Repairman

When Lawrence Kimpton, after only a year as vice president for development at :he University of Chicago, took over as chancellor in 1951, the academic world fixed a watchful eye on him. What could Philosopher Kimpton do that Robert Hutchins had not already done? Last week, when Kimpton's third annual report was published, the academic world found out that Hutchins' affable successor was a highly skilled administrator indeed.

In spite of Hutchins' brilliant--and often controversial--contributions to U.S. higher education, Chicago was suffering from some major aches when he left (to become associate director of the Ford Foundation). The campus was in danger of becoming an island in a sea of slums, and the whole area was plagued by one robbery and mugging after another. The university was also running in the red: except for a couple of years during World War II, it had not balanced its budget since 1938. Most ticklish problem of all was the fact that Hutchins' famed B.A. degree, given whenever a student, with or without a high-school diploma, could pass the necessary general-education requirements, had not been entirely successful. Other universities Were suspicious of it, and so were the secondary schools. As a result, undergraduate enrollments went down year after year.

In the Black. Kimpton knew that none of these problems could be licked overnight. The university had borrowed so much from its capital endowment that it was $3,000,000 behind in its repayment. Kimpton ordered his deans to slash their budgets 5%. He reduced his own secretarial staff from 15 to five, uprooted telephones all over the campus. Though he refused to cut faculty salaries, he realized that "you can't do the kind of hatchet job we're doing without its costing you something." He was forced to drop some research projects, could not always replace retiring professors. But by last week he was able to announce that in 1954 the university had ended up $74,000 in the black.

To stop the spread of slums, Kimpton helped found a special Southeast Chicago Commission. The commission hired its own lawyer, law-enforcement officer, building inspector. It helped to drive cheating landlords out of the area, sparked a whole series of neighborhood redevelopment corporations. Kimpton himself called on Mayor Kennelly and President Eisenhower, helped persuade the city, state and Federal Government to back a $30 million slum-clearance program. Among the new buildings now going up in the vicinity: a row of houses and a bustling shopping center, as well as the already constructed new headquarters for the American Bar Association.

Imaginative Flair. When Kimpton attacked the problem of the Hutchins B.A., some professors shook their heads in dismay. But the chancellor made it clear that he had no intention of throwing out the broad sort of program Hutchins had in mind. Today the university offers three plans to its undergraduate students, depending on how much specialization they want. They can 1) take three years of general education and one of specialized "tutorial study," 2) take two years of general education and two of concentration, or 3) combine their general courses with their major throughout the four years. One fairly certain indication of the new plan's success: last fall freshmen enrollments were up 40%.

For all these accomplishments, Kimpton realizes that the University of Chicago has lost much of the experimental glamour of the Hutchins era. Nor has he been able to replace such men as Physicist Enrico Fermi, who died last November, Psychologist Louis Thurstone and Sociologist Ernest Burgess, who retired, or Chemist Harrison Brown, Geologist F. J. Pettijohn and Physiologist Ralph Gerard, all of whom have gone elsewhere. Will Chicago ever again become as exciting a place as it used to be? The danger is, says Kimpton, "that you get so used to thinking in terms of retrenchment that you lose any imaginative flair." Kimpton's own summary of his first three years: "We have repaired our house, but our real task is to build a city."

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