Reflections

This section collects the essays from Reflections from the Frontiers (Explorations for the Future: Gordon Research Conferences 1931-2006), GRC's 75th anniversary commemorative publication.

Leading the Cutting Edge
Neil E. Gordon
Neil E. Gordon
Founder
Gordon Research Conferences
Leah Shaper
Chemical Heritage Foundation
Neil E. Gordon - "Method Must Not Interfere with Learning"

Neil Elbridge Gordon, Gordon Research Conference founder and science educator, was born to William J. and Ella Mason Gordon on 7 October 1886 in Spafford, New York. After earning a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1911 and a master of arts degree in mathematics in 1912 from Syracuse University, Gordon received a doctorate of philosophy in chemistry in 1917 from Johns Hopkins University (whose chemistry department chair and eventual university president Ira Remsen had pioneered chemistry research and graduate education in the United States). During his career Gordon held several professorships and chaired several chemistry departments, most notably those of Maryland State Agricultural College in College Park, Maryland (1920-1939); Central College in Fayette, Missouri (1936-1942); and Wayne University in Detroit, Michigan (1942-1947). Of significance for the development of the Gordon Conferences he had also occupied the Garvan Chair of Chemical Education at Johns Hopkins from 1928 to 1936.

Gordon’s influence on chemical education germinated in the 1920s. Inspired by a paper on undergraduate research presented at a 1921 meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Gordon successfully petitioned that organization to create a new Section (later Division) of Chemical Education, for which he served as secretary and prepared a program that fall. To collect the papers produced by the division, Gordon also launched the Journal of Chemical Education. Francis P. Garvan, president of the Chemical Foundation (formed after World War I to purchase German patents for use by the American chemical industry), was so impressed by the journal that he endowed the creation of the Garvan Chair at Johns Hopkins. In that position Gordon developed a fellowship program to support graduate student research, as well as a lecture series designed for uninhibited discussion of research issues; these were the Johns Hopkins University Research Conferences, the first manifestation of what would become GRC, held in Remsen Hall during the summers from 1931 to 1933.

Incorporating innovation into classrooms and pro-fessional meetings was of particular interest to Gordon. A chief goal of his unconventional 1927 chemistry textbook, Introductory Chemistry, was to incorporate new discoveries into the most recent body of chemical knowledge and introduce them into the classroom. Gordon was spec-ifically concerned that knowledge about the electron’s role in the structure of the atom was not being passed on to students, and he noted that because atomic structure formed the basis of all chemical principles, this oversight slowed the learning curve and impeded understanding of chemistry:
There is inevitably a lag between the discovery of new facts and principles in science and the incorporation of those facts and principles in science into courses of instruction, but it appears to the author that in the application of our present-day knowledge of the structure of matter and in the teaching of general chemistry the lag has been unusually great.… [W]hen all the laws of chemical combination are traceable to the structure of the atom, how can we maintain that we are imparting a knowledge of chemical principles if we neglect the most fundamental principle of all?
Similarly, Gordon conceptualized the conferences at Johns Hopkins as a way of encouraging scientific novelty and progress. These conferences were designed to provide a forum for the discussion of new developments in chemistry and related fields among leading experts and students in a collegial, relaxed, and remote environment that dispelled communication barriers and eased inhibitions, thereby nurturing highly productive brainstorming sessions. Gordon provided just such an atmosphere by moving the conferences in 1934 to Gibson Island, where he encouraged attendees to dress casually, socialize, and partake in recreational activities available in this remote environment. He also guaranteed the confidentiality of conference proceedings and discussion, providing scientists the freedom to discuss novel concepts and experiments well before the publication stage and to get critical feedback from colleagues without the fear of ridicule. “[M]ethod must not interfere with learning,” Gordon philosophized in the preface to his textbook.

Frequently described by others as tenacious, persuasive, and resolute, Gordon was considered a highly effective organizer and a relentlessly determined fund-raiser for endeavors that furthered chemical education. In a special fall 1949 issue of the Record of Chemical Progress memorializing its editor Neil Gordon, who died in May that year, colleague Otto Reinmuth remembered a man with extraordinary drive:
In Neil E. Gordon [University of Maryland president G. Forrest Woods] found for chairman of his chemistry department a good executive, a fine organizer, and a promoter of inexhaustible energy...

He thoroughly sold himself on a project before he set out to sell others, and he never tried to feather his own nest. His obvious sincerity and selflessness, coupled with his extreme artlessness, doubtless disarmed many who were used to being high-pressured by smooth operators. He was optimistic to the point of blindness, and the continual dropping that weareth away the hardest stone had lessons in persistency to learn from him.

...Whatever aspirations toward scientific scholarship he may once have entertained, he early recognized his own peculiar abilities as an organizer and promoter, and subordinated all else to the furtherance of projects which he felt would advance the cause of chemistry and chemical education.
The conferences that had already begun in the late 1920s and were formalized at Johns Hopkins in 1931 grew steadily in the mid-1930s. Gordon, however, wanted to move on to other endeavors. By persuading the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to administer the conferences in 1937, he took a critical step toward their permanence. In a November 1939 letter to AAAS executive secretary Forest R. Moulton, Gordon wrote:
This summer session needs to take a little more definite form of organization. I should like to bring it to such a status this summer that it could be continued as a permanent function of the association. I should like to try to put the whole thing on a paying basis, and extend it over at least six weeks of the summer months.
To do this, Gordon also felt it necessary to establish leadership of the conferences and suggested that he be named their director.
This would mean that I should have to have power to go ahead and organize it, selecting a chairman for each week. I realize that if I am to do this, I must do it so as to guarantee no expense to the section or to the society. I believe it might be helpful in this work, if I were made director of the summer session. It is beginning to become a proposition to handle it as secretary to the section, without some other title, for I shall already have under me at least six chairmen to carry out this work.
Yet in the April 1948 dedication ceremony that officially named the Gordon Research Conferences in honor of their founder, Gordon accepted the honor modestly and characteristically deferred credit for the conferences’ success.
I am accepting this honor in the name of the men who have participated in the conferences because of their cooperation, and hope that I may have the privilege of working with them in the future to do what little I can so that the conferences may be much more successful during the next ten years than they have been during the past ten years.
Gordon’s retirement as director of the conferences in 1947 did not put an end to his efforts to improve the state of chemical education and professional development opportunities for chemical researchers and educators. As chair of the Wayne University chemistry department, Gordon established the university’s first doctoral program. He also succeeded in creating the Kresge-Hooker Library, a large collection of chemical texts originally compiled by the industrialist Samuel C. Hooker. During this time Gordon was also busy directing a lecture series called Frontiers in Chemistry as part of an academic course at Wayne. The series was soon published in a two-volume set called Advancing Fronts in Chemistry. The volumes’ prefaces by Sumner Twiss and Wendell Powers echo the principles established by Neil Gordon for the conferences at Johns Hopkins:
There is a special need for the correlation of recent and diverse experimental information... This series of lectures is, therefore, an attempt at such a correlation, presenting as it does the unified concepts of certain phases of the polymerization problem as they are understood and interpreted by various experts in the field. (Twiss, 1945)

It has been [Gordon’s] aim in securing lectures for this course, to invite specialists from the industrial as well as the academic chemical field, who are actively engaged in the development of certain fundamental branches of chemistry. (Powers, 1946)
Behind the early years of the conferences was the support and idealism of Neil Gordon, in whom intersected a powerful combination of sheer determination, fund-raising and networking skills, and a passion for chemical education. This concurrence of traits provided an incredible momentum to the Gordon Research Conferences that has carried them through to their seventy-fifth year and beyond.