Pieb FALL 2012

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 became more willful and cantankerous, as old men sometimes are. Today, at forty, he is the most dangerous man in American education. 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 celebrated 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 understand 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 country’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.

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