"Worst Kind of Troublemaker"

See Cover, Thinking about the invitation from the dean of the Yale Law School, the 24-year-old instructor at Columbia University hardly knew what to make of it. Apparently the eminent dean, of whom he had scarcely heard, had taken some interest in an article the instructor had written touching on the law of evidence. Anyhow, it was a chance for a notable meeting that the young philosopher had no intention of missing. Putting on his most sedate black suit and black hat, he set out for New Haven to call on the distinguished gentleman who should, he thought, turn out to be a man of 60 or so.

He felt a little foolish bustling down the street all dressed in black on that hot day in 1927. But he felt more foolish still when he saw the tall young man in tennis flannels who opened the door of the dean's house.

"Is Dean Hutchins in?" he asked. "I'm Hutchins," replied the young man in flannels. "Come in and tell me what you know about the law of evidence." From that meeting on, Philosopher Mortimer Adler was to learn a lot about the dean--and so was the rest of the world. Out of their acquaintance was to come a challenge aimed at everything that many U.S. colleges and universities had come to hold most estimable: spreading campuses, more & more courses, a steady stream of glossy new facts. The sharp question that Hutchins was to put to U.S. higher education (in the loudest of voices): What shall we do with the facts? Robert Hutchins got his chance to make the challenge just two years later. At 30 he became the "boy wonder" president of the University of Chicago. Not long after, he invited Adler to come out and be a .professor. "I'm the president of a great university," Hutchins announced to Adler at lunch. "But I haven't thought about education." "Me either," said Mortimer. "I'm a philosopher." The only thoughts he had about education, he went on to say, had come from Columbia's John Erskine, who had taught a general course in "the great books" of Western civilization. Adler thought Hutchins should begin reading them too. "He broadly hinted," Hutchins said later, "that the president of an educational institution ought to have some education. For two years we discussed these matters, and then, at the age of 32, my education began in earnest." The Order of Goods. The education of Robert Maynard Hutchins parallelled and sped a slower re-education of the U.S. itself. Confronted by vast problems and vaster confusions which burgeoned after World War II, the U.S. lived face to face with a gnawing question: How can Western civilization, with all its mastery of production, science and the material world, keep from coming apart at the seams?

The pragmatists, who had had a vast influence over education in the U.S. for many decades, held to their basic proposition that men must study the facts at their command, test them in the light of science and their own experience and plan their conduct accordingly; it was up to each generation to decide for itself.

In such a world, as Hutchins saw it, education had been split into specialized fields in which chemists could not speak to lawyers and hardly anyone was speaking to God, in which everything was a matter of opinion and each opinion was as important as every other. "It has become the fashion," he once told his students, "to be bewildered."

What should be the content of education? Hutchins' answer was simple: there is a kind of knowledge that transcends time & place; there are absolute values such as Truth and Justice, and they can be found by modern man, especially by studying what the great minds of the past had to say about the constant problems of mankind. The purpose of education, he held, is to train minds to be free, not chaotic, and free "because they can understand the order of goods and can achieve them in that order . . ."

In the battle of Facts v. Ideas, Educator Hutchins had taken the side of ideas. This did not mean that he rejected facts. This week he marked his 20th anniversary at Chicago, the university had reached a height in science (i.e., the pursuit of facts) such as it had never achieved before. But Hutchins thoroughly intended that students at Chicago would be equipped to make a sound search for the truth about the facts.

No Votes. It had taken quite a while for the U.S. to make out what Bob Hutchins was really driving at. One of the explanations for that lay in Hutchins himself and in the way he went about his job at Chicago. "I have no idea of revolutionizing it overnight," he announced at the beginning; but he soon seemed to be doing just that. "Why are you in such a hurry?" a professor once asked him. Replied Hutchins: "No successful president ever did anything to a school after his first five years."

For a while it seemed as if he might not last even that long. In the midst of the furor that followed, one dean guessed that if they had ever voted on the matter, nine out of ten professors would have voted to oust him. But somehow, the vote was never taken.

No Speeches. On his 20th anniversary there would be no elaborate festivities for tall (6 ft. 2 in.), trim, greying Bob Hutchins. "If there is one thing I hate worse than a long introductory speech," he snorted when his trustees offered to give him a dinner, "it is a lot of long introductory speeches." Instead, he went about his business as usual, filling his own house with the clack of his typewriter at 6 in the morning and working through the day in his bright white-walled campus office, which a battery of clerks outside take pleasure in calling "God's Office." The only thing he had consented to do was to write a report entitled The State of the University ("Down the Hill with Hutchins," he calls it), a faithful and not particularly modest account of his first brilliant and stormy 20 years.

Otherwise, there were the usual conferences and brief interviews; and as always, the stack of "reading-for-tonight" papers on the floor mounted to the toppling point. At 50, Robert Hutchins was slightly mellower in manner. But he could still get excited--now puffing a Fatima and pacing about, now plumping himself down in an easy chair to declaim across the room. Long ago, he had made up his mind what the ideal university should be. He thought Chicago was beginning to show signs of becoming one. "It is not a very good university," he said recently, in typical Hutchins-ese. "It is simply the best there is."

"A Real School." By Hutchins' own provocative standards, Chicago was. Anyone else might have been given pause by the fact that such universities as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and California, not to mention Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne, also existed. Actually, Chicago had been jostling about among the first four or five U.S. universities for quite some time.

Under its first president, William Rainey Harper, the school that John D. Rockefeller had founded in 1891 with a $600,000 gift (and which John D. had originally thought of as just a good Baptist college) became a first-rank university almost at birth. As its grey, Gothic-style buildings sprang up on Chicago's dreary South Side, notable minds had nocked to it: Philosopher John Dewey, Economist Thorstein Veblen, Archeologist James Henry Breasted. It was a place of exciting research, fired by the spirit of scientific inquiry and by the yeasty pragmatism of John Dewey. "The result is wonderful," exclaimed William James in 1903. "A real school and real thought. Here [at Harvard] we have thought, but no school. At Yale, a school, but no thought. Chicago has both . . ."

In a way, Robert Maynard Hutchins was a complete anomaly in such a place. It was true that the trustees wanted a young man with ideas, but they hardly expected him to advocate a reversal of everything the university had seemed to stand for. To them, he was simply the extraordinary young man who had been made acting dean of the Yale Law School at 28 and had done so well that Yale made him full dean.

In his baggy Brooks Brothers suits and gay cravats, he could charm Chicago hostesses when he wanted to. But he was also irrepressibly flip. Asked what he thought of Yale, he replied: "Compared to Chicago, Yale is a boy's finishing school." Asked what he thought of Chicago, he said: "The faculty does not amount to much, but the president and the students are wonderful." When he prepared to testify before a committee of the Illinois legislature (after Drugstore Tycoon Charles Walgreen had charged that his niece was being taught Communism at the university), Trustee Laird Bell offered to pay Hutchins $25 for every wisecrack he didn't make.

Or Simply "Nuts." He was a brilliant man who could read a page at a glance and had a passion for German novels. He was also a man in a hurry, and his letters --"Dear Flash: I do. Sincerely yours ...; Dear Reuben: i. No. Ever yours . . .; Dear The Central Administration: By God I am. Sincerely yours . . ."--added to the legend. "Stop bothering me," he would scribble across a memo. More often his comment would be a simple "nuts."

In class, where he gave a special course in the Great Books with Mortimer Adler ("The Great Bookie," he calls him), his abruptness was less humorous. He was impatient with foolish answers. "That's lousy," he might say, or he would pull his glasses to the tip of his nose and shoot out a withering look. To most students, he was simply a tall, imperious figure sometimes seen striding down the Midway with his coat slapping in the wind. But they saw him so seldom that he once scheduled a speech to the senior class "for the sole purpose of dispelling the rumor that I do not exist."

Farewell to Football. Many educators began to think that he did exist for the sole purpose of stirring up trouble. He seemed to sneer at everything, from the B.A. degree (that protector "of an archaic and disintegrating collegiate organization . . . given at the wrong point for the wrong reasons") to football. "There are two ways to have a great university," said he. "It must either have a great football team or a great president." In 1939, intercollegiate football vanished from Chicago.

Hutchins examined U.S. education and flatly declared it aimless. The eight-year elementary school and the four-year high school, he thought, had no better reason for existing than that Horace Mann had admired the German system and had talked the U.S. into copying it. He lambasted the U.S. university for trying to be too many things that it should not be--"an athletic establishment, a health resort, a vocational school and a place ... to acquire the social graces." He scorned its welter of research ("the microscopic study of Byzantine mosaics to determine their age and lineage by looking at their teeth, as it were . . ."). To him, U.S. education was not only "unintellectual but anti-intellectual as well"; universities had become, not beacons of light, but mirrors of confusion.

Facts v. Ideas. One day in 1933, Robert Hutchins stepped from his office to address a university convocation. "We have confused science with information, ideas with facts, and knowledge with miscellaneous data . . ." he cried. "As the Renaissance could accuse the Middle Ages of being rich in principles and poor in facts, so we are entitled to inquire whether we are not rich in facts and poor in principles." Then, as he went on to explain his ideas of what the higher learning should be, his listeners began to grow restless. Shortly after, civil war broke out on the campus.

It seemed to many faculty men that Hutchins was suggesting, not a re-evaluation of science's role, but its complete abolition. In his envy and admiration of the unified thought systems of Plato, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, it seemed he was suggesting a return to some similar kind of orthodoxy. To many of Chicago's professors and most of its students, such orthodoxy was the worst kind of heresy.

For months the Facts v. Ideas battle raged; hot & heavy arguments echoed through Chicago's classrooms and corridors. Social Scientist Harry D. Gideonse (for Facts) carried on a running debate with the editor of the university's Maroon, posting his arguments on a bulletin board, like news flashes from the front.

Past v. Present. As time passed, the Chicago Fight earned the university various tags--"Chicago Thomism," "Aristotelianism on the Midway," the "Return to the Middle Ages." Some professors, including Gideonse and George Mead, head of the philosophy department, resigned. One hundred and nineteen members of the academic senate signed a manifesto protesting Hutchins' views. Professors began calling him "Saint Robert of the Midway." >A new song was sung: "Should auld Aquinas be forgot. . ."

Meanwhile, beyond the Midway, other educators chimed in with protests. To John Dewey, the split between Hutchins and himself was "the cleft that now marks every phase and aspect of philosophy. It presents the difference between an outlook that goes to the past for instruction and for guidance, and one that holds that philosophy . . . must pay supreme heed to movements, needs, problems, and resources that are distinctively modern."

To Hutchins, the greatest need of the present was a broad, unified education that would train men to think importantly alone, but also to talk wisely together. For 20 years, that has been his mission at Chicago.

Bastard of Arts. The first steps, taken over his first years, called for a complete reorganization of the university under a resolution passed by the trustees to permit "experiments in education."

"You can't do it," an assistant exclaimed when Hutchins first explained his plan.

"But it says right here we can conduct experiments in education."

"You'll never get away with it," sighed the assistant.

Hutchins was sure that he could. Chicago set up a college that was to give a basic liberal education by the end of the sophomore year. Students who wanted to specialize thereafter could do so in the university. Instead of a hodgepodge of electives, there were only four main course divisions--the social, physical and biological sciences, and the humanities. Since students differed in ability, Chicago decided that they should be free to attend class or not and to go as fast as they wanted. All they had to do was to pass a set of broad examinations given, not by the teachers, but by a board of examiners. Thereupon, on the basis of achievement rather than "time-serving," Chicago decided they should get their B.A.s.

The notion of awarding a B.A. after sophomore year scandalized the rest of the educational profession. On the University of Wisconsin campus the Chicago B.A. was called the Bastard of Arts. The Association of American Colleges and the American Association of University Women "deplored" it. It was, recalls Hutchins, "an alltime high in educational deploring."

In spite of the deploring, however, the Chicago Plan worked. Though free to stay away, students flocked to classes where no attendance records were kept and no grades given. Gradually, the Great Books were worked into the courses, until this year they are 75% of the reading for the B.A. It was not all that Hutchins could have wanted, but it was close--an education not of books about books, but one which places ideas over facts, firsthand knowledge over secondhand interpretations, theory over practice.

"The reason Chicago is as good as it is," says Hutchins, "is that the faculty is of high quality and they are talking to one another." The talking goes on beyond the college. Courses in philosophy, psychology and economics have found their way into the law school. In the graduate schools, such degree-granting committees as the Committee on Human Development straddle all fields of knowledge.

Kant & Coffee. Today, around the yawning Stagg athletic stadium (57,000 seats) where intercollegiate football is no longer played, life at the University of Chicago spreads out through streets that look more like suburbia than a campus. Among the quadrangles 9,000 students in tweeds, sport shirts and bandannas pass to & fro.

Says a clerk at the university bookstore: "Any week we are asked for the most popular writer, I can answer Aristotle and have no doubts." Chicago is a place where Kant and Comte make coffee conversation -- "One of the few places," says one coed, "where you can make a philosophical reference and have it understood." In dormitory bedrooms students listen to Bach on their record players with an "Ah, Bach" air. Other student favorites are Beethoven and Dixieland jazz; Chicago's students tend to scorn Tchaikovsky and bebop alike. They think of themselves as tense & intense, and perhaps more than most college students they feel that they are more at home away from home. "I get lonesome when I go home," grumbled one husky undergraduate. "There is no one to talk to." But such isolation does not last long. In jobs, or in advanced work at other universities, their record stands up to that of any other group of college graduates, whether they have made their B.A.s in the standard four years or in the unconventional Chicago way.

Chicago is still a place of noted names (among them: Charles E. Merriam, dean of U.S. political scientists; Psychologist Louis L. Thurstone of aptitude test fame; Italian-born Philosopher-Critic Giuseppe Borgese). But under Hutchins, the natural sciences have flourished as much as the beloved classics. During the war, Chicago was picked as the headquarters of the U.S. Government's $2 billion atomic-energy research program. There, in the caverns of Stagg Field's west stands, the first nuclear chain reaction took place.

After the war, Hutchins decided to keep such famed physicists as Harold Urey and Enrico Fermi on the staff, today is completing three new research institutes, one for nuclear studies, one for metals and one for radiobiology and biophysics. Without the money on hand, he followed a favorite formula of his: "Get the project underway, demonstrate its usefulness, and then put the bite on donors." He is now out to raise $12 million, get industries to subscribe for $20,000 yearly memberships in the institutes besides.

Beyond these matters, Hutchins' chief interests are his old ones. He is helping to sponsor a project, with Mortimer Adler at its head, to compile a giant index of the Great Books--a learned cross-file of all the great ideas the great minds have ever voiced. Meanwhile, as a result of brisk promotion by the university-organized Great Books Foundation, adult education classes in the Great Books are becoming a nationwide middlebrow vogue. Hutchins himself teaches one class of prominent Chicagoans (known as "The Fat Men's Course"). There are 50,000 other people hashing the books over, too, from Chicago's swank Union League Club to the Detroit House of Correction and the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala.

Cucumbers & Cheese. "It's not that I know much about education," Hutchins once said just before launching into one of his attacks, "it's that I know nothing else." The son of a Presbyterian preacher1 who was also a professor of homiletics (pulpit oratory), he has been around & about colleges all his life. He spent his boyhood on the campus of Oberlin College, with its "two little red buildings crumbling away upon its corners" and its roads of yellow clay. It was the "hottest, coldest, wettest, flattest part of the state of Ohio," where life revolved about his father's class, the long hours in chapel, and the fact that, in Hutchins' sophomore year (1916), Ohio State beat Oberlin at football, 128-0.

Later, kindly father Hutchins became president of Kentucky's Berea College, but by that time young Robert had gone on to Yale. In 1917 he had joined the Army ("The manual of arms is not a great book"), won the Italian Croce di Guerra for being "poisoned by a can of sardines," then enrolled in the Yale Law School ("No case book is a great book"). At 24 he was secretary of Yale University, at 26 a lecturer at Yale Law School, at 28 a full professor and dean.

Last spring Robert Hutchins married his former secretary, petite, pretty, 31-year-old Vesta Orlick (he was divorced from his first wife in 1948). His new marriage seems to agree with him (he quipped: "I think I'll try it every year"). He now likes cooking (including baked cucumbers & cheese), and, after years of pretended disdain for outdoor exercise ("I believe in it for others"), fishing.

Budgets & Books. Over the years, the self-perpetuating board of trustees of the University of Chicago has grown accustomed to wincing every time Robert Hutchins opens his mouth (he once suggested that all universities be burned down every 25 years lest they get into a rut). But he is a crack administrator who has seen $86 million raised for his university, and who seems as much at ease with Chicago's great budget (almost $39 million) as with its great books.

The nation has also grown accustomed to him. Other educators, too, have become dissatisfied with the free elective system that Harvard's Charles Eliot began and that Hutchins so effectively denounced. In 1945, with the publication of Harvard's report on General Education in a Free Society, that dissatisfaction came to something of an official climax. Today, many U.S. colleges now require their students to take a broad general curriculum, in their freshman and sophomore years. It is not a curriculum of Great Books, which most educators still regard as a slightly romantic notion (though many schools, e.g., M.I.T. and N.Y.U., have a Great Books elective). But at least the idea of a basic and common education had become the fashion. Could Hutchins claim the credit? Says he: "There is nothing new in talking about a liberal education. There are traces of it all over the map, all over history." What he had done was to give it the sweeping approval of a great university while many another topflight school was only nibbling at the idea.

He had also done something more. "The academic administrators of America," he once remarked, "remind one of the French Revolutionist who said, 'The mob is in the street. I must find out where they are going, for I am their leader.' " Hutchins' idea of an administrator's job was different. Since the days of the great Chicago Fight, Hutchins, as perhaps no other university head of his time, has brought the basic issues of education into the open forum. "The worst kind of troublemaker," says he with vast approval, "is the man who insists upon asking about first principles." It is that sort of trouble Robert Hutchins has been making for the last 20 years.

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