Clear and Distinct

Ever since Robert Maynard Hutchins became president of big University of Chicago in 1929, he has enjoyed himself tremendously. He reduced the term of Chicago's undergraduate course from four years to whatever length of time a clever student might need to lope through it, ignored critics outside the University, passionately upheld the banner of academic freedom. Many a Chicago teacher, however, has been disconcerted by "Bob" Hutchins' exuberance, his insistence that colleges should present their students with "clear and distinct ideas."

Last week 37-year-old President Hutchins returned to Yale to lecture his alma mater on what ought to be done about U. S. higher education. In four addresses given under the Storrs Lectures foundation he declared that the nation's universities are not "coherent." They must be "strong enough and clear enough to stand firm and show our people what the higher learning is." Faculty members more interested in research than in teaching, he said, should be shunted off to special "research institutes," set free to explore "fundamental problems in metaphysics, social science, and natural science." President Hutchins also thought that universities in search of "clear and distinct ideas" might do well to revive the medieval schoolmen's trivium of rhetoric, grammar and logic, teach the young "the two most important elements of man as man, language and reason."

While their president was thus engaged at Yale, Chicago faculty men chuckled at a rare piece of pedagogical audacity in the International Journal of Ethics, ordinarily one of the University's most sober publications. In what began as an innocuous review of President Hutchins' recent collection of speeches, No Friendly Voice,* the Journal's Managing Editor Thomas Vernor Smith proceeded to give a critical analysis of his superior's aims and aspirations :

"The President has had only a few years to settle in his own mind the content of a curriculum for modern minds (and those years distracted by what would appear the heaviest administrative and public duties). . . . Where are the clear and distinct ideas? . . . The aureole of unity characteristic, or supposed to be characteristic, of an earlier time has caught the President's fancy . . . and he is out to save the world from bewilderment upon borrowed material. ... Do we want clear and distinct ideas or clear and fruitful thinking? ... I can myself make nothing of this nostalgic preference save a diverting chance publicly to perpetrate as education delightful dinner-table repartee. . . . To some men the world of fact is only a small place in which to eat, sleep, drink, sexualize and die. To others it is a place primarily for dialectical self-exhibitionism. If one really wants to make ideas simple, clear, and distinct, he need only narrow his sympathies so as not to see the points of view of others."

An explanation for Editor Smith's temerity is that while he is on the payroll of the University of Chicago as a full professor of philosophy, he has drawn a second salary from the State of Illinois since 1934, when he was elected to the State Senate by Chicago's Fifth District. Famed as a metaphysician (Beyond Conscience) and radiorator (University of Chicago Round Table), T. V. Smith is a tall, spare Texan of 46, who always weighs his words well, admits that his favorite book is the dictionary. Fellow legislators admire his eloquence, which he dismisses as ''just liquid vowels." When the Senate is in session, he commutes to Springfield in an automobile, likes to pause on the way to pass a quiet night outdoors in a sleeping bag.

*University of Chicago Press ($2).

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