here. These newcomers found strong traditions established at Iowa before they arrived. I am fortunate to have lived long enough to have known some of the leaders from the earlier period.
