sign in sign up
<<
Home , Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University

FOUR : Founders' Visions and Today's Reality

he mission of this journal has been defined by relatively recent devia- T tions from traditional standards in higher . But there is in- sight to be gained from broader perspectives, and from our contemporary vantage it is useful at times to remember those who christened our universi- ties and set directions for the American academic enterprise. The editors, thus, have enlisted teachers at four schools, Cornell,, Stanford, and the of Chicago, to look back and gauge how well those schools have realized the originating concepts of their founders.

Cornell University

Jeremy Rabkin: Professor, Department of Government, CorneU University, Ithaca, New York, 14853-4601.

Cornell is the only one of the "ancient eight" founded under the Ameri- can flag. When Cornell opened its doors in 1868, all of its sisters (as they would later be known) had already been training students for over a century. Harvard, Yale, and the others were founded by prayer- ful, anxious clergymen in precarious coastal colonies. Cornell was estab- lished in a very different America, a continental nation awash in new industrial fortunes, bursting with confidence-and impatient with hoary tradition. (So the Cornellian of 1870 bridled at characterizations of the uni- versity as "Mr. Cornell's experiment": "To be sure, we cannot look back upon a long and eventless period of years, bounded by a modest origin and equally modest prospects for the future...nor do we claim to be journeying in the old beaten road which education has followed since the days of the Humanists.") Ezra Cornell, a principal organizer of the Western Union telegraph em- pire, had set out to found a great university in his home town of Ithaca, New York. No one in that era thought it odd for a man of limited schooling to found a university in such a place-if he had made the fortune to fund it. In fact, the university's first president, , was able to real- ize Mr. Cornell's ambition almost overnight. With Ezra Cornell's financial backing, White simply went on a shopping spree, buying up libraries, art

Please address correspondence to Academic Questions/NAS, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540-2741; .

63 64 Academic Questions/Spring 1998

collections, laboratory equipment-and distinguished professors-sufficient for a great university. "It is easy to be liberal," Mr. Cornell remarked, "the only hard part is drawing the check." But while Cornell aspired to be ranked with the most distinguished older schools, it was always a different sort of institution. Unlike most older col- leges (and all of the other Ivy schools at their origin), Cornell was founded as an avowedly non-sectarian institution. It prided itself on its devotion to sci- ence and progress-and in its first decades was continually fending off at- tacks from suspicious New York clergymen. Cornell's founding vision was not disdainful of religion, but it was decid- edly impatient with sectarian dissension. Mr. Cornell's overriding concerns were practical. He persuaded New York State to devote its land grant funds to a state agriculture adjoining, and sharing facilities with, his own privately endowed liberal arts college. Cornell wanted to offer instruction in a range of practical subjects, along with sciences and the classical cur- riculum. The university's official shield still carries Ezra Cornell's resolu- tion: "I would found a university where any person can find instruction in any subject." Within its first decade, the university realized one implication of this pledge by admitting women students-one of the first major in the country to do so. But Ezra Cornell wanted to do still more to expand the university's reach. To make university training available to students from poor families, he proposed to establish a shoe factory and a furniture factory adjacent to his new university, where students could work part-time to earn their keep. He was with difficulty persuaded to abandon this scheme. Mr. Cornell also wanted to put a brake on collegiate snobbery by having students board with local families. Here he was more successful: in its first decades, the university of- fered no housing alternative (and still has nothing like the grand residential houses of some other schools). The founding vision provoked skeptical reaction from the outset. In En- gland, Matthew Arnold raised a refined eye-brow in the 1869 preface to Cul- ture and Anarchy: "the university of Mr. Ezra Cornell...seems to rest on a misconception of what culture truly is, and to be calculated to produce min- ers, or engineers or architects, not sweetness and light." But Cornell continued on its original program of combining practical stud- ies with more traditional fields of scholarship. In time, the College of Agri- culture was joined by state-funded colleges of Veterinary Medicine, Home Economics (subsequently renamed, Human Ecology), and Industrial-Labor Relations, while the College of Arts and Sciences was joined by privately endowed colleges of Engineering, Management, Hotel Administration, and Architecture, along with a law school and a medical school. Today, when the cost of an at the Arts College exceeds $100,000, the university may seem rather removed from the demo- Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 65

cratic and populist hopes of its founder. But the presence of the state divi- sions and the mix of different schools on the same campus certainly spares Cornell from the sort of precious or pretentious atmosphere of some older, liberal arts colleges. Cornell remains a place where sports and absorb a lot of student energy-along with libraries and lectures. For all its outstanding library collections, laboratory facilities, and Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, Cornell remains a place where respectable callings are respected. No one dares to mock the School of Hotel Administration- or dispute that its pre-eminence in its field is anything less than an honor to Cornell. In some ways, however, Cornell is different from what it was. Under the terms of the Morrill Act, Cornell was required to provide students with mili- tary training, and all male students received such training until well after World War II. The honor roll of Cornell casualties in the World Wars attests to the tradition, as Cornell launched a disproportionate number of officers into front line service (and over twenty generals in World War II). But A.D. White saw military training as much more than an insurance policy against future wars. He foresaw, as he noted in his Autobiography (1905), "serious internal troubles" in a rapidly industrializing country and thought it would be "a source of calamity, possibly of catastrophe, if the power of the sword in civil commotions [should] fall into the hands of ignorant and brutal leaders, while the educated men of the country, not being versed in military matters, shall slink away...and cower in corners." Today's Cornell still has a sizable ROTC program, but its administration is quite averse to using any kind of force against "civil commotions." When students took over the student union building in 1969-brandishing guns and ammunition belts to underscore their militancy-President James Perkins insisted that the university must give in to their demands rather than risk bloodshed. A quarter century later, in a comic replay of this tragic epi- sode, a much smaller group of unarmed Hispanic students took over the office of President Frank Rhodes, who immediately agreed to establish a special Latino House, despite his previously announced opposition to such special program houses. No one was surprised last spring when the new presi- dent, Hunter Rawlings, decided to impose no punishment on black students who burned copies of the campus conservative newspaper, disrupted a uni- versity awards ceremony, and blocked traffic for several hours. The campus Judicial Administrator blandly explained that "when large numbers of stu- dents violate the Campus Code, that is not a judicial question but a political question for the President to decide." A.D. White could display the intellectual self-confidence to match his Vic- torian moral confidence. Though he favored the teaching of modern litera- ture, he insisted that students need not spend time with the "bubbles floating on the surface of sundry literatures": "when I hear of second-rate critics sum- 66 Academic Questions / Spring 1998

moned across the ocean to present to [American] universities...the coagu- lated nastiness of Verlaine, Mallarme and their compeers, I expect to hear of courses introducing young men to the beauties of absinthe, Turkish cigarettes and stimulants unspeakable." We may presume that President White would not approve of the French Literature Department's current course in "Perfume,Jewelry and Cigarettes." He might be still more exasperated to learn that , master of deconstructionism, had been summoned from Paris to serve as an "A.D. White Professor at Large" and that one of his acolytes in French literary studies is now dean of the Arts College. It is simply too painful to contemplate stern old A.D. White's reaction to the English Department's current course in "Queer Theory," or the German Studies course in "Lesbian Theory" or other cross- listed oddities in Cornell's current program of "Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Studies." Of course, such ventures are not at all unique to Cornell. But an earlier Cornell was proud of setting its own course. One might also say that courses in debasing literary fads are, after all, an extension of the founding vision- "instruction in any subject." But that, I believe, quite misconceives the found- ing vision. Ezra Cornell sought "an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education" and so "furnish better means for the culture of all men, of every calling." In that sense, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, for all its harsh words about Cornell's response to the crisis of 1969, reflects a characteristically Cornell outlook. Bloom simply takes it for granted that the Great Books should matter to ordinary people in ordinary careers. He was perhaps the only one in his own scholarly circle who was not sur- prised when his book became a best seller. It strikes me now that there was always something improbable in this no- tion. But perhaps there was always something improbable-and charming for all that-about Cornell. E.B. White (who immortalized his Cornell English teacher, Professor Strunk, by repackaging the latter's notes as The of Style) captured something of Cornell's improbability in a 1939 essay. Noting the Homeric resonance of its hometown and the reproductions of Greek statues in Goldwin Smith Hall, he lauded the institution above Cayuga Lake as "the university which best combines the classic ideals of Pericles with the practical success of the Redskin....One need only look out of any classroom window to realize that beauty lay on those hills long before culture arrived to clutter it up. The Cayuga tribe was in quest of it, and the place is still full of rabbit-hunters." It is all quite recognizable sixty years later. So is the cheeky tone of student publications from sixty years before that. Cornell is still a place that can nur- ture a variety of ambitions without taking itself too, too seriously. But today, few of its liberal arts faculty and none of its administrators would dare to be outlandish-except in ways approved at Princeton or Yale. Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 67

The

Jack P. Greene: Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and professor of history, The Johns Hopkins University, , MD 21218.

When The Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, it represented some- thing entirely new in American . Like the English and Scot- tish institutions on which they had all been modeled, U.S. institutions of higher learning concentrated upon the transmission of knowledge to under- graduate students. Even at Yale and Harvard, each of which awarded a hand- ful of doctorates in the 1860s and 1870s, graduate education was a peripheral activity involving the very few students, mostly their own graduates, who wished to do advanced work. Faculty and graduate student research received little emphasis-and little support. The founders of Johns Hopkins envisioned an institution that would be radically different. Six years before he died in 1873, the Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins had stipulated that his fortune of seven million dollars be used to found both a university and a hospital. Drawing upon the experience of the new research universities that had emerged in over the previ- ous half century, the Hopkins trustees and first president, , sought to establish a university dedicated to the production of knowledge, one which by emphasizing faculty research and publication and concentrating on graduate instruction would consciously promote advanced scholarship. The principal learning sites would be the seminar room and the laboratory, where active investigators would provide small numbers of select graduate students with the tools, the professional training, and the opportunity to become in- dependent and original researchers in their own right. To lure the best stu- dents from across the country and abroad, the founders set up an innovative program of fellowships for postgraduate study. In this ambitious effort to launch the country's first , both Gilman and the trustees understood that a strong faculty composed of people doing original work was critical. If the university was to achieve dis- tinction, the faculty, in Gilman's words, must be people "of acknowledged ability and reputation, distinguished in special departments of study, capable of advancing these departments & also of inciting young men to study & research." To recruit such people, Gilman scoured the , Great Britain, and Germany, offering high salaries, light teaching loads, and ample space and equipment for research. Deliberately, the trustees gave the faculty an astonishing degree of depart- mental independence and full control of instruction, research, and gover- nance. Guided only by a set of general principles, each department designed its own program of training to fit the needs of its particular discipline. Within 68 Academic Questions/Spring 1998

departments, individual faculty had wide latitude in organizing courses, while students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels enjoyed considerable flexibility in choosing their course of study. Effectively, the university created by the faculty under Gilman's guidance sought to engage the energies of its community-faculty and students-by providing them with maximum scope for the cultivation of their creative capacities and the active pursuit of their own research agendas. To provide the free intellectual atmosphere in which creative work could be done, the founders actively discouraged the use of sectarian or partisan criteria in the selection of faculty and students. From the beginning, Hopkins was committed to concentration and spe- cialization, as opposed to comprehensiveness. Its founders conceived of it as a small and intimate institution, providing instruction in many but by no means all of the basic fields of knowledge. The first faculty covered only ancient languages, mathematics, biology, physics, and chemistry. Subsequent appointments over the early decades added people in philosophy, history, modem languages, geology, jurisprudence, and comparative philology. Within each of these broad disciplines, moreover, Gilman expected people-faculty and graduate students-to specialize or, as he phrased it, to do good work in a limited field. While the emphasis, university-wide, was on graduate instruction, the founders made room for a small and also research-oriented undergraduate program. Rather than offering the broad liberal education available at other colleges, they encouraged undergraduates, too, to develop their own special- ized programs of study. At both the graduate and the undergraduate levels, therefore, Hopkins' appeal, as Gilman put it, would be to the "creators" and "doer[s] of the world," the producers of the knowledge that institutions com- mitted to a more traditional, collegiate style of instruction would then impart to their own more passive students. Johns Hopkins' pioneering approach to graduate instruction and the idea of the research university in the United States inspired the transformation of older colleges like Harvard and Columbia into research universities and deeply influenced the shape of new research universities such as Clark, Stanford, and Chicago. Yet, for well over a century, Hopkins remained unique in Ameri- can higher education. The distinctive personality that had emerged during its founding years was powerfully reinforced by a similar emphasis in the medical faculty, added to the university in 1893. Notwithstanding a steady expansion in the number of undergraduates, Hopkins continued to be distin- guished by the degree of emphasis it placed upon research, graduate study, specialization, and departmental and faculty independence. Despite the small size of its faculty and student body, moreover, Hopkins maintained considerable intellectual distinction throughout its first century. A national peer evaluation of graduate schools and faculty reputation in 1925 placed thirteen of fifteen arts and science departments within the top ten in Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 69

the United States, and the other two departments within the top thirteen. The explosive increase in faculty that occurred at most universities following World War II put Hopkins at a decided comparative disadvantage. Only the medical school, richly supported by government and foundation grants, par- ticipated in that explosion. Routinely, Hopkins' arts, science, and engineer- ing departments were smaller by a factor of three than their counterparts at other major research universities. Despite this disadvantage, many of the arts and science departments con- tinued to do well in national peer evaluations. In 1957, five of Hopkins' six- teen ranked departments placed among the top ten departments nationally and the rest were among the top sixteen. In 1964, four of Hopkins' nineteen ranked departments placed among the top ten, nine more among the top fifteen, and the remaining six among the top twenty-two. In 1969, four out of twenty departments placed among the top ten, eight more within the top fifteen, and three more within the top twenty; three departments, all in the sciences, fell into the low twenties. In 1982, only three out of nineteen ranked departments (all in the humanities) remained within the top ten and three more in the top twenty. Ten more departments ranked in the top thirty, but no science department ranked higher than twenty-seven. Notwithstanding this evident slippage in national reputation, the arts and sciences at Hopkins continued to show considerable vitality. The establish- ment in 1966 of what quickly became a distinguished and widely imitated inter- disciplinary center for the humanities and in 1973 of an interdisciplinary program in Atlantic history and culture, nearly a quarter century before Harvard, Columbia, and other institutions established similar programs, showed that the university still had the capacity for national intellectual and academic lead- ership. Equally encouraging, in a 1995 peer evaluation of graduate depart- ments, seven of twenty-one ranked departments, five of them in the humanities, ranked in the top eleven, more than twice as many as in 1982. Four more were in the top twenty, and six more in the top thirty. For the first time in thirty years, the sciences showed modest overall improvement. A new school of engi- neering, established in 1979, registered only one program among the top twenty- five, but the medical school continued to receive its usual high marks. Moreover, these gains were made at the same time that the faculty was undergoing signifi- cant diversification, an achievement that made it clear that diversification could be achieved without sacrificing quality. Acutely aware that the distinctive personality articulated for Johns Hopkins by the founding generation-a personality emphasizing research, graduate study, specialized , departmental independence, faculty control of curriculum and governance, and the higher potential for intellectual collaboration within a smaller faculty-was what defined the uni- versity and gave it a continuing capacity to draw outstanding faculty and students; later generations have been careful to preserve that personality. 70 Academic Questions / Spring 1998

Whether their successors will do as well is not clear. For the last decade, Hopkins has found itself at a crossroads. Fiscal mismanagement in the late 1980s, a significant swelling of the undergraduate population in response to the resulting financial shortfall, high levels of faculty turnover, and growing bureaucratization all press powerfully in the direction of turning Johns Hopkins into just another run-of-the mill with a great medi- cal school, too small to compete effectively in faculty excellence and gradu- ate training with the major private institutions of higher learning such as Harvard and Yale, and lacking the ethos to be a top-flight liberal arts college like Bryn Mawr or Amherst. If it is to continue to retain and attract the best faculty and students, Hopkins needs to remain Hopkins, and its faculty, ad- ministration, and trustees will have to devote themselves wholeheartedly to that end.

Stanford University

Norman E. Tutorow: Visiting Fellow, , , Stanford, 94305-6010.

Leland and founded , Jr. University as a memorial to their son, who died in , , of on 13 March 1884, at the age of fifteen years and ten months. Stanford said he intended to establish a school for boys and girls which would prepare them for the realities of life, one that would focus on practical learning rather than higher education. There was a world-wide outpouring of praise for Stanford's plan: It was the "most magnificent educational endowment of the world," and sprang from the "most unselfish and noblest inspiration." Stanford's gift was "unique in the history of civilization" and had no other aim than the improvement of humanity. The Stanford benefaction was unmatched by that of any private citizen in the "whole civilized world." California law had no provision for the incorporation of the institution Stanford had in mind, so his attorneys drew up an education bill and had it presented to the California Assembly on 26January 1885. The Assembly passed it by a vote of sixty-three to four and the Senate passed it unanimously-thirty- one to nothing. Governor George Stoneman signed it into law on 9 March 1885-Stanford's sixty-first birthday. Under the terms of the founding grant, Leland and Jane Stanford would serve as sole trustees until they died or voluntarily transferred their authority to the university trustees. The Board of Trustees held its first meeting in the Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 71

founders' home on 14 November 1885. In the presence of a hundred people the Stanfords turned over to the trustees three large tracts of land as an initial endowment, the total value of which was estimated at $5 million and was expected to increase to $20 million by the end of the century. The purposes of the university as defined by the founding grant were: (1) to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of human- ity and civilization, (2) to teach the blessings of liberty and to inculcate love and reverence for the principles of government, and (3) to create a curricu- lum that would be practical rather than theoretical or speculative. The school was to have seminaries of learning of the highest grade, includ- ing mechanical institutes, museums, galleries of art, and laboratories and conservatories, everything needed for mechanical training and the study of agriculture, horticulture, stock raising, and poultry husbandry. Stanford's initial idea for a university was that it should consist of a num- ber of schools, beginning with kindergarten and progressing up to a super high school. He intended to have two prep schools, one for girls and one for boys, with a "central collegiate university" between them. Twelve-year-old children would be admitted to these schools for their preparatory work and would be promoted to the university when they were advanced enough to begin studying for a particular vocation. Stanford objected to conventional wisdom, rote learning, or traditional organization that stifled individual initiative. Freedom of individual devel- opment was to mark all curricular organization. Degree requirements and traditional sequences of courses were to take secondary place to practical, useful, individual development. He held that education necessitated absolute freedom of investigation on the part of teachers and students. Studies di- rected to the cultivation and enlargement of the mind were essential, since his goal was to prepare students for "personal success and direct usefulness in life." Central to Stanford's plan was his insistence that the sciences be given more importance than they were accorded in other universities. Furthermore, his university was to be democratic: desire and willingness to work and learn were more important to him than were money, family, or social position. In 1891 Stanford hired David StarrJordan, then president of Indiana Uni- versity, to be president of Stanford University. Jordan underscored the fact that Stanford believed that no educational system could be complete in which admission to the university was a privilege limited to the chosen few: there should be an unbroken ladder from the kindergarten to the university, a lad- der each should be free to climb, as far as his ability or energy should permit. Stanford University was to be coeducational, though Jane Stanford at first objected to this. Stanford carried the point by reminding her that they had taken the children of California to be their children, and that girls as well as boys were children. Stanford later elaborated upon his idea: ~'I deem it espe- 72 Academic Questions / Spring 1998

cially important that the education of the female should be equal to that of the male, and I am inclined to think that if the education of either is ne- glected, it had better be that of the man than the woman, because if the mother is well educated she insensibly imparts it to the child." Students at this school were to be inculcated in the necessity of living so- ber lives. Stanford estimated that twenty-five percent of the nation's produc- tive capacity was lost in buying, selling, and consuming hard liquors. The founding deed prohibited forever any kind of "saloon" on campus. In 1888, when Stanford gave his approval for a railway station at Palo Alto, he did so with one reservation: whiskey must never be sold there. The aim of the university was to cultivate individual potential in order to advance humanity and the foundation of humanitarianism. Stanford insisted that neither intellectual nor moral development alone, but the Golden Rule, was to be the guide in the development of the "religious element in man." The Stanfords prohibited sectarian education, though the trustees were to see that the immortality of the soul was taught, and the existence of an all- wise and beneficent Creator! The founders stated: "It seems to us that the welfare of man on earth depends on the belief in immortality, and that the advantages of every good act and the disadvantages of every evil one, follow man from this life into the next." The Stanfords were wise enough to seek the advice of outstanding leaders in a field they knew little about. Stanford contacted a number of the nation's foremost college administrators: President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, who had revolutionized that institution's curriculum with his elective system that made classical instruction a matter of student choice; Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, America's first all-graduate research university; Amasa Walker, who was shaping the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into a combina- tion university and training school; and Andrew White of Cornell, who had combined elements of the first three universities into a distinctive university for men and women. One of Stanford's associates said that Girard College in Philadelphia was the model Stanford had in mind. Stanford later said that the Cooper Institute in New York was his prototype: it focused on the advancement of art, me- chanics, and business. Stanford University was organized, built, and then developed independently of any fixed model or pattern; it at first reflected the pragmatic and in some cases anachronistic ideas of its founders, tem- pered and guided by the academic bent of its first president. The development of Stanford University immediately took a different di- rection, when Jordan-an academic traditionalist who was far more experi- enced in how a university was to be organized and managed-persuaded Stanford that a "real university...would be better in every way and would be of more benefit to students and to the commonwealth." Jordan contributed Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 73

immensely to the development of Stanford's ideas; his employer came to real- ize the need for a more traditional curriculum including medicine, law, eco- nomics, and political science. Following Stanford's death, Jane Stanford-still acting as sole trustee-de- cided that the university was in danger of becoming a school for girls-the Vassar of the Pacific. On 13 May 1899, she told the Board of Trustees: "The number of women attending the university as students shall at no time ex- ceed five hundred." This policy was observed for a while, then modified, and later abandoned altogether. President Jordan praised Jane Stanford's move as "sound as a policy." He explained that Stanford University was better able to handle the subjects at- tractive to women, which required less outlay for equipment. Because the university could not yet handle the curricula preferred by men students, many applicants in law were advised to go to Harvard, medical students were sent to the Johns Hopkins, and those choosing engineering were advised to apply to Cornell. Jane Stanford said that for her part in the creation of the university, she was building a Christian temple. Her notion that somehow religion was the heart of the university was made clear in a letter to Jordan in which she admonished the president not to forget that "every boy and every girl" at Stanford University had a soul germ which needed to be developed. She later said, "while my whole heart is in this university, my soul is in that [Stanford Memorial] church." Stanford University moved away from being a universal school for boys and girls to being an institution of higher education even before it opened: the early notion of its being a kindergarten through trade school was never acted upon. And rather than developing into or remaining a bastion of religious superstition and a vehicle for promulgating religious doctrines as suggested by some of Jane Stanford's ideas-it began at inception to de- velop into one of the great universities of the world. Despite the simplistic ideas of education expressed in the 1880s, a central position in scholarship and research has been the university's real destination in the world of higher education. Moreover, the anachronistic religious, social, and educational values of the founders-having to do with alcohol, the status of women, and religion-gave way to the classic conception of a university as formulated by Jordan. Discrepancies between stated goals and principles and actual development of Stanford University are not to be viewed as an undesirable shift away from principle: rather, they represent shifts toward an educational institution greater than ever imagined by its founders. It is difficult even to speak of original purposes in the case of Stanford University, since they changed so much from Stanford's earliest ideas to what he and Jordan agreed upon as the pur- pose and character of the university that Leland and Jane Stanford created. 74 Academic Questions/Spring 1998

The

George Anastaplo: Lecturer in the liberal arts, the University of Chicago; professor oflaw, Loyola University of Chicago; and professor emeritus ofpolitical science and of philosophy, Dominican University.

From its beginning the University of Chicago has been a distinguished institution in a special neighborhood in perhaps the most American of our larger cities. Indeed, it has long been a feature of the university's setting that most of its (now twelve hundred) faculty could walk to their classes and could easily have extensive social contact among themselves off campus. Almost all of the university is located seven miles south of Chicago's down- town business district, alongside the principal site (the Midway) of the Columbian Exposition. That great world's fair was being prepared while the first buildings on campus were being built in 1891-1892. The university was baptized in the spirit of the hopeful Enlightenment which the 1893 Columbian Exposition celebrated and which is still evident in the joy of learning that pervades the University of Chicago campus. The university, created through the collaboration of William Rainey Harper (a Biblical scholar) and John Davison Rockefeller (a Baptist of means), was intended to be first-rate, as well as unapologetically American, from its be- ginning. It has been self-consciously so for a century now, a place where chal- lenging ideas could be rigorously investigated in a civil manner. Consider the account of the university provided by the most home-grown of its presidents:

At the heart of the University of Chicago is the faith of its founders, Rockefeller and Harper, in the power of the unfettered human mind and in the wholeness of knowledge. The hallmark of the University has always been its interdisciplinary nature and its faith in basic research. The dialogue among its scholars has been continuous-so much so that Alfred Whitehead, after a visit to the University of Chicago, characterized it as the nearest approach to ancient Athens in the mod- ern world.

The various scholarly disciplines have been more solidly integrated at the University of Chicago than they tend to be in most other academic institu- tions in this country. Contributing perhaps to this cross-fertilization has been the remarkable compactness of the main campus. Interdisciplinary alliances tend to moderate the effects of the "cultural wars" of the 1980s and 1990s. Innovations that catch the fancy of one discipline or another from time to time are not apt to be fashionable across disciplinary lines, whatever the incli- nations of students may happen to be. Questionable ideology is thereby more likely to be contained. Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 75

The intellectual aspirations of the university presupposed, from its found- ing decades, spiritual and moral underpinnings. These are suggested even in the way its most successful athletic director could ask (in a 1904 letter to the president of the university), "Why not have [on campus] a goodnight chime for our own athletes? to let its sweet cadence have a last word with them before they fall asleep, to speak to them of love and loyalty and sacrifice for their University and of hope and inspiration and endeavor for the morrow." What does the modern insistence upon "value-free" social sciences do to the moral concerns exhibited here? The second great founding of the University of Chicago is associated with the presidency of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1929-1951). Among his accom- plishments was the elevation of undergraduate education to a higher status than it had had in what was then, and still is, a university serving primarily graduate and professional students. Much of what was done with the college, as well as with the reorganization of the graduate divisions, during Mr. Hutchins's administration had been set in motion before he came. His legacy for the university included a heightened emphasis upon primary texts, or the "Great Books." There were other legacies of the Hutchins administration, including the unexpected one (considering his coolness toward the physical sciences) of the establishment in Chicago of an international ascendancy in those sci- ences, in large part because the university provided (without being blown up in the process) a critical site for the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. Among the faculty thus acquired by the university were scientists whose diverse interests, as well as their fundamental sensibleness, encour- aged an integration of several disciplines in the physical sciences. An interdisciplinary tendency may still be seen throughout the university. This is evident in the large number of interdepartmental joint appointments that are not mere courtesy titles. And yet there has been the curious phenom- enon, at least in recent decades, of the almost total absence (at Chicago as elsewhere) of faculty members and graduate students (who are infernally busy people) from the audiences of lectures, workshops, and colloquia outside their respective fields. Our primary concern here, however, is not with the failings of higher education generally, but rather with what may be distinc- tive about the University of Chicago. The university has long been noted for its self-conscious seriousness, with a minimum of distractions, about the life of the mind. This now tends to take the form, probably more than ever before, of intense specialization in one's discipline. In this way scholars come to resemble professional athletes, as they do also in their greater mobility these days. The university did begin by enticing a number of prominent scholars (in- cluding eight former college presidents) from other schools in this country. But in the interval since then it was more steady in its personnel than it is 76 Academic Questions / Spring 1998

now. Making matters worse today is the fact that the queen of the sciences is coming to be methodology, which does not have much use either for the substantive content of the traditional disciplines or for local allegiances. All this promotes an ever-greater emphasis within the university upon a stable administration. Various features of academic life today, most of which are evident at the University of Chicago, tend to increase the power of admin- istration at the expense of faculty cohesiveness. These include the mobility of the faculty (which is related to the privatizing effects of intense specializa- tion), the growth in size of student bodies and of faculties, the dependence of schools upon large sums of money from governments and ideologically minded foundations (especially when recipients can take their grants elsewhere), the ever-greater proportion of the faculty that is part-time or untenured, and the growing use of a network of impersonal electronic communication (which discourages pauses between messages and hence reflection) makes reflec- tion less likely. The fear of students in the 1960s reinforced a reliance by the faculty upon administrators to manage the university's affairs. The rising costs of academic life have made balance sheets and fund-raising more obviously important than they had ever been. Particularly threatening for a "world-class" univer- sity has been the prospect of a decline in the quality of its library, when compared to the libraries of those schools that have either much larger en- dowments or generous state treasuries to draw upon. The ever-greater, perhaps inevitable, reliance upon administration means that the leaders of the university are less likely than formerly to have either the disposition or the time to develop a general plan for education appropri- ate for the Chicago tradition. There seems to be, as one result of the move- ment toward the "normalization," if not even trendiness, believed to be required for both academic standing and financial health, a growing defer- ence at Chicago to how things are done at other institutions, especially in the Ivy League schools. This finds expression in proposed changes in the college (looking both to more entering undergraduate students and to fewer required "common core" courses for them), in recruiting "senior" faculty with huge reputations, and in talking and acting as if a university is just another busi- ness corporation. This attitude cuts across the grain of the logos of an institu- tion that has always seen itself as a major source of teachers, not of the social and business leaders who are more apt to become wealthy alumni. Symbolic of what has been happening was the 1960 migration of the once- more-humanistically-minded law school from the heart of the campus to a large enclave (a third of a mile away) on the other side of the sometimes bitterly cold Midway. One consequence of this is that a law student can spend his or her three years in the university without having to set foot on its main campus. Another consequence is that an enterprising of Business, Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 77

which moved into the building abandoned by the law school and which then acquired two adjoining buildings as well, dominates the heart of the campus. Most of such changes have been made with the best of intentions, some- times with the feeling that they were unavoidable. Since fewer and fewer of the newer faculty are aware of the original aspirations and history of the university, there is less and less tendency among the faculty as a whole to resist the pressures that move the university to imitate the other prominent (and no doubt useful) universities in this country. Still, the University of Chicago is, in one critical respect, like the country it was intended to serve: it, too, has been deliberately founded, and refounded, relying upon what Federalist No. 1 refers to as "reflection and choice," rather than upon "accident and force," in its two establishments. However neglected if not even repudiated the university's or the country's founding principles may seem to be from time to time, they somehow remain available to be rediscovered, cherished, and acted upon by those open to the best.

According to Interactive Edition of 12 June 1997, an associate dean of the law school at the University of Illinois wanted to be sure that work assigned by faculty did not offend anybody. A "Diversity Checklist" he issued included the following guidance:

Generally, make attempts to portray traditionally disfavored groups in a positive light and traditionally favored groups in a com- paratively inferior light; the goal is to challenge rather than rein- force traditional . For instance, an African-American or female judge and white male secretary challenge traditional stereo- types whereas a white male judge, African-American janitor, and female secretary reinforce them.