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HUTCHINS, ROBERT M. 1899-1977

UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT, EDUCATIONAL INNOVATOR

"The Tradition of the West."

President of the University of Chicago by the age of thirty, Robert M. Hutchins's sudden rise to prominence in education was due to his ability to put educational philosophy into an accessible public form. An arresting speaker, Hutchins gave over one hundred speeches a year, most of them deploring the state of American education. Hutchins condemned egalitarianism and progressive education. Something of an elitist, he also feared that the increasing specialization of society was undermining its civilized foundation. His solution was to advocate a classics-based education designed to familiarize all citizens with "the tradition of the West." In the 1940s such an educational philosophy had enormous appeal, especially after the barbarism of the Nazis. It also appealed to those who feared the communism of the East and those who were anxious over the increasingly amoral use of technology. Hutchins's attitudes toward education offered Americans certainty after the unsettling developments of the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the atom bomb.

Background

Son of a minister at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Hutchins came from a family that on both sides traced their ancestry to the original New England colonists. At age eight Hutchins relocated with his family to Oberlin, Ohio, where his father had accepted a teaching position. Hutchins himself went on to Oberlin College, adopting deeply its Calvinistic strictures regarding personal restraint and moral certitude. World War I interrupted his college career, and Hutchins served in the ambulance corps in Italy long enough to absorb a host of European languages and to become disillusioned about the romance of war. With the end of the conflict he enrolled in Yale, completed his studies, and went on to graduate from the law school. He passed the Connecticut bar, but rather than practice law he began an astonishing career with the Yale Corporation as a fund-raiser and administrator as well as a faculty member of the law school.

Yale

By 1927 Hutchins was dean of the law school, earning a public reputation as a boy wonder for the speed with which he earned the prestigious post. Much of the credit for Hutchins's success, however, must go to Yale president James Angeli. Like Hutchins, Angeli saw the curriculum at Yale as outdated and unscientific; he sought to modernize the university by providing more interdisciplinary courses and giving students more autonomy on campus, in a manner similar to that pioneered by Harvard and Columbia. Hutchins was Angell's choice to shake up the law school. Hutchins did just that, bringing men such as William O. Douglas to Yale. Both Douglas and Hutchins were proponents of legal realism and sociological jurisprudence, philosophies which integrated social science and legal precedent. Angeli and Hutchins also expanded their interdisciplinary study of the law by establishing the Institute of Human Relations, which brought the law faculty and the medical faculty together to explore the psychological roots of crime and justice. His reputation as a scholar and academic administrator was such that in 1929 he was offered the post of president of the University of Chicago. Only thirty years old at the time, he served in this position until 1945, when he was named chancellor of the university, a position he held until 1951.

In Loco Parentis

At Chicago Hutchins continued his efforts to modernize the university. One of the most irritating traditions in higher education for modernizers such as Hutchins were the in loco parentis (in the place of parents) rules. In loco parentis referred to the nineteenth-century tradition that colleges should act in place of the absent parent and monitor the social and moral behavior of the students. Curfews and complex rules regarding drinking, dancing, and dating were common on most campuses. Hutchins believed the students were adults by college age and could monitor their own behavior, and he dispensed with in loco parentis. He also believed students could successfully plan their own educations. The freedom with which students could plan general and elective courses at Chicago was unprecedented and became the model for American universities generally.

Salary Equality

At Chicago Hutchins also equalized the pay scales of university professors. He was troubled by the disparity in pay between older, established scholars and younger, struggling academics. Older professors not only enjoyed higher salaries as a result of their seniority but often earned hefty incomes from outside publishing contracts. Hutchins, arguing that it was the younger scholars, often raising families, who needed the greater income (an observation some-what obvious during the Depression), initiated a voluntary program whereby senior scholars turned over outside income to the university and the university raised the pay scales for all professors, young and old alike. An in-demand speaker, Hutchins himself led the way by turning over his considerable income from lectures to the university.

Neo-Thomism

Despite his modernizing efforts, Hutchins was most widely known for his advocacy of a classics-based humanities curriculum, which he first proposed in a 1936 book, Higher Learning in America. Hutchins was profoundly influenced by his friend, philosophy professor Mortimer Adler. Adler was an acerbic, antagonistic personality believing absolutely that pragmatism—the philosophical foundation of progressive education—was leading American civilization into decline. So indelicate was Adler in his opinions that when Hutchins appointed him to the Chicago faculty in 1930, it led to several resignations and continual tension between Hutchins and the faculty. In part, sustained ill will was also a function of Adler's increasing influence with Hutchins. Where at Yale Hutchins was determined to make education more scientific, modern, and plural, at Chicago he sub-stantially abandoned these goals. Adler was developing into the leading practitioner of a school of philosophy based on the medieval scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Hutchins became something of a medievalist himself and found in the university of the Middle Ages a model for the present. By the 1940s Hutchins advocated a unified liberal arts/humanist curriculum for Chicago not unlike that found in the great universities of the premodern period. This Thomistic education, oriented around a curriculum of "Great Books" and a "hierarchy of truths," supposedly would provide an antidote to the overwhelming emphasis on science and technology in modern education. The Thomistic model would become the basis of Hutchins's educational philosophy, and he would spend much of the 1940s defending the idea.

Opponents Respond

Opponents of Thomistic education charged that Hutchins was attempting to roll back the modernization of American universities. The debate between Hutchins, Adler, and associates such as John Nef and Stringfellow Barr, and opponents led by John Dewey, Sidney Hook, and University of Wisconsin president Glenn Frank became quite heated. Adler and Hutchins charged that absent a Thomistic education, society disintegrated into fascism or communism. Hutchins in fact argued that the type of progressive education and pragmatic philosophy embodied in the work of John Dewey undermined eternal truths and led to authoritarianism. When schools adopt progressive education, he argued, "the journey from the man of good will to Hitler is complete." Hutchins's opponents replied that it was the Thomistic concept itself that was authoritarian. "As far as I can see," noted Dewey, "President Hutchins has completely evaded the problem of who is to determine the definite truths that constitute the hierarchy." Despite his position, Hutchins could not convince the faculty at Chicago to reconstruct itself on a Thomistic basis. None-theless, the idea remained at the center of educational controversies during the 1940s and into the next decade.

Politics, Science, Humanities

To some extent the debate over Thomistic education during the 1940s unfairly stigmatized Hutchins as an educational and political conservative. In fact he was a political liberal and lifelong Democrat. An engaging speaker, Hutchins was often proposed as a political candidate, Supreme Court justice, and head of New Deal agencies such as the National Recovery Administration, None of these appointments came to pass, but Hutchins, along with Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant, became one of the key academic administrators of joint government/industrial/university research ventures during the war, setting an important precedent for such ventures during the Cold War. Under his superintendence the world's first controlled nuclear reaction was sustained by a Chicago research team. The wartime emphasis on university science, however, jibed uncomfortably with Hutchins's humanistic bias. As a result, during the war the university began a humanist, interdisciplinary study group that achieved postwar acclaim: the Committee on Social Thought. An interdisciplinary graduate program, the Committee on Social Thought benefited from the participation of leading expatriate European intellectuals such as Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, Arnold Schoenberg, John Von Neumann, Friedrich von Hayek, and Hannah Arendt. Oriented around a curriculum Hutchins's associate John Nef called "the fundamentals," the Committee on Social Thought offered a humanist antidote to the reigning wartime emphasis on science and technology. To Hutchins such high-minded intellectual work was all the more important in a postwar environment dominated by the presence of the atomic bomb—a technology to which Hutchins had partially contributed.

Later Work

The anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s raised Hutchins's hackles and led him to-ward his later work in political and philanthropic organization. When, in 1949, the Illinois legislature sent the Seditious Activities Investigating Commission to assess the loyalty of the Chicago faculty, Hutchins ably defended his teachers and denounced such inquests as "the greatest menace to the United States since Hitler." He followed this defense by becoming, in 1954, president of the Fund for the Republic, a Ford Foundation group dedicated to combating the civil liberties abuses of the McCarthy era. The fund also attacked racial discrimination and sponsored academic studies of civil rights. For his efforts Hutchins was pilloried by the Right and investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he continued his activities, directing the fund to create the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a think tank, in 1959. In the 1960s the center became one of the leading liberal study centers in the United States, attempting to lessen Cold War tension between the United States and Russia through cultural exchanges, even during the tumult of Vietnam. Hutchins retired as head of the center in 1974 but returned as president in 1975. He maintained this position until he died on 14 May 1977.