PHILOSOPHY IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS

XIX FALL 2012 No 2

Robert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 – May 17, 1977)

HUTCHINS OF CHICAGO

Part I - The Daring Young Man•

Milton S. Mayer

I

university president is supposed to go downtown and get the A money. He is not supposed to have ideas on public affairs; that is what the trustees are for. He is not supposed to have ideas on education; that is what the faculty is for. He is supposed to go downtown and get the money.

The trustees may use the money to buy residence halls, stadiums, and chapels. The faculty may use the money, if there is any left over, to buy brains. The president, in the pursuit of his low occupa- tion, must belong to the best clubs in town and agree with all the members. He must make speeches about the advantages of a col- lege education in the great game of life. He must stick to those foggy platitudes which have been tested and found good. And he 2 must not rock the boat.

There have been—and there are—university presidents who defied the tradition and rocked the boat. They have not been numerous. They have not been popular. William Rainey Harper was known, according to his own testimony, as a despot; and the official histo- rian of Harvard says of Eliot that at any time during the first fifteen years of his tenure both the faculty and the overseers would have voted against his continuance by a large majority. But it is men like Harper and Eliot who have advanced American education.

In the office of the President of the University of Chicago there sits with his feet on the desk—a man who gets the money and rocks the boat and has ideas continuously. In appearance he compares favorably with a Greek god. His classic profile—which he didn’t get by reading the classics—melts into a dark smile as readily as it hardens in stony disdain. His well—proportioned six-feet three adapts itself just as easily to the true Yale swagger. as it does to the terrible stature of a Moses. And though he gets no exercise—or perhaps because of it—he grows no less handsome with the years. If he had been only a nice boy he might have become the most glit- tering representative of a calling whose chief characteristic is the stuffed shirt. He might have whiled away a few years at Chicago— he was thirty when he took office—and then gone on to higher things, say, the chairmanship of the policy committee of a great national party.

But Robert Maynard Hutchins is not a nice boy. He is a natural- born stem-winding hell-raiser. What Henry Adams predicted of Wilson may be predicted of Hutchins at any stage of his career— that “he will quarrel with everybody at once, and especially with his friends, if he has any.”

As the product of a long line of New England preachers, Hutchins might reasonably have been expected to spend his life raising hell with the Devil. But when he was ten years old he saw his distin- guished grandfather, conducting a Memorial Day service, get down on his knees and show the backsliders how Abraham Lincoln prayed. Little Robert gagged at that. He gags still at emotionalism, and that includes the emotionalism that is overflowing the world today. So he turned out to be a different kind of trouble-maker.

First he lit into the Yale Law School, where he was called in as dean, at the tender age of twenty-eight. His highhanded zeal shook the ivy to its roots. When a professor whom Hutchins considered mediocre tried to get a raise by telling the dean that he had been 3 offered a place at Harvard, the dean grabbed his hand and said, “Harvard’s gain is our loss.” Chief Justice Taft is said to have warned a member of the Yale Corporation that the boy would wreck the place. But what had once been a pale imitation of Har- vard’s became, in two years, one of the outstanding law schools in the country.

As a university president, Hutchins began by raising hell first with one aspect of education, then with another, and finally with every- thing and everybody. As the hoar of age settled upon him he be- came more willful and cantankerous, as old men sometimes are. Today, at forty, he is the most dangerous man in American educa- tion. And there is reason to believe that unless he is stopped where he is he may yet become one of the most dangerous men in Ameri- can life.

In the midst of serious discussions about serious things he is heard to mutter something about the end being the first principle. Mean- while the University’s football team, short on ends and backs alike, is being shoved all over the lot, and those alumni who are celebrat- ed for normality are agreed that the old school is finished unless they get rid of Hutchins. He’s been muttering for ten years now, and the University has gone to pieces: look at the football team.

The world moves faster, faster. Progress is everywhere. Everybody has an automobile, a neurosis, and a gas mask, marvels unknown to primitive man. But the president of a great modern university sits at his desk muttering about first principles, last ends, moral virtues, and rational animals—mummery long since discarded for science, technology, the air raid, and the goon squad. A man so immersed in unreality should never be left alone.

Fortunately, he never is. When he isn’t attending a donor in labor, he is meeting a faculty committee and snarling, “Professor, when you accuse me of monkeying with the medical curriculum you lie in your teeth.” Or he is downtown at the Chicago Club, telling the boys he is not a Communist. Or back at a faculty meeting, telling the boys he is not a Fascist. Or hiring the President of Czechoslo- vakia. Or trying to hire the President of Harvard.

When he came to Chicago, he was informed by a trustee that there was a Professor Douglas on the faculty “who ought to be lined up against a wall and shot” because he defended labor unions. Hutchins replied that inasmuch as he himself had defended Sacco and Vanzetti there would have to be at least two in the line. The trustee decided that age would soften the boy. The faculty, likewise 4 assuming that he would outgrow his zeal, adopted the Chicago Plan with almost no discussion. But both groups were sadly be- trayed.

The trustees are still inclined to hang on to Hutchins because he goes downtown and gets the money. They don’t understand his methods; they don’t understand how, on occasion, he can get away with telling a fractious donor of $25,000 that “donors of less than $50,000 are not allowed to open their heads.” But they do under- stand the results; in nine years of depression Chicago has taken in $52,000,000—a haul exceeded only by Harvard’s and Yale’s.

The faculty is still inclined to hang on to Hutchins because he spends the money for education and carries the torch for academic freedom. In the past decade Chicago’s position as one of the coun- try’s greatest universities has been more than maintained. Its pro- fessors breathe the freest air on earth—or a shade or two freer, it would seem on the basis of recent incidents, than Harvard’s, Co- lumbia’s, or Yale’s. And it is one of the few institutions that has cut administrative salaries without cutting faculty salaries.

Not all of the trustees are entirely happy. There was the time Hutchins insisted on bargaining with a CIO union just because there was a law. There are his published references to the Child Labor Amendment, “which will deprive the little ones of their Constitutional right to mine coal.” There are his gratuitous insults to the great lawyers of the Liberty League, “to whom we are in- debted for the discovery that the Wagner Act was unconstitution- al.” There was the celebrated crisis when Hearst, the Chicago Tribune, and the financial community ganged up on the University for sedition, and Hutchins looked squarely at the millionaire front- man for the attack and said, “Those who have made these charges are either ignorant, malicious, deluded, or misinformed.”

It is said that had Hutchins’ few friends among the trustees allowed the question to come to a vote during the “Walgreen investiga- tion,” he would have been forced to fire the “seditious” instruc- tors—which he wouldn’t have done—or make way for someone who would. But a year later the misinformed millionaire gave the University $550,000, and the trustees are still wondering who was crazy. They fight the President on his “Rooseveltian finance,” since he maintains the crackpot theory that education, unlike other investments, should not adapt itself to a falling market. But they let him run his University his own way.

Or, rather, they let him try to. 5

II

Hutchins’ way is not the popular way in American education. And except for a few alterations in method and structure, the University of Chicago continues to be run according to the popular way in American education and not according to the educational program proposed by its president.

One of the reasons why American universities are chaotic today is that they are so organized that the faculty can’t run them and the president mustn’t. The higher learning, like the automobile busi- ness, has expanded in the past half century. Yale’s endowment was $5,000,000 in 1900 and is $100,000,000 today; Chicago’s faculty has increased 60 per cent in the past ten years alone; but the organ- ization of the American university still rests on the assumption that the place is small enough for all the members of the staff to know all about it and to pass intelligently on the problems of any part of it. The most powerful members of any faculty are usually famous for scholarly specialization, but theirs is, by “democratic” tradition, the administration of a general institution.

Honest professors, like other honest men, sometimes suffer from hardening of the vested interests. The university president who re- gards the departmental system as responsible for the disintegration of education cannot expect the co-operation of very many depart- ment heads. The university president who interferes with admin- istration, meddles with the curriculum, and says right out in public that every great change in American education has been secured over the dead bodies of countless educators, is on the very face of things a would-be despot.

So the education that Hutchins proposes is not in operation at Chi- cago. His college curriculum, the heart of which is the study of great books from Homer to Freud, has been laid before the college faculty three times and has been rejected. Nor, contrary to misrep- resentation, has he sneaked his notions in the back way; of more than five hundred appointments he has made, exactly four were “Hutchins men,” and two of these are gone, while only one is a full professor. The illusion that Chicago is a Hutchins institution may account in part for the increase in enrollment. It remains an illu- sion.

Hutchins did, to be sure, succeed in putting into effect the Chicago Plan. But the Chicago Plan—which eliminates compulsory class attendance, reduces residence requirements, and to some extent 6 substitutes general examinations and general courses for the gener- ally abominated credit system—was not Hutchins’ idea at all. Lib- eralization of method has long been the keystone of Progressive Education; and, before that, of the educational system advocated by Plato. Hutchins’ contribution was to do something about it at the college and university level, where the idea had been kicking round without a taker. Nor are his proposals for structural reform revolutionary. It is an old notion, and one which is now held by the National Education Association, that the last two years of elemen- tary school be combined with the first two of high school and the last two of high school with the first two of college. Hutchins’ de- mand that this last unit constitute a college education available to every boy and girl has long been materializing haphazardly in the rise of public junior colleges.

But method and structure are incidental to the Hutchins program. “We cannot solve our problems by teaching the wrong things the right way.” The repository of “the wrong things” is the curriculum. It is here that Hutchins is the enemy of both great groups in Amer- ican education. There are, first, the Old Hats, who, since they are in the saddle, do not bother to argue. They rely upon the heroic in- ertia of American education. They want the content to remain as it is. This means, with thirty thousand curriculums in operation to- day, no general content at all. There are, second, the Young Turks, who want education to “identify itself,” in the words of Young Turk George M. Counts, “without reservation with all those liber- ating forces and movements which have marked the advance of the modern era.” To those who may object that any such commitment will bind education to a partial world view, the Young Turk replies that education will be only “defending itself.” Reading his morning paper, Hutchins is not entirely convinced that the modern era has advanced. But he is sure that an education built on “defense” in- stead of the search for truth will be no more education than the program of the Manufacturers’ Association.

Now the President of the University of Chicago is a reformer and holds the world’s record among university presidents for being called a Communist. But he believes that if education is to reform it must do so by giving the future citizens a picture of all human experience in society so that the citizens will be able to figure out for themselves whether or not the reforms proposed by a Huey Long are really reforms. The Young Turks may know all the an- swers, but until they achieve that direct contact with Omniscience at present enjoyed only by a few European politicians we shall not want to commit the young to their care “without reservation.”

7

Great books, in which the experience of man has been considered by great minds, are the heart of college education in one institution in America. Two years ago Hutchins accepted the board chairman- ship of St. John’s College at Annapolis and encouraged Stringfel- low Barr and Scott Buchanan to leave Chicago and take the presidency and deanship of the ancient Maryland school. The pat- tern for the great books course at St. John’s was John Erskine’s at Columbia in the ‘20’s, with Richard McKeon and Mortimer Ad- ler—the two Hutchins men still at Chicago—among the original instructors. The course has just been revived at Columbia in abbre- viated form, and is compulsory for all freshmen.

Hutchins’ university program is in operation nowhere in America. He would have the university—beyond the present junior year of college—open to every boy and girl who had demonstrated capaci- ty for research or professional work. Philosophy would permeate and unify the faculties of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

“Ph.D’s,” says Hutchins, “might even be doctors of philosophy,” As long as vocationalism dominates the higher learning the univer- sities are safe from Hutchins. They are safe also as long as Hutchins calls philosophy “metaphysics,” Though “philosophy,” like “metaphysics,” is a horrid word, it at least survives in the ver- nacular, where it means (1) what to do when your wife elopes with a prize-fighter or (2) the vermiform appendix of a modern universi- ty, where maunderers try to erect ideas with the broken bricks of language. But “metaphysics,” so one of Hutchins’ opponents in- forms us, is the basis of current education in Germany, Italy, and Russia.

If Hutchins’ program is so remote from materialization why is eve- rybody so excited? What makes a one-man cavalcade a menace to our sacred institutions?

III

In the first place Hutchins seems to be lucid and he seems to be concerned with important matters. Few men in or out of education ever seem to be both. His brief statement of his position, a series of lectures bound as The Higher Learning in America, is a veritable Gone with the Wind among serious educational treatises; it has sold 8,500 copies. His series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, a sort of Higher Learning on a lower level, produced more mail than any similar non-fiction the Post had ever published. Where educators usually write parochially and nearly always inar- 8 ticulately (Justice Holmes said that John Dewey wrote “as badly as possible”), Hutchins examines education from top to bottom, and he writes some of the sharpest prose in America.

In the second place he has—in the words of one of his more gallant opponents, Dean Clark of the Yale Law School—raised the discus- sion of education from the trivial. The impact of his coming, if it has done nothing else, has revealed the ankle depth of previous ed- ucational reformism. The reformers had all been brought up on Watson and Dewey. They differed as to whether Progressive Edu- cation should begin at three or five, or whether Latin and Greek, since man was an aggregation of sensory motor integrations with- out any intellect to train, had any “transfer of training” value. Amid this palaver Hutchins raised an ancient and fundamental question: “What are we trying to do?”

In the third place, though he seems to write lucidly and certainly writes simply, Hutchins is not easy to understand. He uses words and ideas that have been in the discard for centuries. Social and physical scientists, on being told that philosophy will illuminate their work and unify their purposes, are at once resentful; they didn’t ask to have their work illuminated. But more than resentful, they are puzzled by the abstractions involved. It is not an over- statement to say that professors are not all philosophers, nor will it require an affidavit to confirm the report of a conversation in which a distinguished scientist recently said: “When those boys start talking means and ends and all that stuff—that’s where I walk out.”

Some of these uneducated specialists—the term is Hutchins’— simply make no effort to understand; they eventually decide that they don’t like the fellow for some extrinsic reason, or they let the whole thing drop as a lot of harmless chatter. Others, however, feel, without knowing that Socrates felt it before them, that they are under the duty to inquire. They turn to the educational journals. There they find an occasional Hutchins supporter, but he too uses abstractions. The opposition writers are much more numerous and their line is much more palatable. They use terms like “reality,” “progress,” “adjustment,” “democracy,” and “authoritarian.”

It is at once clear to the uneducated specialist that Hutchins is a fascist, or something. An expert on Fascism said that “to be grand- ly vague is the shortest route to power,” and Hutchins’ abstractions sound very grand, and, to those who are meeting abstractions for the first time, very vague. Things become complicated at this point, for the Hutchins who sounds like a fascist is the same 9

Hutchins whose defenses of freedom of thought and expression are, in the words of Dean Clark, “noble additions to our priceless heritage of human liberty.” Dean Clark revolves the apparent con- tradiction without resolving it: “Hutchins does not fit into brackets anyhow.”

Not all of those who attack the “paradox” are as frankly baffled. The object of their analysis, in addition to sounding like a fascist and acting like a democrat, is a very irritating fellow. He is brusque. He is cryptic. He is arrogant. He needles the educational fraternity with such expressions as “Please do not tell me,” “I in- sist,” and “I shall not be attentive.” His way of saying things is so annoying that good men cannot keep their minds on what he is say- ing.

This goes far toward explaining his reputation for extremism. When he says, for instance, that “the truth is everywhere the same,” people break out in a cold sweat. A line like that, torn from its context, has terrifying implications. Hutchins either believes that his audience knows that he is talking about speculative as op- posed to practical truth, or that they will take the body of his writ- ings together and find the answer there. Either way, he is naive. “Truth” has a meaning in philosophy, and educators are not phi- losophers. And as for taking the body of a man’s writings together, that is usually done after the body of the man has been laid away.

Hutchins is cursed with a dogmatic disposition and he knows it. With Mortimer Adler he conducts an undergraduate course in the history of ideas, and the same bright student who at one moment is warmed by his magnetism is, at the next moment, frozen when the mighty man says, “You have favored us with a stirring oration; now tell us what it means.” Hutchins, conscious that his manner has been characterized as “baby-baiting,” says to the stammering scholar, “Don’t let me intimidate you.” The scholar stammers harder than ever, recovering his equanimity only when the profes- sor has left him pinned to the wall and has passed on. Intimidation is in the nature of the beast, and there is nothing he can do about it.

That doesn’t mean that the students don’t like him. They worship him because, being young and ardent themselves, they go for a stand-up guy. And he returns the compliment. “The faculty,” he says, “does not amount to much, but the president and the students are wonderful.” The student body was at first disgruntled because it never saw the man. He once addressed the senior class, “for the purpose,” he told them, “of dispelling the rumor that I do not ex- ist.” But they soon began to take a proprietary interest in all his 10 shenanigans, and today the typical bull session at Chicago, instead of being 60 per cent sex and 40 per cent football, is no more than 55 per cent sex, somewhat less than 20 per cent football, and at least 25 per cent Hutchins.

But his colleagues in the academic world are not so easily won. When he addresses them, and he does it on every platform, he is so cold, so sure, and so cocksure that some of the thinner-skinned among them find it hard to resist the temptation to call him names. “Fascism” is the new American devil word. The unphilosophical educator who reads about “Hutchins’ rationalistic, authoritarian ends” registers on authoritarian without measuring rationalistic against, say, Hitler. Nor is the unphilosophical educator likely to analyze the discovery by President Cowley of Hamilton College that “Hutchins’ theories are so bad that even the Nazis threw them out:’

Men who talk like that are innocently or mischievously serving confusion. Undiscriminating citizens, some of whom are profes- sors, fasten upon loaded terms like “Fascism” and “Communism.” They forget that men who cannot, or will not, consider ideas use epithets. Such men may be interested in stampeding the crowd or in maddening their adversary. Those who, knowing Hutchins’ rec- ord, talk about Fascism may know the temper of their audience, but they do not know the temper of their opponent. Hutchins scorns hysteria, and those who exploit it by calling him a fascist will not have the satisfaction of hearing him reply in kind.

Making faces and calling names are of course irrelevant to the is- sue. They would be unimportant were it not that they tend to de- base a dispute which is serious in itself and, as central to education, of the first importance to the national life. The American people are not very happy. They are losing faith in education, along with everything else. But it is not Hutchins’ kind of education that they are losing faith in. If the man has nothing to contribute to the cure of a sick profession and a sick society he ought to be exposed. If he makes sense, he ought to be listened to.

IV

There are issues above the “Fascism” level, and Hutchins is trying to bring them to debate. The two men who gave American educa- tion its present character are Eliot, the father of electivism, and Dewey, the father of progressivism. Eliot and Dewey reacted against the sterility that developed just before and after the turn of the century when education tried to pour the traditional classical 11 curriculum down the throats of the newly admitted millions of young people who were not going to go to college and were sent to school to learn a trade.

Hutchins recognizes the sterility and says so. He suggests simply that the deathbed of one monster may have turned out to be the childbed of another. We started by throwing the sterility out of ed- ucation and wound up by throwing out the education. He proposes a swing from the anti-intellectualism which now monopolizes edu- cational practice, a swing to an education which will avoid sterility by preserving the advances in method made under Eliot and Dew- ey; overcome vocationalism and serve the common good by providing a general education at the college level for every boy and girl; and restore intellectualism by recalling from the store- room the accumulated wisdom of the race.

Until Hutchins’ advent the likelihood was remote that American education would move in our time toward the mean which partakes of the good in the two tried and unsuccessful extremes. Hadley took Hutchins’ position thirty years ago; but he was such a nice, mild gentleman that nobody listened to him. Hutchins’ rhetoric is violent; it takes more than sweetness and light to break up a mo- nopoly.

The schism between Hutchins and his critics appears at a suspi- cious point in the debate. Hutchins holds that his program is the inescapable corollary of his analysis. He says that if, as he be- lieves, American education is suffering from confusion, specializa- tion, and anti-intellectualism, it must shift its emphasis to integration, generalization, and intellectualism. His opponents— including Dewey—agree with the diagnosis. They disagree with the cure. They have offered no cure of their own beyond prescrib- ing for the dying patient a few more hairs of the dog that bit him.

The educational world has to subscribe to Hutchins’ analysis be- cause its accuracy is self-evident. In the past ten painful, if unillu- minating, years it has become increasingly clear to everyone who went through the American educational system previous to and during the era of Permanent Prosperity that something serious was wrong. An education that prided itself on being “practical” instead of “theoretical” produced a populace incapable of solving practical problems. It continues to produce “practical” young men and women. We know that our children, like us, are not well educated, that they do not read books, that they are contributing bewilder- ment and distraction to a world bewildered and distraught.

12

We may, perhaps, judge the efficacy of American education by the criteria of two of Hutchins’ adversaries, Dewey and Whitehead. “Abstraction,” says Dewey, sounding remarkably like Hutchins, “is the heart of thought: there is no other way … to control and en- rich concrete experience....” “Fundamental progress,” says White- head, sounding remarkably like Hutchins, “has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.” How many college graduates are concerned with abstraction or know how to be? How many college graduates are concerned with basic ideas or know one when they see it? Under these doleful circumstances, it seems fair to insist that these educators who proclaim education a failure take a more impressive position than the barber who confined his efforts to lathering.

Every educator since Erasmus has promised us that education would transform the world. Education must accept at least some of the credit for the tragically transformed world we have today, or it must admit that it has been taking society’s money on false pre- tenses. Whatever the shortcomings of Hutchins’ proposals—and they may, if he ever gets round to producing more than a prospec- tus, contain every sin that is alleged against them—it would seem that education owes something to the man who awakened it to its plight, even though in doing so he felt himself compelled to nudge it with a meat axe.

V

From the age of eight, when his father became a professor, until four or five years ago, Robert Maynard Hutchins confined his cru- sading to education. There was one interlude; he helped win the War To End War and received the Italian Croce di Guerra for be- ing poisoned by a can of army sardines. But education was his spe- cialty. When he came to Chicago he refused to take a position on the depression, the League of Nations, or the American Girl; he would talk about education, but nobody was interested.

In June of 1932, he slid down the banister of the ivory tower and appeared before the Young Democratic Clubs, meeting prior to the Democratic National Convention. Speaking as “a rapidly aging young man,” he characterized the history of the Republican Party under Hoover as “a history of inaction, bias, and misrepresenta- tion,” and presented his audience with a 500-word platform for the Democratic Party, a platform that included all the rational aspects of the unborn New Deal—tariff reduction, government regulation (“if necessary, governmental operation”) of monopolies, increased inheritance and income taxes, government reform of banking (if 13 necessary, “elimination of the motive of private profit from bank- ing”), farm allotment, unemployment insurance and old age pen- sions, public works (“including the elimination of slums”), and federal relief.

Not a donor or a trustee peeped; those were the dark hours when the business community was completely engrossed in prayer. Two months later he flung a still stiffer challenge when he told a ship news reporter, “I am not a socialist, but if neither major party makes itself any clearer on vital issues I shall vote for Norman Thomas.” Hutchins was out in front now, and it was great sport. When, early in 1933, as regional chairman of the first National La- bor Board, he found for a striking bus drivers’ union, a Chicago newspaper called him an accomplice of Communists and murder- ers.

His hands full of educational reorganization at Chicago, he seems to have realized, about this time, that he was on the way to doing everything and getting nothing done. He pulled into his hole and once more confined his activities and utterances to education. Mr. Roosevelt offered him the commissarship of NRA; he remained at Chicago. Hutchins as a possibility for public life was fast forgot- ten. His brilliant battle for academic freedom focused public atten- tion on him briefly, and Mr. Hearst, who believes that if you can’t beat ‘em you can buy ‘em, proceeded to offer him a job. The Rockefellers kicked in with three million badly needed dollars for the University’s general purposes, reputedly a reward for Hutchins’ generalship against Hearst and the rest of the nightshirts. Even his own faculty forgave their oppressor. When the Illinois Legislature exonerated the University of sedition but demanded the retirement of the saintly Robert Lovett, James Weber Linn called Hutchins and said, “Bob, if the trustees fire Robert Lovett you’ll get twenty resignations from the faculty within twenty-four hours,” and Hutchins replied, according to Linn, “I won’t get them; my successor will.”

There was still time for Hutchins to have ingratiated himself with his faculty and with the educational profession. Relations were strained, but not quite to the breaking point. His opponents knew— though they might not say—that he had not diverted the University from science to philosophy—or to his philosophy. Chicago, under Hutchins, had recovered and surpassed its early eminence in half a dozen sciences, and the philosophy department had been elevated from mediocre to excellent by the appointment of men whose thinking was antipodean to the President’s. Besides, the Chicago Plan, though it sounded ferocious, hadn’t really done anybody any 14 harm. The only actual reorganization had been that of the law school to include such alien subjects as history and ethics, and no- body wanted to argue that ethics had nothing to do with the prac- tice of law.

The opposition had not yet crystallized. Hutchins could have given himself and education one of those “breathing spells” we some- times read about in the newspapers. He could have abandoned candor for compromise on the pretext that, after all, it was the practical thing to do. He could have set out to woo the faculty with the wit that has given him the reputation of being able to ignite a dinner table at forty yards. A few visits to the faculty club, which never sees him, would have helped. He might have winked at a few promotions that neither he nor the deans regarded as merited. He might have ignored tobogganing interest rates and raised salaries, and the normal rule against shooting Santa Claus would certainly have prevailed. There isn’t a doubt that if he had left education to the alumni and philosophy to the scientists and directed all his transcendent gifts to shaking down the rich, the campus of the University of Chicago would in time have extended from Memphis to Duluth and Hutchins would have become the Lord Plushbottom of American education.

That was the course indicated, the course known quaintly as “con- solidating previous gains.” But Hutchins believes that a university president has from five to ten years to get something done. If he stops while he can still budge, he will never get started again. In 1930 the faculty adopted the Chicago Plan in twelve minutes. Each succeeding reform came slower and harder. Last year Hutchins was stopped; the natural sciences division abolished comprehen- sive examinations. The vested interests had finally regained their feet.

Had he cultivated three or four key men in faculty politics, the bat- tle could at least have been postponed. There are a few distin- guished faculty members who would go down the line for him, but they are not the politicians. Holding, with Aristotle, that man is a rational animal, Hutchins insists on reasoning with men. He will reason friendlily; he isn’t an ogre. But he will not lobby. Though he cannot, for the life of him, divest himself of his inordinate charm, he balks at kissing babies or professors. He prefers to lose a fight rather than win it by mesmerism. His political “It” he saves for those who are already with him, a small and weirdly assorted group extending all the way from Felix Frankfurter in Cambridge to Alex Woollcott in New York and Bill Douglas in Washington.

15

There are men who are moved to good deeds by bad dreams, and with some such men a money-raiser must deal on their own level. These men do not, however, claim to be devoting their lives to the search for truth. Professors are supposed to be different. They are supposed to be learned and idealistic and objective; it is a neces- sary tradition, because it alone protects education from the whims of politicians and business men. Hutchins will not seduce men who identify themselves with this tradition. He will not ask them to do what he regards as the right things for the wrong reasons.

It is not alone that he doesn’t want to. He hasn’t the time. He is the hardest working man on his campus. Every minute of his day, from eight to five, is consumed by the routine of administration and pocket-picking. He has to go downtown for lunch every day, three or four evenings a week go to donors or visiting firemen, and on these occasions Hutchins curses the destiny that put him into edu- cation.

His nights are the only time he has for reading, and in addition to keeping up with current books in every major field, he is trying to justify his right to teach the course he gives on the history of ideas. “I have the education of a sophomore,” he says only half ironical- ly, “and all the education I have, I got after I started teaching.” Why should he go to banquets or entertain the faculty? He will not see that this self-sufficiency—not to mention the self-sufficiency of his sculptress wife—is an affront to a genial and far from stupid university community. The gossip which follows aggravates his isolation. The third or fourth time he rejects a professor’s invitation to dinner or bridge the professor concludes that Hutchins is a snob. The transition from this conclusion to the enemy camp in educa- tion is not impossible.

A cold zealot, this man, and a most untheatrical evangelist. The son of William J. Hutchins of Berea College in Kentucky is a born moralist, and the brother of Francis Hutchins of Yale-in-China is a born missionary. But, though his platform manner is grave and ministerial, he will not moralize and he will not preach. (Thornton Wilder has written his epitaph: “Here Lies a University President Who Never Used the Word ‘Ideals.’”) He tells his Commencement audience that he is sure they have learned in college—which, of course, they haven’t—that there is an order and proportion of goods whereby man may achieve a degree of contentment even higher than the cow’s. It is all dispassionate, somewhat sarcastic. Yet beneath the stony surface, safely repressed by a constitutional mind, a legalistic training, and an intellectual contempt for flam- boyance, there burns the “dogmatism and intolerance and insin- 16 cerity of the Pilgrim Fathers” that George Augustus Sala found be- neath the burlesque humor of Lowell.

Here, however, is no ordinary Puritan, who knows he is good and shows it. Here is a revolutionary whose disposition to rebel never atrophied but hardened into habit: the result, possibly, of the fact that wherever the young man went and whatever he did, he was constantly reminded that he was very, very young and must some day settle down. What Hutchins dreads most for himself and for the nation is the moral and intellectual “settling down” that comes with the consuming ambition to be a good fellow.

Now Hutchins never had to worry about being called a good fellow by educators. But outside of education he was beginning to be looked upon, especially after the Walgreen gusher came in, as a good business man. His friends say he was haunted by the prospect that he would walk into a board meeting one day and find all the trustees agreeing with him. So, along about 1936, with the sirens whispering to him to layoff the rough stuff and feather his nest, he extended his challenge from education to the whole world and the things it honors.

He did not descend to the streets with a bread-knife. That tech- nique has been tried before and to date has produced a long line of Napoleons. He turned his attention to the principles of human ac- tion, to man’s exclusive and rational capacity for being moral and practicing morality. Hutchins did not come upon philosophy all of a sudden. He had been nibbling at it ever since his deanship days at Yale, where he was proudly running an anti-philosophical law school. The psychology of the law led him to the philosophical Ad- ler, who was then at Columbia, and Adler led him to McKeon, Bu- chanan, and Barr. Hutchins possessed uncommon philosophical sense, though he’d had no formal training; and when he came to Chicago he was already beginning to learn how to think.

VI

As his educational reforms met opposition at every turn and in eve- ry quarter, the rapidly aging young man began to be impressed by the circularity of education and society. He found that education was devoted to the love of money because American life was de- voted to the love of money; that the schools could not be reformed as long as the society they served worshipped the god of utility and regarded moral values as fit not for practical men of the world but for convicts and poets; that so long as society saw salvation in a rising market, education would not concern itself with the ancient 17 pursuit of truth for its own sake and virtue as its own reward.

This discovery by our permanent revolutionary coincided nicely with the growing conviction everywhere that, in spite of our mod- ern marvels, society was going to the dogs. Skyscrapers and streamliners and shortwave broadcasts, far from providing emo- tional security, left the citizenry frightened and confused. Won- drous techniques for production, distribution, and communication seemed to be serving Hitler instead of his victims. An age that prided itself on its preoccupation with reality found itself faced with a reality in which barbarians had seized the tools of progress. A world that had scorned the best of the past found itself reviving the worst.

So Hutchins, taking all this to be the result of man’s denial of ra- tionality, lifted his voice with Milton’s and cried, “Dark, dark, dark! amid the blaze of noon.” He saw a crashing world trying to solve its problems in the same pragmatic tradition that created them, everyone calling for action, action—and as every action worsened man’s lot, the wheel of injustice spun faster. “Faster, faster,” said the Red Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” And Hutchins en- tered the arena of philosophy with the same embarrassing question he raised in education: “What are we trying to do?”

His answer will be considered in next month’s HARPER’S. But before we learn what Hutchins holds out for the future, we may ask what the future holds out for Hutchins.

When his friends suggest that he develop his philosophy more completely and knock his opponents for a loop, the President of the University of Chicago snorts and inquires how a man can become a philosopher incidental to being a corporation president, a travel- ing salesman, a trained seal, a high priest, and a police matron. The place to develop a philosophy is a cave.

But the life of action is hard to resist. Even on the sordid level at which the rest of us live, Hutchins has been more than moderately successful. His method of insulting everybody is strangely effec- tive in a world of backslappers. He is one of the country’s most notorious money-raisers, and he receives approximately 1,000 speaking invitations a year. He may not have made friends, but he has influenced people.

If, then, he remains in education and abandons the life of contem- plation, he may at last succeed in intimidating the higher learning. 18

He will never have to leave Chicago; but he wants to get things done, and he will never get things done at Chicago. (He once told Westbrook Pegler that universities ought to be conducted in tents and torn down every twenty—five years.) Where, in education, can he go? There are other universities, but if (as Hutchins once told a newspaper publisher in confidence) Yale is a boys’ finishing school, the field is narrower than it looks. There is no more emi- nent presidency than Chicago’s because—Cambridge papers please copy—there is no more eminent university.

What he probably itches to do is to start a university of his own—if he could only get the money without getting what goes with it. His proposal to merge Chicago and Northwestern—rumors are about again, though negotiations collapsed two years ago—does not in- terest him in connection with his own career but because he re- gards the structural reform of education as important. Not, however, as important as the development of a content. And if the Chicago faculty won’t alter its curriculum it is doubtful if the fac- ulty of any other existing institution will.

If he were interested in making money, or if he believed that mon- ey-changers could be reformed, he would have taken the presiden- cy of the New York Stock Exchange, which was offered him when the Exchange discovered that everybody had discovered that Rich- ard Whitney had been careless. “What they want Bob to do,” said a friend of his, “is to sing psalms to the yokels while the boys go through their pockets.” Hutchins declined.

His name has persistently recurred in connection with the last three Supreme Court vacancies. His invariable statement on all such ru- mors is: “I am not interested in public life.” That is not hard to be- lieve; he has been shying from political office since he was thirty, when he declined the Democratic nomination for U. S. Senator from Connecticut. But then there is the inevitable circularity be- tween education and the state that weighs upon him these days: the people get the kind of education they want, and they must be per- suaded to want something different. They cannot be persuaded by a philosopher; they might be persuaded by a philosophical states- man.

His reputation for stiff-necked integrity is rapidly becoming a leg- end. Last December he resigned as a “representative of the public interest” on the board of the New York Stock Exchange, in protest against the refusal of the Exchange to investigate the ethics of Whitney’s confidants in Wall Street. Here was a fellow, it ap- peared, to whom “the public interest” meant the public interest. 19

The spectacle of a man who cannot be used by anybody has had reverberations in curious corners. General Hugh Johnson long ago demanded that Hutchins head a committee of Solomons to “find out the facts” about everything that everybody alleges is right or wrong with the country. The Sinclair Lewises have both nominated Hutchins for President. But that any such glamorous possibilities will ever come to pass is doubtful, for Robert Hutchins specializes in being a minority man in a majority world.

Should the time ever come when the American people develop a distaste for soft soap, they may find a use for a man like Hutchins. They may not have figured out his metaphysics, but they may in time be impressed by the behavior of the metaphysician. As long as American educators see no connection between “real life” and the moral virtues of the Greeks, the American public may likewise be mystified. But there is nothing mysterious about a record of mo- rality that extends without a break from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Stock Exchange.

It is a little difficult, however, to picture the rational animal of Ar- istotle promising the citizens $31.50 every Thursday or anything else he knows he can’t give them. It is not easy, indeed, to picture Robert Maynard Hutchins campaigning on any platform. He would be afraid that somebody might vote for him.

Part II - The Flying Trapeze

20

I

Robert Maynard Hutchins has brought nothing new to philosophy and education except a good profile and a bad rhetoric. And the fact that the President of the University of Chicago is thought to be an innovator is evidence that he is right when he says that the pre- sent is unacquainted with the past.

The young man’s profile cannot be argued. But his way of saying what he means involves such violence and hyperbole that the effect on most people ranges from flat misunderstanding to gaseous con- fusion. Simple and direct, his language nevertheless requires trans- lation in an age which is hearing a philosophical barker for the first time.

The pillars of his philosophy are two. He is arguing (1) that man is a rational animal and (2) that philosophy is knowledge. There is nothing new in that position; it was argued by Socrates and the Sophists.

To say that man is a rational animal is to say that man can think; that, so far as we know, he is the only animal that can think ab- stractly; that, further, he is the only animal whose irrationality can be held against him. To say that philosophy is knowledge is to say that the rational animal can generalize from his experiences; and that from such generalizations arise principles of action by which the individual can guide his life and judge his fellowmen.

Hutchins proceeds to suggest that education should develop the student’s reason and pay some attention to the principles of human conduct. At this point the young man’s idea of an educational sys- tem begins to take form.

The first object of Hutchins’ proposed higher education is the de- velopment of the rational powers, and this is achieved through the cultivation of the liberal arts of reading, writing, and speaking. (This is what the bad rhetorician means when he talks about “grammar, rhetoric, and logic.”) The special object of Hutchins’ proposed college—a unit composed of the last two years of the present high school and the first two years of college—is the transmission of the accumulated wisdom of the race, scientific as well as philosophical, to the entire adolescent population, and this is achieved through the study of human experience as it has been examined and recorded from age to age. The special object of his proposed three-year university—open to those who have shown capacity to proceed to specialization—is the study and develop- 21 ment of the natural sciences, the social sciences, literature, and the arts, the students and workers in each field to see the relation of that field to the others in the light of philosophy. The prospective physician, for instance, would emerge from medical school (at the same age he does now) knowing not only how to save other peo- ple’s lives but what to do with his own.

This emphasis on man’s rationality and the obligation of education to develop man’s rational faculties has aroused the complaint on a wide front that Hutchins would have education devoted wholly to the intellect, to the neglect of the “whole man.” To the “whole man” school the reply must be made that Hutchins has character- ized man as a rational animal—partly rational and partly animal. “The question,” says Hutchins, “is a question of emphasis.” He has made this point in every speech and in every paper, but his oppo- nents are still producing tracts under such titles as Intelligence Is Not Enough.

If we are talking about emphasis, and not about exclusion, it is ob- vious that the “whole man” needs to be educated. It is also obvious that he is not being educated under the present program. “I ask you,” says Hutchins, “how many colleges and universities are there to which you could say in good conscience, ‘What you need is a larger and more expensive athletic program, more and gayer fra- ternities and sororities, and a larger proportion of schools and courses of a directly vocational kind’?”

“Whole men” would seem to be men who had acquired—among other things—the capacity to think and to think about serious mat- ters. There are numerous institutions which educate the young physically and socially. The schools need not neglect these aspects of education; they do need to emphasize that aspect of education which no other institution emphasizes—the training of the mind.

It may be pertinent to suggest that the President of the University of Chicago is flagrantly intellectual and philosophical, and at the same time gets along with his wife and his friends, balances budg- ets and juggles donors, manages a large corporation, drinks and eats with satisfaction, tells very funny stories, and conducts him- self firmly and successfully in practical and political affairs. Hutchins is a “whole man” and will wrestle anyone in the house for a quarter.

“But,” says one of his critics, “we are not all Hutchinses’. This raises the question: how many young people are competent to mas- ter the books round which the Hutchins college program is built? 22

Hutchins points out that ordinary children mastered them at the University of Paris in the 13th century and in New England and Virginia in the 18th. The classics—an odious word in the 20th cen- tury—are the heart of the curriculum at St. John’s College in An- napolis, of which Hutchins is board chairman, and an unselected group of Maryland boys is not only mastering them but enjoying them.

Good books are not too hard for American adolescents, but an in- competent profession which has not read them does not know how to teach them; before they were given up altogether they were so stupidly taught that children turned truant to escape their terrors. Of course Bacon does not have the same natural fascination for the adolescent as does baseball, but the present tendency toward a child—centered curriculum presupposes that a child of six or even of sixteen knows what he ought to learn. What will happen to the child when he has to face the problems which didn’t interest him in school?

Those who would reduce education to the average instead of rais- ing the average are only a few steps removed from those who see salvation not in the training of the mind but in the regulation of the emotions. The opposition at this level is of two kinds. Some psy- chologists—amateur rather than professional—argue that reason, if there is any such thing, is wasted on neurotic children; it is neurot- ics, seeking security, who fall for demagogues; if education will only resolve the emotional difficulties of its charges, then every- body will be safe from Hitler. Closely related to this school are those who maintain that the answer to our Weltschmerz is the sub- stitution of good emotions for bad ones, a position which over- looks the fact that there is no emotion so good as that derived from burning down the house across the street.

The contention that neurotics succumb to demagogues is half the truth; neurotics and ignoramuses succumb to demagogues, and the mind is the only known enemy of ignorance. The world did not acquire its present horrors from devotion to the intellect. The man who has not been educated in the tradition of spiritual and intellec- tual independence, the man who does not know what men have sacrificed for freedom and why, the man who has not been trained to analyze what he reads and hears—this man is the meat upon which our Casars feed. “Fascism,” as Mussolini’s official philoso- pher says, “is war on intellectualism,” and it is not because intel- lectualism produces fascists.

One of Hutchins’ opponents finds that the best students in any uni- 23 versity are maladjusted, “brilliant but wretched.” Aside from the fact that this is the historic argument advanced against all educated men by those who oppose all education, may it not be true that young people who have actually acquired an understanding of men’s long struggle for freedom and dignity ought to be “wretched” in a wretched world? Jesus declined to do as the Ro- mans did and was notoriously maladjusted. Hutchins ventures to suggest that “there are some things in every environment to which no honest man should ever adjust himself.”

The child or adult who is actually tied in emotional knots cannot be expected to act rationally. But most children, whatever their emo- tional difficulties, are able to absorb the kind of education we give them today; most teachers, whatever their emotional difficulties, are able to transmit that kind of education. Hutchins simply wants the same teachers to give the same children a better kind of educa- tion.

The maladjusted child or youth is suffering from an affliction for which science is trying to find a therapy. But what can the schools do about it? Emotional difficulties are the problem, and the proper problem, for psychotherapy. After the maladjusted child has been adjusted—then what? He still has to be educated. He still has to learn to think and to think about serious things. He still has to face fundamental problems. Freedom from emotional difficulties, like any freedom, is not an end in itself, but a means to a higher end.

The mind of man, as De Tocqueville observed, runs naturally to practical things. Modern science has given us the practical things we see all about us, and science is the new religion. Colleges and universities seek—and get—endowments on the basis of their “useful” research. Philosophy pulls no teeth and ships no wheat, and the nature of justice may have to be studied with funds stolen from the student lunchroom.

It is easy enough to dispose of the skeptics who hold that philoso- phy is so much verbalism. Although language has been abused in the name of philosophy, language remains our only tool for com- municating things which cannot be seen or felt. That men utter philosophical concepts unctuously and emptily proves something about the men but nothing about philosophy. But that men who are held to be learned do deny the existence of philosophic knowledge or its parity with science is a fact, and it is a fact that, like all other facts, has to be explained. There are two reasons why philosophy, as it flourished from the Greeks to the pre-War Russell, is, so to speak, in the doghouse. 24

First, it never recovered from the hairsplitting and logic—chopping practiced by the corrupt scholastics of the Renaissance in the name of Aristotle. Blind to the naturalism that underlay the thinking of the Greeks, the scholastics of the 15th and 16th centuries were liter- ally verbalists and just as literally indifferent to experience and re- ality. Aristotle must have spun in his grave while his Renaissance disciples quibbled over his words.

Second, philosophy in its heyday committed the same gluttony as theology did and as science does today: it refused to delimit its field. Aristotle, Augustine, Berkeley, Hegel, Spencer—all of them “answered” questions philosophically which—it developed later— could be answered only by science. The scientists reacted natural- ly, claiming jurisdiction over wider and wider areas as their influ- ence increased; and the philosophers, weakening under the attack, turned anti—philosophical and, by and large, accepted the humble task of developing a philosophy of the scientific method, the cur- rently dominant empiricism.

“Science,” says one of Hutchins’ opponents triumphantly, “has a laboratory; metaphysics has none.” But when we carry the funda- mental problems of man and society into the laboratory we do not get the answers. If we deplore current developments in Europe and Asia it is not because we can prove them bad by any objective test, but because, however vehemently we may deny it, we are all phi- losophers, inveterate if rudimentary, making ethical and political decisions that lie outside of science.

Science, says Hutchins, tells us how to get wherever we’re going; it does not tell us where to go. “Men may employ science for good or evil purposes; but it is the men who have the purposes, and they do not learn them from their scientific studies.” If airplanes are good in themselves, and there are no goods above them, then we are doomed to live, or, more certainly, to die, in a world of Addis Ababas, Nankings, and Barcelonas.

The philosophical President of the University of Chicago is not as lonely as he was ten—even five—years ago. There are others who are beginning to discover that the “mastery of nature” is only a faithful servant, equally faithful in the service of liberators and of tyrants. No less a scientist than Birkhoff of Harvard, the retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, put the question to his fellow—scientists at their last con- vention: “Does it clarify our idea of social justice to try to explain it in terms of the reactions between the protons and electrons in the 25 brain?”

II

An educator who talks about the accumulated wisdom of the race, an educator who would have the college student study books that were written before the invention of the Ford, is suspected of ad- vocating a retreat to the past. What do we want with the past, any- way?

At a low level the argument runs: the past was a bad place, dark and savage, full of tyranny and war and outside toilets; thank God it’s gone. Hutchins’ opponents at a higher level maintain that the thinking of the past may have been all right in its time and place, but conditions have changed, and “philosophy needs to be remade into consistency with the situation.”

Some of his critics hold that the fact that Hutchins cites Aristotle proves something about Hutchins’ philosophy. It is not that Aristo- tle said something but what he said that matters. If we are looking for knowledge we must look for it wherever it may have existed, even if our search leads us to pagan Greece or the feudal Middle Ages. Whether or not it is knowledge is the only argument. If we insist on judging thinking by its dates instead of by its arguments we must expect our descendants to despise the thinking of Freud and Dewey because that thinking was found in a dark and savage world full of tyranny and war and the slaughter of women and children.

The popular notion that we don’t need the past because we have incorporated the best of it in the present is based on the fallacy that only the best survives. We have only to look about us to see that the best of justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence is forgot- ten. These virtues are the same today as yesterday, and if the Greeks were also subject to human vices, we can scarcely congrat- ulate ourselves for having preserved and advanced those vices. Every moral problem that might face any man in any age is found in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. “The ancients,” says Mark Twain sadly, “stole all our thoughts from us.” In The Nation of last October 8th Archibald MacLeish substituted the Czechs for the Melians, the Nazis for the Athenians, the British for the Lacedemonians, Prague for Melos—and 1938 for 416 B.C.—and published verbatim a section from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War.

These ancient problems are modern problems because men have 26 not changed fundamentally. Since we have to face these problems when we leave college, why shouldn’t we begin, in college, by finding out how men have faced them before, and with what re- sults? At the height of the 1935 Red Scare Hutchins made a stirring statement: “Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth. Some people talk as though they would like to visit upon the educators of America the fate which Socrates suffered. Such people should be reminded that the Athenians missed Socrates when he was gone.” Hutchins’ opponents in education rose to a man to cheer; they did not seem surprised, at the time, that Mr. Hearst and Colonel McCormick had not changed in twenty-four hundred years.

There was a time when the past was still thought to have some- thing to say to men who lived in the present and planned for the future. A few months ago Mr. Walter Lippmann picked up an ob- scure book on the education of the Founding Fathers and learned, “to my immense surprise,” that the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and led the American Revolution “had followed essentially a course of studies which comes down through the Middle Ages from the schools of ancient Greece.” The books that Hutchins wants the American college student to study come closer to the list that Jefferson handed to young Peter Carr than any read- ing course in America today.

Hutchins does not want to go back to Plato; he wants us to go for- ward, as practical men, toward Plato’s ideals. Those ideals were no more realities in Plato’s time than the realities of today are ideal. The general education Hutchins proposes utilizes the past for the sake of the present and the future. Its proponent is not a “classi- cist”; he does not care if Greek or Latin are taught or how many parts Gaul was divided into or whether Ulysses had a bag of wind. The children who in the last half century rebelled at being stuffed with dead heroics and dead declensions and drove the classics from education were righteous rebels deprived by incompetent teachers of the contemporary wisdom that lay untouched in the books they read.

Hutchins holds with every educator that education should be prep- aration for life. But the present is, and the future will be, built upon the past. The flux and variety and multiplicity of current phenome- na defy understanding as the trees obscure the forest. It is impossi- ble to duplicate in college all the singular experiences that the student will confront as a man and a citizen. But the kinds of expe- rience the student will meet, and the processes involved in under- standing and profiting by experience—these can be considered and developed in the few years that precede the practical pressures of 27 later life. Education, under the present circumstances, cannot pro- duce the good society, but it can do what is prior to the production of the good society: it can prepare the student to discriminate be- tween a good society and a bad society, regardless of circumstanc- es.

Hutchins is accused of wanting to regiment American education. Now we know that man is a social animal, and we know, from tragic experience, that if men cannot unite on common understand- ing they will unite on common ignorance or prejudice. It was not Hutchins, but Samuel Eliot Morison, who, in his Three Centuries of Harvard, asserts that Eliot, in establishing the elective system, committed the educational crime of the century. We have seen specialization and vocationalism run wild. We have seen boys and girls, who find no difficulty mastering enough “pipe” courses to get a degree, devoting their own time and their parents’ money al- most exclusively to “college life.” The elective system denies that there is such a thing as common understanding among men and common problems in society. It produces practitioners of trades, jolly good fellows, and doctoral dissertations on the bacteriological content of the cotton undershirt. These things are nice to have, but the world needs common understanding, and it will not get it from the colleges until the colleges abandon the false democracy that holds one subject matter as good as another.

It is, or should be, obvious that there is no regimentation in an edu- cation that includes Plato and Machiavelli, Dante and Milton, Marx and Adam Smith, and all the great minds that opposed one another, and oppose one another today, in fundamental problems of man and society. It should be just as obvious that there is no regimentation in a university unified by the search for philosophic truth when philosophy itself is not unified. Great minds have al- ways disagreed as to the truth in both theory and action; but they disagreed as to matters that they all held important and they carried on the controversy with common tools. The few who were educat- ed in ages past had learned how to learn; the many who are educat- ed today shed the pretense of learning with their cap and gown. The few who were educated in caves and porches were able to talk to one another; the many who are educated in “cathedrals of learn- ing” are not.

III

The complaint that all education was “unrealistic” and a waste of time was prevalent during the rise of higher education in this coun- try. The colleges answered the complaint by devoting themselves 28 to “realistic” education and demonstrating that their graduates were practical men who landed in the big money. Though we see all about us the tragedy into which practical men have led themselves and the world, education continues to devote itself to these popular ideals.

Real life certainly demands a minimum of material goods that is now denied a large proportion of the population. Hutchins does not suggest that we work and pray and live on hay, for he knows that starving men cannot be expected to practice the virtues. The ques- tion is, in life as in education, one of emphasis and ends. Education should prepare the young for jobs by making them intelligent men and women, not by stimulating the love of money. Freedom from hunger, like freedom from emotional difficulties, is necessary free- dom, but in man it is freedom to pursue higher ends.

If we want to improve society, says Hutchins, we need some con- ception of a good society in order to decide what improvement is. If we can know nothing, if we can only have opinions, then what constitutes a good society can be determined only by force. If there is only scientific knowledge, tentative and technical, if there are no values good for all men in all times and places, how can we im- prove society and avoid merely changing it? Henry Hazlitt, dis- cussing Dewey’s “insistence upon the importance of knowing where to put our feet for the next ten steps,” asks the critical ques- tion: “Unless we know where we want to go, or whether it is worth while going there, what is the point in moving at all?”

A democratic community must have common action on common problems. Since these common problems are difficult they cannot be understood by men whose reading ability is limited to the newspapers, whose efforts at writing are confined to office memo- randa, and whose achievements in reasoning begin and end with business matters and bridge. Common understanding of difficult problems is not the hope of democracies alone but of the democrat- ic spirit throughout the world. If the “reasonable man” in law has no existence outside the opinion of a jury we cannot quarrel with the decisions of German juries as to what “reasonable men” may or may not do to Jewish storekeepers.

Hutchins holds that man is a rational animal and that philosophy is knowledge. If there is such a thing as reason, and if men are capa- ble of rational activity, then men are fit to govern themselves. If there is no reason, men, like other animals, are irrational and must be controlled by force. If, further, there is such a thing as philoso- phy its very existence depends on a society in which men’s minds 29 are free; for philosophy is nothing more than an appeal to reason and it cannot be imposed on men without ceasing to be philosophy.

The end purpose of training the intellect is the development of a character that rests on something more secure than platitudes, early habits, or fear of punishment. If, as fascism holds, man exists for the state, then we need not bother with the character of the individ- ual. But if, as Hutchins holds, the state exists for man, we cannot make good states out of bad men.

IV

To say that Hutchins’ rhetoric is bad is to say that he does not suc- ceed in making himself understood. Perhaps it is because he does not try hard enough. Perhaps it is because he cannot find common terms to express uncommon notions. Perhaps it is because he will not “talk down” to his audience. At any rate, he does not succeed in making himself understood.

Hutchins is talking about emphasis, but educators who play largely by ear insist he is talking about exclusion. Dewey refers to “Presi- dent Hutchins’ complete neglect of the natural sciences in his edu- cational scheme.” But St. John’s College in Maryland, where the Hutchins college program is in operation, is the only liberal arts college in the country where four years of laboratory science are compulsory, and in Hutchins’ theoretical university the natural sci- ences are one-third of the curriculum. Another of his opponents—a member of his own faculty—says that Hutchins “insists that facts be completely excluded from college and university curricula,” though Hutchins has said repeatedly that facts, while subordinate to ideas, are indispensable to education and research.

The worst rhetoric in the whole argument is a definition that Hutchins snapped up from Aristotle: “Metaphysics is the science of first principles.” Fifty years ago Thomas Huxley clamored for the study of first principles of metaphysics. Whitehead has been deploring the neglect of “basic ideas” for forty years. For thirty years Nicholas Murray Butler has been saying that “the great thinkers of Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages sounded the depths of almost every problem which human nature has to offer.” Coming from Hutchins, these modest notions aroused the wrath of the educational world. “First principles,” “Aristotle,” and “Middle Ages” suddenly matured into fighting words.

Why? Because Hutchins was a university president who threatened to do something about it all. John Dewey became so excited that he 30 accused Hutchins of saying that “fixed and eternal authoritative principles are not to be questioned,” though Hutchins had never used those interesting adjectives and had indeed written that “the development, elaboration, and refinement of principles together with the collection and use of empirical materials to aid in these processes is one of the highest activities of a university and one in which all its professors should be engaged.”

Whence come these “first principles”? From Hutchins? From Aris- totle? From the current majority on the Supreme Court?

First principles come from human experience interpreted by rea- son. They do not come from something called “pure reason.” St. Thomas Aquinas (of whom Hutchins is correctly suspected of holding a high opinion) says that “a human concept is not true by reason of itself ... an opinion is true or false according as it answers to the reality.” If Dewey had remembered his Aristotle (of whom Hutchins is correctly suspected of holding a very high opinion), he would not have accused Aristotle’s local sales manager of “divorc- ing intellect and experience,” for Aristotle says: “Those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundation of their theories, principles such as to admit of wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.”

Since wise men, from Aristotle to Dewey, have been observing phenomena for several thousand years, the race should have by this time been able to formulate a few principles of universal applica- bility—their “firstness” lies in their universality—which might properly be used as starting points in the search for further specula- tive and practical knowledge.

Every exact science presupposes the existence of metaphysical principles of possibility and actuality, whole and part, substance and accident, and the like. Without uniformity in nature at least tentatively accepted, the natural sciences could not engage in ex- perimentation. Without the first principles of change, there would be no physics; without axioms, no geometry. The principles that science employs, metaphysics examines. The conclusions of sci- ence can be disputed only by science.

Neither Hutchins nor Aristotle nor Roosevelt can decree a first principle or by legislative fiat make it true or false. Aristotle con- cluded that the first principle of law—and most 20th century law- 31 yers at least pay it lip service—is that good shall be sought and evil avoided. Taken together with what is universal and enduring in the philosophical analysis of good and evil, this principle is violated by the Nuremberg Laws. The principle helps rational men decide where they should stand on the Nuremberg Laws, and the purpose of Hutchins’ educational program is to make rational men more rational.

May we, O Hutchins, have any new principles? We may. Are we likely to find any? In a new discipline, yes. In an old one, hardly. In the sphere of human affairs principles, after five thousand years, are likely to be pretty well established. May we look for new first principles? We may, though the philosopher, like the geometer whose student wanted to look for new axioms, suggests that we study the old ones first. Does the consideration of the first princi- ples prevent change or growth? We can answer that one ourselves if we take, for example, the first principle of political science: man is a social animal seeking the common good.

IV

Even more disastrous to Hutchins than the rhetoric of words is what might be called the rhetoric of circumstances. Hutchins wants to revive philosophy. Philosophy has been known to lead to theol- ogy. Does Hutchins’ philosophy lead to theology? And if it does— to what theology?

“We are a faithless generation,” says Hutchins, “and we take no stock in revelation. To look to theology to unify the modern uni- versity is futile and vain. If we omit from theology faith and reve- lation, we are substantially in the position of the Greeks. Since theology unified the Catholic universities of the Middle Ages and metaphysics unified Greek thought, Hutchins would seem to be more of a pagan than a Christian. But few of his critics have made this inference—the exceptions being Catholic educators and the Christian Century, which laments the fact that he does not propose to organize education “around the supreme reality of religious faith.” Most of his opponents are afraid that he proposes to do just that, and inasmuch as medieval philosophy plays a significant role in Hutchins’ thinking, his opponents, opposed as they are to the predominant political behavior of the Church Temporal, see the shadow of the Inquisition and a good man heading for Franco.

This intimation, though it seldom reaches print, is a favorite in ac- ademic gossip. It is motivated in some notorious instances by old- fashioned Kluxism, but it cannot be completely disposed of as con- 32 scious bigotry. In the first place, Mother Church is aggressive and has always been the bogey of non-sectarian education in America. In the second place, Hutchins’ interest in St. Thomas as a philoso- pher and explicator of Aristotle has attracted the favorable atten- tion of many Catholic educators and philosophers; and third, the man who is accused of “selling” St. Thomas to Hutchins is a full- blown Thomist philosopher and is widely—and falsely—believed to have been converted to Catholicism.

Mortimer Adler, like his friend Hutchins, is a political liberal and a “whole” man—and a devastating dialectician on the side. Hutchins found him at Columbia and brought him to Chicago, and, after some distress in the philosophy department, he landed in the law school, where the few men who know him admire him. Since he occupies no position of public prominence, since he is indifferent to admiration, since he is even harder-working than Hutchins and is never seen in university society, it has become fashionable, par- ticularly among ladies who swoon at the mere thought of Hutchins’ profile, to blame the latter’s shortcomings on that strange little man Adler.

One of Hutchins’ friends told him one day that “a lot of fellows say that this Thomism stuff is fascism,” Hutchins asked if his friend knew how the “fellows” came to associate the two phenom- ena. He didn’t, so Hutchins explained. St. Thomas was a Catholic; a majority of Catholics are supporting fascism in Spain; therefore Thomism is fascism. “I see,” said the friend. “No, you don’t,” said Hutchins; “there’s another syllogism you must hear. St. Thomas was a philosopher; the greatest living Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, who happens to be a Catholic, denounces fas- cism and fascism in Spain in particular; therefore Thomism is against fascism,” When the friend had laid the two syllogisms side by side, he said to Hutchins: “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Hutchins replied: “For the same reason I’ve never told you I wasn’t a snake-charmer; you never asked me,”

Hutchins holds, simply, that the fascism of some Catholic prelates in Spain or of some Catholic communicants in Jersey City is irrel- evant to the validity of Thomist or any other philosophy. If—you want to argue philosophy you will have to argue philosophy, and you do not argue philosophy by calling a Catholic a fascist any more than you argue democracy by calling a Jew a communist; what you succeed in doing is adding bigotry to a world that has just about enough. Al Smith was a Catholic when he reformed the State of New York and a Catholic when he joined the Liberty League. Hutchins says, privately, that it is not his fault if some 33

Catholics or all Catholics or no Catholics abandon the Catholic in- tellectual tradition. Half the modern books that Hutchins wants every child to read are distinguished by their presence on the Ec- clesiastical Index.

Hutchins teaches not only Aristotle and St. Thomas, but Plato and Darwin—and Dewey. You would never know it, however, to hear his critics. The notion that St. Thomas is a dangerous bird is held by almost everyone who has never read his works, a category which includes almost the entire adult population of the United States. The encyclopedia—any encyclopedia—says that Aquinas was one of the most important philosophers of all time, but he is not studied in non-sectarian education and he is not studied philo- sophically in Catholic education. When Hutchins and Adler or- dered twenty copies of a volume of the Summa Theologica for the honors course they teach in the history of ideas the university bookstore reported, a week later, that only eighteen copies were available.

St. Thomas was a theologian and a philosopher who held that phi- losophy and theology were separate and independent. He horrified his fellow—theologians by studying the writings of the Jew Mai- monides and by going to the infidel Moslems for their opinions, and his reply to the attacks that were made upon him within the Church was that he was seeking “the truth, wherever found.” As a Thomist, Maritain holds that capitalism and Christianity are in- compatible, and three of Adler’s graduate students, two of them Catholics and all of them radicals, are engaged in trying to recon- cile St. Thomas and Marx.

Hutchins is a Christian. (Congregationalist, I believe.) He doesn’t go to church. He tries to practice Christianity on week-days. It is possible that the world would be no worse off if public figures generally tried to practice Christianity. Religion, like philosophy, has fallen to low estate, and for the same reason: its name has been forged on bad checks. Lincoln Steffens observed that the less knowledge men had, the more religion; but he should have added: the more religion they said they had. If churchgoers whose divi- dends are produced by children inhaling lint and spitting blood in textile mills are gladdened by the rumor that the president of a great university is trying to interest the citizens in God, they should be reminded that he is also trying to interest the citizens in the Child Labor Amendment.

It can be argued, and not altogether irrelevantly, that in the four centuries of modern Europe, religion, which was once central to 34 what little civilization there was, has become a suffered institution in what little civilization there is. It can be argued, further, that the spread of learning in the intervening period has been great and the spread of morality small. It can be argued, finally, that men must have a religion, and if they cannot have a good one they will take a bad one. Faith that an automobile going eighty miles an hour will not throw a wheel may be a religion. Faith in communism or fas- cism or a million dollars may be a religion.

Science, failing to answer certain sublunary questions that rational animals have asked, leads to philosophy. Philosophy, failing to an- swer certain eternal questions that rational animals have asked, leads to the consideration of man’s last end. If a dynamic figure in American life should be found guilty of speaking with the voice of God, it might be well to remember, in fixing his punishment, that it is the voice of Caesar that deafens the world today. &

This article was originally printed in Harper’s Magazine in two parts. The first part appeared in March, 1939, pp. 344-355, and the second part in April, 1939, pp. 543-552.

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