Raymond Carhart and the “Gray Fox”

By James Jerger

This article is a part of the March/April, Volume 35, Number 2, Audiology Today issue.

From 1954 to 1960, I was on the faculty of Dr. Raymond Carhart’s audiology program at Northwestern University. These were the exciting formative years of our profession—years in which Dr. Carhart virtually invented audiology as we now know it. 

No one would ever have described Carhart as verbose; he was a man of very few words. When he came into the graduate student office, those of us with military experience silently came to attention. My fellow graduate student, Robert Harrison, who lacked a sense of propriety, often referred to Dr. Carhart as the “Gray Fox.” Harrison suggested that Carhart resembled the cunningly shrewd fox who lies in wait, quiet and motionless, and then, at the right moment, pounces on his prey. I thought about this as I walked to his office in response to his request for a brief meeting. What had I done wrong? One never knew. 

These brief meetings usually ended in a new graduate-student project, generally involving a good deal of subject testing, elaborate statistical analyses of the data, and development of the first draft of a paper based on our findings. In those days, we had just completed the execution of a five-factor analysis of variance on data gathered in more than 90 young adults with normal hearing. Deriving the necessary sums of squares with a manual calculator taxed everyone’s patience. We were not keen to undertake another such project.