Trouble in Chicago

The purpose of the University is nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual and spiritual revolution throughout the world. The whole scale of values by which our society lives must be reversed. . . . [It is] the crusade to which we are called.

There was conviction in President Robert Maynard Hutchins' voice last winter as he addressed these words to his University of Chicago faculty. The well-dined faculty drifted home from the comfortable South Shore Country Club to the Midway, deep in thought. They kept thinking for three months while the speech remained off the record, a University matter. Last week it was clear that Hutchins' words had started a sizable rebellion in his faculty.

Last February six full professors signed a letter to Hutchins. To his ringing call for a crusade they opposed their relatively prosy conception:

"The [University's] function [is] advancing knowledge by freely determined research and teaching. We cannot see how the University could become an effective instrument ... of the revolutionary crusade . . . except by some kind of common institutional adherence to a particular analysis of what is wrong with the world . . . and ... a philosophically unified program of academic studies . . . that would serve as means. . . . We [ask you to] assure us that none of these apparent implications [of obligatory unity of thought] form any part of your practical intentions." Hutchins answered that he did not wish and had no power to enforce his aim on the University, but when he and his professors finished their interchange of letters, the six were still dissatisfied. They appealed to their colleagues, and 115 signed a petition to the Board of Trustees asking for assurance that Hutchins will not drastically alter the nature of the institution founded by John D. Rockefeller. The signers constitute a majority of the Senate, made up of the University's 180 full professors.

Ends & Means. Some of the means towards Hutchins' ends proposed in his country-club speech have since been reported (TIME, Feb. 28):

P: There should be a new University motto: Walt Whitman's line, "Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a new world."

P: Faculty rank should be abolished.

P: The faculty should be put on a full-time basis with "decent salaries. . . . They should be free to engage in any outside activities they like. To make sure that the ones they like are . . . good for them ... all their outside earnings [should go] to the University."

P: The President should ask faculty advice before making decisions but should make them alone and "take the consequences" of approval or of a no-confidence vote.

P: The Senate should be cut in size and elected by and from the whole faculty, not merely full professors.

P: A new Institute of Liberal Studies should train teachers of Hutchins-style liberal education based on the "100 best books."

Many Senators could see merit in one reform or another. Many sympathetically recalled Hutchins' achievements in the past: the abolition of football; revision of the examination and credit systems; defense of academic freedom from legislative attack and of academic salaries from depression cuts; general expansion of income, endowment and activities. But, objecting primarily to Hutchins' ends rather than to his means, the full-professorial majority decided to follow the original six.*

How to Think. When vacationing President Hutchins gets back from Arizona, he will doubtless assemble the Senate, for the first time in a year, to vote on the petition. Formal adoption would oblige him to present the petition to the Board of Trustees, headed by Packing Tycoon Harold Higgins Swift. Chairman Swift has been spending Wednesday evenings this year studying the "100 best books" under President Hutchins and Neo-Thomist Associate Professor Mortimer Jerome (How to Think About War and Peace) Adler. If the Hutchins-Adler pedagogical theory (the best books best teach readers how to think) is sound, this study will have helped student Swift to think about the knottiest problem yet raised by Hutchins' lively 15-year regime.

* Historian Avery Odelle Craven, Economist Jacob Viner, Economist Frank Frank Hyneman Knight, Zoologist Sewall Wright, Botanist Ezra Jacob Kraus, English Literature Professor Ronald Salmon Crane.

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