Hutchins of Chicago: The University President as Publicist by Roland L. Guyotte Before the Civil War American colleges were often led by Protestant clergymen. These preacher-presidents did not limit their working days to college administration, a relatively simple task then. They served as public philosophers, speaking out on issues of the day-to their students and to local, sometimes national audiences. Timothy Dwight of Yale, Edward Everett of Harvard (who gave the featured speech on the same platform as Abraham Lincoln's more memorable words at Gettysburg) and Francis Wayland of Brown were identifiable public personalities. So too the university- builders of the late nineteenth century-Andrew Dickson White of Cornell, Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, Charles William Eliot of Harvard, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, and William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago. If no longer clergymen (only Harper was), they still supplied the public pulpit. In Thorstein Veblen's words, they had become "captains of erudition" who paralleled their counterpart "captains of industry" in force and presence. Upper right: A view of the Rockefeller Chapel from the southeast. Named in honor of oil baron John D. Rockefeller whose substantial gifts established the University in 1892, the Gothic Revival Chapel, which was first opened to the public in 1928, was the site of the convocation at which Hutchins was installed. University of Chicago Archives. Middle right: William Benton (left), Hutchins, and Mortimer Jerome Adler pose with a presentation copy of Great Books of the Western World, a gift to Queen Elizabeth II in 1952. Hutchins edited the fifty-four volume series. University of Chicago Archives. Lower right: Amos Alonzo Stagg (1862-1965) directed the University's athletic programs from 1892 until 1935. Hutchins retired the aging but popular coach, and he abolished intercollegiate football in 1939 over the objections of alumni and the public. University of Chicago Archives.

This has not been the story in the twentieth century. Most college presidents begin their careers as professors and spend their adult lives in higher education among peers who teach and write about scholarly specialties for small audiences of like-minded people. As presidents, even at the largest universities they speak mainly to other academic figures and concentrate on the politics of making their institutions run smoothly. College management, increasingly complex, means spending and raising money-for faculty and staff salaries, residence halls, laboratories, libraries, and financial aid-from alumni, private donors and foundations, state legislatures, and the federal government. It is a strenuous job. Most serve as president for about seven years, a far cry from the forty-year tenure of Harvard's Eliot. And just as most twentieth-century American business executives have seemed less colorful and less public than their nineteenth-century forebears-fewer Rockefellers and Carnegies, more Roger Smiths of General Motors who work their way up a corporate ladder-so have leaders in higher education. Few Americans today can name the chief executive officers of educational institutions in their states, let alone those of the nation's most famous or venerable colleges.

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977) was different. Not only did he become president of the University of Chicago, then as now at the top of the academic pecking order, at the age of thirty, he stayed there for twenty-one years. His picture graced the cover of Time magazine. Articles with his byline appeared in the mass circulation press, including the Saturday Evening Post, in the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Times, where late in life he wrote a weekly column on the Op-Ed page. From the U. of C., he oversaw the Encyclopedia Britannica and helped foster its offspring, the Great Books of the Western World. He issued a major report on freedom of the press in 1947, and defended academic freedom, even for Communists if their politics did not compromise their competence. After he left the University in 1951 Hutchins gave away millions of dollars as a director of the Ford Foundation and the Fund for the Republic. In the 1960s and 1970s he presided over a think tank, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, to whose convocations in Washington, New York, Mexico City, and Geneva many of the major figures of the time came. On occasion Hutchins seemed a prospect for the Supreme Court or even Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President. A striking figure, he seemed larger than life, certainly larger than what college presidents had come to be.

During his years at the University of Chicago, Hutchins epitomized the college president as publicist, a role so rarely played that it earned him the title, "last of the giants," from Berkeley's Clark Kerr, himself a contender. Hutchins articulated a vision of American democracy and higher education's place in it that emphasized a citizen's responsibility to be an informed participant in public affairs. This meant an advocacy of general education rather than specialized training, and a teaching style that rewarded intellectual breadth over the mastery of facts. It subordinated some subjects and all extra-curricular activities. Hutchins' vision argued for life-long learning for everyone, including the previously excluded. He expected Americans to have opinions on national affairs, and he freely expressed his-whether to warn against the costs to democracy of American entrance into World War II, the need to guarantee access to the media for unpopular viewpoints, or the value of trying to frame a World Constitution. Along the way, he struggled with his faculty at the U. of C., winning victories and suffering defeats alike.

Hutchins' rapid rise reflected a series of happy accidents of the sort which befall those who can profit from them. The son and grandson of Presbyterian clergymen, Hutchins studied at Oberlin, where his father taught theology, and after service in the Ambulance Corps on the Italian front during World War I, at Yale, where his peers voted him "most likely to succeed" in 1921. Two years later, stamina, discipline and intelligence enabled him to work full time at Yale as an administrator while attending the Yale Law School, where he was soon asked to teach a course. His charm and wit brought success to yet a third simultaneous undertaking, a major fund drive for his alma mater which he helped manage. At twenty-seven, when the Law School's Dean became a judge, Hutchins succeeded him. Within two years he had reformed the curriculum and recruited several impressive newcomers to the faculty, including William O. Douglas, the future Supreme Court Justice, a lifelong friend. Picked as the University of Chicago's President in 1929 when its Trustees deadlocked over more senior candidates, he was already accomplished enough that his selection was not entirely outlandish.

At the U. of C. in the 1930s and early 1940s, his youth and energy applied to vigorous promotion of his various projects to change what and how the University taught, made him better known inside and outside the academic world-and sometimes more roundly denounced-than any university leader in recent memory. Hutchins rocked the academic community with slashing attacks on the college curriculum as it had evolved in recent years. In the world beyond, he drew notice for dramatic decisions that contested what Americans thought were settled elements of higher education. After retiring Chicago's venerable coach Amos Alonzo Stagg in 1935, he abolished intercollegiate football in 1939. It had become a symbol of irrelevance to the intellectual life. In Hutchins' words, "Football has the same relation to education as bullfighting has to agriculture." Soon afterward Hutchins issued another challenge to collegiate orthodoxy: he offered the B. A. degree after two years of study, encouraging sixteen-year-olds to apply to the University. He dared other educators, wedded to a four-year degree he called a "protective tariff," to submit their graduates to the comprehensive examinations, administered independently of the regular courses, required for a U. of C. degree.

In all of this, Hutchins took cen-

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ter stage in the midst of the Great Depression and made radical proposals in a light-handed, witty manner that was decidedly unscholarly. He seemed to delight in the unexpected, at puncturing pomposities. In a disarmingly self-deprecating manner, he did and said things that college presidents didn't say or do. At times, one might wonder whether he was intentionally putting his opponents off or putting them on. In a national radio address he warned that, "Parents who are not willing to have their children enter the world of ideas should keep them at home." Later, an eminent U. of C. professor questioned whether first-year students in the seminar Hutchins personally conducted with his even younger and far more tempestuous colleague Mortimer J. Adler could understand Dante's Divine Comedy after a week's exposure to it. "In my day at Harvard under Professor Grandgent, we spent a whole year on Dante's poem." Hutchins shot back, typically: "The difference, you see, is that our students are very bright." Questioned in 1949 about suspected Communists on campus, specifically about retired U. of C. cancer researcher Dr. Maude Slye's alleged practice of "indoctrination by example," Hutchins countered quizzically: "Of mice?"

Yet Hutchins was serious. He did mean to change things at the U. of C. and in American education generally. His mix of sincerity and bravado perplexed even his sympathizers. Many of them, especially, could not understand Hutchins' attachment to Adler, who abrasively tried to lecture professors on their ignorance. Adler's approach to college teaching seemed to favor a return to the Middle Ages with his emphasis on the intense study of a few metaphysical classics, later included in the Great Books, to the exclusion of traditional subject matter in the various academic majors. This apparently contradicted any attempt to put higher education at the service of helping solve the problems of the Great Depression. Why would Hutchins want to do that? One man, a liberal economist Hutchins had recruited to the Yale Law School faculty before leaving for Chicago, tried to explain the U. of C. President to another academic reformer: "When Bob was lifted out of Yale and set down in a strange environment-one teeming with plots and politics-he had to have an inclusive educational theory quickly." Too young to have developed one through administrative experience and "too non-monastic to make one up for himself," the economist suggested, Hutchins had simply borrowed Adler's, "at least for the time."

Hutchins' pronouncements, radio addresses, and books reached a wide audience. He reclaimed the academic pulpit his fellow college presidents had set aside a generation earlier. Though Hutchins used his position as a publicist to comment on many issues, his remarks on higher education naturally drew the most attention, not least because of their striking formulations. In The Higher Learning in America (1936), he attacked "the service-station conception" of American higher education for its narrow specialization and for the disorganization of an elective system where students picked and chose their courses haphazardly and without knowing what was good for them. College students needed Hutchins' program because the nation was in danger. Americans suffered from excessive materialism, faulty democratic practice, and a multitude of other sins including venality, ineptness, and ignorance. His remedy was a core curriculum of year-long, required general education courses, the rudiments of which the U. of C. Senate endorsed in 1930 and 1931, soon after Hutchins' arrival. What the Chicago faculty did not do to Hutchins' satisfaction was to base these courses on timeless literary and philosophical classics, rather than the latest works in a professor's special field.

Unlike some cultural critics of that day (or ours), Hutchins was no angry conservative railing at the present in behalf of a bygone Golden Age. He was a firm supporter of democracy, a forceful advocate of academic freedom. In 1935 Illinois legislative hearings on charges that the U. of C. harbored "red" professors who bamboozled innocent teenagers and later, in the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and 1950s, Hutchins defended college faculty more fervently than almost all other academic leaders. But Hutchins' theory of democracy went beyond the protection of individual freedom. Hutchins claimed that to be properly democratic Americans had to become more rational than they were and that to do this they had to seek common ground through a common culture, "a common stock of fundamental ideas." This they were not born with but they could learn by reading and arguing over the Western classics. The idea was not entirely novel, but Hutchins popularized it with a new twist. These classics, Hutchins contended, were accessible to any high school student and to adult Americans in all walks of life. Anyone could learn at any time; the Great Books were not just for an elite. This belief in lifelong continuing education later inspired the Great Books of the Western World publishing project in the 1940s and 1950s. Hutchins made the case well; why didn't more people flock to his banner?

What Hutchins ignored, among many other things, was a persistent American pluralism that championed local autonomy throughout American life, including higher education. Even as Americans accepted an expanded federal government during the New Deal, they jealously guarded what traditional prerogatives they could: neighborhoods, churches, schools. Most believed that higher education was something individuals pursued for their own private purposes, whatever they might be. While they might laugh with Hutchins about the failings of universities devoted to "body building and character building . . . the social graces and the tricks of trades," they were not ready to abandon faith in the advantages of a conventional college degree. Hutchins' belief that college professors should teach citizens democratic procedures and values ran against a majority of Americans' definition that democracy was popular rule, not professors making the rules.

Ultimately, Hutchins failed to reshape the U. of C. as well. More

off-putting to its faculty members than their President's commentary about democracy and education were his pointed remarks about progress and science. Denouncing materialism or the follies of the multitude left a professorial audience indifferent, or even pleased it. But Hutchins had seen a flawed notion of progress, nourished by wrong use of scientific method, at the heart of the higher education's troubles. His critique of the university fit all too well with his complaints about the society which nurtured it. Hutchins' censure of sterile fact-gatherers struck at the heart of a research university, whose faculty power rested upon a specialist's ability to justify and sustain pure, or "useless," research. When Hutchins proposed to banish data accumulation to research institutes separate from colleges, he described what was actually happening, yet he annoyed professors by saying it. Hutchins seemed to want senior faculty to teach the philosophy of their subject rather than the techniques and results of their research. They refused. Declining to move beyond the general education requirement they had passed, the Senate rebuffed his call to reform upper division courses in the specialized disciplines.

Faculty opposition to Hutchins' ideas grew. Staunch foes in the natural sciences, such as the physiologist Anton J. Carlson, were flabbergasted at the metaphysical approach of Hutchins and Adler. How else could you teach students, except by research and apprenticeship? Yet Hutchins left the scientists more or less alone; they were the bedrock of Chicago's national eminence, and Hutchins deferred to them more than he or they admitted. Within the social sciences, where Hutchins found allies, such as the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and recruited others, he also made enemies. A cadre of them gathered to hash over his pronouncements and prepare countermanifestoes, most notably a reply to The Higher Learning in America, conspicuously entitled "The Higher Learning in a Democracy." Others bided their time, fearing the worst, ready to discover hidden motives in any Hutchins proposal. As Edward Shils, then a graduate student and Hutchins supporter, later wrote, "The speeches of Hutchins were worked over with the care which in later decades, speeches of Soviet politicians were studied by Kremlinologists."

Hutchins retained the loyalty, even affection, of many at Chicago simply because he had steered the University effectively through the Depression, cutting administrative salaries rather than faculty pay, proposing a national program of student loans, raising money for traditional purposes, as well as for his pet projects, from Chicago business leaders. As a national figure, he kept the U. of C.'s profile high even as his critics grumbled. Who could stay angry for long at a president who advertised his institution as, "not a very good university . . . simply the best there is"? Few resented that part of the publicist's role that took Hutchins on the road or put him on the radio to promote ideas that had little to do with higher education. But the man tried to do too many things, to tinker too much with what the faculty regarded as its own business. Like FDR, who created several new federal agencies to address a single problem, Hutchins attacked specialization and disorganization from many sides at once, and faculty who disagreed with him in the first place on these matters increasingly opposed what they saw as academic sideshows.

A special grant from a local benefactor enabled Hutchins to bring several academic rebels to Chicago in 1936-1937 to work independently of the U. of C.'s academic departments on curricular schemes. The next year, some of them left to entirely reorganize St. John's College in Maryland, a small private institution, around the study of a hundred designated classic texts. Hutchins lauded the venture and agreed to chair the college's Board of Trustees. Before long, Hutchins tried again to circumvent the U. of C. departments, appointing independent committees with degree-granting power in such broad areas as "the Committee on Social Thought" and "the Committee on

This aerial view of the University of Chicago campus was taken in the 1930s during Hutchins' tenure as president. By this time, the campus has expanded beyond the original site, which was donated by philanthropist Marshall Field. University of Chicago Archives.

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Human Development." Having made the undergraduate College autonomous from the graduate divisions, he gained enactment of the B. A. degree after completion of general education courses, basically after the sophomore year, in early 1942. But the Senate almost immediately tried to overturn this Pyrrhic victory-his opponents' motion to repeal lost on a tie vote, with Hutchins voting "no" from the chair.

The last straw came in early 1944 when Hutchins proposed abolishing faculty rank altogether. Though promising to raise salaries, Hutchins catalyzed his foes with his proposal that all of a professor's outside income be turned over to the University, as he had done with royalties from his speeches and books. This time prominent faculty led a revolt, gathering the support of two-thirds of the Senate for an anti-Hutchins "Memorial on the State of the University," and a key trustee had to bail Hutchins out. From then on, Hutchins seemed to be living on borrowed time. He had himself raised to the rank of Chancellor in 1945, with operating duties delegated to another administrator. He worked on the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, which issued its report in 1947, and on a more quixotic Committee to Frame a World Constitution. He took a year off to oversee the University's Encyclopedia Britannica project. When the Ford Foundation offered him a position in 1950, he accepted.

What was Hutchins' legacy from two decades at the University of Chicago? At the U. of C., his faculty opponents seem to have triumphed. They promptly abolished the two-year B. A. degree and subordinated the College once again to the academic departments, though not without opposition from Hutchins diehards. Aspects of the university's administration Hutchins had neglected haunted his successors, especially the deteriorating quality of the University neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Several of his ventures did less well than he had hoped; the Great Books publishing venture notably did not transform Americans' reading habits. Even Hutchins' most prescient public arguments of the late 1940s against universal military training, against the arms race, and in favor of greater responsibility by the mass media fared poorly. The title of an important historical survey of these years, Richard Pells's The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, helps link Hutchins' short-run failure to a historical context. Unfortunately, Hutchins' name does not appear in the index.

A longer view may see Hutchins more positively. Many students at the "Hutchins College" hold it in high regard, as do the faculty, some of whom such as David Riesman and Daniel Bell went on to achieve distinction (elsewhere) as scholars of higher education. By comparison to other major universities, the U. of C. may have been one of the best places in America to be an undergraduate, especially during the late 1940s. At a time of pervasive anti-Semitism in the academy, the Hutchins years at Chicago saw Jews, women, and persons of color appointed to faculty ranks, largely without fanfare and probably to a greater extent than at other prominent universities. Beyond the confines of the Midway, Hutchins' controversies invigorated discussion of undergraduate education and influenced significant reform, if not always along Hutchins' own line of march. His call for broadened access to the mass media has recently been revived as a model of far-sighted thinking. And his post-Chicago work, buttressed by the reputation of the college president as publicist, carried on the fight for liberal and democratic causes he had begun during his years at the U. of C.