Flexner, Abraham (1866–1959)

US educational reformer. After years of campaigning for improvements in the field of medical education, he became the founder and first director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a pure research institution, to which he recruited eminent scholars including Albert Einstein.

He was born in Louisville, Kentucky. After a 19-year career as a secondary school teacher he earned a Harvard A.M. in psychology (1906). His Carnegie Foundation report on medical education in the USA and Canada (1910) exposed the abuses of a profit-driven system lacking standards for students, curricula, or facilities. The report sparked a revolution in American medical education. While on the staff of the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, he made a further major contribution to medical education reform when he disbursed $50 million in funding for medical education, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars more to establish medical school research faculties. He also campaigned for improvements to secondary education and championed the German university model of intellectualism and research against the American vocationalism.